The change is definitive.

I wanted to be David Sylvian.

My bangs are light yellow straw now, long enough that a few strands of scorched hair cover my eyes while most of it spikes above my forehead, in the cockatoo style Howard Jones sports. I’ve got on loose, light gray pants, with pockets on the sides of the leg. Black cotton boots with a big tongue sticking out the top, and a long-sleeved grey shirt with black specks on it, collar up. I’m wearing brown eyeliner, which my mom approved begrudgingly, and brown mascara, which she didn’t notice. It’s the first day of sophomore year. I’m braced, because Paul already got taunted and shoved at registration.

This is my debut walk across campus. “No big deal,” I told my mom. “Lots of kids are mod,” using the term for her sake. The lies don’t ease my nerves now. I can feel eyes on me. As soon as I climb the stairs from the drop-off area, I hear the first jeer: “Dude, check it out. Fagaw went mod.”

We are plastic, according to the neuroscientists. If there is a single idea in brain research that has become doctrine in the last few decades, it’s plasticity. Like plastic, your brain is malleable. It changes constantly. (Other connotations of the term—cheap, artificial, dehumanized, crowding the earth with non-biodegradable molecules—are unfortunate side effects.)

Brains are plastic in part because synapses, the connections between neurons, are at least as important as the neurons themselves. Synapses are in a constant state of reconfiguration. Don’t get me wrong: brain structures don’t just reshape themselves wholesale from moment to moment. They’re largely stable, but they are always shifting gradually, and gradual shifts can amount to significant change. These changes are most evident in stages of development common to the species, like the shift from childhood to adolescence, or when an individual undergoes a major psychological change, like becoming a drug addict, experiencing a psychotic break, attempting suicide, finding enlightenment, getting married or divorced, “going mod.” But most of the changes we experience are less high profile.

Plasticity is the latest in a very long tradition of metaphors devised to explain brain function. For centuries, philosophers envisioned a homunculus—a tiny man at the controls—inhabiting the dark place in the brain, pulling levers and making consciousness happen. Descartes characterized the mind both as a bell pull used to communicate between servants in disparate sections in a great house and as a microscopic system of hydraulics. Early twentieth-century neuroscientists conceptualized the brain in terms of the steam engine, the camera obscura, the telephone switchboard.

William James famously called consciousness a stream, and a generation of novelists got busy illustrating the power of his metaphor: Virginia Woolf sought an elusive lighthouse located deep in the streamy labyrinths of her character’s minds; James Joyce revived Homer’s Ulysses and turned twenty-four hours into a thousand pages of meandering epiphanic lewdness; William Faulkner conjured the sound and the fury of flashing color interior worlds dense with tangled thoughts and sensations. James, less influentially, also compared consciousness to a bird’s flight, whereby periods of free-flight are punctuated by perchings, or moments of attention.

The computer was the dominant metaphor for several decades: the brain being the hardware, the mind the software, and sensation the external input. Recently, metaphors of plasticity—network, web, ecosystem—have displaced the computational model. The brain, according to the network, web, and ecosystem metaphors, is a dynamic system of systems and subsystems whose interrelationships are vast, asymmetrical, and fluctuating. And somehow this ecology becomes self: we are this ecology.

We choose these metaphors because of what they reveal—in this case the vast interconnectedness and malleability of brain function. But metaphors also conceal. The problem is that we tend not to see what is concealed until a given metaphor has begun to outlive its usefulness. We probably won’t begin to see what plasticity conceals for decades, but it foregrounds the possibility of change. It suggests reinvention.

My guess is that three decades from now, we’ll have a metaphor that suggests more fully both the possibilities and limits of change within a given organism. But for now: we are plastic.

I walk, one foot, then the next, until I reach my locker. I open the door to make a shield and lean against it. I breathe, a deliberate breath, deep, strained. Before I finish, Shane Carlin rounds the corner, in floppy leather boots, ripped and bleach-stained jeans, studded belt hanging around his waist, outside the loops, Adam Ant bone choker, blue eyeliner that wings off the corners of his lids, white streak in his brown bangs. His walk is casually lanky, like he’s in a Bow Wow Wow video. He glances at me, looks away, glances back, smiles just barely at the corners of his mouth, locks eyes with me for a slow motion second. I feel him take his arms and wrap them around me. I feel him whisper in my ear, “You look great.”

One foot in front of the next, he disappears around a corner, just like that. Was that smile good or bad? Did he like how I look? Was he making fun of me?

“Hey Toug,” I hear my cousin Nichole say. “Nice eyeliner.” It’s her first day of freshman year. I can tell she’s nervous for me, and it’s annoying.

“Shut up.”

“I’m only kidding. Jeez.”

“Okay.” Nichole has short hair now, with a sun-in streak in the bangs, and she wears a big plastic pink jewel of a brooch. She’s in the category I was in until today—mod supporter but not mod. There are lots like her, most of them girls. At San Pasqual, at this point, there are seven or eight full-fledged mods, none of them actually mod. In fact, hardly anybody fits a category, even though the categories are well defined: punk, newro, mod, ska, goth. Most of us are a mix, stylistic mutts.

Although mod is a misnomer, we don’t reject it entirely because it demonstrates our accomplishment: complete removal from the social fabric of high school, which also means nearly instant immersion in a new social milieu, comprised of a network of others like us from high schools all over the county. Eight or ten at each of dozens of high schools means there are enough of us to gather and become a force—at malls, concerts, coffee shops, thrift stores. We spot each other right away, in the Adam Ant collars, Robert Smith bangs, Siouxsie eyeliner, Thompson Twins clam diggers, Jam polyester turtle necks, Chrissie Hynde leather.

“Has anybody said anything?” Nichole asks.

“Not to my face,” I say.

“Oh my god,” she says.

“What?” I say, annoyed on the verge of getting mad. She’s not helping the way I want. I want her to tell me I look cool, that everybody else is stupid.

“No, Mr. Sensitive,” she says. “It’s Paul. Oh my god.” Paul is walking toward us, hair dyed blue-black, eyeliner to match, black t-shirt way too big, black slim cut pants, his mom’s rosary around his neck.

Paul wanted to be Robert Smith.

“Oh my god,” Nichole says again. Paul’s transformation is more iconic than mine. He is Robert Smith, though a little darker, with some Jesus and Mary Chain and Bauhaus thrown in. I’m Howard Jones, who has top ten hits, wishing I was David Sylvian or Fun Boy Three, who aren’t famous in America.

“Some fucking stoners threw paper airplanes at me,” Paul says, like it’s a badge of honor.

“Jason Meyer has been going around saying ‘Fagaw went mod’,” Nichole says.

“He’s jealous,” Paul says, “because he’s so ugly.” He’s laughing like a maniacal Satan. It’s part of his look. “Here comes Amy