BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “One Need Not Be a Chamber,” Arielle Zibrak excavates the history of her haunted Wyoming house, reckoning in the process with her brother’s suicide years earlier. Zibrak’s essay is a moving account of the imperfect revelations and unexpected connections that can arise in the process of working through grief.

“One Need Not Be a Chamber”

Arielle Zibrak

As children, my younger brother and I had the same recurring dream. An old man dressed all in white would sit at the foot of our beds and stare at us with a look of love that nevertheless made us both feel afraid. I wondered if my brother started having the dreams because I’d told him about mine. The power of suggestion was strong between us. We loved ghost stories, but neither of us thought ghosts were real. We refused to think of the dream as a haunting. If you had told me you’d seen a ghost when my brother was alive, I would not have believed you. But I would believe you now.

I was sixteen weeks pregnant with my son when I learned my brother had died. I was in the Denver airport, on my way to Chicago, having just ordered a Caesar salad at a restaurant in the terminal when my dad called to tell me my brother had jumped off the roof of a parking garage in Los Angeles. “He’s dead!?” I yelled, before remembering I was in a public place. Leaving my belongings in the custody of the stunned family beside me, I ran into the airport hallway, through a door marked BOMB SHELTER, which led to a stairwell with a large landing. In that echoey chamber, I cried with a ferocity I had not known before. I still walk by that door in the Denver airport occasionally and wonder if I will haunt the stairwell behind it when I die. Sometimes I wonder if I haunt it already. I still don’t know haunting works, even now, after everything, but I know I would be afraid to open the door.

When I finished crying, I went back to the restaurant and sat down and ate my salad. I realized what I needed to do. I’d change my flight to return home-home, to Boston. I’d select my brother’s coffin, write his obituary, chose a grave site, and make the long litany of calls. After the funeral, I would fly back to Denver, drive home to Wyoming, where I taught, and resume the tedious business of living. My own childhood had been so marked by the grief of my parents and my grandparents that I determined, as I ate my airport salad, not to let this grief define the life of my unborn son’s. When I crossed the jet bridge to board my new flight to Boston several hours later, I put the grief away. It would not touch me anymore and therefore it could not hurt anyone.

Almost five years later, I was in my new house, having just finished dinner. My then four-year-old son sat at the dining room table spooning pudding into his mouth while I did the dishes, my back to him. In the shiny new window I was facing, I saw my own reflection, and, behind it, a man walked past. When I turned my head to see where he went, he was gone. Just as they say, the hairs on my neck and my arms stood on end. I had goosebumps. I felt a shiver run through me. But I composed myself so as not to scare my son. I would pretend it hadn’t happened. Until, after a beat, my son said,

“Who was that man?”

“What man?” I replied, as deliberately as I’d pour coffee into a mug.

“The man who just walked through the wall.”

After that, I did not see a ghost again for some time. But things would happen.

A black stain appeared on the floor near my bedroom closet, which I scrubbed away until it was an almost imperceptible shadow. The next morning the stain returned, thick and dark as an oil spill.

The pocket door to the room I use as an office, a door I struggle to operate, slid smoothly closed on its own.

Once, I was in the shower and felt a human hand grab my hip through the curtain. It felt so real I assumed there was a home intruder and threw the curtain back, ready to fight. The medicine cabinet on the wall across the room flung open, spilling its entire contents on the floor. I had an overwhelming feeling that someone had just fled the room in fear, but I stood standing very still, one foot in the tub, the other on the wet floor, while I watched a pool of nail polish form around the broken glass bottles.

Another evening, passing the open door to my son’s room, I saw a man sitting in the plush reading chair that had been the prized item on my baby registry, the thing I’d felt I most needed in that flush of new maternal anxiety. In an instant, the man in the chair vanished before my eyes, like a projector had been turned off. He was tall and thin and mustachioed, wearing what seemed to me to be formal clothes. I was pretty sure it was the same man I had seen in the kitchen behind me before, but there was no way to be certain.

When you do not believe in ghosts and then you see one, a lot of rearranging has to take place in your mind. That my son has also seen the ghost and my partner has seen evidence of his presence certainly helped to preserve my own sense of sanity. But my desire to understand what was happening in my house could not be sated. I felt that if only I knew something, or did something, the haunting could be solved and would therefore stop. This is the logic of many ghost stories.

One of my favorite authors, Edith Wharton, believed that ghosts were real but only some people (ghost-seers) could see them. More common were ghost-feelers, who could only sense the presence of the dead. Lesser people, she thought, did not believe in ghosts but were still afraid of them—an irony she delighted in exposing. Wharton loved irony and reversals, and her ghost story “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” riffs on the trope of the dead ordering the living around so that they can act out their unfinished business in the world: in the story, both the ghost and the ghost-seer are servants. The ghost is a deceased Lady’s maid, who is trying to get the living maid to do something for her, but the living maid can’t guess what. Every time the ghost vanishes, the living maid feels like the ghost “left me all alone to carry the weight of the secret I couldn’t guess”—a line that devastates me in part because it would be a great description of my own childhood.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that the reasons my parents were angry had to do with themselves and their own parents and not me at all. A heavy, unknowable secret one must carry is a good description for any kind of trauma, really, and in ghost stories the trauma is often the historical kind. Here I am thinking of the mansion built on the indigenous burial ground or the haunted Southern plantation. Such tragedy-of-history hauntings suggest a different kind of demand than the unfinished business of the Lady, one that is collective rather than personal, but they traffic in the same logic: that to repair the present we must answer to the past. I wondered if learning more about my house would yield a clue to what I’d need to do to stop the haunting.

My first memory of being inside my house in Laramie, Wyoming, is the smell: some unholy combination of stale beer, cigarettes, rot, and body odor. I could endure it for only so long and left without even seeing the second floor. I saw a few other homes, put in an offer on a charming one-story bungalow with its original wavy glass windows that fell through in a heartbreaking turn of events. I considered a one-story, two-bedroom cottage but decided it would be impossibly small for a family of three during a long, cold winter with not much to do. The house we’d lived in before had sold quickly and the new owners were already moved in, a condition of the sale. The bulk of our stuff was in storage, and we were staying at a friend’s place while she traveled for the summer. I was running out of time. We’d have nowhere to live. My thoughts returned to the house on Eighth Street, its red tin FOR SALE sign still swinging in the wind every time I’d drive by.

The house was very old, the Realtor told us; the records said it was built in 1900, but it was likely built earlier. They put “1900” when they weren’t sure. It certainly looked like a mid-nineteenth-century folk Victorian, a style not uncommon in the railroad towns of the Rocky Mountain West. These, and the log cabins of the earlier settlers, are some of the oldest buildings in the state of Wyoming. But the house on Eighth Street didn’t instill a sense of historical pride. It was clad in dented aluminum siding in a yellow too pale to be charming, grained to look like highly unrealistic wood. Most of the Victoriana inside had been torn out in a series of terrible renovations. The floors were lined in wall-to-wall shag, stiff with dirt. The ceiling lights were all bowed fluorescent panels. But there were picture moldings on the plaster walls, decorative archways between the living room and the dining room, high ceilings. The upper rooms were shaped by the steeply peaked roof, cozy. And the house was big. If we bought this, I thought, it would be the biggest place I’ve ever lived.

After that second viewing, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was seized with a desire to make it mine. We put in an offer at the asking price, which had drastically fallen since our last viewing, but waited what seemed an eternity to hear back. The owners lived out of state and were difficult to contact. Eventually, our Realtor called to tell us the house was ours. It was a closing by proxy, so I never met the people who owned it before us. The tenants vacated, leaving quite a few things behind. I had two weeks before our stuff arrived from storage and I set to work.

I ordered a giant dumpster and began manically filling it, hiring a friend’s husband, who had his own painting company and a lot of tools and supplies, to help. Appliances went in, junk went in, cheap finishings I tore from the floors and the walls and ceilings in dusty strips. The house contained three dryers and two washing machines, two rice cookers, a bunkbed, parts of old exercise equipment, a rusty swing set, a kerosene lamp, and an enormous painting of a tiger which looked to have been made by a child.

These objects carried no meaning for me; at the time I had no connection to or curiosity about the place. In fact, the only thing I felt as I scraped glue and sanded plaster and pulled the carpet nails out from the floorboards was a violent sense of urgency. I had to make this place into my home. I decided to take no “before” pictures, a decision I now regret. At the time, I needed the house’s past to be erased, to inhabit it as new—as my own.

What I found as I tore the house apart, for the most part, delighted me. The floors were well preserved under the carpet, beautiful old oak laid in an elaborate pattern of concentric rectangles in each room. I mixed baking soda into the gallons and gallons of paint I hauled from the store and repainted every wall: Oleander, Lagoon, Mineral, Navajo White. I had the basement recarpeted, the wood floors sanded and sealed, the broken windows replaced. When we moved in, it felt pretty much like home. But further signs that we were not alone emerged quickly after our first sighting of the ghost that one night over the dishes.

I began to notice my son talking more than usual during bath time. I would run his bath and sit with him for a few minutes before leaving him to play with his toys so I could fold laundry in my bedroom down the hall. I’d leave the doors open to listen to his splashing and chatter. But his chatter seemed more coherent of late, less like the sounds of imaginary play and more like a conversation. When I went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet lid, and asked him who he was talking to, he said, simply, “The Man.”

“Who is The Man?” I asked.

“He’s very nice, he likes to visit my bath.”

“What do you two talk about?”

“Oh, we just play.”

“What do you play?”

“He plays what I play.”

“Is he here now?”

My son laughed, like it was an absurd question. “No, you’re sitting there now.”

We were planning a family trip that would take us away from the house for a couple of weeks. I enlisted a neighbor, Sandy, to housesit, never mentioning these eerie goings on. Sandy texted me late on the first night of our trip, asking if it would be okay to invite a few friends over. “I know this is weird,” they wrote, “but I’m too scared to sleep here alone. I feel like someone else is here.” I told them it would be fine.

I ran into one of Sandy’s friends, Claude, at the grocery store a few weeks later. He told me something Sandy didn’t mention: they had held a séance in my living room that night. Claude was the grandson of a medium well known to locals in their small Tennessee town; he’d moved to Laramie for school, had been in town a little less than a year. His grandparent was intersex, and Claude is a trans man. In their family, as in many cultures, they believed that atypical gender presentation was linked to the ability to communicate with the dead. For this reason, Claude had apprenticed with his grandparent, even though he had no plans to become a medium. When Sandy called him over to my house, they decided they should attempt to contact the spirit. Claude was able to feel the presence of someone he described as a young adult man, very timid and perhaps intellectually disabled.

“He likes that you’re in the house now,” Claude said. “He felt like past residents scared him and disrespected the house. He feels close to you; he especially likes to keep your son company in the bath. And there’s something else,” Claude leaned over his shopping cart confidentially, “other spirits are trying to use the portal in your house. They scare him and he’s trying to protect you, but he isn’t sure he can keep them out. If you find a portal, close it up.”

While Claude spoke from the helm of his cart, I had what can only be described as a dissociative experience in the shadow of a pyramid of apples. The Man was real. Later that day, Claude came by the house on Eighth Street to drop off a bag of powder that he’d blended as a spell, telling me to burn it if I ever felt afraid. I stood there holding it in my hand. It smelled like cinnamon and something else, something herbal and smoky and sweet. I put the plastic bag on the top of a dresser where it sat for several years. But my fear never reached the point of necessitating a ceremony. When I finally threw out the bag, it felt like a deed of some gravity. Like I should say something, but I had no idea what. I’m sorry was the only thing that came to mind—an apology to no one for nothing at all. I realized fear was never a part of my experience of the ghost. It was a feeling far more difficult to pin down, made of much rarer stuff, like the complex aroma in the bag.

The bag was a reminder of the potential portal. I didn’t have any concept of what might indicate a portal or how to know if I’d found one. So I asked my friend Greg. Greg had his own ghostly experience one night while he was in bed with his “special lady friend,” as he always says when he tells the story, and Greg is a natural-born researcher, a collector of wisdom and lore. He is excellent at trivia and knows a disturbing amount about the history of bowling. A true Midwesterner. Greg was the only one to treat the ghost in my house as a solvable situation, so I texted him.

“Are there any mirrors that came with the house that are still in the house?” he

immediately asked.

“Yes, there’s one jammed at a strange angle in the closet below the stairs, beneath the

place in the bedroom where the black stuff seeped through the floor.”

“You have to get it out,” he replied.

“I can’t,” I wrote. “It’s stuck. It’s wedged right in there.”

“You have to try.”

I set my phone down on the nightstand and marched down the stairs to the closet. Kicking and tugging, I worked up a genuine sweat dislodging the mirror. When I finally got it free, I learned it was bizarrely heavy, the heaviest mirror I had ever held. I could barely lift it, though it was maybe only three feet by a foot and a half, ovular, in a gilded wooden frame. I somehow managed to get it in the car and drove to Greg’s house, where I left it by his side door. “There’s a haunted mirror at your door,” I texted him from the car. “Good luck.” But removing the mirror did not stop the haunting. I had to keep trying.

The real estate records office in Laramie is a small room in the building where I vote and pay my license plate fees: a dusty municipal cube made of the same ubiquitous sandstone as the university and the territorial prison on the outskirts of town, still extant from the period before Wyoming became a state. The records room is dominated by shelves of large logbooks filled with deeds noted in the immaculately penciled script of the distant past. The book pertaining to my lot was handed to me by Ashley, an amenable clerk, who was curious as to why I wanted all of the records, dating from the very beginning. “I’m a historian,” I told her, which is sort of true.

“What are you writing about?” she asked.

I found I couldn’t tell her about The Man, so I mumbled something about local history and opened the massive volume with a dull thud. The first document inside was the deed granting homesteading rights, under the authority of President Ulysses S. Grant, to one Jackson Brown. Jackson Brown was given what is essentially my entire neighborhood in 1875 as ranch land under the Homestead Act. The Brown House still sits across the street from mine, now covered in stucco. I often think of the one nineteenth-century photograph of the Brown House I managed to turn up. The image is of Jackson’s wife, Diana, standing confidently on the porch from the perspective of my own house. After I find it, I can’t unsee her on the porch when I look across the street. She stands gazing back at me as though I’m standing in a bright light, her hand raised to her brow like it is in the photograph. She’s not a ghost, not like The Man is. But she is both dead and there still.

When there’s a ghost in your house, it has a firm hold on your thoughts. Most days, I take a long walk. I find myself looking at all the houses, dating them in my mind, wondering about the circumstances of the people who acquired the land, who lived there before, who built each house, who first inhabited it. I imagine a woman walking through a front door in an 1890s dress, a 1920s dress, a 1960s dress, and I begin to wonder what it would feel like if I knew about all the people who’ve ever lived everywhere I ever went. If I would feel like my presence in each space is an intrusion, as I sometimes feel in my own home.

I attempt to talk to the ghost out loud as a way of coping. I try on different attitudes. I read a sentence from my book and say, “What do you think?” My words echo through the empty room. It feels forced. So I talk to him more often inside the corridors of my brain. I wonder if he can hear me. I mostly think this: I’m here, too. I hope he understands how I mean it, like an outstretched hand.

Speaking silently to the dead comes more naturally to me because I speak to my little brother this way a lot, to my grandmother, to my friend Jim. Never previously did I think of this practice as actually communicating with the dead. Because with these other folks, I’m accommodating for the fact that I would normally call them on the phone. It’s Jim to whom I read a phrase I’m reworking aloud or address a practical question. To my grandmother, I complain about family and ask cooking advice. Then I find I already know how they’d respond. In that way, it does become a kind of conversation, though not the kind where my body feels the other person is actually there.

I never knew the ghost in my house when he was alive, so I don’t know what he’d say in response to my thought questions. The conversation remains one-sided. The other marked difference is that when I speak to The Man, it’s because I feel in my body that he’s in the room, or he’s done something to prove it. A pencil rolls off a desk. A glass jar shatters around an unlit candle. The stairs ring with footfalls. A key slowly turns in a lock.

I don’t know if he can hear my thoughts, but it occurs to me that, if he can, then not only am I never alone in my house, I’m never alone in my mind. It makes me want to know what he wants. But that is the one question I can easily imagine him answering. He wants to be here, in his house, with us. My attempts to communicate with him do not stop the haunting.

Three miles south of the Brown House on Eighth Street stood Fort Sanders, erected in 1866 to protect homesteaders traveling along the Overland Trail from attacks by the Plains tribes defending their land: the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Shoshone, and the Sioux. When the railroad was constructed in 1868, the soldiers who lived at the Fort protected the Union Pacific workers from the same threat, killing indigenous people whose names or number I cannot know. Some of those killers lived in my house. Through my research, I learn it was originally constructed as an officer’s dwelling at the Fort. When Fort Sanders was decommissioned in 1882, Diana Brown, then a widow, purchased the building and had it moved to where it now stands.

At some point in the 1880s, Diana sold what is now my house to Davis and Nella Carey, who had just moved to Wyoming from Illinois. Davis was a harness and saddle maker, the son of a Massachusetts abolitionist. Nella was a homemaker who, according to the amazingly detailed society columns of the small-town daily papers, was fond of hosting parties where she would challenge her guests to solve riddles and tell them their fortunes using a crystal ball. Her flowering houseplants won awards at the State Fair; she volunteered frequently for her children’s school and the local church. They had two young children together—Robbie and Lettie—and were joined in Wyoming by Davis’s sister Emma, a much in-demand pianist who entertained at parties thrown in the home and gave lessons to local children. There was a piano in my house, I realize, and immediately hear the faint echoes of Chopin.

Davis died of Bright’s disease in 1904, an inflammation of the kidneys we now call nephritis. I wonder if it was caused by the chemicals he used to tan saddle leather. When I can’t sleep, I try to look it up, but I can’t find any correlation. We still don’t know what causes nephritis—maybe toxins, maybe stress. Sometimes hindsight is no more powerful than present understanding. Many of the same questions he must have had one hundred and twenty years ago I still have now. The account of his death in the paper includes the detail that, after days of lying in a comatose state, he awoke moments before he died to tell Nella he loved her.

The Careys’ appearances in the town newspapers suggest a life of relative good fortune, until late June of 1893, when Davis and Nella’s twelve-year-old son Robbie went missing. He left the house to go play along a nearby river, a river where my own son often plays now, too. Robbie was missing for three weeks. Each day, the newspaper reported the frantic efforts of the search as Davis led groups to drag the river for his boy. On June 20th, 1893, all of the businesses in what was then known as Laramie City closed for the day so the whole community could help the Careys find Robbie. On July 10th, his body finally washed up at a dam twenty miles downstream.

The Laramie Daily Boomerang, still in operation today, printed a story describing the recovery of the body on July 10th, 1893. Davis had ridden out on the bumpy dirt roads in a horse-drawn wagon with the funeral director and a coffin. Together, the two men lifted the boy’s swollen remains from the dam and put them inside, driving the team back to the Carey family home on Eighth Street. That afternoon, at two-thirty, the funeral was held in the front parlor. The paper reports that the house was so crowded and hot, the mourners spilled into the front yard. Scores of bouquets and “floral pieces” were offered because, the article goes on to say, he “was a popular boy with both old and young.”

It is impossible to read these words sitting at the desk in my office upstairs, in the house they were written about one hundred and thirty years before, without getting up and walking down to my living room: the scene of Robbie Carey’s funeral. I stand looking at the same windows his family would have looked out of. My bare feet on the same wooden floors. I imagine the mourners in black crepe and bombazine filing in, the floral arrangements lining the room, those who were crying and those who were comforting them. I envision the figures on the lawn casting shadows inside, as figures do when they pass the sidewalk in front of our living room windows at that time of the afternoon in July.

When I imagine Robbie’s funeral, the person I most long to comfort is Lettie. Ten years old, she has lost her brother, her only sibling. The year prior, the newspaper records Lettie’s having given a memorized recitation of “Jack Frost,” a poem, at the Thanksgiving celebration at her school. Written by Celia Thaxter in 1873, it’s a poem I already know:

Rustily creak the crickets: Jack Frost came down last night,
He slid to earth on a starbeam, keen and sparkling bright . . .

If I say it aloud, will she hear it? Did she have it by heart for the rest of her life, just as I still have all the poems I memorized as a child?

Lettie married a wealthy rancher from Colorado, moved to Washington state, raised nine children, and died at the age of sixty-three. It’s a strange thing to come to know someone whose life is already complete. I do not know if anything new ever happens to ghosts, but it hardly seems likely.

At my brother’s funeral, my father delivered the eulogy. When he spoke of us, of my brother and me, he said we had “an almost mystical connection.” Mystical is not a word I’d ever imagined my father using; death does strange things to us all. He went on to describe us as two sides of the same coin, which was apt. It had always felt as if we grew up back-to-back—close but looking at different things. As adults, we communicated in abstract texts, sending each other bits of language that would make no sense to anyone else. I treasure a card he once gave me, which has a picture of a cat jumping in the air on the front. Inside, he only wrote one word: surface.

We had variant spellings and meanings and pronunciations for words that were inherently funny to us. When I encounter those words now, I say them our way under my breath, but I do not feel that he can hear me. My brother does not visit me in my dreams or make his presence known to me in the spaces he once inhabited. When I sit in his bedroom, a space once so thick with his sorrow, I do not feel that he is there. They are, rather, inhabited by his absence.

The only place where I find Jonathan is in my own mind. Not only do I talk with him in my head, but, more often, I imagine how he would encounter the world as it unveils itself to me. I listen to a new album with his taste in mind; I read the news stories he’d want to follow as though my knowing their contents might grant him access. Sometimes living with my brother inside of my mind makes me laugh for no apparent reason and I try to turn him off, the way you avert your eyes from your funniest friend when you’re in a serious meeting. There is a poem I want him to hear me read aloud a lot these days, a poem by Emily Dickinson:

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors surpassing
Material Place—

I read him the poem as an invitation to haunt me, to remind him that ghosts can haunt their loved ones, too. I can’t know how it sounds from his side. To people on this one, I am, in fact, already haunted—a constant reminder of my brother’s absence. When I go out for a walk after dinner, no one joins me. It’s understood that I’m walking with him still. On his birthday, it’s me who people call and text. Those who know me best do not offer condolences because they know I celebrate his life on that day, but it makes other people who knew him only a little or not at all sad to think about it. That sadness is embodied in me.

When I look up the Careys of Laramie on a popular genealogical website, I find that there are pictures of the family that lived in my house posted by an anonymous relative. There is a photo of the whole family in front of a photography studio background: a fake house that is neither theirs nor mine. Then there is Lettie, a teenager, in what is quite clearly my backyard, hanging laundry. Another picture of Davis posted by the same user arrests my heart: a blurry solo portrait of him with a mustache, rather than the beard he wears in the earlier family picture. He looks exactly like The Man. The lights in the office where I sit flicker at the exact moment I realize.

I write to the anonymous relative who posted the photographs but receive no response for almost a year. Then Claire, Davis’s great-granddaughter, finally writes me back. She’s a retired schoolteacher from California, and a truly lovely person. We text back and forth for days, sending photographs and drawings and links. I tell her about her family history, about how Robbie, her great uncle, died. I explain how the community rallied around them. I send her pictures of my house, of the house where Lettie and Nella moved after Davis’s death, of the saddle shop where Davis worked (now a liquor store), of the Episcopal church where they worshipped (now a yoga studio). I tell her about their apparent love for one another.

“I feel like I know them now,” her words light up my phone. “I can’t tell you what you’ve given me.”

It is surprisingly comforting to offer her comfort, a stranger grieving a loved one they never knew. Claire told me her grandmother Nettie had died before she was born, and it had always felt like a loss to have never known her. I hope our conversations soothe that grief a bit. But talking with Claire doesn’t stop the haunting.

I begin to wonder if the dead, if ghosts, also grieve for those left living. Maybe they grieve for life itself. The longing across the gap can’t possibly traffic in just one direction. Maybe all ghosts are like my brother: those for whom the present plane is intolerable, travelers seeking another realm. I can’t imagine where my brother might be right now any more than I can see what the world looked like from his side of the coin while he was alive. There is no love powerful enough to pull someone from the clutches of their own mind. The thing about how he died that is the hardest for me to explain is that he had been dead for a long time before it happened. That I was already longing for him then.

The philosopher Simone Weil writes that the objects of all desires are imaginary. Drawing on Buddhism and Catholic mysticism, she argues that what we think we long for is merely the image of what we long for, a projection of our imaginations. Only by accepting and renouncing the illusory nature of that image can we encounter truth. Truth is, for Weil, to be found on the other side of death. She writes that, in grief, though the dead person we long for is now imaginary, our desire for them is not. In fact, it is the truest desire the living can have. All we really desire when we miss the dead is for them to exist, and they did exist. Weil sees this closed loop of longing as an aspirational model for all desire—to want what has already happened, to live in the wake of its happening.

When I read this passage for the first time, I thought about the many-folded sleeve of my brother’s baggy sweatshirt beside me as we watched TV in my old grad school apartment, the one that kept getting shut down for safety violations and reopened again. In the memory, I know there’s an arm in the sleeve, even though I can’t feel its presence. There were a lot of times when my brother and I wouldn’t speak. For days, a week even. I would miss him, but I knew he would answer when I called. Now, he will not. What is the difference between being missed and being gone?

My mistakes about death were, first, believing that my grief was mine to put away and, second, believing that the dead are gone. Any of them. The haunting in my house has not stopped. Every once in a while, it alarms me still, but more in the way I feel when I stumble on my partner turning the corner in the dark. Oh, it’s you.

***

Arielle Zibrak is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming and the author of Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024). She is also the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women (Penguin Classics, 2025). She is currently at work on a historical memoir about postcolonial haunting called The Ghost in the Mirror. See more of her work at www.ariellezibrak.com.

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Header image credit: Laramie Plains Museum

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “A Woman of Scanty Means Traverses the Underworld,” Hallie Pritts recounts a soul-searching trip abroad after her band breaks up. A brush with death in the Paris catacombs awakens her to the possibility of life after loss.

“A Woman of Scanty Means Traverses the Underworld”

Hallie Pritts

The room was spare, unassuming. It could have been the front desk of a conservatory, with a walkway to the gardens tucked behind the ticket window. But there were no gardens here, only a doorway leading down. When I’d heard about the catacombs, I had imagined vast cathedrals of bones, high ceilings studded with skulls, and a knowledgeable français imparting historical tidbits to a crowd of international tourists.

“When’s the next tour?” I asked as a woman handed me a ticket.

“No tours this time of year. You go alone.”

It was January in Paris. My life had fallen apart in a spectacular melding of day-to-day disasters, and I’d fled, hoping an adventure might clear my head. I was the only catacombs visitor that morning. And I didn’t want to go through that door.

But what could I do? Walk out into the empty sunlight, where no one waited for me? I descended one hundred and thirty cold stone stairs to a narrow pathway between stacked bones. The ceiling pressed on me, death water dripped from above. A carved stone sign: “Stop! Here is the empire of death.” I was the only living soul in sight.

Back home in Pittsburgh, my long-term relationship had fractured. My day job had dissolved with paychecks still outstanding. Those events devastate most people. And I was devastated. But for me, the most piercing, soul-cracking wound was that my band was breaking up. It opened a void within me that the loss of the boyfriend and job couldn’t touch. I’d been pushing my music career up a hill my whole adult life, willing it to work, scheming gigs, ways to record albums for pocket change. I’d sunk everything into it. I was the songwriter, the bandleader, the singer, the rhythm guitar player. But without the others, I felt lackluster and incomplete. The synergy of many minds and talents, the layers of strings and percussion, breath and electricity, made the magic. Who was I without a band?

It was ending even as I played the best shows of my life, with lines out the doors of local clubs. Don’t get me wrong—this wasn’t Bonnaroo, but my band finally, briefly, occupied a hometown-hero slot. Everyone knew us; we played fun music; and we could get a cool hundred-fifty people into a room. But as had happened many, many times before, my bandmates were coming to me one by one, announcing in let-her-down-easy voices their intentions to move on. And somehow, this time, I couldn’t face putting the band back together again.

I’d always joked that being in a band is like dating five people. I worried about my drummers leaving me for other bands. I wondered if this iteration was “the one.” I turned myself inside out trying to keep it together and functioning, often to the detriment of my other personal relationships, because can there be anything more personal than sharing a fart-air tour van and one hotel room between ten people when you’re thirty years old?
 

Some low points:

Waking on the floor of a suspiciously nice house in the Midwest and realizing the band we opened for the night before lived with their parents. Because they were in high school.

Playing to one person in an Atlanta bar.

Botching a set in Chicago when a label scout was there.

Knocking on an ex’s door to beg him for a place to crash after fleeing the creepy funeral-home-turned-apartment on offer as post-show accommodation.

Dry heaving in a porta-john before a festival appearance in Georgia, after drinking god-knows-how-much the night before at a show in Knoxville.
 

Some high points:

Driving the van through the Smoky Mountains, the whole band singing along to a Donovan song and realizing I was doing exactly what I’d wanted to do since I was fourteen years old.

That sweet spot where the lead guitar hits the perfect string of notes on the bridge as the kick drum syncs up to your heart. Feeling the electricity rise from the microphone to your lips.

A sold-out second-floor show, the audience dancing till the wooden floorboards bounced.

Playing with an experimental folk orchestra at a little club in Vermont, strings swelling behind my songs.

A promoter snaking us from the small stage to open for a sold-out crowd at the World Café in Philadelphia.
 

I’d had thirty-eight different bandmates over the years. Maybe it was time to move on. But to what? What did people do after they’d squandered their youth?

I cast about for direction, but nothing sounded good. I lowered my bar. If nothing was good, was there perhaps something that sounded not awful?

I’d once been a big traveler. Living in France when I was eighteen, Germany at twenty-one. I hadn’t left the country in a decade—every bit of time off saved for touring. Maybe I’d find some forgotten bit of myself if I could just get away.

I had no job and very little money, but if I stayed with friends, if I ate very little, if I bought nothing, I could just about afford it. I fretted over the decision. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to stay put and dole out my savings in the smallest possible increments until I starved to death? Instead, I booked a ticket to Europe leaving the day after Christmas.

I scoured my history for people to check in with. A career in the arts may not give you much in the way of security or a bank balance, but it does give you a list of contacts up for adventure. I made a plan to record an album with an old musician buddy in Berlin. I looked up a childhood friend in the Paris suburbs. At the last minute, a woman I’d done an arts fellowship with invited me to hostel around Scotland with her and her mother for the first week of my trip.

When I stepped into the airport, I felt lighter than I had in a long time.
 

Scotland was:

Gale force winds, my plane rocking like a canoe.

A youth hostel with a big bleach stain on blue carpet. Scottish breakfasts, tomatoes and beans.

A kind friend, her elegant, eccentric mother.

A club called Nice N Sleazy on New Year’s Eve where I sat in with a noise guitar ensemble, the space vibrant with pheromones and lights shimmering off party dresses.
 

I made a circuit of Scotland, fighting crowds of holiday tourists in Edinburgh, exploring hip, gritty Glasgow, which reminded me of home, then moved further afield. Near Dundee, my friend, her mom, and I went to a dinner where each person brought something they made. A local librarian showed us a dinosaur he’d constructed from paper cups. Someone recited a monologue. I played a song.

When it was time to leave for Berlin, all bridges were closed for wind, my train ticket cancelled. I crossed Scotland on a last-ditch bus. The view was cheerless, the sky blending into the lifeless husks of the winter landscape, everything gusting and heaving.

I felt like I was losing shape, no longer held strong by the skeletal frame of the band and the drive to “make it.” I’d been sustained by the constant push to make the band work, to dig out some recompense for all these sunk costs. But now?

A night spent in the Edinburgh airport waiting for my jumper flight, then I was off to Germany.
 

Berlin was:

A home studio in Wedding.

Vintage synthesizers, organs with pull switches, microphones, a drum set.

A trumpet, an aging MacBook, a pianet.

My friend Jules and our long musical history.

An album we called Winter Wedding Party named for the neighborhood and Jules’s upcoming marriage to his girlfriend, Nathalie.

A spare mattress for me, on the floor in the middle of it all.
 

Between recording sessions, I cocooned myself in the city of Berlin, going out every night, making it back to the studio mattress at six or eight AM. Not debauchery, but meeting a friend of a friend, listening to music, walking along the river. I spent one dawn in a brand-new, not-yet-open pub named after an American naturalist, testing cocktails for the owner. I caught night trains and arrived in echoing, tile-walled subway stations populated sparsely with other late travelers. We emerged into the mild, dark night.

And Nathalie cooked me breakfast, frothed the milk on the stove with a wire whisk.

I had nine days in Berlin to make the Winter Wedding Party album. The concrete beginning, the hard stop did something for me. The holding-on-too-tight feeling dissolved. I could set down the make-this-something-real imperative, the urge to justify all those years of poverty-tinged band practices and poster-hanging and gigging. In Berlin, it was just music with an old friend, twiddling synths, writing songs in French because it was fun, staying up all night.

Days nine, eight, and seven: the glimpse of Jules’s life, laying backing tracks, recording scratch vocals. Day six: writing an Italo-disco dance track. Day five: covering an old Brigitte Bardot song. Day four: schlepping our instruments through the metro to play at a friend’s party. Day three. Day two. Then day one, and Jules taking me to board my slow train to Paris. I arrived just as dawn broke over the city.

But down in the catacombs, I was bereft.

It was too hard being alone underground. I thought I could hear one other person, far ahead. I wanted to yell out, please, don’t leave me behind. But it was only a stranger, forging ahead without me.

Stone plaques with macabre sayings bloomed from the walls. Things like: Whichever way you turn, death is on the lookout. Or: If you’ve ever seen a man die, remember always the same fate awaits you. Or: It is sometimes more advantageous to die than to live. Things so dry and dark, you could almost laugh. But underground, alone, an outstretched arm’s length from death, I wasn’t laughing.

There were other paths off the main one, blocked by slim chains. What if I took a wrong turn and was lost forever underground? I was just a person. A woman, broke and fretting. Dumped, lost. So few skills to defend myself: translating feelings into chords; a pretty voice; a finger on an old synthesizer, singing hummmmmm.

My knees jellied and a lump formed in my throat. The sound of footsteps had vanished. No band, no friends, no music, no jobs. Only me.

And the only way out was through.

When I reached the end, I rushed the stone stairs. Up, up, up, and I burst into the January sunshine. The cold air slapped blood into my skin. My live heart pounded.

I crossed a courtyard to a typical French café and ordered a glass of Merlot, hand shaking as I drank it. Winter pigeons fluttered down in clusters. Adrenaline sang in my veins. I marveled at how our world could allow for a lone woman of scanty means to cross oceans, to follow the desire for something not awful, and end up here, traversing the underworld, then climbing out into the sun. And I was that woman. Scanty means, but still here. Beaming into a wine glass, having escaped death.

The future was a wide white space. It was up to me to fill it. There was time for the death of one thing and the birth of another. And there would be, all the way until I joined the bones underground.

At the end of January, I flew home and started over.

***

Hallie Pritts is a writer from Pittsburgh. She’s a Sewanee Writers Conference alum, Chautauqua fellow, and former writer-in-residence in New Zealand. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Points in Case, Barrelhouse, and Off Assignment, among others. The music recorded in Wedding, Berlin can be streamed here.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “Addiction Medicine for the Hopeless,” an essay that draws on the author’s experience as social worker, Susan Kushner Resnick grapples with feelings of self-doubt that arise while helping others recover from addiction. A disease that affects the whole person, addiction requires a whole-person treatment. Resnick shows that this treatment is as harrowing to administer as it is to undergo.

Addiction Medicine for the Hopeless

Susan Kushner Resnick

My second favorite patient rested her chin on her knees and tried to explain a reality show about a yacht crew to me. Her name was Lisa. She was forty years old but skinny as a prepubescent girl who never got enough to eat. Her hair was stringy but clean, thanks to the availability of a hospital shower, and most of her teeth were absent. I sat in a chair beside her bed in one of the world’s premier medical centers, our necks twisted to see the TV hanging from the ceiling. Those people run the boat, she said, pointing at the women stuffing sheets into washing machines on the screen, and every week new guests charter it, but the crew’s more interesting. This was the opposite of our hospital reality, in which the guests—patients like Lisa—were far more interesting than the crew—social workers like me. I asked questions aimed at discerning the show’s plot, such as who’s that? and why is he so upset? to which she responded by shrugging and shaking her head. There was no plot. The same thing happened episode after episode: attractive crew members presented trays of crab legs or topped-up champagne glasses for passengers, argued or had sex, and got gently scolded by the captain. It was a cycle of indulgence and regret, just like the lives of the addicts I served. We both agreed the show was stupid.

I liked watching TV with Lisa because for a few minutes I could avoid the truth of our dynamic. I could pretend we were just two gals goofing on dumb TV, not a paid professional and a patient who was slowly dying from years of shooting opioids into her body. She was in the hospital to get flooded with antibiotics aimed at killing a spine infection, cause unknown. She swore she didn’t inject back there, and I believed her, so maybe it was living in a tent or repeated sexual assaults that had swiped in the bacteria. We were both mothers, though she hadn’t seen her children in years, and we were both sober at the moment.

My job description as a hospital social worker didn’t officially include watching TV with patients, but it didn’t exclude it, either. We were encouraged, in the jargon of social work, to build rapport with patients. Maybe, just maybe, I’d earn her trust by laughing at a show together, which would open the gate to convincing her to get clean. That was technically my task—to offer treatment options like rehab and Twelve Step meetings, to tell patients how to access these tools of recovery, and to use the clinical language of motivational interviewing to tease out their reluctance when they refused my suggestions. I was supposed to ask them things like:

“What’s good about shooting fentanyl into your neck and what’s not so good?”

Or: “What do you think you’d lose by giving up a quart of vodka every night?”

The idea was to help them figure out on their own that they should stop killing themselves rather than telling them directly to cut it out. Hence the descriptor motivational. Except I never asked those questions because they felt too manipulative. Instead, I gave Lisa a pocket-sized Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and showed her how to log on to Zoom recovery meetings from her phone. This giving of sobriety party favors was also part of the job. She yessed me with a smile, saying she’d definitely open the book and check out the meetings, but I didn’t believe her. As with most of the people who ended up on my caseload, it was probably too late. The inebriated at the top of their downward slides—those who came to the emergency room for safe detox or for patching up after a bar fight—weren’t usually admitted to the medical floors. Only those nearing the bottom, whose addictions had started to snatch body parts and shut down internal control panels, got inpatient beds and referrals to my Addiction Consult Team. By that time, they had often run out of the two things required for long-term recovery: operable brain cells and hope. Absence of the former made it impossible for them to follow through with the motions necessary for sobriety. Lack of the latter resigned them to slow suicide, even if they didn’t realize that’s what they were up to.

The nursing staff generally wasn’t very nice to our patients, seeing them as frequent fliers who took up beds instead of sick people with brain diseases. The addicts rarely received outside visitors. They had alienated the dependable people in their lives—the mothers and cousins and husbands who normally visit cancer and car crash victims, who vouch for a patient’s worthiness with their presence. My charges’ current loved ones were often fellow addicts who were either too high or too incarcerated to make sick calls, so I visited and tried to be kind. I walked a lady outside in the cold March wind so she could smoke the one cigarette allotted to her. I bought a package of peanut M&M’s for a man dying of AIDS and addiction. I watched a woman lovingly fold and unfold the used clothes someone had left in her room, modeling the outdated jackets for me with the joy of a little girl showing off a new party dress. Anything that allowed me to feel useful in job that often seemed like a waste of time.

A few years earlier, I had turned away from a writing career to become a clinical social worker because I wanted to help people. My reasons were both virtuous and ugly. I wanted to be a voice for the voiceless and a comfort to the discarded, but subconsciously I also wanted to feed my ego by being a savior. Unfortunately, social work didn’t allow me to measure success at either mission, which was frustrating. I craved a win. I asked an experienced colleague how she coped with the ambiguity of the job.

“What’s the point if you don’t see the result?” I wondered.

She told me she didn’t need results to feel successful. She simply did the best she could.

“I just try to be an agent of change,” she said.

Huh.

The doctors and nurse practitioners on the Addiction Consult Team (ACT) had tangible tools for affecting change. They could prescribe medicines to ease detox agony and curb cravings, and they could ask their colleagues to perform operations to remove rotting tissue or replace tapped-out livers. They were good people, these healers with “End The Stigma” printed on their lanyards, whose goal was to help patients stay alive until they were ready to stop hurting themselves. They offered time and succor, not judgement and demands. A team dedicated to addiction medicine is a special thing. At the next hospital where I worked, a community joint in a vacation town, the staff veered closer to the antiquated idea that people caused their own addiction and were therefore weak if they couldn’t fix it themselves. They referred to patients trembling in the emergency room hallways as “drunks.” The ACT crew described the same people as “suffering from substance use disorders,” which is both politically and factually correct.

When we sat around a conference table to review each patient’s case, I learned precisely how drugs and alcohol score the body. Popular culture hypes liver damage as the direst side effect of drinking, and overdose or meth mouth as the main downsides of drugs, but there’s so much more. The heart and brain can take the hardest hits.

Drinking can stretch and billow the cardiac cavity like wind gusting through a tent, which breaks the rhythm of pumping. That’s called cardiomyopathy. Hepatic encephalopathy is what happens when the alcoholic’s liver is dying and takes the brain with it. Toxins that the sick liver can’t process have to go somewhere, so why not the brain, which reacts with all kinds of wackiness like confusion, crankiness, or coma.

Drugs may make the heart sing or settle in the short run, but they’re sure to kill it eventually. Deliver a hit with dirty needles and you could also be shooting bacteria or fungus into the bloodstream. When it swims to the heart, it can cause infective endocarditis, a cardiac valve infection that’s fatal without a slow infusion of medicine. Many of my patients lacked the stamina to tolerate clean sheets and fresh meals for the weeks it took for the infections to abate. You can’t imagine the pull of addiction until you’ve heard about drug users who yank out their IVs and drip a trail of their own blood along hospital corridors on the way to the city’s drug market.

In no surprise to anyone, drugs can also make you insane. Cannabis and methamphetamine can both induce psychosis. Some meth addicts having psychotic breaks turn into violent, dangerous zombies. Some weed users jump off bridges.

Even getting clean is risky. Drinking a lot every day then suddenly quitting can cause seizure and death. Methadone, which thwarts the opioid high, can make the heart beat erratically, like a bottled moth on its way to suffocation. The doctors call this long QT, jargon for the heart taking its sweet time to recharge between beats, which can cause it to stop permanently. My colleagues couldn’t simply load patients like Lisa up on methadone, even when she was begging for more to stave off withdrawal. They had to parcel it out gradually, lest the cure become the killer.

After the medical people flashed their scientific tools during rounds, we social workers would announce our strategies: the race to get a newly-sober patient into a rarely-available rehab bed before they were discharged to the street again, where they would surely drink or use; the handouts outlining steps to take before giving in to a craving, simple and impossible at the same time; the referrals to group counseling, individual counseling, and peer counseling, placed for people who wanted no counseling at all. I usually felt like an imposter during rounds (I’m just a writer! Who let me into a hospital?). That, plus my respect for the professional knowledge at the rounds table, kept me from saying what I really felt when it was my turn, which was this: there isn’t enough medicine or quick-fix therapy in the world to heal what’s broken in these dying patients. I wanted to explain that it isn’t only the heart muscle that’s sick, but the place in the heart that can’t be seen, the amorphous zone where pain and joy live. It isn’t only the noodle-mass of brain that needs rebalancing with vitamins and mood stabilizers, but also the shredded spirit hidden beneath the physical injuries. This is because, contrary to so many illnesses, with addiction the pain comes first, followed by the powders, potions and pills that sicken and eventually destroy the body.

One day they got hurt, the woman with festering sores eating through to the bones on her forearm or the man with cirrhosis-spawned ascites bulging his torso. Someone scared her or abandoned him, either physically violated them or neglected to protect them, as children, from a raging adult. The template I used while assessing patients for my formal reports included a prompt about trauma. Did you ever experience trauma as a child? I asked, as generally as possible. They rarely hid their original wounds.

Once a thirty-year-old man who tried to kill himself with all the drugs in his house told me he’d been sexually abused as a child for years.

“Have you ever talked to a therapist about that?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “My family told me to get over it.”

When I heard this kind of history—and I heard it often—I offered a brief primer on the connection between unprocessed trauma and addiction. We drink because we want to feel better, I told this man. He was lying on an emergency room gurney with a coarse blanket pulled over his head. I talked at him anyway. We use substances to numb the pain, I said. Also, it’s the brain’s way of protecting us from feelings that are still too hot to hold. You were a child, I told him. It’s never the child’s fault. Did he and the others subjected to my spiel grasp my words while they were still wasted or freshly detoxed? Who’s to know. At least I was offering something. Planting seeds, we call it in the recovery field.

The wounds that lead to addiction don’t have to involve overt abuse. Attachment theorists think the original injury can happen before conscious memory if the infant doesn’t feel properly protected from the world. The baby was held while the mother was punched. The baby was fed by someone too addled by mental illness to establish eye contact. The baby wasn’t touched or fed as often as a human requires. In those cases, where the cause remains a mystery to the conscious mind, the growing person can spend her life trying to figure out what went wrong and why she always feels afraid.

But the details or the timing of the wound don’t really matter. What matters with self-medicators is that the heart and soul sustained damage. And because of their particular make-up or their tender age, or because no one told them that we are built to withstand painful emotions, these future addicts yearn for a remedy. Then one day, someone passes the bottle or the joint that makes the pain shrink to a manageable size.

***

My favorite patient, a fifty-year-old man who looked seventy-five, wasn’t exactly sure when his pain started. Jeff remembered his mother locking him out of the house because he was a “bad” child. He also remembered being loved by a woman and her children, a family he lived with before things got too bad. Now things were very bad and he had no one. I met him in the emergency department. Someone had bashed him in the head with a hammer, but he didn’t want to press charges. He was still drunk. During a workup, the doctors found a spot on his lung, which turned out to be nothing compared to the fluid filling his belly from his dying liver. They admitted him so they could drain that fluid, which gave us more time to talk. Sobered up, he was smart and funny and could make the sounds of sports with his voice: the thwack of a baseball hitting a catcher’s mitt, the squeal of basketball sneakers on a court. He wasn’t an easy patient, prone to shame-filled rage when aides neglected to get him to the toilet on time and flat-out brattiness when nurses refused pain meds on his command. They softened, and so did he, when I asked him to make his sound effects, my attempt to show that this mess of a man was human. He taught me the history of the bridge over the Charles River that we could see from his top-floor window, and he saved me the angel food cake from his lunch after I told him it was my favorite. I talked to him about rehab and meetings, and he told me he’d try them, but first he needed someplace to live. I tried to help him with that, but he always had a reason for not filling out the housing application forms. He liked the streets, he finally confessed. It felt safer there.

Some consider addiction a disease of the spirit. Carl Jung wrote in a 1961 letter to Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA: “You see, ‘alcohol’ in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.” Underline straight from Jung’s pen.

Spiritus contra spiritum translates to “spirit against spirit.” Only something beautiful—God, Mother Nature, love—can triumph over alcohol, the thinking goes. Even if you can’t buy such woohoo cause and effect, it shouldn’t be too hard to accept that drugs and alcohol suffocate the human spirit. Joy evades people dying from addiction. But I’ve seen the spirit come back when given enough air. Jeff handing me cake, Lisa describing her daughter. I loved watching monsters turn into men, to quote a song by The Avett Brothers. But even that happiness on the job felt sordid; was I an imposter and a voyeur?

***

Lisa and I didn’t always watch TV together. Once I’d stood to her side while a team wove a tube through her right bicep into the big vessel that leads to the heart, a significant journey up and across the body. This PICC line (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) was supposed to make life easier for Lisa and for her nurses because PICCs last much longer than regular IVs. As nurses fed her antibiotics and drew blood to check her progress, Lisa wouldn’t have to be poked so often or humiliated as they searched for veins she hadn’t torn through. She was scared before the procedure. I asked if she wanted me to stay and hold her hand and she said yes. But the technicians said I couldn’t touch her because they set up a make-shift operating theater right there in her room. Everything, including her, had to stay sterile, so I could only stand against the wall and watch. This wasn’t her first PICC line, so they couldn’t understand why she was so afraid, but she didn’t remember getting that first one or pulling it out before escaping the hospital against medical advice. The procedure took a while. They had to ultrasound her to find the best vein, then x-ray her to make sure the tube was aimed toward her heart properly. I offered encouragement and generally felt useless. Lisa slept after the procedure and when I checked back later, she was sitting up in bed, her knees hugged into her chest like a little kid, watching the yacht show. This time, a crew member was talking privately to the captain, who looked exactly as tan and white-maned as you’d expect. No matter how many times I watched the show with her, which was a lot due to the length of her hospital stay and the frequency of the show, I couldn’t figure out whether he was a hero or a villain. Our roles were equally obtuse. On paper, I looked like the hero with my laminated badge and pamphlets on recovery, while she played the role of “bad” drug addict. But maybe she was the true hero for teaching me the limits of good intentions. Look, she was saying without saying, you can’t save me.

Jeff gave me a similar object lesson. The next time he came in, I didn’t realize it was him. I was assigned a patient named Paine, not Jeff’s last name. But there he was in the assigned bed, black with burns. Someone had pushed him into a fire homeless people were using for heat. He was in such agony when he came to the emergency room that when they asked his name, all he could say was pain. It took many days for him to gain the strength to sit up and talk. This time I didn’t bother him with recovery pitches or try to convince him to apply for housing. He had trouble following and remembering conversations, and he lost his temper easily. I wrote wet brain in my notes, which is street jargon for hepatic encephalopathy. My favorite doctor split the difference and described Jeff’s condition as progressive cognitive decline. All Jeff wanted was money, he said, so I worked on that. He already qualified for some kind of disability payment but couldn’t access it because he’d lost all that identified him as a citizen of the world. First, we had to confirm that the agency was actually sending the payments. That didn’t require too many hours on hold. The problem was, he couldn’t get the money out of his bank account because he’d lost his ATM card, which he couldn’t replace because he’d lost his ID, which he couldn’t replace without a social security card, which, of course, he’d lost. As had I. Who remembers where their social security card is? In the end, he left before we could work it out. His doctors had recommended he transfer to a nursing home to heal from the burns, but he refused, so they discharged him.

I wasn’t working the day he left so I never got to say goodbye. I tried to track him down through local homeless channels. The agency worker I reached knew who he was and which interstate he slept under. She said she’d let me know if she saw him, but she also seemed to be judging me for trying to find him.

“Wow, you really care about this guy,” she said, as if that were perverted.

***

I loved those patients because I could have been them. Could still be them. I, too, have the spirit sickness. I tried to treat it for forty-one years with the liquid remedy until I found the other one. You’ve read about my cure and seen it acted out in enough movies that I don’t need to elaborate much here. People sit on folding chairs in badly painted church basements airing out their pain until it melts like cotton candy on an August afternoon. They earn tokens that represent multiples of one-day-at-a-time + one-day-at-a-time + one-day-at-a-time = I’m still alive. They make speeches about how they twisted the rusted wires of dead days into the satin ribbons of live ones. Mostly, though, they—we—teach each other how to live in the world without alcohol, drugs, food, sex, shopping, gaming, and whatever else society provides to numb us from our humanity. We are agents of change for each other.

The last thing Lisa and I did together was sit on a slope of lawn in the hospital courtyard. Behind us stood the building where in 1846 a doctor first used a drug to block pain before slicing into a patient. His magic came in the form of ether, which people mostly use now to get high. In front of us rolled construction trucks repairing roads that would make it easier for patients to get into this palace of medicine. Or get out, in Lisa’s case. She wanted to run and kept asking where we were and which street led to the train station. I withheld direct answers, but that didn’t stop her. Later in the week, a couple of men visited her. One carried a duffle full of something he didn’t want the nurses to see. When he refused to let them inspect his bag, they kicked him out. Lisa grew irate, unthreaded her shiny new PICC line, and found her way to whatever she called home.

I left the hospital shortly after to move to another state, still unsure whether I’d helped anyone. The waylaid souls I was privileged to meet pop into my head all the time, with Lisa and Jeff headlining that show. Are they still alive? I don’t think there’s any way for me to find out. They aren’t the kind of people whose stories pop up on Google. Obituaries aren’t published for those lost before they die.

I pray for them, the admission of which makes me feel like the Bible thumpers I used to judge. I pray for their safety, but mostly I pray that they will stay sober and learn what I’ve learned between my last whiskey and today: How to stop polishing your pain like a sterling trophy to prove your victimhood. How to cope with the effects of a fully functioning heart. How to begin again.

I’m starting a new job soon where I’ll be asked to offer direct treatment to recovering addicts and alcoholics. The gestures I relied on at the hospital—watching TV, looking for housing—won’t be enough. This time I’ll need to say what I mean. Maybe that’s the only way to be useful. If so, I hope I’ll be brave enough to toss the clinical language vested in me by the social work licensing board and share the most important message I’ve heard: you, too, deserve to feel alive.

Patient names have been changed in adherence to HIIPA rules.

***

Susan Kushner Resnick, MFA, LCSW is a creative nonfiction writer and social worker. She has worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, essayist, and Brown University nonfiction writing lecturer. She is the author of three books of creative nonfiction, including the memoirs Sleepless Days, and You Saved Me, Too, and the historical narrative, Goodbye Wifes and Daughters. Her social work career has included stints in child protection and addiction medicine. Resnick lives in Rhode Island. 

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In her poignant essay on “Lullaby Machines,” Caitlin Horrocks processes the psychological impact of listening to the same album of lullabies over 20,000 times in the course of parenting her newborn children. She bears witness to the desperate lengths we go in search of peace, quiet, and sleep.

Lullaby Machines

Caitlin Horrocks

My maternity leave was nearly over when a large envelope showed up in the mail from my employer. Inside was a mishmash of pamphlets and grainy photocopies about infant care and HR benefits. At six weeks postpartum, most of the information was already irrelevant. A final item slid out of the package, a CD whose full, weird title is Baby-Go-To-Sleep “Stops Crying” Original Heartbeat Lullabies. This was in 2016, and probably many of my coworkers no longer even owned CD players. I did, but I assumed the CD would be about as useful as the rest of the envelope’s contents and shoved the album back inside. I still can’t decide whether I wish I’d left it there.

This particular CD turned out to be an obscure reissue of a 1997 reissue of a 1987 recording: our cover illustration of fluffy clouds and sheep made no promises, but the most widely available album cover is almost entirely large, purple letters promising miracles:

STOPS CRYING GUARANTEED
OVER 3.4 MILLION COPIES SOLD
MUSIC TO HELP YOUR CHILD SLEEP
HEARTBEAT MUSIC THERAPY

The words “HEARTBEAT MUSIC THERAPY” are overlaid with a little illustration of an electrocardiogram line, the spikes and dips communicating that this is science, not snake oil.

I’m not sure if this cover, with the words “STOPS CRYING GUARANTEED,” would have prompted me to play the album sooner or never, if it would have more powerfully triggered my cynicism or my desperation. As it was, for months we limped along without it: for eight weeks of maternity leave, and then months more of work-from-home, I nursed our baby to sleep, exactly the way all the baby guides tell you not to. I was supposed to feed him, then put him down in an empty crib, where he would supposedly lie motionless on his back and sleep. I believe that this has worked for somebody, somewhere, the same way I accept in the abstract the existence of people who like to eat Marmite. I believe those peaceful babies are out there, or those parents sufficiently dedicated to sleep training. But the particular baby I had was one who demanded to be held, and the particular parent I found myself to be was one who would allow this, who would attempt to type for hours one-handed, laptop precariously perched on the couch arm, while our son sprawled across my lap. I made social media posts for my university department about events I couldn’t attend, and I completed edits to stories that took place in far-flung locations I felt no hope of returning to. My life, broken into small increments of silence, felt small in every way except the enormity of my baby’s needs.

My husband would come home in the evenings and take bedtime duty after the last feeding, bouncing our son on an exercise ball while singing Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” then gingerly placing the baby in the bassinet, where he might stay for an hour or two. He woke not only from hunger. He also woke with nearly every wet diaper, and sometimes startled at his own farts and sneezes, wailing with outrage at this strange, damp, noisy body he occupied. Once we’d picked him up to investigate the inevitably anticlimactic source of his distress, he reacted to any attempt to put him back in the bassinet as if we were lowering him into boiling lava.

At some point, we rediscovered the CD. We figured it couldn’t make things worse. Our son didn’t immediately drop off to sleep, but it seemed to relax him better than Soundgarden, easing him into sleep and keeping him there when we left the recording playing. We would let it play all night. Since our son still slept in our bedroom, that meant we slept to the same half-hour loop of lullabies.

The album starts with the slow, measured thump of a heartbeat, a bass line that undergirds every song. Then comes an arpeggio of chimes, then the vocals. London Bridge is falling down, but the singer sounds blissfully unconcerned. Let it fall, let it all fall down: she is on the verge of sweet, sweet sleep. She, and her fellow vocalists stay similarly detached through songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” all delivered in slow, soporific sincerity. Everything is a recognizable children’s song, complete with lyrics, but not all of them are lullabies: the album finishes with a bizarrely down-tempo version of “Old MacDonald (Had a Farm),” the ee-i-ee-i-o delivered as a mournful dirge. The follow-up album, Baby-Go-To-Sleep “Stops Crying” Original Heartbeat Lullabies: Volume 2, includes “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean,” with the lyrics inexplicably altered so that the singer begs a nameless god to bring back my daddy to me, to me.

In the wee hours of the night, with a child sleeping on top of me, it is possible for this song to hit me just right and feel like the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. But mostly, as a matter of sanity and survival, I taught myself not to hear this music at all, to let it blur into a long wash of gratitude that these were the sounds that filled the night hours, and not shrieking or sobbing. We played the album so relentlessly that it created a Pavlovian sort of response in all of us, so that when we used it for car naps, even the driver was filled with a dangerous languor.

We depended on the music until we didn’t, until our son was a toddler who would still climb into our bed, but the lullabies no longer made any discernible difference. We then managed to put it out of both our lives and our heads so effectively that our twins were a few months old when we remembered that this album existed, that we had in fact downloaded it onto multiple phones, iPads, and computers. One of the iPads by then was ancient and barely functional. We pulled it back out, marveling at how much of our early parenthood had been erased, blanked out by sleep deprivation and whatever evolutionary amnesia prompts people to want more children, to believe that if they survived the first one, they’re equipped for the next. We dubbed the iPad “the lullaby machine,” since that was nearly the only thing it still did, and put it on a shelf in the twins’ bedroom.

***

The concept of “heartbeat music therapy” does not exactly have the backing of medical science, but it doesn’t not have the backing of medical science. It was created by a record producer in Muscle Shoals, a town with an outsized reputation for music, like a tiny Nashville. Starting in the 1960s, FAME Studios lured singers to northwest Alabama to record hits like “Mustang Sally” and “When a Man Loves a Woman.” The FAME house band, The Swampers, eventually founded their own recording studio, and hired recent college grad Terry Woodford to run the music publishing department.

Woodford had written songs for his high school band, one of which made enough money to finance his degree in textile engineering. “Because I had that engineering background, I decided I would study all the hits,” Woodford recalled for the “Roots of American Music Trail,” a documentary project and tourist trail. “I looked at the chart records, listened to them, and I realized there were about fifty things that all hit songs seemed to have in common… So that is what I taught the songwriters, and it worked.” He went on to found Wishbone, an independent production company. Rather than trying to lure established stars, Wishbone combined Woodford’s mercenary analysis with the talents of up-and-coming regional songwriters and musicians. The approach worked, culminating in a Wishbone song winning Billboard‘s “Song of the Year” in 1977. By 1987, Woodford had shut down Wishbone to run Audio-Therapy Innovations, Inc., devoting himself exclusively to heartbeat lullabies.

Supposedly at the request of a daycare provider desperate to help kids nap, Woodford devoted Wishbone resources to a new, unlikely, project. The album info reads “Artist: Heartbeat Lullabies Singers,” but there was never any such group. The album was recorded by session musicians and vocalists from the Muscle Shoals community. The singer of “London Bridge” is Cindy Richardson-Walker, who moved to Muscle Shoals as a teenager to make it big in country music. She never launched a solo career, but she’s worked steadily for decades as a backup singer and songwriter, performing with artists like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. The 1984 Sheena Easton hit “Almost Over You” is by Richardson-Walker. She’s also a longtime friend and collaborator to Marie Tomlinson Lewey, who sings lead on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Lewey has performed with artists like Lionel Richie, Roy Orbison, and Tammy Wynette. The heartbeat itself turns out to belong to Brandon Barnes, a songwriter who arranged all the tracks on both albums, and whose pop, country, and R&B songs went on to receive four Grammy nominations and sell 15 million records for artists including Boys II Men and Brian McKnight.

In the context of these resumes, the lullaby album looks like a blip, a quick buck for the musicians involved and for producer Woodford, who had no particular reason to care whether or not it actually worked—very few of the sleep aids that parents plunk down money for have much evidentiary backing. But nurses reported, of an initial 1985 trial run at a hospital nursery, that the music really did calm crying newborns. Cardiac Intensive Care Unit nurses, working with infants recovering from surgery for congenital heart anomalies, said that “the tapes… seem to reach something in them that helps them relax and go to sleep.” After documenting this success, Woodford embraced heartbeat lullabies with missionary zeal.

Between 1985 and 2010, a handful of studies were performed using the music: researchers at the Indiana University School of Nursing found that babies who listened to heartbeat lullabies maintained better oxygen saturation during and after circumcision, and a study at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center of Akron found that playing heartbeat lullabies for premature infants could result in less time in the NICU. Meanwhile, Woodford began marketing his music not just to new parents, but to animal shelters and dementia wards. “It would have been irresponsible not to share the dramatic successes animal care providers were having playing the CD for their upset dogs,” Woodford wrote.

***

So it was unfortunate, and maybe counterintuitive, that heartbeat music therapy eventually inspired in me a murderous rage.

If we say a child’s sleep night is between 10-12 hours, then a 30-minute album can repeat up to 24 times per night. Times 365 nights, times years, times multiple children: I have probably heard Baby-Go-To-Sleep “Stops Crying” Original Heartbeat Lullabies over 20,000 times. Minus nights we didn’t use it, or when the iPad ran out of charge, or when I turned it off in a fit of…— I don’t know what to call it, but it’s the feeling that comes over you when you suddenly hear again the music you have taught yourself not to hear, and you think you might either spontaneously combust or toss your sleepless baby out the window.

Babies’ stomachs are so tiny that they need to eat every few hours around the clock, meaning that sleep deprivation is a biological inevitability for new parents. But a constant lack of sleep, an inability to defuse the tiny bomb constantly detonating in your house, does not feel inevitable or routine. It feels annihilating, and a person will do nearly anything to alleviate it, within the bounds of financial reason. Parents might pay $1,695 for a bassinet that senses when your child is restless, and adjusts its automatic rocking accordingly, or $35 for a Baby Shusher, a small battery-operated cone that says “Shhhhhhh….” They buy the books, they join the Facebook groups, they follow self-proclaimed sleep experts online, they sign up for classes and private consultations. They are gifted copies of the satirical picture book Go the F**k to Sleep, which the Boston Globe says, without irony, “Resonates powerfully with almost everyone.”

Parents get so desperate they harm their children, which is where Audio-Therapy Innovations makes the most strenuous case for its products. Their website touts that their music literally saves lives, not in reference to NICU or surgical outcomes, but because babies without the benefit of Audio-Therapy’s heartbeat lullabies are at risk of being so aggravating that their parents might attempt to shut them up by any means. Babies are fragile; Shaken Baby Syndrome, which can mean death or permanent brain damage, is generally not the result of sustained abuse, but of an explosion of frustration in an overwhelmed and exhausted adult. The company describes itself as a U.S. Department of Defense contractor, by which it means that its lullaby albums are distributed to service members with newborns, the same way my employer distributed it to me; if our babies can be put to sleep more easily, there is less risk of parental violence.

I never harmed my children, but I understand how it happens. I understand it best when I hear the dirge-like version of “Old MacDonald (Had a Farm)” that ends Baby-Go-To-Sleep “Stops Crying” Original Heartbeat Lullabies: Volume One, because I know it plays exactly 27 minutes after “London Bridge,” meaning that I am now 27 minutes closer to death, and I have spent 27 minutes of my one wild and precious life trying to cajole a being who is awake to become a being who is asleep and it hasn’t even worked, and in those 27 minutes I have done nothing else that needs doing, like grading papers or washing the dishes or getting my older child to bed or showering or sleeping myself, and there are untold minutes ahead of me tonight, and the next night, and the night after that, and all the nights stretching out before me. The feeling is something like the frustration I feel trying to wedge a storm window into its frame, or stubbing my toe on a rock. Neither the baby nor the window nor the rock can be reasoned with or made to yield. They are what and who they are, and their nature is entirely outside of my own.

Which the twins probably perceived, could feel my Old MacDonald-inspired anguish electroshocking them as I cradled and rocked them, usually one at a time, my husband taking the other while we left our older child downstairs to be raised by Minecraft YouTubers. We traded babies on alternate nights with the unspoken hope that this time we’d get the easy one, even though there was no discernable easy one. We’ve all heard the airplane announcement about putting your own oxygen mask on first, either on an actual airplane or as metaphor: take care of yourself, or you won’t be able to care for others. But its non-aviation manifestations are rarely so clear-cut: what did it cost me, really, to hear a CD I did not want to hear anymore, especially when I could successfully no longer even “hear” 90% of it, when the sound could slide by me unmarked? Of all the sacrifices parenting might entail, why not play this album?

Well, because it made me want to crawl out of my skin. But that somehow wasn’t enough to make me stop playing it. The success of the heartbeat album had once felt both miraculous and fragile, and sleep so very precious. There was never, ever enough of it: why would I risk the amount we had? Of course, it wasn’t really a “success,” not anymore. This album had reached a point of diminishing returns, where whatever sleep incentive it offered the babies was less and less equal to the rageful despair it prompted in me. But sleep deprivation doesn’t make anyone smarter or better at problem solving.

Finally one evening, I heard new sounds coming from the room where my husband had taken one of the babies, a blur of rain sounds and piano notes, a few chords that sounded vaguely Erik Satie-ish. These white noise lullabies may not have had the backing of medical science, but they also had no recognizable tunes or lyrics or sharp edges for the brain to snag on. I couldn’t tell where any track began or ended. There was nothing to mark the passage of time. There was nothing to hate.

***

At some point, Audio-Therapy Innovations stopped innovating. The company never went into white noise or diverged from the original vision of “heartbeat music therapy.” Woodford at one time announced he was working on songs with “lyrical messages based on the 12 step program.” But I can find no such album available for purchase. In the 32 years since Audio-Therapy’s third album, Jesus Loves Me Fast Asleep – 9 Christian Heartbeat Lullabies, Audio-Therapy has released and rereleased its three albums in different editions and formats, but not recorded any new music. There are no versions of “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” rewritten for dogs or dementia patients.

I reached out to the contact email on the Audio-Therapy website, asking if there were any plans to ever release more music. I have not received a reply. I don’t know whether Woodford felt that, with the proceeds of his original three albums enough to live off of, there was simply no financial need to make more. Or maybe he felt he’d reached a pinnacle of both commercial and artistic success, that Baby-Go-To-Sleep “Stops Crying” Original Heartbeat Lullabies, Volumes 1 and 2 were the perfect expressions of heartbeat music therapy, the alpha and omega, never to be surpassed. Either seems possible.

Most of the Audio-Therapy website looks like it was designed only slightly later than the 1997 CD edition I have, but it’s e-commerce capable: you can, for example, buy “The ‘LullaBeat Comfort’ Speaker/Player with Preloaded Heartbeat Lullabies” for $49.95 to $64.95, depending on how many songs come preloaded. As far as I can tell, the small wireless speaker is a literal “lullaby machine” that can’t be used to play or download any other music. It’s a monstrous invention and something I might actually have purchased had I seen it earlier.

***

After the night I heard the white noise lullabies wafting down the hallway, I asked my husband the kind of questions I might have asked had he suddenly invented the theory of gravity. What paradigm-shifting vision had it taken, to queue up a new lullaby album? He’d searched Spotify for “white noise lullabies,” he said, and this was what had come up. I asked how he had known that it would work at least as well as the old songs, as if the risk involved was akin to stunt-deviling his way over a gorge in the family minivan. It seemed worth a shot, he shrugged, refusing to claim any special vision. It just looked that way to me in the light of my own spectacular failure of vision, the way I’d clung to something that no longer worked, the way I worried I’d cling to other rituals or practices that had once served. I’d be the parent dragging my kid to music lessons they no longer wanted to go to, trying to sustain friendships they’d moved on from, or doing something truly humiliating, like holding their hand at school pickup when they were way, way over it. How was I supposed to recognize those moments and adapt, to change as a person and a parent, if I couldn’t even pull up a new lullaby album on Spotify?

How do you know, and when do you leap? When do you set aside your decades-long career as a soul and country producer and sink all your time and money into a music “therapy” you invented? Or when do you keep showing up to auditions, booking gigs, making a life in music that’s different from the starring role you might have envisioned, but still sustains you? When do you decide to leave music altogether, as my nemesis, the singer on “Old MacDonald (Had a Farm),” chose to do? As far as I can tell, she never appeared on any other albums of any kind. Her Instagram highlights her historic Craftsman farmhouse. She has children and grandchildren and worked in early-childhood education. She participated in Colbert County Tomato Sandwich Day. I assume she would be dismayed to learn that her singing of ee-i-ee-i-o makes me contemplate my own mortality. I want her to have lived happily, and I want to know how she knew what would make her happy, how she saw past whatever phase of her life she was in when she recorded “Old MacDonald (Had a Farm).” Maybe singing ee-i-ee-i-o made her contemplate her mortality, too.

***

The heartbeat lullaby era did me the favor of definitively ending one night when I couldn’t log into the paid Spotify account to play the white noise lullabies. I had to choose instead between the interruptions of Hot Cheetos ads on a free account or our old lullaby album. The twins noticed, all of a sudden, that the sleepy, throbbing lullabies were actual songs with words, which they now knew. They’d sung these songs at daycare. Some of these songs had accompanying hand gestures. They reached for me during “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” wanting to yank me back and forth in a game they’d learned. When I wouldn’t play, when I told them it was sleep time, they then reasonably asked for their sleep music: “White music! White music!” they demanded, and I didn’t know whether my husband had referred to the album as “white noise” or if they meant the album’s cover image, a large black and white image of a pale baby head wearing a white flower headband. Either way, they were telling me what they needed. Learning to listen to them isn’t as easy as the parenting gurus on Instagram try to tell me it is, but I have to trust that it’s possible, that between all five of us, we can make it to our children’s adulthood without anyone throwing anyone else out a window. One of the twins another night pressed his forehead hard against my own. “You beautiful, you good,” he said. “You beautiful, you good.” And oh, how I’m not, but here I am, trying: to be both my own person and the person he needs. He understands I am a person, now. Not a person whose musical tastes he cares about, but a person. There’s hope in that.

That was the second-to-last time I ever played the album. The last: one night, the six-year-old announced that he couldn’t sleep. “Help me go to sleep,” he insisted, an open-ended demand I had no idea how to fulfill. He kept thinking about the horror movie The Ring, he explained, whose plot I had sketched out for him one day in response to a line of questioning I can no longer recall nor even imagine. Did I say I’ve never harmed my children? Allow me to retract the statement.

The white noise lullabies were playing in the next room, the house otherwise quiet. My husband had fallen asleep with both twins on the mattress on the floor they preferred to their beds. I sketched a fantasy beach picnic that was a mash-up of Pokémon: Sun and Moon and Avatar: The Last Airbender, with my son the guest of honor. “Can you try to sleep now?” I asked, aware of the clock, the hours remaining until we’d need to pry him out of bed for school.

“I keep thinking about it,” he said. “Help me stop thinking about it.”

I felt as helpless as I’d ever felt trying to get the twins to sleep. Perhaps it was that same sense of helplessness, or guilt, that prompted my suggestion. “Do you want to try the lullabies?” I asked. “The old music you used to go to sleep to?

To my surprise, he eagerly nodded. My phone was old, and the storage situation had gotten so dire that I had deleted every music album except the lullaby one, which by then I hadn’t used in months. But I just couldn’t do it. I’d imagined I might still need it, somehow. The heartbeat started in, then London Bridge started falling down, all over again. My son put his head on my shoulder. His body, long and lean and transformed unrecognizably from his infant self, slackened against mine. His breath slowed and he slid, miraculously, into sleep. Long before Old MacDonald could rear his accursed head, I pulled my arms free and turned off the music. I held my breath. He stayed asleep.

***

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice titles. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the 10 best books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In her Perkoff-Prize finalist essay “Cancer Culture,” Courtney Miller Santo brings together her account of a failed biopsy with her past history working for a nonprofit advocacy organization. The result is this essay that balances intimate experience with the larger subject of cancer in the twenty-first century.

Cancer Culture

Courtney Miller Santo

“You seem capable,” the woman says as she leads me down the dim hallways of St. Francis Hospital. Her body language tells me she intends this as a compliment. “Most people bring someone. But it’s not. I mean. It’s no more trouble than getting a cavity filled.”

The “it” she refers to is the impending needle biopsy on my right breast. A few weeks earlier, at the suggestion of my gynecologist, I’d had a baseline mammogram, which is to say my first mammogram. The American Cancer Society recommends getting one in your early forties to document what your breast tissue looks like when it is normal. Mine, as it turned out, didn’t look normal.

Truthfully, it hadn’t occurred to me to bring someone. My people, as they say here in Tennessee, live thousands of miles away. I assume that the someone most women bring is a mother, an aunt, a sister, anyone with the requisite pair of boobs and the flexible schedule needed to spend an afternoon in the service of a cancer scare.

She deposits me in a windowless room with two hospital gowns and a clear plastic bag. The woman has been assigned by the hospital to be my patient advocate. Her job, as she explained when we met, is to answer questions and guide me through “everything.” She’d made actual air quotes when she said this to me.

“You must have questions,” she says from the doorway.

I shrug. I don’t know enough to know what to ask. I look around—it seems to me now that I should’ve at least googled “needle biopsy.”

“Capable,” she repeats, as if she’s assigning me a role to play.

As she exits, she tells me to leave my socks and panties on and to layer the gowns so that one covers the front and one covers the back. I do as instructed and wait. I open the door and look down the corridor. Leaving it ajar, I sit awkwardly on the examination table and then decide to fold the clothing I originally just stuffed into the bag. The pink bra is too visible in the clear plastic sack. I tuck it inside the turtleneck I wore.

Before putting my phone inside the bag, I text my best friend, who still lives in the Pacific Northwest, where we grew up. Last year she had a portion of her cervix burned off and suctioned out after her annual pap smear came back with abnormalities. The hospital is quiet except for the low hum of machinery and a whiny buzz coming from one of the fluorescent lights. I wait, as we all do in this position, for a knock at the door to ask if I am ready.

***

Cancer is America’s bogeyman. The word itself is a jump scare. We don’t have heart-disease near misses, diabetic close calls, or almost strokes, but by age sixty, nearly every woman has had an abnormal mammogram or pap smear. That is to say we’ve all had or are going to have a cancer scare. And thanks to Grey’s Anatomy, The Fault in Our Stars, St. Jude commercials, and even the government’s war on cancer, we’ve been conditioned to catastrophize these cancer scares. In 2017, researchers concluded that the terror many people feel about the possibility of having cancer exists because we see it as a “vicious, unpredictable, and indestructible enemy.” It remains the second leading cause of death in the United States.

One of the major initiatives intended to stop cancer from killing us is early detection: that is your mammograms, pap smears, and even the gloved finger swipe your dental hygienist does for early detection of mouth cancers. The problem with these cancer screenings is that they  haven’t translated into fewer cancer deaths. Looking at the numbers, it is clear that while people are living longer after being diagnosed, cancer remains deadly. Instead of diagnosing the disease a year before it kills us, we are diagnosing it a decade before it does. We are living longer after diagnosis but not living longer in absolute terms.

My only previous cancer scare happened the year we moved to Memphis. I left my husband home with our two small children and took our only car to the dentist for a routine cleaning. It turned out to be one of those one-woman offices where the dentist is the receptionist, the hygienist, the dentist. After checking me in, she busied herself with the dozen or so x-rays of my mouth that are standard for new patients. I’d been through similar visits with other dentists and didn’t think much of it until she returned shaking her head and sighing dramatically as she sat on the rolling stool next to the dental chair.

“Do you have someone we can call?” she asked.

I thought it might have something to do with her being the only one in the office, but, no, it became clear as we spoke that she wanted me to get someone to come and sit with me while she told me about my x-rays. I tried to explain about having one car and not really knowing anyone in Memphis. “We just moved here,” I said.

The two of us gazed out the window that overlooked a local high school. A dozen years later, both my children would attend this high school. Students had just been let out for the day and their shouts and laughter filled the silence. “I’ll just have to show you,” she said.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

She had me follow her to the light box where my x-rays were mounted. We looked together at the small fluid-filled sac grown into the cavity where one of my wisdom teeth had been. I don’t think she ever used the word “cancer,” but by the time I left, she’d made an emergency biopsy appointment with an oral surgeon.

Of course, it wasn’t cancer. What had scared her was the possibility that the sac was an ameloblastoma, a rare tumor made up of the cells that form enamel. If left untreated, it can result in severe facial disfigurement. I wonder what sort of pictures they showed her in dental school to scare her. In the years since, this particular cancer scare has become a running joke between me and my husband. “Do you have someone we can call?” we will say to one of the children when they stumble on the playground. My husband says it to me when I tell him my foot’s asleep. I say it to him when he bumps his head on the low attic ceiling. It’s become a way of saying, “Don’t be dramatic.”

***

Back at St. Francis, two efficient nurses, Louise and Julia, have been tasked with taking a fresh mammogram of my right breast. The density and spherical nature of breasts makes them difficult to get images of. In the late 1940s, a doctor in Uruguay, Paul A. Leborgne, pioneered leveling the breasts during the x-ray, which allowed him to better differentiate between harmless calcifications and those that were cancerous. His technique for achieving what scientists call the “enhancement of imaging quality” was to flatten the breast as if it were a specimen on microscope slide. Leborgne and those who’ve followed in his footstep, refer to this technique as “compression.”

To achieve the required compression, Nurse Julia, moves the front hospital gown aside and tells me to grab hold of the white plastic machine with my right hand. She takes my right breast and smashes it onto an acrylic stand the size of a legal pad. I think about feeding pasta dough into the attachment for my Kitchen Aid. When it is flat enough, she has me hold it in place with my left hand while she lowers the similarly sized top piece of clear plastic until it secures my pancaked breast in place.

It is uncomfortable but not painful. Nurse Julia tells me not to breathe and hustles out of the room. From far away I hear her say to look to the right and lift my chin, and then there is the low hum of the x-ray. I exhale, and before I can draw in a breath, she has released me from the machine. We repeat this process several times. The other nurse, Louise, is in and out of the room. She makes a joke about how men would respond if this were the screening procedure for testicular cancer.

I think about how different medicine would be if women had been allowed into medical schools from the beginning. There’s a website that credits Dr. Leborgne with saving more than 16 million lives. At the end of the day, I wonder about his so-called invention. What is revolutionary about making a woman’s unruly breasts fit between two slides? There’s a long line of Leborgne men in Uruguay who are radiologists. His brother and nephews have published numerous papers in the American Journal of Roentgenology about x-rays and cancer, and even though theirs is a French surname that means “one-eyed man,” not one of them has suggested putting their own one-eyed monsters on a slide and smashing them for better diagnostics.

After the rounds of flattening have ended, I’m taken to a sterile office and told to wait for the doctor. We are in the basement of the hospital, which was built in 1974, the same year Betty Ford had a mammogram and went public with her diagnosis. It is said to have been the beginning of the end of the stigma women faced over the disease. Surely Betty should be credited with saving as many lives as Leborgne. The office is a shared workspace—clearly meant as a placeholder space for doctors to use to meet with patients. There aren’t any diplomas, or framed photographs, and the bookshelves are empty. It needs to be dusted.

***

In the early 2000s, I worked for a nonprofit dedicated to educating the public about lung cancer. Even though it is the deadliest of cancers—more than half of lung cancer patients die within one year of being diagnosed—lung-cancer research receives fewer funds than research on other cancers. One of my first assignments at ALCASE (Alliance for Lung Cancer Advocacy, Support, and Education) was to create a what-to-expect brochure for those undergoing treatment for the disease. Funding for this came from pharmaceutical companies.

Fresh off my job at a newspaper, I approached the assignment like a reporter and connected with a woman, Ann, who’d been recently diagnosed. I asked permission to accompany her to her radiation and chemotherapy appointments. Ann was in her early sixties and a widow. She lived alone in a small house in Washington State, where ALCASE was headquartered. Before going to any of her appointments, we met at her house, so I could explain the project to her and get to know her.

Most people with lung cancer start conversations about their diagnosis with an apology. It’s always the same apology, even if the words are different: I didn’t quit smoking soon enough. Of course there isn’t, at least medically speaking, a soon enough to quit. To be considered a never-smoker, you have to have had fewer than one hundred cigarettes in your lifetime. Ann offered her apology, and I told her, as we did everyone we worked with at the nonprofit, that it wasn’t her fault. Blaming people for being sick is one of the worst parts of capitalism. She’d started smoking as a teenager—a time when doctors appeared in R. J. Reynolds advertisements to say that their preferred cigarettes were Camels.

As we finished our conversation, I marked out the appointments that I’d take her to over the next two months. She kept making sure I could drive her. The treatments, especially the chemotherapy, left her too drained to drive herself. Her daughter lived in another state, and she’d been relying on a handful of neighbors, acquaintances, and the occasional taxi driver to get her to and from her appointments.

Back in the office, I opened Adobe and worked on a trifold brochure for the caregivers of lung cancer patients. The overall message was supposed to be encouraging—a you-can-do this vibe balanced with a dash of don’t forget self-care. Before visiting with Ann, I hadn’t considered what people did in the absence of caretakers. The neat columns and easily digestible bullet points felt disingenuous—like I was writing out a recipe for chocolate cake to give to someone who didn’t have an oven. My own family spiraled out from me and exponentially multiplied. I had grandmothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, and even second cousins who could be called into action as caregivers. I had begun to see how living could be a numbers game. One way of ensuring that you have someone there to hold your hand, to take you to your appointments, is to have a dozen options to choose from.

People who were newly diagnosed with lung cancer often called our hotline. We sent them treatment information, connected them with local support groups, and told them to record every conversation with every medical professional. Diagnosis is overwhelming, and patients, along with their caretakers, often forget what doctors have said to them. At the time, phones were mostly of the flip variety, and very few people carried them at all times. We suggested getting a small digital recorder. I’d used a similar device as a reporter.

The last appointment I went to with Ann was one of the endless rounds of chemotherapy. The West Cancer clinic, a nearly ubiquitous presence in all major cities, has patients settle into large recliners while the drug cocktail is administered via IV. I waited for the nurse to check Ann’s medical bracelet and chart. Once she matched all the information, it became a waiting game. Ann and I passed the time by talking about whether or not her daughter would get engaged to her current boyfriend.

My memory isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be. The few diary entries I made about Ann were mostly about me and my feelings. I wish I remembered more or that I still had the tapes to hear the things she said, the things her doctor said, but it’s been almost twenty years. Two whole decades, and nothing has significantly changed in cancer care. Sure, there have been minor refinements in treatment protocols and drugs. There’s even been some forward movement on gene therapy to target specific types of cancers and the nearly unprecedented success of the HPV vaccine. But mostly, a cancer patient still doesn’t know whether they have a slow-growing cancer that won’t kill them, or an aggressive one that will break off from the lungs, the breast, the jaw, and find its way into the lymph system and from there riddle the whole body with growths. Most cancer patients don’t even have a clear idea of how much time they might have or not have, once diagnosed.

***

“Hello, Hello,” the doctor assigned to do my needle biopsy says. I will learn that he repeats everything twice. I think it is a technique he’s picked up to make sure patients register everything he says. He’s carrying the film from my mammograms. Thinking about Ann and all the days I spent telling people to record anything their doctor tells them, I take out my phone and ask if it’s okay to record.

“Yes, yes,” he says loudly into my phone and then sits behind the desk. “What we’re going to do today. Today,” he puts two of the films against a light box and flips the light switch, “we are going to get a sample of these little calcifications here.”

I look at the x-ray of my breast. I think I see the rocks he is talking about.

He points them out, using the top of his silver pen. “Here and here.”

I nod.

“They are very close to the chest wall. But I am confident we can get what we need,” he says—or that’s what I think he says, until I listen to the recording several days later. In the recording, I hear him say think instead of confident.

He explains the procedure to me, and I sign a few more pieces of paper. He is in and out of the room in less than eight minutes. The shorter nurse, Louise, comes to get me and takes me to the room with the stereotactic biopsy machine. The radiologist is in another part of the room, where the controls of the machine reside. It reminds me of restaurants where you can see the chef making the food. He doesn’t make eye contact with me, and whatever he is doing with the machine’s controls I can’t see.

Imagining the procedure, I thought the doctor would insert a needle and suction one of the calcified stones out of my breast. Instead, Nurse Louise helped me climb onto a large plastic platform, lie face down, and then stick my boob through a hole in the plastic table. She asks if I’m comfortable. I don’t know how to answer her—nothing about this is comfortable.

“Sure,” I say.

She says something I don’t hear, and then the table rises into the air. It stops, and I hear her ask if I want to hold her hand.

“I’m fine,” I say. I am not fine.

The doctor speaks into a microphone and tells me to hold my breath. I do, and like a sewing machine punches into fabric, a needle pushes into my breast just above the nipple. There is a pause; then, after about five minutes, it repeats the motion. There is silence, and now Nurse Louise is telling me that I did a good job as she’s leaving the room.

I stare at the nubby plastic and think about how the brain measures time in heartbeats. She is gone longer than she should be. When she comes back, it is to tell me they didn’t quite get what they needed and that the doctor is going to try again. I am repositioned and adjusted, and again she offers to hold my hand. I tell her I’m fine.

The next time she comes back, she is muttering about the doctor under her breath, but she gets me out of the machine and gives me a big smile. My breast hurts the way your body hurts after a hard fall.

“We’re just going to get another mammogram.”

It isn’t until Nurse Julia appears to get my breast into the flattest of positions for the mammogram that I start crying. They whisper among themselves. I don’t hear much of what they say, but I think the doctor has blamed the mammogram for not being able to get a biopsy.

What was uncomfortable about the mammogram before has turned into pain. Blood seeps from the spot where I’ve already been poked a dozen times with the needle. I want to yell at somebody, but I wouldn’t know who to yell at. Later, when I tell my husband, I make the story funny. When I tell my best friend, I make it funny. When I tell my mother, I say that it was “not great.”

Mercifully, the mammogram takes less time than it did before. Her mouth in a thin line, Louise positions me back into the biopsy machine. The doctor comes out from his booth to check his work and assures me he’ll get it this time. Because he knows that the last thing I want is to have real surgery. I suppose that doctors are so used to telling patients how they physically feel that it is a natural inclination to also tell them what we want. Later, much later, I understand that this was his way of asking me if he could do the needle biopsy again.

“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s fine.”

Louise does not ask me if I want her to hold my hand. Instead, as the machine raises me into the air, she stands close and reaches up to grasp my hand as if it is part of the procedure. She squeezes hard each time the needle moves in and out of my skin. I am still crying.

***

When President Nixon announced the National Cancer Act in 1971, he started the so-called war on cancer. In his speech, he predicted we’d have a cure within five years. More than fifty years later, there is no cure. In fact, most of the data concludes that the decrease in cancer death rates is almost entirely due to the reduction in the number of Americans who smoke and the HPV vaccine. In a report detailing the advancements and results of the war on cancer, Dr. Young-Joon Surh notes the trouble with using the language of war about a disease that starts with healthy cells. He suggests that “rather than speaking of cancer in militaristic terms, it’s better to communicate that we are ‘living with cancer’ for as long and as well as we can.”

Of course, the doctor did not get the sample he needed to biopsy my suspicious duct calcifications. We are back in his office, and I’m not recording. I can’t tell you much of what he said. We look at the x-rays again, and he points to the narrowness of my milk ducts and the positioning of the calcifications, “so close, so close” to the chest wall. He is speaking about how three dimensions are more difficult than two.

But I’m not thinking of those dimensions or of the war on cancer. Instead, what comes to mind is my first English professor, Claudia Emerson, who during her cancer treatments had ˘ ʼ tattooed on her right wrist. She always said the iamb—that poetic metrical foot of an unstressed, then a stressed syllable—was our heartbeat: da-Dum, da-Dum. When she died in 2014 from complications of colon cancer, I had a similar tattoo needled into my wrist. I rub my thumb across that tattoo now and feel for my own heartbeat as the doctor continues to talk.

After he leaves, Louise takes me to the patient advocate’s office. In contrast with where I’ve been, this is a real office with diplomas, disorganized shelves, and family photos. She is quiet while she looks through the papers they’ve given her. There are a few options. Most people have the surgical biopsy, but given my age and the lack of family history, I could also wait and get another mammogram in a few months to see if anything has changed. Too late, I realize I should be recording her. I know I am supposed to say something.

“Should we schedule the surgery?” she finally asks.

“Not right now.”

“I don’t schedule mammograms,” she says. “You’ll have to do that on your own.”

“Yup,” I say.

Once again I follow her through the corridors of St. Francis Hospital. She leaves me at the payment window where I charge the $1200 I owe to my credit card. At least, I think, I can get the points for it.

It is bright outside. The light in March has a particular quality—one I have always loved. It is as if Memphis is trying to rid itself of the winter sky with sunlight that is denser. I sit in my sun-warmed car and try to think about what to do next. My hands are shaking. I wish my people lived close. I call my mom. A memory has begun to surface of her telling me about a similar procedure for a similar reason.

We chat about the kids, my job, and my husband. I ask about the rest of my siblings; some I’ve spoken with recently, and others not. When there is a pause—the pause that says Why did you call? What is it that we are meant to talk through?—I ask her about her own mammograms.

“You had the calcifications, right? The ones in your milk ducts?”

“It’s never anything,” she says and explains that after the third or fourth needle biopsy came back benign, she just told them it was what her body did and that she wasn’t going to get cancer.

I tell her about the biopsy, about Louise and the patient advocate. She says all the things mothers are supposed to say.

***

It takes me a few years to get to my next gynecologist appointment. The pandemic put so many routine medical visits on hold. Sitting in her office this February, I listen as she tells me I need to get another mammogram on the books. I tell her I looked at the screening guidelines, that I don’t really have to. She’s about my age and, like me, has children in college. I joke that the upside of breast cancer is new boobs.

“It doesn’t work like that,” she says and then tells me she’s going to have her office schedule a mammogram for me. “If you don’t want to go, cancel.”

The best hedge against cancer is prevention, which means drinking less, eating more grains and vegetables, and avoiding toxins like cigarettes and, in some cases, the actual air in your city. Screening and early detection can and do save lives—for every two thousand women screened, at least one is saved from dying of breast cancer—but they aren’t foolproof. There is collateral damage.

In that group of two thousand women, ten others will, as a consequence of screening, become cancer patients and will be treated unnecessarily. The other adverse effect is the one I experienced. One out of seven women’s first (or baseline) mammogram will be flagged for more testing. This means the initial screening showed an abnormality, such as the cysts in my milk ducts.

One of the poems Claudia published three months before her death detailed her own medical history of benign and eventually malignant biopsies. In “The anatomy lesson: resection” she writes, “And then / there was the first biopsy/ of the cervix, a plug the size of a pencil eraser/ they said, and that mole/ you’d had all your life they of a sudden called /suspicious, and the nuisance / the gall bladder became, and the thyroid gland.”

It is the “and then” that stops my heart. The iamb at the end of a line that starts the long list of parts we live with that have the potential to turn against us. I’m not the only one with an iamb on wrist: more than a handful of her students, her friends, have marked ourselves as part of this tribe of heartbeats.

I haven’t canceled my second mammogram. In fact, I put it in my Google calendar with alerts—a week before, a day before, an hour before. I’m hedging. But I’ll tell you that what’s finally different this year is that my people are here now. My grandmother, mother, father, uncle, and  two of my brothers have moved to Memphis. I thought about this change when my grandmother broke her hip. Sitting with her in the emergency room, holding her hand, I thought of Ann and Louise and how scarcity can turn to plenty.

***

Courtney Miller Santo is the author of two novels, The Roots of the Olive Tree and Three-Story House, both published by HarperCollins. Translations of these works were published in German, Italian, Hungarian, Korean, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Turkey, and Slovenian. In addition to her novels, her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Shark Reef, Belief and Literature, the Los Angeles Review, Swing, Memphis Magazine, and Mason’s Road, among others.  She teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she serves as editor-in-chief of The Pinch. Find her online at courtneysanto.com or on Instagram @courtneysanto.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  “Days in the Life,” by essayist Michael Stokes, explores the intersection of nostalgia, fandom, and modern technology in this reflection on the Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road album and the EarthCam that films the famous intersection every minute of every day.

Days in the Life

Michael Stokes

In front of Abbey Road Studios, a man in a hooded jacket passes under the EarthCam, hands thrust in pockets, ignoring the tourists milling around at the gate. On the other side of the street a jogger goes by, followed a few moments later by an elderly woman walking her dog. A red London bus (number 139) rumbles past and takes a left turn at the intersection. A woman with a child in a stroller appears on the curb, again on the left, and a car draws up to allow them to cross. Snatches of conversation emerge from the white noise of traffic. Foreign tourists, apparently unsure of the quaint British custom of not running people over at pedestrian crossings, hesitate for a moment then strike out boldly and freeze in midstep, arms and legs flung wide. While this is taking place, a renegade cyclist, coming towards the camera, nips through the narrow gap between the Beatle impersonators and the curb on the right.

The EarthCam, which films the famous crossing 24/7, never gets more interesting than this and makes, more often than not, for very dull viewing. There is always that undertow of monotony, however busy things get, and no purchase for the mind in the random flow of life on the street. Even the Beatles imitators, more faint-hearted than inept, merely reinforce a sense of numbing banality. The Abbey Road EarthCam is what it is and shows what it shows, which is little more than the dross of everyday life.

So what, one might well ask, is it actually there for?

A webcam is basically surveillance technology, so it could serve to dissuade fans from looting the site (the vintage lollipop signs or the gates of Abbey Road Studios), but it is also symptomatic of our clinging to the past, as though, like Big Ben, it has become a symbol of permanence in an ever-changing world. Now, indeed, whatever the time of day or night and wherever we happen to be, we can visit the website to reassure ourselves that Abbey Road is still there. (Ironically enough, if the street is where it always was, the same cannot be said of the pedestrian crossing. It turns out that the original was moved, probably in the late 1970s, to a location nearer the junction, though according to a spokesman for Westminster City Council, “the detail of exactly when and why the crossing was moved has been lost in the annals of time.”)

The Abbey Road crossing is also a place of pilgrimage, and the main reason for tourists making this stop is to pay homage to the Beatles. One suspects that many do so, however, not because they are especially enamored of the band or its music but simply because they wish to partake in the modern cult of celebrity and enjoy, in true Warholian fashion, their own taste of fame, since not only can you make the crossing on live feed for all the world to see, but the time segment in which you appear is viewable online for a period of twenty four hours. And if you pull off an especially silly or lifelike or otherwise remarkable performance, there is every chance that yours will feature among “the best crossing shots” on the website’s “Wall of Fame.”

This is actually one of the reasons cited by English Heritage for granting the crossing grade II status. As Roger Bowdler, head of designations, put it at the time, “The crossing has international renown and the temptation to recreate that iconic 1969 album cover remains as strong as ever.” The point is a valid one, perhaps, but it is worth asking whether designating a few strips of white thermoplastic a “historic monument” and filming them round the clock is the best way to celebrate the Beatles’ achievement. Surely what they and their music were about could not be more remote from the grinding monotony of this urban thoroughfare, the sounds of car traffic suggesting instead the tireless swish of a broom which, day after day, and month after month, and year after year, sweeps away all trace of their magic.

The street, superficially at least, is the same as it always was. (You can view an image of the front cover here.) There are the same facades and front gardens. The same trees dapple the sidewalks, and the road still turns to the left just ahead of the vanishing point. However, vintage elements aside—the funny little van to the right of Ringo’s head, the Volkswagen Beetle to the right of George’s—much has changed. As we have seen, the crossing itself no longer exists. The road surface, which was once a biscuity brown, is now a dull black or dark gray, and the brick wall on the back of the album sleeve (view an image here) was demolished three decades ago (a vertical crack can already be seen in the photograph, bisecting RO AD on the street-name tile and clipping the terminal S in the name of the group).

It is safe to assume, however, that the tourists who flock to Abbey Road would prefer to believe it unchanged and unchanging and so fail to see it as it actually is. The place could not be more pedestrian (pun intended) and is as mundane today as it was half a century ago. Cars drove past incessantly and, then as now, commuters were liable to experience that very London inconvenience of waiting for buses that never showed up, although one in fact did on this occasion (Imagine the excitement in its dingy, smoke-hazed interior: “Where?! No! Oh my God, it is, it’s them…!”).

The place is nevertheless an important landmark in the history of the group. Abbey Road runs through St John’s Wood, a residential neighborhood near Lord’s Cricket Ground, and it was here, hidden away from the world in this leafy urban backwater, that the Beatles created most of their music. Shooting the sleeve in front of EMI studios and naming the album after the street were acts of homage, therefore, and of retrospection, and generations of music lovers, poring over the famous picture, have followed suit, lingering on this hallowed curbside where, like a warm breeze in the lime trees, the Beatles’ muse so often made her visits.

The music is suggested most directly by the crossing itself, which not only looks like a piano keyboard but also evokes a chord progression, the four band members like four beats in a bar, the measure most frequently used in pop and rock music. Likewise, the three visible hands of George, Paul, and Ringo evoke a lilting melodic line or musical phrase, a gentle pendular motion which, beginning on the left, is stressed on the upswing by the tail of Lennon’s jacket and completed on the offbeat by his hidden right hand.

But aside from what it suggests about its contents, what makes the Abbey Road sleeve most compelling is the portrait we have of the Beatles themselves at their most productive and inspired. The apple, here, was at its ripest and most rounded, but the beautiful harmonies they were creating in the studio bely the tensions that would break them apart. Paul, who’d had the idea for the cover, was clearly after something brisker, perhaps even regimental in spirit (think Sergeant Pepper’s), but, with the possible exception of Ringo, always the good soldier, the others look moody and tired. Harrison is visibly bored, McCartney himself looks groggy and greasy-haired, while Lennon, with his shoulders hunched up and his fists thrust deep in his pockets, looks like a pelican with a sore head.

It’s a wonder, in fact, given how bad the vibes were, how good they managed to look: kitted out for the occasion in their nice designer threads, their aura was as potent as ever.

And they didn’t just show up, but single-file and in step, their legs like compasses, they performed this little skit, a kind of music-hall number, wowing their fans with one last turn before bowing out and leaving the stage for good. It’s actually quite a corny idea for an album cover, harking back to the early 1960s, when the four would pose in naive configurations to stress their unity as a group, but on a simple, almost childish, level it works very well. Urban life is formless, for the most part, and dull—as a visit to the EarthCam will confirm any time—and the sudden appearance of a regular pattern disrupts our perceptions, creating a thrilling disjunction in our sense of the real.

The shot is remarkable, however, for its realism, for the way it captures a time and a place—the local topography, prevailing light conditions, and the slow ebb of life in this neck of St John’s Wood. London is basking in sunshine, and hot, dry air is wafting through the neighborhood. The lime trees have long since shed their fragrance, but there is an odor of tar, and of curbside dust and motor oil. It is a perfect day for repainting one’s garden railings, and right around the corner, on Grove End Road, sticky black paint is sparkling in the sun.

At Lord’s, a little further south, the groundskeepers are rolling the pitch for the afternoon game, while on Edgware Road, the traffic noise is loud and heat shimmers over the asphalt. You can taste exhaust fumes on the air, but also Wimpy burgers and John Player Specials.

Many, however, are taking things easy at this time of year, and on Primrose Hill, a mile or so east of EMI studios, office workers have loosened their ties and are resting on the grass in their shirt sleeves. They can feel the burn of the sun on their arms and necks, and horn-rimmed glasses are starting to slide down their noses. Secretaries too are enjoying the sun, and warm breezes might ruffle their perms. Some of them, at a time when sexual liberation was reaching the masses, have taken off their shoes and are feeling the cool of the grass between their toes.

Many of us idealize the 1960s—always suffused, it seems, in that warm Kodak yellow—and it is tempting to indulge in evocations such as these, but the lives of most people were far from glamorous and often depressing. The ordinary folk mentioned above most likely worked in offices that had brown carpeting on the walls and were filled with acrid clouds of cigarette smoke and the nerve-jarring clatter of manual typewriters. Britain was a shabbier place than it is today, and anyone who grew up in that period will remember the nauseating smell of Woolworths supermarkets, redolent of rain-sodden clothing, Right Guard anti-perspirant, and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. The country was then, as it is now, a land of stodgy food and lowering skies, of places so sad they are an affront to the soul—soot-blackened terraces that went on for miles, run-down council estates, and concrete shopping developments rattling with discarded beer cans and reeking of piss. Despite a dramatic rise in living standards since the end of stamp rationing in the mid-1950s, the Orwellian austerity of the postwar years was still the dominant mood when the Beatles broke onto the national scene.

Their music was an opiate that infused English life, bringing color to a world where even grass can seem gray, and populating everyday reality with figments of the imagination. Most of us, however, are dullards, and like the motorist in the photograph driving away down Abbey Road and wondering for the umpteenth time, no doubt, if he shouldn’t quit his job or leave his wife, we have no idea what we are missing but go about our lives oblivious of the wonders that dwell in our midst. Abbey Road, too, has stories to tell, and the album sleeve itself seems full of visual signs, as though, amid the intervals of shade and the dashes of light in the leaves, one might glimpse a girl groupie climbing through a bathroom window (protected, needless to say, by her silver spoon), the appalling Mr. Mustard with that ten-bob note up his nose, or the unarguably groovy but revolting and disease-ridden character we encounter in the album’s opening track and who, on reflection, is surely not so hard to see.

This love of the ludicrous was typically English, and the Beatles saw themselves as entertainers first and foremost, purveying a sense of optimism and gentle anarchy to the laboring masses. In a context of growing political turmoil, they chose, for the main part, to stay out of the fray, and their refusal to condone violent protest or the dialectics of ideological warfare attracted the ire of the radical left. Revolution 1 is about as close as the group came to a manifesto, but they, too, had a plan. However, rather than change the world by direct political action, they sought to “free (our) minds instead,” through psychedelia and formal experimentation, flower power and transcendental meditation—and, last, but not least, through the laid-back inducement of “bop shoobie-doo wop.”

Through their musical recordings and media presence, the Beatles did more than any of their peers to bring the ’60s counterculture into the mainstream, and the Abbey Road crossing evokes a virgin shoreline, the band like anti-war conquistadores filing off their ship to spread the hippie creed. But the summer of ’69 was never the Summer of Love, and if the music on Abbey Road is sunny and warm, the bad blood between the group members makes the yellow light in the picture appear more jaundiced than mellow.

As it so happens, the group’s internal history reflected the increasingly somber mood of the late 1960s.

The very next day after the Abbey Road photo shoot, on August 9, 1969, members of the Manson Family went on the first of their murderous sprees in Beverly Hills. Charles Manson would later claim that inspiration for these crimes had come from his twisted personal take on The Beatles’ White Album.

Woodstock, which would begin one week later, on August 15,1969, easily lived up to its billing—“Three days of music and peace”—and was certainly the biggest party ever thrown, but it is hard to escape a sense of gloom when watching the last half hour of the movie. By the time Jimi Hendrix comes on to close the festival it is 8 am on a Monday, and in the pale morning light, the crowd that was once half a million strong has dwindled to a smattering of sleepless derelicts. Beyond the area in front of the stage, the 600-acre grasslands of Max Yasgur’s dairy farm have become a muddy scab strewn with trash and sleeping bodies, and although Hendrix tries all his voodoo chops, the music only really transcends when he plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the feedback from his guitar screams across the sky like the mother of all hangovers.

The hippie dream would soon be floundering in the mud of Woodstock and the mud of Vietnam, and many felt that the brotherhood of man, which the Beatles had done so much to promote, was beginning to look like a pie in the sky. In its cool-eyed realism and embrace of the mundane, the sleeve of Abbey Road surely reflects a desire on their parts to clear their heads and come back down to earth and—as spelled out by the street-name tiles on the back cover of the album—to make the return journey from ’60s idealism and universalism to the local and parochial. The point might also be that if you want to change the world, start where you are and carry on from there. In the case of the four band members, this meant walking away from EMI studios and going their own separate ways. It meant starting again from square one. But if this is where it all ended, it was also here, at N° 3, Abbey Road, London NW8, that it all began.

The Internet has created opportunities the Beatles could never have dreamed of, but in its dissolution of space, the cybersphere is tantamount, in the literal, geographic sense, to a no-man’s-land, and Abbey Road today is a non-place like any other. As I write this, the live audio of the EarthCam is playing on my desktop, so that the hiss of London traffic mingles with the hiss of Paris traffic. When a car beeped its horn a moment ago, there was no way of telling whether it was just beneath my windows or two hundred miles away, on the other side of the English Channel.

No place you could mention is a center anymore, and video monitors like the EarthCam lend a weird remoteness to the actual street we find ourselves on, watching over our public spaces night and day as if to confirm their barrenness or to ascertain that nothing threatens to happen there—the gestation, that is, of an actual event.

Surveillance cameras and webcams are ubiquitous—drones, flying eyeballs, will soon be swarming our skies—but these ogling devices are merely the latest extension of our culture’s scopophilia, traceable perhaps to the dawn of the television age. Modern humans absorb most of what they know about the world, or think they know, through visual media—“live” or otherwise—and dwell more in the drizzly light of video than they do in the clear light of day. So addicted are we to moving or static images—the iconic album cover and the Abbey Road EarthCam being obvious examples—that we are increasingly unable to see things as they are, and so much of our experience is mediated by screens that we risk losing our connection to the tangible world on our doorstep. That IT is empowering no one can deny—information being power, as the saying goes—but if we dwell in virtual reality too much of the time, we become mere spectators and cease to be actors of our lives. Modern technology, by keeping us busy with an array of petty tasks, creates the illusion that we are in control. Unwilling to lose that illusion, fearful of embarrassment or failure, we become more reluctant to engage with the world.

One suspects that the Beatles, as their rooftop concert six months before suggests, were aware of this danger.

Unlike Let It Be, however, recorded live with few overdubs, Abbey Road was lavishly produced; closeted in the studio for weeks on end, the band members were probably feeling cooped up. In the photo, they look as if they hadn’t seen the sun in days and were not only glad to step outside but willing to do things with a minimum of fuss and a very pure faith—typical of the 1960s—in the virtues of improvisation. Nothing was rehearsed. Iain Macmillan, a freelance photographer and friend of John Lennon, showed up with his Hasselblad camera, and a bobby was hired to hold up the traffic. The session took ten minutes, and Macmillan snapped six photographs from a stepladder as the group walked back and forth across Abbey Road. The picture that was chosen was the only one in which the four Beatles were walking in unison.

This famous photograph, in other words, was something of a fluke. They knew of course what they were looking for but had no way of telling how the picture would turn out, since no human eye—not even a trained photographer’s—could have caught that fraction of a second when all four pairs of legs would form inverted Vs and all eight feet would be touching the ground. All Macmillan could do was click the shutter and hope for the best.

John leads the others, stalking out of the picture, while George brings up the rear, staring moodily off to one side. Paul, for his part, is clearly out of step, worried perhaps that Ringo, whose vigorous stride looks a lot like Johnnie Walker’s, might crush his toes with the heel of a black leather boot.

Paul opted to go barefoot not as a passing whim but to ground himself in the present and feel the earth beneath his feet. The photograph could indeed be said to translate in concrete, visual terms a verse from “All You Need Is Love,” a track often dismissed as a naive singalong, but which is actually an ode to letting go, and to the power of present moment awareness.

Recorded live on TV at the height of the Summer of Love, the group’s performance of the song had spread the vibes of that moment to an audience of millions. Two years later, the context could hardly be more different, but here again the four, or perhaps only Paul, as metteur en scène, sought to capture the Zeitgeist. Everything in the picture emphasizes the Beatles’ thereness at this time and in this place. Contrasting with the dark gray of the tarmac, the white strips on which they tread are glaring in the sun and do what zebra crossings are supposed to do, which is to heighten their visibility. The sense of their physical presence is also re-reinforced by pictorial means. From our vantage point, the crossing is comprised of two horizontal lines running parallel to the picture plane (the one nearest to us coinciding with the bottom edge of the sleeve) and eleven diagonal lines converging towards a vanishing point. What this means is that the second and third dimensions are stressed with equal force so that the white bands of the crossing seem hyper-tense, like springboards jutting out above the tarmac. So strong, indeed, is this effect, that the four band members seem like tin cut-outs, or raised silhouettes in a children’s pop-up book.

At a certain level, so intensely were they there in 1969 that they are still here today, but that is not really an honest statement, and if a pedestrian crossing was used to emphasize their presence in the photograph, there is no better way to feel their absence than to visit the same place today.

What better, indeed, than a pedestrian crossing to symbolize the transitoriness of life? The Beatles, like the girl in the miniskirt on the album’s back cover, were only there for a moment, and then they were gone. They were walking out of the most successful collective—commercially, artistically—in musical history, out of the ’60s and into another era. At an average age of twenty-seven, they were also making the crossing from youth into maturity.

Much like a river, the flow of car traffic on Abbey Road might serve as a metaphor for the passage of time, its direction, like a river’s downstream, the one you’d be heading in were you sitting at the wheel of your car and had drawn up at the lollipops to allow the Beatles to cross. But this, to pursue the metaphor further, makes the pedestrian crossing like a ford or a bridge, an immovable structure over which, or under which, time ceaselessly flows, a symbol not of time without end—the drudgery of everyday existence—but of its opposite, which is timelessness.

The Beatles’ last album, transcending as it does the context of its making, frequently affords such moments of grace, but beyond the lasting fabness of their music, the importance of their legacy rests on how fusional they were with their own time and place. Everything fun or exciting about the era, and very little that wasn’t, went into their melting pot, and out of it they fashioned a stream of musical artefacts that perfectly reflected the dreams and aspirations of their contemporaries.

***

To be sure, the ’60s were a golden moment in our cultural history, and the Beatles were given, no doubt, as much as they gave. But the dream was over as John sang a year or so later, and the group itself knew, even as they were making Abbey Road and a new decade was dawning, that this would be their final recording. Their messianic visions had indeed lost much of their luster, but it is a testimony to their generosity of spirit that even when the bitter end was near, they were able to create a body of music as warm and optimistic as anything they’d committed to tape. The cover photograph struck a dissonant chord, portraying the Beatles as a band no longer but four individuals striking out on their own. It is notably down-in-the-mouth, but it also challenged their contemporaries to let go of the past and reengage with the here and the now at a time of widespread confusion and social unrest.

This message is as relevant today as it was in 1969, and if the Abbey Road EarthCam serves any useful purpose, it could help cure us of our fixation on screens and incite us to reimagine the world we actually live in, as the Beatles, for a few short years, so memorably did theirs.

***

Michael Stokes is an emerging writer of essays and short stories. After studying art history at Cambridge University, he became a picture dealer, then a fine artist himself. He now lives in Paris, France, where he teaches English at the University of Paris-Saclay. Other examples of his work are available at: michael.stokes.writer@gmail.com  

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. What is sacrificed when one person in a relationship agrees to follow their partner to a new place? Cameron Carr asks in this essay that explores questions of loyalty, love, and commitment in real life and in classic songs by Carole King and Tom T. Hall.

How One Gets to Memphis or Any Other Place

Cameron Carr

It took several months and was a modest success at best, but I trained my cat to respond to three commands: “Come,” “Up,” and “Lap.” She’s learned to listen but has no interest in staying. This makes planning a photoshoot with her a particular challenge. I’m trying to recreate the cover of Carole King’s Tapestry, but I can’t get my cat to stay in pose. This is something I’ve been wanting to do since moving into the house. Since I won’t be here much longer, the time is now.

For days, the Tapestry track “Where You Lead” has circled in my head. The message is straightforward: If you lead, I will follow. It’s not that I identify with the perspective King’s singing from; it’s almost the opposite. I want someone to care for me the way she describes, someone who cares enough to follow me anywhere, to the end of the earth even. It probably has to do with leaving, with taking final pictures in a house before moving across the country, with moving somewhere you’ve never been, where you’ll know no one—except for the one person who will come with you. I like the song because it reminds me of that person and reminds me that I’m cared for. I’m about to move from the Midwest to the desert, and that person will follow me. “Where You Lead” feeds me an optimistic narrative of what that following can be, and that’s what I want right now.

I’ll leave this house after only one year, but I love the window seat already. It runs the full length of what must be intended as a dining room, completely unnecessary given the dine-in kitchen separated by only a change from hardwood to tile flooring. We never finished furnishing the possible dining room, so it doesn’t really matter what it’s supposed to be. Besides a bookshelf, a large mirror leaned against a wall, and a splattering of cat toys, the purple window seat cushions are the primary décor of the room, and they came with the house.

The window seat is all I need for the Carole King photo, though. That and a cat. On Tapestry’s cover, King sits on a cushion in the center of the image, one foot resting in front of her on the window seat and the other hanging off the edge, out of sight. The cat sits farther in front, with its own cushion. Its body is pointed away from the window, but its face is turned to the camera as if it’s just become aware of an unwelcome intruder. Sun is streaming in through the windows—that I’m not sure I can recreate, but the rest seems relatively easy, if I can convince my cat to get onto a cushion, stay still, face the camera.

The photo’s mood is a separate challenge. King looks like she merely happened into the windowsill. The cat must’ve just been woken from a nap. King looks happy, but closer inspection reveals that she isn’t smiling, her mouth flipped slightly downward. Her head is tilted toward the window, unconcerned with the camera in front of her. I imagine this was a chance photo—candid.

This is a notable difference from other albums of the time. They’re full of dramatic close-ups: John Lennon’s Imagine, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. The Rolling Stones chose a close-up of a male crotch in tight jeans for Sticky Fingers. Bands—the Doors, the Allman Brothers, Yes—tended toward posed photos of the group together. The Who posed for a shot where they appear to have just pissed on a giant pillar for Who’s Next. The mood that eventually prevailed in the ’70s was a confidence that by 1971 was already bloating into big albums and bigger egos. People wanted to be up front, to be a rock star, to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, as Dr. Hook asserted the following year.

Carole King was different. She had spent more than a decade behind the scenes as a songwriter, first with the Brill Building and then with her lyricist husband Gerry Goffin. That work—“You’ve Got a Friend,” “The Locomotion,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”—would be enough to cement her influence, but if it weren’t for Tapestry, King might have always been a character known to insiders only. That’s the fate of Goffin, who released one lackluster Bob Dylan-aping album under his own name in 1973 (he technically made one more go in the ’90s, but that’s best left alone). King, too, had an unsuccessful debut behind the microphone. If, like Goffin, she had retreated to solely songwriting after the uneventful release of Writer in 1970 (in hindsight, an underrated if less ambitious album), she would be forever relegated to the background. But she didn’t.

On the cover of Tapestry, the dark sits to King’s right, obscuring half her face, but the light washes in from her other side. And that’s how we hear her, moving from one world into another. She seems to have been sitting there all along, writing and waiting, and her sophomore album is the moment when the light showed her to the world. What I want to capture in my photo is this feeling of quiet, patient intention that King embodies.

It’s not the truth, though. I’m posing as Carole King and imagining myself a contented songwriter circa 1971, but there’s another song repeating in my ear.

In Tom T. Hall’s 1968 track “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” he asserts there’s no doubt you’ll follow if you truly love someone. The song is entirely about following, a loyalty seemingly without limits. And this same feeling is what I like to believe brought me to this house, brought me back to Ohio after moving away the first time.

In “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” we don’t know where the narrator came from, but there’s an impression that Memphis is a long journey for him. And by making it, he intends to prove his love. He’s following because he wants to understand, because his lover is in trouble. This is an act of Good. He’ll follow all the way to Memphis and, if the lover is not there, keep following the trail of her tears.

It’s an admirable commitment. I want to be the I that follows, the I that finds itself in Memphis and needing to explain how it got there. I want to say that I returned to the Midwest because I loved somebody enough and I’d follow wherever they went, but I’m listening to Carole King instead because right now I am the one asking to be followed.

***

Like King, Hall started as a songwriter. He wrote for Johnny Cash, George Jones, Loretta Lynn. His “Harper Valley PTA” made Jeannie C. Riley the first woman to top both the Billboard Hot 100 and the U.S. Hot Country Singles charts with the same song. (The excellent Hot Country Singles name reigned from 1962-1990. In 2005, the chart became the more practical but, let’s be honest, much less fun Hot Country Songs.) Eventually, Hall would also write songs with his spouse, Dixie Hall. He was even more reticent than King about stepping to the front of the stage, only doing so after coaxing from his record label.

Despite similar hesitancies to take the lead, Hall doesn’t describe the same following as King. The aching country croon of “That’s How I Got to Memphis” is reactive; the assertive belt of “Where You Lead” is proactive. Where King promises her commitment to follow in the sense of staying by someone’s side, Hall is following from behind, out of a feeling of loss. His lover has already left, and his tune attempts to keep up.

Maybe the reason I’m drawn to Hall’s song is that it offers something concrete. Memphis is a place; I can grasp that. With King, I’ve been caught up with the choruses and missed the details. But it’s the details in a song that speak to me more than anything else. That’s where I hear the writer’s feeling most. Yet popular music must leave space open for easy universality—that’s what makes it popular. The favored approach to achieving this in a song is an erasure of specifics. The void left behind is a place where a listener might find themselves. The you doing the leading might be a lover, a parent, a child, a friend. The follow being done might be a lifestyle, a move, a career, a religion.

When I listen to “Where You Lead,” I hear it as a moving song. More than that, it’s about trust and life paths. I hear someone singing to a lover their desire to follow whatever path keeps the couple together, to trust and support the other in picking up and leaving. Today, the song speaks to me because I am about to move across the country, from Ohio to Arizona, and my partner is going to move with me. I want to believe that this is good for them too, that I am the benevolent you making the wise decision worth following.

But the more I’ve listened, the closer the lyrics have become, too close even. There’s a line I’ve never noticed before about wanting different things: she wants a house with flowers, he wants New York City. She says she’ll follow anyway. I’ve never registered the New York reference before. It flips my relation to the song. This is the power of a personal detail, that a listener can have no idea whether Carole King actually followed someone to New York, but the mention of it implies a world unspoken. And I do hear another world. I hear the heat of hot concrete in Brooklyn, I hear the subway train brushing by our window every eight to twelve minutes, I hear our first apartment together.

The lyric is my reminder that New York is not the Midwest or the desert. It’s my reminder that this is the second time my lover has followed me and my moving. And it’s a reminder that the first time didn’t go so well, that we wound up barely alive back in Ohio.

It’s most often assumed that we’ll connect with the I of a song, so it bothers me that I’m increasingly recognizing myself in the you of this one. What I admire in “Where You Lead” is the devotion of the I, but I’m not sure if my admiration extends to wanting to embody the devotion or only to receive it. I feel too much that I am the you. The you that tells but does not ask. At some point, King recognized that she actually did not like this you, did not want to follow only, did not want to even sing the song anymore. So she stopped.

***

The house I’m leaving is full of marks of comfortable living that feel absurd to me, despite my more than comfortable suburban upbringing. After leaving home, I became accustomed to snug, utilitarian spaces; half of the years between moving out and moving here were spent in places where the people living there outnumbered the bedrooms.

In this house, the two of us share just one of three bedrooms. Besides the window seat, there is a front porch, a back patio, a balcony. There are two bathrooms—one on the first floor complete with washer and dryer. The kitchen, half surrounded by windows, has cupboards with roller drawers and spice racks. The unnecessity of it all is what makes it so delightful, to have for the sake of convenience.

None of this is what attracted me to the house, though. It was the flowers out front. Our previous house was only five blocks away, so we knew these flowers from walks around the neighborhood. A four-foot stone wall raises terraced beds above the sidewalk, and every spring, phlox creeps over the wall in pale shades of lilac and pink. Above and behind that, tulips bloom in meticulous rows.

When I moved back to Ohio from New York, I wanted there to be flowers. That was part of the idea: to blame it on the flowers. If I were to leave, I had to find a reason, so I made one that had to do with space for gardens, trees, and porches. It was an excuse. I never intended to return from New York; I was following.

Maybe I’m just having bad memories.

After only one year in a city I called a dream, I followed someone I loved back to a state I called a trap. One week later, I followed them to a psychiatric hospital. I went home that night, but they stayed behind the locked doors. Does it matter what song I choose to sing about it?

They followed me to New York, and then I followed them back. They said they had to go home, to get help. When they needed to be the one to lead, I let them—but now I’m asking them to follow again. I’m posing leaned back and comfortable in my place just as I prepare to leave. And I don’t know where the leading ends and the following begins anymore, and I’m increasingly concerned I’m doing both for the wrong reasons.

In “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” the concern is not about making a sacrifice, it’s about not losing someone. It’s a following that has more to do with pursuit than love. Whatever love is present is a love without detail. No explanation of why she left or what he did, and no explanation of what home is left behind. We know how this I got to Memphis (sort of), but we don’t know where he came from. We do know that Memphis was his lover’s home in the past, that she threatened to return there whenever things weren’t going well between them. The location of his home is left unsaid, though. And while he’s concerned about what she left behind when she set out for Memphis, there’s no thought to what he might have left behind on his pursuit—or, even earlier, if he was the one who asked her to leave Memphis in the first place.

In “Where You Lead,” she follows as she’s told. In “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” he follows to save her from her trouble. King expresses a willingness to follow, while Hall asserts an ability to follow. Though the narrator of Hall’s song follows at any cost now, there is no explanation of why he’s following her trail and not following alongside her. We’re told he must find out if she’s in trouble but also find out why she left. The cause is left open, and there’s reason to believe it might be the I narrating Hall’s song. Is this I following because of love or because it fears no longer being the you who leads? Would the I have to follow if it hadn’t been a fuckup in the first place? Is this the I that I identify with?

***

The truth is that these are only songs. There’s hardly talk of fact or fiction in music; we hear what we want. Carole King did leave, going from New York to Los Angeles. But Tom T. Hall stayed. He came to Nashville, married, wrote songs with his wife, and never quit, never left. If there’s a truth from Hall’s own life in “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” it’s not about leaving or following. But there is a truth there. I hear it, I want to.

What I’m hearing in “That’s How I Got to Memphis” is the explanation I’ve been unable to give. Hall’s narrator doesn’t care where he comes from. In the isolated moment of the song, it doesn’t matter where he’s been or what he thinks he’s done. What’s admirable in this character is that all he cares about is finding his love and telling her that she is exactly that. That’s the I that I want to be. The I that can recognize the person and the love as more important than the place. An I that’s worth following but that will turn and do the following as well, to Memphis or any other place. This is who I’m trying to immortalize myself as now with a photo, a person who once sat happily in Ohio.

Nearly thirty years after Carole King stopped performing “Where You Lead,” she came back to it. She re-recorded the song as a duet with her daughter, Louise Goffin, and changed some of the lines about following a man. The new recording became the Gilmore Girls theme song. For everyone who watched that show, it has an entirely different meaning.

The leaving and the following are a matter of perspective: Who is the I and who is the you? And where exactly are they going, anyway?

The photo I want to capture now has nothing to do with who is leading and who is following, just with what one might be willing to do. And if I sit here long enough, I will see the sun come streaming through the windows. If I sit here long enough, the cat will eventually stay in place. Then we can take the picture, then we can leave. But the cat won’t stay in place.

***

Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona and a nonfiction editor for the Sonora Review. He is currently working on an essay collection about amateurism and art. This is his first creative nonfiction publication. Find him on Instagram @cameroninacarr.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. “The Marble” is essayist Claire Salinda’s reflection on an emotionally fraught period in her life when she was drawn to crystals and tarot readings, to magical thinking and startling impulses that even now occasionally haunt her. 

The Marble

By Claire Salinda

I once experienced a recurring desire to hold a marble in my mouth. This was a foreign sensation occurring at a foreign time. I’d never had an oral fixation before, and this new craving for a marble coincided with the end of my marriage, another novel event in my life. The separation was necessary but unwanted, but my longing for a marble was so visceral that once or twice, I even caught myself swirling my tongue around as if one was there between my cheeks. However, when I did eventually procure a marble, I only ever kept it in my pocket.

I bought my marble in a local crystal shop that I visited on the advice of a tarot reader. I had gone to her to learn if the separation from my husband would be permanent, if it would lead to a divorce. For reasons that are not unique to couples who meet when they’re very young, marry when they’re still young, and then suddenly, one day, are no longer young, we decided to be apart for a year. It was the mandated minimum amount of time you must be legally separated before you can file for divorce in North Carolina, where we were married and lived, and besides, we still loved one another. So no decisions would be made before the year was up, aside from the decision that I was moving to Brooklyn in a few weeks as an ostensibly, if temporarily, single woman.

Still, I wanted to know what my husband and I would decide, which is how I found myself in front of a stranger and her deck of cards, asking her for clarity. I am not a believer in the mystical power of people or rocks. But I am also not not a believer; there is too much room for it to go either way, and I would hate to miss out on salvation just as much as I’d hate to be made a fool. A separation is one of those events when both the possible and the impossible seem to exist in the same moment, and if there was ever a time to reap a benefit, even one of dubious origin, this was it.

The tarot reader looked at her spread of cards and then informed me, unequivocally, that this was the definitive end of my marriage. I don’t recall the specific cards that lay between us, just that they said there was no going back. I should have, and probably could have, taken a photo of the spread. It’s not uncommon for a querent to do so, and I’m sure the reader would have allowed me to document the cards. But I didn’t.

Yet I did take a picture when I arrived at the tarot reader’s studio. In the photo, two walls of wooden shiplap converge in a partly sunny corner of a room, both painted the same shade of cream but with planks of different widths and orientations. The greenery of the outside peeks through a four-paneled window on one of the walls. Besides that, there’s nothing else in the scene to suggest where I was: no furniture, no people, no tarot cards. Just the corner of an unidentified room. And while I don’t know why exactly I took that photo, I possess a vague memory of wanting to capture the essence of something in that moment, to mark the time just before the reading, as if I knew things would be irrevocably altered on the other side of it.

In her next breath following her proclamation about the end of my marriage, the reader warned that my mother-in-law was harboring bad energy toward me and then gave me a list of gemstones that could help shield me from the malice. This was no great surprise to me, my mother-in-law’s contempt. This, after all, was the woman who’d worn a bone-colored dress to my wedding. Even my husband once remarked that she didn’t know how to hug, always holding her body at arm’s distance, even from her son.

Shopping for rocks is easier than dealing with the prognostication of divorce, so I set off for the crystal store straight from the reading, list in hand. There were seven kinds of stones on the tarot reader’s list, each with its unique properties to hopefully bolster my energetic wherewithal. I circled the small store and added what I needed to my basket: iridescent labradorite and inky black obsidian for sound sleep and protection, respectively; a few pieces of jade to bring me success and wisdom; lapis lazuli and red jasper specimens to help me stay calm and grounded; a chunky rod of near-transparent selenite for clarity; an optimistic slice of rose quartz, the crystal of unconditional love, for good measure. According to the shop employee, I was supposed to touch the gems to feel which ones belonged to me, and although I was there among the rocks with only a half measure of earnestness, I can attest that the stones practically buzzed in my palm.

When I went to pay for my small galaxy of crystals, I noticed a bowl full of deliciously glossy marbles next to the register. Like a child encountering a gumball machine, I salivated. Even now, the better half of a decade later, typing the word marble over and over again brings a pleasant fullness to my tongue. As bizarre as it sounds, it makes sense, considering that I was desiring, with every cell in my body, to understand my own life at that time, and desire is just another form of hunger. I wanted to consume the knowledge because if I did, it would no longer be apart from me. I would have control over my life. I would know.

Perhaps because I was in a crystal store, these marbles were agate and jasper and other opaque gemstones rather than glass like the ones I remembered from my childhood. Setting aside my protective stones on the counter for a moment, I submerged the tips of my fingers in the bowl of marbles and savored their cool smoothness. I lingered over one or two that immediately caught my attention—bright and striped like scoops from some sort of extraterrestrial fruits. But I eventually chose a marble that, while not dazzling in appearance, was made all the more appetizing by its milky coloring. I didn’t dare touch it to my lips, though. I didn’t feel ready yet.

***

Retrospection is its own form of magical thinking, and considering the marble today, it’s clear to me that I wasn’t ready to devour an understanding.  Or rather, I wasn’t able to admit to an understanding of my life because, before going to the tarot reader, I already knew that my marriage was ending. When I claimed to want to know what was on the other side of that year to come, what I meant was that I wanted someone else to say the truth aloud. The tarot reader wasn’t a psychic then, just an empath. I thought I could hold a marble in my mouth in place of the words I lacked. Because although I had been sad before in my life, devastated even, I had never spoken this language of loss before, and I didn’t possess the vocabulary to explain it to myself, let alone to others.

But perhaps it also felt too tender to even get close to the place where my words were formed, and that is why I kept the marble in my pocket, next to that solar system of protective crystals. My mouth was too powerful, with its ability to render a prophecy true if I spoke it aloud. If I opened my mouth for the marble, who knew what other words would tumble out and what havoc would be wreaked, whose heart would be broken? And yet what cannot be said must still be felt. The experience of separation was so overwhelming that it demanded a somatic, almost animalistic reckoning instead of a spoken one. Of course it did.

***

There were many other unfamiliar and immutable desires in my body around that time of heartbreak. My first ever IUD was inserted a few days before I left for Brooklyn. The searing procedure was a convenient and optimistic distraction, allowing me the grounding experience of scheduling and prepping for my appointment while also giving me the space to imagine a future of protected sex with someone new or possibly, just maybe, someones plural.  But even more so, the resulting pain in my abdomen provided a corporeal analogue to the emotional anguish I could not express otherwise. I cramped and bled for months after, the pain eventually becoming an assumed condition of my daily existence. If you had asked my body then, it would’ve said exactly what I could not: This hurts.

There were other symbolic translations and signs, too, beyond the tarot reading. A few weeks before I moved out, the first ring given to me by my husband snapped in half while still on my finger. I was driving to a parking structure between work meetings so that I could cry alone in my car, and the silver band just seemed to dissolve into two. Like my marriage, I can assume there had been a weak point in its arc that I didn’t notice, the silver becoming thinner each day until it could no longer hold itself together. I had practically begged him for that ring after we encountered it by chance in a store. It was the perfect representation of how I wanted to feel in our relationship, with its chip of a diamond embedded next to its engraved sentiment: “Loved.”

On one of our last evenings together before I moved out, my husband ran the garbage disposal and it jammed against a hard object. He reached in and extracted one of my pieces of protective jade, left behind from when I was washing my stones of his mother’s bad energy. I didn’t tell him what it was or how it ended up there, and he didn’t ask.

***

I arrived in Brooklyn, and the coincidences followed. For a short time, I dated a guitarist who moonlighted as a bartender, or maybe it was the other way around. Late one night when I was killing time in Washington Square Park while waiting for him to finish his shift, I was approached by a boy. I knew he was a boy, only twenty, because he told me but also because I made him show me his ID. Elliott—the same name as my husband—was from Seattle, and he didn’t know why he was in New York City. He told me I looked scary but also that I was so pretty, like a beautiful twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican from the Bronx. He told me he just wanted into my vibes, cracked himself up, and then gasped when I told him that I was not Puerto Rican but half-Filipina, originally from Los Angeles, and that I was thirty-one. He said he’d take the L train to Brooklyn for me anyway. He was staying at a Marriott on a stolen credit card, down from Boston University with “some dudes” he knew, who’d goaded him into talking to me. He promised he was not a skateboarder or date rapist like everyone else he knew at school. He was a sophomore at BU but knew all the senior soccer players at my alma mater in upstate New York, and, according to him, it was “a great school.” He wasn’t even that wasted, just stressed about the stolen credit card. If I wanted to have the best night ever, I should go with him and his friends.

I recognized this college boy’s manic brazenness in a previous version of myself, and for just a brief moment I was tempted to follow him. If I had in fact still been twenty-three and still lived off the L train—because those two things had once been true—and if I had actually believed that he wasn’t that drunk, I probably would’ve gone with him; adventure often trumped reason during that naively hedonistic period of my early twenties in New York. However, I was in my thirties and living off the F train in a less cool part of Brooklyn. And also, a few years before that night, I’d made the most audacious of all choices: I’d promised a man, in front of everyone who knew us, that I would love and stay with him forever, only to later learn that I was no longer a choice he would’ve made. I had since learned to be somewhat more reasonable in my decision-making.

“Goodnight, Elliott,” I called out to the retreating boy and, in doing so, repeated an exact sentiment I had uttered hundreds and maybe even thousands of times before, each time, including this one, intending it as a loving release into the dark. Then I turned back toward the arch in the park and continued to wait for the guitarist’s shift to end.

The guitarist was the opposite of my husband in almost every way imaginable. For this alone, but for many other reasons, he was another placeholder, his own form of translation for what I could not put words to. But it didn’t mean that it hurt any less when our fling ended. I still didn’t possess the language then to give shape to my pain, but I did start to think about using my words again in the future, drafting a list of things I should write about someday: “Bartenders I Have Fucked and Maybe Loved”; “Bathrooms I Have Shared”; “Rings I Have Worn.” Instead of writing about these things then, I sipped twelve-dollar smoothies delivered directly to my front door while I watched season after season of Frasier on my couch. Days later, when I did finally leave my apartment, I walked around the American Museum of Natural History by myself and cried when I read a display on the deaths of Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and wife within hours of each other. The plaque bore a photo of Roosevelt’s diary entry that day, just a large black “X” on lined paper with a single sentence: “The light has gone out of my life.”

A few weeks after the museum sojourn, I took the A train alone to the beach with the intention of breaking an egg into the Atlantic. The night before, I’d attended a women’s-only energy healing circle at the urging of a sympathetic friend who knew the witch leading the ritual. If I’d had no qualms before about soliciting a tarot reader’s interpretation, I also did not see any reason to refuse a witch’s. So I sat among a handful of other afflicted women on a concrete floor, situated around a giant hand-painted eye, the eye witnessing us with its startling blue iris and we witnessing each other. No one spoke except the witch, but our pain required no translation. If love is a universal language, then so is pain—most especially so in a room full of aggrieved women.

The witch asked us all to embody our pain. I wish I could recall if this felt easy or difficult, if it was agonizing or cathartic to endure, but all I remember is that I did not cry like the others. After sufficient conjuring, when the trauma was closer to the surface of our skin, the witch instructed us to rub an egg all over our bodies so that we might transfer our pain to it. In my hand, the egg reminded me of the marble: cold, hard, unswallowable, necessary to possess. I dragged it lightly, thoughtfully, up and down my limbs, across my chest and abdomen, along my shoulders and back.

After the cleansing, we placed our eggs in plastic takeout containers filled with cornmeal so we could transport them to a large body of water for disposal without incurring further psychic harm. I took my sealed egg and went to the bar next door to have a drink with the witch. Round objects seemingly beget more round objects in my life, so we played a game of pool, I taking immense satisfaction with each hard thump of the cue stick against the ball. Of course, the guitarist walked in just then with his own intentions of having a pool game with friends. Part of the reason I had agreed to participate in the circle in the first place was because the space with the painted eye on the floor shared a wall with the guitarist’s favorite watering hole. The witch watched me as the guitarist approached. However, I was no longer waiting for him; I trusted the witch like I had trusted the tarot reader—not necessarily with my future but with my already existing present. So just as the cards had told me what I already knew, the egg lifted away what was ready to be cleansed. Now I had the egg in the cornmeal and the pool balls lined up, both waiting for me to dispatch them.

Looking out of the window of the A train the next morning on my way to the beach, the contained egg in my lap, I saw an old graveyard I’d never noticed before, which made me think of Teddy Roosevelt’s black “X.” It was overcast and already chilly when I got off the subway, despite it being just a week after Labor Day, but I appreciated the ambient moodiness and subsequently deserted shoreline. When I dug my bare feet into the clammy sand and plucked the egg from the container, I wasn’t moved to cradle it as I had the marble. I held it tentatively between my thumb and forefinger instead, aware of how delicate it was despite its heaviness. I didn’t want to crack its shell before I was ready, so I lay down on the sand instead. I closed my eyes against the glaring gray sky and, in an attempt to mimic the ritual with the witch, I concentrated hard on finding the heartache in my body, identifying it some moments later as a hollowness in my chest and stomach and as a tingly weakness in my fingers, still holding the egg. I might not have been able to grieve in words yet, but at least I could give the sorrow enough shape to locate it.

I stayed on my back for a long, long time, just breathing. When I finally did wade into the whitewash and throw the egg into the oncoming waves, I never actually saw the shell break. I knew it must have happened, though, because the subway train car I boarded back to the city was empty, and I sang along to the song in my headphones, out loud, at the top of my lungs. When I reached for the marble, still carried in my pocket, I only thought to lick it.

***

I stopped carrying the crystals and the marble around the time my divorce was final, but I returned to the water often. Sometimes it was the train to the beach, when it was warm enough; sometimes it was a stream on a weekend trip upstate. Most frequently, it was the lap pool at my local YMCA. I had never been a strong swimmer, but when I grieved the guitarist and started to grieve my marriage, when I finally had the room to make a new life with myself, one aspect I desired for my identity was to be a woman who swam laps in the morning. It didn’t pan out exactly as I wanted—I only had time to swim at night, for one. But I did swim. I even took lessons with other aspiring adults to perfect my freestyle and master my flip turn, building an awareness of my body with every stroke. And when I returned to my hometown of Los Angeles a few years later, I translated my laps to the local pool here.

Like all translations, though, the outcome is subjective. Last week, I did a flip turn, but the pool here is shallower than the one in Brooklyn by nearly five feet, so I smacked my forehead on the hard tiles lining the bottom of my lane. The goose egg that emerged was a convenient talisman of sorts, one that I found myself mindlessly caressing in the days following the botched flip turn. The touching bordered on compulsive, and if I was writing this a week ago, I’d be rubbing my forehead the whole time. Because even though it was tender and bruised, the echo of pain I felt when I gently stroked it wasn’t altogether unpleasant, calling to mind another egg in another body of water and, before that, a marble I used to want to hold in my mouth.

***

Claire Salinda is a writer from Los Angeles and New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Assay, Thrillist, and Pen and Ink, among others, and has been supported by the Prospect Street Writers House. She is an MFA candidate in literature and nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars and is currently working on an essay collection that engages with the themes of identity, desire, sexuality, power, and place, through the lens of a mixed-race Asian woman in America. Sometimes she writes about surfing, too. Claire lives in LA, where she reads tarot and consults with companies on creative operations.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “On Raking Up the Dead,”  a nonfiction finalist in our 2022 Perkoff Prize contest for writing about health and medicine, Ben Reed considers some striking similarities between the plague years in Prussia and public response to COVID-19 in the United States.

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On Raking Up the Dead

Ben Reed

How the unusual afterlife of a Prussian servant sheds light on social-media comeuppance in the time of COVID-19.

Were it unlawful to speak ill of the dead, it would follow that no histories ought to be wrote.

             –Andrew Le Mercier

            A Treatise Against Detraction, 1733

In his fascinating 1905 chronicle, A History of the Plague in East Prussia*, German historian Wilhelm Sahm recounts a curious incident during an epidemic that ravaged the Baltic region in the early 1700s. In March 1710, a domestic worker named Barbara Thutin was found criminally responsible for fatally infecting both herself and her employer with plague. Following something akin to contact tracing, the civil and sanitary authorities in Königsberg determined that Thutin had stolen clothing from one of the many houses deserted through exodus or death and that she had taken in a sick relative without her employer’s consent. However, by the time the judiciary handed down its decision, Thutin was already dead and buried. What happened next is astonishing: Barbara Thutin’s body was exhumed from its burial place in the new churchyard, and on the following day, it was hanged, inside its coffin, from a gallows. After being left on display for three days, body and coffin were cut down and burned to ash. Dead or not, there was still a price to be paid, if only symbolically.

By the start of 1710, Prussian state and ecclesiastical authorities were already struggling to mitigate an unprecedented crisis. Central Europe had been wracked by outbreaks of plague since the Black Death in the late 1340s, but this latest epidemic, one of the very last plagues to afflict Europe, was the deadliest wave ever in some parts of Prussia, Estonia, and Lithuania. A consequence of the Great Northern War between the Swedish Empire and the Tsardom of Russia, infection spread across the region as far as Germany and Sweden, killing between one quarter and two thirds of the populace where it struck the hardest. Many died from hunger, as agricultural production was virtually halted. And because the farmlands in the worst-affected areas of Prussia were predominantly owned by the crown, the bottom fell out of the national economy. Attempts to throttle the spread of plague were insufficient or tragically delayed. Despite widespread understanding of the threat of epidemic, early cases were downplayed until the disease had taken root, after which news of the devastation was hyperbolically exaggerated, undermining trust in the state’s authority, particularly in the new sanitary ordinances. The missteps were many, leading to civil unrest. In the autumn of 1709, after the closure of the eastern capital city of Königsberg, the “fiery, irascible Pietist” and professor of theology Heinrich Lysius—later accused of being “a Cartesian and Copernican”—gave a sermon in which he rebuked threats by the authorities to hang citizens who might attempt to break through the plague barrier outside the city, suggesting instead that the people who deserved to be hanged were those who ordered the city to be closed, as they were the ones who had done the most to increase general misfortune. The sermon was later confiscated.

Writing almost two hundred years later, the historian and schoolteacher Wilhelm Sahm wistfully observes, “How should the epidemic be stopped under these circumstances! After all, it may be difficult to absolve the state authorities of individual mistakes, but it would mean misjudging the facts, if one were to unjustly attribute the whole severity of the problem to them.”

The difficulty of contending with early mistakes, disinformation, social disorder, and widespread distrust of government health officials are just the beginning of the similarities between the plague years in Prussia and the public response to coronavirus in the United States today. Sahm writes that unrestricted personal movement and simple carelessness contributed to the early spread of the disease across Prussia. Economic trade tapered off in numerous sectors, leading to high unemployment. The cost of goods spiked. Jews, foreigners, and the homeless were targets of suspicion. City streets were filled with turbulence and mayhem. Robbery and violent crime rose sharply, precipitating the formation of armed night watches. Citizen militias—or Bürgerwache—frequently clashed with police, who in turn were given enhanced latitude to battle mobs and quell riots. Agitators such as Professor Doktor Lysius were censored and punished for giving provocative speeches. Many Prussians sought bizarre folk remedies with no empirically observed history of efficacy, and some attempted to worsen the outbreak by decapitating plague corpses, in the belief that this would strew plague-causing poisons. One government doctor bemoaned the populace’s “foolish resistance” to the sanitary ordinances, and the “mindless defiance” of infected patients who stubbornly refused the prescribed remedies. He complained that the threat of the most common punishment—public lashing with a braided whip—was “not respected at all” and speculated “whether a harsher example should not be made.”

Engraving. “The Corpse of Gillis van Ledenberg.” Anonymous, ca. 1619-1699. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In the spring of 1710, officials in plague-beleaguered Königsberg must have thought that Barbara Thutin, owing partly to her social status as a servant and partly to her being dead, could provide an opportunity to make a sufficiently harsh example. Previously, violators of plague edicts were publicly whipped or put in a stockade, but state warnings that more serious penalties—life imprisonment, or execution—would be handed down were understood to be disingenuous, even by the Berlin Medical Council responsible for issuing them. State authorities and the citizenry were seemingly of the same mind that it would be an injustice to hang an individual just for trying to escape the daily miseries of urban quarantine or find food or do a little commerce, at least not while public morale was already so low. Such callous punishments would cause only more rioting, whereas Barbara Thutin was not only dead; she had done something that had reliably increased one’s chances of being executed for centuries in Prussia: she had contributed to the death of her employer. Her corpse could be hanged and burned, almost as an effigy, with little threat of backlash. Just as astonishing, this gambit seems to have elicited a promising response. Three months later, Prussian state authorities prompted the clergy to read a new edict from the pulpits, announcing, in effect, that Barbara Thutin’s posthumous punishment had been promulgated into law, with notable expansion. In June 1710, church leaders warned parishioners that anyone who died after violating the sanitary ordinances would be considered a suicide and that their body would be exhumed and publicly hanged by the judiciary. The clergy also proclaimed, “The same punishment would also apply to those who died after refusing to take the prescribed medications.”

***

Today, inflicting physical punishment on a dead body strikes one as both ludicrous and ghastly. In fact, postmortem punishment was commonplace in medieval and premodern Europe, and the castigation of those who died by suicide persisted much longer. Ignominies and abuses were inflicted upon suicide corpses in many parts of Western Europe until the early 1800s in a diverse range of rituals and state-sanctioned practices that all underscored a general repugnance toward the body of a person who had died by their own hand. What was exceptional about Barbara Thutin was not the calculated mistreatment of her remains but the postmortem administrative recategorization of her death by disease as a suicide and the development of this recategorization into policy. Once Thutin had been officially designated responsible for her own death, her remains became available for public humiliation.

In Europe, well into the 1700s, the bodies of those who committed suicide were frequently subjected to public indignity, such as being dragged through the streets or transported in the same cart that carried condemned criminals to the gallows before being left on public display. In England, stakes were sometimes hammered through the hearts of suicide corpses. Typically, across cultures and over centuries, the principal chastisement was the denial of proper burial. Bodies were burned and cast into a river or corpses were exposed and left to be ravaged by animals and the elements. In Ireland, suicide corpses were buried at the seashore. In southern Germany, these bodies were sometimes sent downriver in barrels in a practice called “running” or even used as bait for wolf hunts. Frequently the job of handling the body of a suicide was left to the hangman, the same local figure often tasked with killing rabid dogs, running lepers out of town, and cleaning out cesspits. Willful suicide committed by an outwardly sane person was a crime and a sin, widely understood to be the result of diabolical or supernatural intervention, rendering such bodies untouchable, out of a fear that physical contact might transmit demonic enchantment. As a consequence, the place of final interment was often adjacent to the gallows or in the same potter’s field where executed criminals were buried.

In 1710, faced with the difficult task of reducing criminality and mitigating the spread of disease within an unruly population, the Prussian state needed an opportunity to demonstrate natural authority. This was achieved not simply through the dreadful spectacle of exhuming, hanging, and burning Barbara Thutin’s body, but also by playing on a deeply seated cultural revulsion of suicide and the awful implications of being denied interment in hallowed ground—of being not simply unremembered by one’s own community, but deliberately ostracized from human society, even after death.

In Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987, Richard J. Evans observes that suicide alone was not traditionally a cause for posthumous execution in medieval or early modern Europe. Despite the litany of degradations and physical insults commonly inflicted upon the corpses of suicides, the hanging or beheading of the dead was generally reserved for criminals who had killed themselves in order to escape capital punishment. Such was the case of Johann Lätsch of Erfurt in 1806, who was condemned to die on the wheel but committed suicide the night before. The local authorities decided to “execute” his corpse, as “the intention of the law is that the sentence shall be carried out on suicides of this kind, as far as is possible, to serve as an example for the deterrence of others.” In 1704, a Vienna newspaper reported on a man who was accused of murdering his wife but who had committed suicide before his sentence could be carried out. His body was dragged to the place of execution, where the executioner beheaded him with an ordinary shovel. In Upper Lusatia in 1647, a domestic worker strangled her employer’s young child before hanging herself, and afterward her body was similarly dragged to the gallows and beheaded by shovel. Perhaps the most famous example of posthumous execution in premodern Western Europe is the Utrecht statesman Gilles van Ledenberg, who was due to stand trial for treasonous activity against the Prince of Orange but preemptively cut his own throat with a bread knife. Like Barbara Thutin, van Ledenberg was later exhumed and hanged in his coffin. Again and again in premodern Europe, the bodies of criminals who attempted to elude justice by taking their own lives were subjected to postmortem or simulated execution, while “regular” suicides were not punished in the same way.

Of course, the public castigation of suicide corpses and the social spectacle of capital punishment are similar in obvious, meaningful ways. Both are elements of social control intended to terrify and shame; both implicitly intend to condemn and deter; and both are ritual performances concerned with the sanctification of the community. However, the capital punishment of criminals who commit suicide carries a specific additional meaning: namely, that the death of a transgressor will not frustrate the community’s entitlement to justice. If a murderer kills himself in the jail to avoid being bludgeoned to death in front of a crowd—well, there would still have to be a bludgeoning because there would still be an expectant crowd. To borrow a phrase, The show must go on.

***

Given the uncanny similarities between the Prussian epidemic of the early 1700s and the response to COVID-19 in the United States today, it should not be surprising that the practice of postmortem mortification has also been resurrected. This time, the posthumously flogged are social media users who employed their online platforms to stridently downplay the seriousness of coronavirus and to undermine trust in the mRNA vaccines, only to later die from COVID-19. While this reckoning against the transgressive dead involves rhetoric and ridicule, not literal disinterment and physical obliteration, the abuse remains retributive, grounded in a sense of cosmic justice, and very much intended for public consumption.

By midyear of 2021, after vaccines had become widely available, many in the U.S. were well past feeling alarm and frustration at the sizable number of unvaccinated Americans who disputed the deadliness of COVID-19, questioned the safety of the new vaccines, and casually undermined basic mitigation strategies. By September 2021, consternation at this mixture of impudence and fatalism had found an outlet in a mordantly entertaining genre of videos on TikTok. Content creators began making montages of social media posts by individuals who amplified vaccine disinformation and derided mask-wearing before dying—ironically but predictably—from causes secondary to COVID-19.

These TikTok montages follow a fairly rigid template. Act I consists of several screenshots of a social media user’s posts, often citing contrafactual research or promoting dubious COVID-19 remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and veterinary ivermectin. Act II has begun when the user shares that they’ve become infected. The posts then focus on their worsening condition. Act III is typically a single frame announcing the subject’s death, either a screenshot of an obituary or a social media post written in memoriam by a family member. Sometimes TikTok creators superimpose themselves over the montage to editorialize and pontificate, dryly or maliciously. Some accounts provide no narration. When music is present, a staple soundtrack is Heinz Kiessling’s “Blue Blood,” best known as the theme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Snark such as this can make the viewer uneasy, as it underscores the medium’s maximal impoliteness and how vigorously these videos breach the ancient social proscription against disparaging the recently deceased. It is not just our bodies that find sanctuary in the tomb.

TikTok creator @…secretlytiktoking has created many solid examples of the genre, such as when she focuses on social media posts made by a Colorado man named Scott Hilliard, whom she describes as an “anti-vaxxer.” In a series of Facebook posts, Hilliard makes statements like, “Take the mask off dumbass democrat,” and “If you get this vaccine your [sic] about a fucking idiot.” Hilliard promises that anyone who tries to forcefully vaccinate him “will die by my hands.” In ACT II, the posts detail Hilliard’s extreme illness: “I’m so dizzy… shit,” “I’m going down hill [sic] fast… my freaking lungs,” “My dear God this covid is kicking my ass,” “My heart feels like it’s going to explode, it hurts to move,” and “Not knowing what lies ahead of me for tonight Is giving me anxiety through the roof.” Then a post announces that an ambulance has been called. Then Hilliard asks for prayers. Act III is Hilliard’s profile picture, in which he is proudly displaying a fish he has just caught in open water. @…secretlytiktoking informs us that Halliard died on November 15, 2021, at the age of forty-two. There is no background music and throughout the video the creator’s tone is flat with occasional notes of wistfulness and melancholy, as if she has been numbed by the never-ending supply of similar stories she has tasked herself with recapitulating.

Collage by the author

One of the more prolific and recognizable contributors to several varieties of COVID-related TikTok content is @crazymotherrunner, who shares and explicates public health information and contradicts disinformation. @crazymotherrunner has accrued over a half million followers and over 21 million likes because she is sharp but relatable, winsome even as she scolds. Unlike others, @crazymotherrunner tends to reserve her comeuppance content for public figures, such as South Carolina Republican Party chair Pressley Stutts, who used his Facebook account to voice resistance to lockdowns and what he saw as unwarranted panic in response to COVID-19. In Act II of a montage video made by @crazymotherrunner, Stutts shares updates on his month-long battle with the virus, much of it in the ICU, which ends with Stutts preparing to be ventilated. Viewers learn that Stutts died shortly after. This time Act III is followed by an encore, as @crazymotherrunner adds a coda on cognitive dissonance, displaying a memorial Facebook post by conservative activist and celebrity attorney L. Lin Wood, who theorizes that the pandemic is being used to partisan ends, because “Only republicans are dying of covid.” @crazymotherrunner also made a video of posts by conservative radio host Phil Valentine, who used social media to make false equivalencies about vaccine safety before dying from complications related to COVID-19. @crazymotherrunner’s closing line for that video: “Is it just me, or is there like, a theme here?”

In terms of antipathetic commentary, however, @crazymotherrunner is hardly extreme. In September 2021, Minnesota-based TikTokker @mikeypiv contributed several montage videos to the comeuppance genre, including a TikTok made with screencapped Facebook posts by a man named Doug Pothul, beginning with a post in which Pothul disputes media claims that COVID-19 is widespread by arguing, “I don’t know anybody that has it.” @mikeypiv offers a disdainfully sardonic narration for a series of slides in which Pothul chronicles his infection and symptoms, shares an image of an “Unvaccinated Lives Matter” T-shirt, and looks forward to overcoming the virus so he can enjoy his “natural immunity.” The last image in the montage is a screenshot from an online obituary reporting Pothul’s premature death at fifty-eight. @mikeypiv says, “Well, at least now you know someone who’s had it.”

The online ridicule of outspoken antivaxxers and pandemic deniers who subsequently died from COVID-19 is by no means limited to TikTok. The website sorryantivaxxer.com is a compendium of social-media reportage on the deaths of “anti-vaxxer [activists] who helped spread COVID-19 misinformation on social media.” There is a private Facebook group titled “My new kink is watching antivaxxers die of Covid.” Twitter is frequently a forum for freestyle comeuppance content, such as a January 2022 tweet by comedian Laurie Kilmartin, who shared the link to a Daily Beast article titled, “QAnon Star Who Said Only ‘Idiots’ Get Vax Dies of COVID,” commenting, “Would be great if these people could get deprogrammed instead of infected oh well.” And finally there is a popular subreddit dedicated to bestowing “Herman Cain Awards,” a reference to the Darwin Awards—sarcastic accolades posthumously conferred upon those “who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool”—as well as one-time presidential candidate Herman Cain, who became one of the first notable right-wing figures to succumb to COVID-19 shortly after downplaying the severity of the disease. (In a bizarre turn, Cain’s Twitter account continued to operate after his death, including a tweet that read, “It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.”)

Almost everywhere that COVID comeuppance media appears online, commenters roundly indict the content-makers for their ghoulishness and toxicity, accusing them of reveling in the deaths of those to whom they feel intellectually and morally superior. Often at least one commenter will invoke the ancient mortuary aphorism, “Don’t speak ill of the dead.” Inevitably, the same question arises: Is content like this a public service, bolstering faith in a new form of vaccine—or is it just schadenfreude? In other words, is humorously highlighting the death of a vocal anti-vaxxer from coronavirus disease an attempt to demonstrate that anti-vaccine rhetoric and “planedemic” conspiracy theories are harmful to the public good, or is content like this no more meaningful than raking up dead dissidents for a few gratifying kicks?

In 2015, psychology researchers at Emory University postulated “a novel tripartite taxonomy” for schadenfreude, or the experience of pleasure or satisfaction at witnessing the failure and suffering of others, which they found is motivated by aggression, rivalry, and a sense of justice. Psychologist C. W. Leach, who was cited by the Emory researchers, connects schadenfreude with gloating and attributes the emotion to social and political polarization. Leach has said, “[It’s] not just taking a little pleasure in somebody’s misfortune […] In many ways, it’s seeing your enemies suffer because of what they believe. That is the sweetest justice, and that’s partly why it’s so satisfying.” Researchers in child psychology at the University of Haifa have suggested that this reflex arises in us as part of our resistance to unfairness and inequality. Schadenfreude isn’t wicked, it follows “the termination of an unequal situation.” The psychologist Norman Feather, who has studied schadenfreude for three decades, has repeatedly argued that the degree to which we enjoy schadenfreude depends on the “perceived deservingness” of the person or group to whom the central misfortune has befallen. For example: If we watch a Dallas Cowboys linebacker get knocked unconscious, we worry for his well-being. But if he gets knocked out two plays after taking a cheap shot at our team’s quarterback, well, that’s practically a morality play.

As robust as the clinical investigation into schadenfreude has been in recent years, the diagnostic terminology retains semantic problems, specifically when it comes to the putative relationship between satisfaction and suffering. It cannot be true that every TikTok user who clicks the little heart icon over a COVID comeuppance video is in fact savoring the real fear, pain, and distress a stranger endured as they approached an undignified and untimely death. More likely, what is most gratifying about these TikToks is how squarely the bad logic and junk science of the TikTok’s Act I are countermanded by the implacable truth of Acts II and III. A cause has met its anticipated effect.

TikTok comeuppance videos confirm the viewer’s assumptions about the world—in this case, that they did the right thing by trusting the science, by depriving themselves of social contact and small errands, by giving Anthony Fauci the benefit of the doubt. They seem to offer unimpeachable proof that we live in an ordered, knowable world of action and reaction. Such a perception of sense and stability in the face of naysayers can lead to faith in reason beyond reason and a level of self-congratulation almost narcotic in how well it satisfies our desire to be right, even as it suppresses our compassion for strangers and their predicaments. It’s also a kind of enchantment, fogging out the reality that vaccine status cannot fairly be correlated to justice or morality, at least not when one’s vaccine status is also correlated to their wealth, race, level of education, and nationality. These TikToks are proof that what ultimately matters to at least some of us, at least some of the time, is belief in a world where people get what they deserve. To reconsider these TikToks as a product of the same drives that once led to the ritualized erasure of the dead is to wonder if we are asking the wrong questions. Maybe it’s not whether this comeuppance content is public service or just schadenfreude. Maybe the schadenfreude is the public service. Maybe what the public wants is not necessarily the good of the public but moral clarity above all else.

When the anti-vaccine proselytizing and COVID denial of the deceased are recontextualized, certain liberal and progressive spaces on the putatively secular, science-loving Internet are ritualistically sanctified, the way medieval villages were once purified with violence after the sudden interruption of a suicide. Here again, it is not the trespasses of the dead in life that comprise the underlying offense, but their death itself. What good is being vindicated in a moral and ideological schism—a schism that calls into question the very epistemological framework of scientific rationalism—if one is denied the ultimate satisfaction: the biologically impossible situation in which an avid COVID-19 denier or anti-vaxxer gets sick and dies from COVID-19, yet also remains attendant and accountable, able to bear witness to their error? What is the common end of empirical and rationalist modes of thinking if not to change hearts by uncovering that which is indisputable? But the dead do not capitulate, and so justice will always feel elusive. And so some of us may find ourselves wending down the path to the graveyard, carrying shovels and rope.

*Title translated from the German Geschichte der Pest in Ostpreußen.

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Ben Reed often writes about politeness, medicine, and dystopia. Find him on Twitter: @BenFromAustin. His essays have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Texas Review, and online at The Millions. His short stories have appeared in Pank, Seattle Review, West Branch, and online at Tin House. Ben teaches literature and creative writing at Texas State University and lives in East Austin. He is currently at work on both an essay collection and a novel.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  In “Sweet Feet,” essayist Amy Shea reflects on her discoveries during a summer spent volunteering as a foot-care assistant for Boston’s homeless population. The essay was a finalist in our 2022 Perkoff Prize contest for writing about health and medicine.

Sweet Feet

by Amy Shea

When I first met Rebecca, I was taken aback by her stature; she was thin, so thin, likely weighing no more than a hundred pounds. She was missing some teeth, and she kept her hair short, complaining of sometimes intense head pain. Her skin clung to her bones, and she walked with a cane. She was less than ten years older than I: in her late forties. Some days, she would come in spirited and energized, one time regaling us with a story of doing free sessions of goat yoga that had been offered near South Station. Other days, she’d come in more subdued and would sit quietly, not making eye contact.

It was 2018, and for the summer I was volunteering as a foot care assistant at a day shelter for homeless persons. Walking is a primary mode of transport for many homeless; therefore, foot health needs to be addressed with those experiencing homelessness. Problems can include athlete’s foot, foot pain, improperly fitting shoes, immersion foot, calluses, corns, blisters, and loss of toes due to untreated infection or frostbite. The most common ailments we saw in the clinic were blisters from ill-fitting shoes, as well as athlete’s foot and immersion foot from wet and dirty socks and from using shared showers in the shelters.

Dr. Jim O’Connell is the founder and president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP), which opened in 1985. In its thirty-plus years, it has grown into a behemoth of safe spaces for those in need, its jewel being the Barbara McInnis House, the 104-bed medical respite unit on the main campus, plus additional sites around Greater Boston, including the foot care clinic inside St. Francis House, where I volunteered. The main campus, situated in downtown Boston across the street from Boston Medical Center, offers a plethora of services, including a dental clinic, a pharmacy, an eye clinic, an outpatient clinic for regular doctor visits for both adults and families, specialty care for those living with HIV, support for transgender people, a behavioral health unit, a substance use disorder unit, as well as a street team that meets a subgroup of homeless people (those sleeping the roughest of the rough) who can’t or won’t enter a shelter.

Dr. O’Connell wrote about his experience as a street doctor in the book Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor. The first chapter, “The Footsoak,” leads the reader through O’Connell’s entry into street medicine, where he first began tending to the feet (and other ailments) of homeless people in Boston’s oldest and largest shelter, Pine Street Inn. O’Connell writes:

In keeping with the obvious biblical allusion, the footsoak inverts the usual power structure and places the caregiver at the feet of each patient and far from the head…After wandering the city for hours, suffering exposure to the extremes of weather, and then standing in a series of queues awaiting entrance to the shelter, a bed ticket, and the evening meal, homeless persons relished the chance to sit and rest while someone cleansed and soothed their feet. (16)

Having read about Dr. O’Connell’s experience, I was compelled to apply as a foot-care assistant. Although I’d never been homeless, as a hiker and someone who didn’t own a car and therefore walked nearly everywhere, I understood the role that feet play in our health. Without healthy feet, so much of our autonomy can quickly be lost.

Leading up to my first day, I was given the foot-care assistant duties and responsibilities sheet that outlined the basics of what I’d be doing: setting up basins for foot soaks and working with nurses to assess the condition of patients’ feet, distributing socks and towels to patients, assisting patients with the application of creams and powder for the feet, engaging patients in conversation (to establish rapport, which can result in the identification of further medical issues), disinfecting and washing basins, and assisting with restocking medical supplies and other administrative tasks. Yet I was still unsure what it would actually be like. I was nervous about the unknown: what the place would look, feel, sound, and smell like. I was concerned about whether I’d do a good job and be able to follow procedures and processes. I worried about trying to remember when you needed gloves on versus when you needed to take them off. What if I was bad at handling someone’s feet? Or didn’t know how to talk to the patients? Or got in the way of the medical staff?

Ultimately, I understood that I couldn’t know it all and that my fears wouldn’t be assuaged until I got there and began putting my training into practice. But I hadn’t expected to be schooled on the importance of something as seemingly small as the sock and its power to heal, to comfort, to offer a small moment of feeling human—of feeling normal.

How often do you think about socks? Socks get dirty and wet. Of course, I knew that. But that knowledge was now placed in a new context. I had never thought about what might happen if you couldn’t clean or easily replace your socks, and it hadn’t occurred to me just how quickly they became unwearable.

Before volunteering in the clinic, my sock buying had always happened passively. I’d be in Target and know that my husband had more holey socks than not, so I’d throw a pack into the cart for him and then wind my way through to the women’s department, where I’d see some ankle socks and think, Yeah, I could use some new ones too. Those packs of socks would then get absorbed into the cost of all the other Target purchases. But when I started going to the store explicitly to buy socks for the shelter, I was taken aback. I’d think, What do you mean it’s fourteen dollars for a six-pack of men’s crew socks? ‘Expect More. Pay Less’ my ass.

Here’s the thing: not all socks are created equal. I could have bought cheaper socks, but they wouldn’t have had the same padding, softness, or weight to them. A better-quality sock will go further in keeping blisters at bay, something that all too often plagues those who are homeless, because if you can’t afford a home or food, you also probably can’t afford a taxi or an Uber. Even a bus ride is likely out of your means, which leaves you walking miles upon miles to pick up your Social Security check, meet your social workers, get to the doctor, go to the foot clinic, and then, finally, head to the shelter for the night, where you’ll leave your socks on after that long day of walking and sleep with your shoes under your head. But as they say, Boston is a walkable city—thank God for small favors.

Most of the socks in the clinic came from donations. Some socks were individual one-off donations. Sometimes people would coordinate sock drives among their friends and family and bring in a larger haul. The biggest donations the clinic received came from the annually coordinated effort between BHCHP and the Red Sox baseball team: Sox for Socks. In 2017, more than four thousand socks were collected.

Of course, I should have expected to have more than just my ignorance of socks eliminated. One day when I came in for my volunteer shift, I wore a T-shirt from the local REI store that had an image of evergreen trees and “Take It Outside” written beneath. It was the first time I’d worn a shirt with writing on it into the clinic. I generally figured it was better to avoid this so as not to offend someone: no sports teams or sayings that could be otherwise contentious. But going outside, being out of doors, what was offensive about that? But what happens when you take something and place it in a new context? What might be considered virtuous or admirable can become mocking and distancing. One man pointed at my shirt as he was bending down to scrub his feet with a small piece of pumice and said, “I’m outside all the time.”

Rebecca wasn’t the only patient who would stand out and hold a space in my memory. On my first day at the clinic, I found myself tickling the feet of a grown man. He plopped down in the chair and boisterously answered the requisite questions on the intake form: name, date of birth, did he have diabetes or any known allergies, had he received a flu shot, did he smoke (we always specified that we meant cigarettes), where his primary care physician was located (at this shelter or somewhere else), and where he spent most nights. He was jovial, and as I examined his feet, he confirmed that he was in fact quite high. Due to his size, he was unable to bend over to take his shoes and socks off and would need help with the process. I crouched down and untied his shoes, placing them to one side, and took each sock off. Then we filled two buckets, one for each foot, as he couldn’t place both in just one bucket. It was hard to miss the large ankle monitor adorning his left leg. He, like so many others, seemed to be in a perpetual state of liminality. While his feet soaked in the warm, soapy water, he regaled the room full of volunteers and other patients with soapbox banter about how certain local universities were known for their love of weed. After ten minutes or so, I took his feet out of the water, toweled them off, and began massaging cream into them. As I massaged, I heard giggling. I looked up at him, and he said, “Girl, that tickles!”

Then there was Mark, a man around my age, who came into the clinic regularly. He was fit and muscular. He looked like a bodybuilder and was someone I would refer to as the invisible homeless. If you saw this man walking down the street, you’d never know that he stayed in a shelter. He was clean-shaven and had no other visual indicators that he might be experiencing homelessness. As Nick Flynn writes in his memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, “Sometimes I point out that eighty percent of the homeless are invisible, like the proverbial iceberg, that when I walk through the city now every other person I see is someone I know from the shelter, but if you didn’t know you’d think they were on their lunch break, enjoying a little sun” (184).

One morning Mark came in deflated and tired and told us about his previous day, which had begun with him needing to do laundry. He’d thought he had money on his card, but when he got to the laundromat, he realized the card was empty, so he retraced the two miles he’d just walked with a forty-pound bag of laundry in tow to get money from someone he knew so that he could go back to the laundromat. First errand over; on to the next. He waited for the bus to take him to the Department of Transitional Assistance—the local social security offices—to pick up his check, but the bus never came. So, he walked there as well. A late-summer afternoon spent walking from errands to chores and back. It was a day to treat himself: McDonald’s. He’d saved enough money for a double cheeseburger—just enough for the burger. But thirst was getting the better of him on this hot and humid New England day. He asked for a free glass of ice water. The woman behind the counter looked at him like he was crazy and hesitated and mulled over his request. He asked again, unable to understand why his question was such a difficult one to answer. Finally, after him asking multiple times, she gave him the water but no ice.

Daniel came in regularly, yet he still struggled to maintain good foot health. Some days he was cheerfully belligerent, and other days he was borderline abusive, depending on how drunk or how sober he was. Whenever he was asked about allergies, his standard reply was, “Is alcohol an allergy?” This was accompanied by a toothless grin, which was not uncommon with homeless alcoholics. His immersion foot was so bad that the entire bottoms of his feet were covered in wet, ghostly white, pockmarked skin. Their condition was always too bad to let him soak, so we just had him apply a lot of powder to his skin and socks. We also gave him two pairs (against the one-sock policy, as stocks always ran low) that he could layer up in a feeble effort to stave off the damp. The first time I took care of his feet, they looked particularly bad, and when I told him, he shrugged. He’d spent the previous rainy night sleeping under a bridge and was soaked through by morning. What was to be expected? All the socks and foot powder in the world were no match for the streets.

Walter, a veteran who lived upstairs, came in one day with an injury to two of his toes. After one look, one of the nurses insisted that he go to the ER. Two of his toes were such a dark purple they were nearly black, and the concern was that he had an infection that could lead to him losing the toes or, worse, the whole foot. He used a cane but could barely walk a block to the pharmacy. The nurse reassured him that she’d put him in a taxi to make sure he got to the hospital. In another instance, I saw the results of infections neglected or hypothermia in the form of lost toes. When I asked one man, who was missing four toes, one of our routine questions about where he spent most nights, he replied, “Streets, sometimes the back of an abandoned car.”

As the end of my time as a volunteer drew new, I encountered a particularly striking patient. He had waited for so long to get into the clinic that day, and although we were technically past closing time, it wasn’t hard to understand why they’d let him in: he was in a bad way. He walked into the room, slowly and deliberately pushing a walker in front of him, which required all his effort and concentration to do so. Thin and frail, he grimaced as he lowered himself into the plastic chair. He winced as we helped him get his feet into the tubs, as they were in severe pain to the gentlest touch.

After soaking, he needed help applying lotion and getting his fresh pair of socks on. I pulled over the leg support stand to rest his foot on, to minimize his pain. I’d touched a lot of feet over my short time there, but as I rubbed the lotion into his legs, I felt scaly, gritty skin through my gloves, as though it would peel off just with my touch. I’d never felt anything like it before, and I had to swallow my shock, as I didn’t want him to see it on my face. To put his socks on, I rolled them down to the toe and maneuvered over his toes (where his pain was the worst), with as little contact as possible. This was so difficult that he had to brace himself to bear the pain.

One of the staff nurses explained that he likely had peripheral neuropathy—diabetic nerve damage leading to pain, numbness, and weakness, usually in the hands and feet. It’s an all-too-common occurrence among homeless people and was something we often saw at the clinic. Without regular access to healthy foods, diabetes rates are high, and for those who are homeless, this can lead to severe complications that might otherwise be avoided through proper management. When you don’t have a safe place to store your medications, your belongings are stolen all the time, you can’t afford to get to the doctor because the bus ride alone is too expensive, or you’re in too poor health to walk the miles you need to, it’s not surprising that something which would be manageable for the housed becomes.

Pain lived in the foot clinic. It came in all forms and intensities, and I dare think that if someone had had the nerve to show the happy-to-sad-face pain scale to some in there, they would have shoved it right up the person’s backside to illustrate what kind of pain they were in. For some, that pain was so limiting that they couldn’t do basic things on their own, such as removing their shoes and socks, placing their feet in a bucket of water, drying them off, then putting everything back on. I often wondered what they did when they weren’t in the clinic and needed to take their shoes or clothes off, use the restroom, or take a shower. Did they have friends who helped, or did they simply not remove their clothing or take showers?

Community is so important, especially in a setting such as the clinic. Staff and volunteers began each morning before opening the clinic with a team meeting, led by Cecilia, the director of nursing. We’d end our meeting by standing in a circle, each of us with a fist extended into the center. We’d pump our arms and chant, “One, two three: SWEET FEET! WOO, WOO, WOO, WOO!”

Our patients were no different. As with any group of people sharing a common experience, they created tight communities that looked out for one another. They shared food; they shared clothing; they shared worries about their friend who heard voices; they shared jokes. We humans need each other.

On my final day at the clinic, I saw Rebecca once more, and she seemed worse than normal. She sat angled on the chair, in evident pain. Every muscle in her face tensed as she winced. She had an abscess on her bottom. Sometimes it’s hard to understand the kind of physical pain someone is experiencing. But I could feel her pain, if only a little. Years earlier I’d had a year-long battle with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)—the scary staph that no one wants—from a tattoo that had become infected. Boils would pop up randomly on my body, the worst being a large one on my lower back, right beneath the waistline of my pants. Even wearing soft yoga pants, I remember hunching over and crying in pain the ten steps from the couch to the kitchen sink. But there’s where any similarity ended. I had a kitchen sink and a couch. I had a place to shelter in. I had doctors throwing every antibiotic at me they could. I was able to keep my wounds clean so that they healed with no subsequent issues.

I took extra care with her that day, cupping her calf—so small it barely filled my palm—in one hand and her heel in the other to lower each foot softly into the warm water and did the same to take them out. I wrapped the towel around her legs like a baby coming out of a bath, massaged the cream into her skin, moving my thumbs in soft circles. It’s such a small thing, but this contact creates a feeling of intimacy—to treat the body in a hands-on way creates a shared humanity between bodies.

Once her socks and shoes were back on, we helped her up, and the director of nursing took her into a room to look at the abscess. I wanted to give Rebecca a big bear hug to show I cared, but I was afraid I would break her. I settled for tucking her feet into a warm pair of socks, tying her shoes, and helping her to stand. Sometimes we need to feel useful, to help, as much as, or more than, we need help. In the beginning of Stories from the Shadows, Dr. O’Connell writes:

Remember that people have lived through hell and listen carefully to their stories…Each guest was invited into the clinic and addressed by name. Most homeless persons wander our urban landscapes for days without ever hearing someone call them by name, and the response was exuberant. Eyes opened, heads lifted, scowls became smiles. (15)

The motto of St. Francis shelter is Homelessness is an experience, not an identity. The clinic embodied this in practice. I’ve never been homeless. I can’t know what it’s like, but in the foot clinic, the physical and mental effects of not having a home are loud and visible. Foot care may not be the ultimate solution, but it does what it’s intended to do well by offering a brief sanctuary from that frenetic space, a sense of renewal and improving health. Dirty and wet socks came in, pained faces and broken bodies came in. A bucket of warm water and soap would be offered up, along with a choice of sock: gold-tipped, thick, thin, high, short, specialty diabetic socks. People soaked their feet, sat quietly, conversed with others, or even dozed off, leaving with clean feet and the comfort of a new pair of socks.

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Amy Shea is an essayist with a PhD and MFA in creative writing from the University of Glasgow, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation, a creative nonfiction work titled Not All Deaths Are Created Equal. Her writing has appeared in Pangyrus, Portland Review, The Massachusetts Review, Spry Literary Journal, Fat City Review, From Glasgow to Saturn, End of Life Studies Group Blog, and the Journal of Sociology of Health & Illness. She works as the writing program coordinator for Mount Tamalpais College, a free community college for the incarcerated people of San Quentin.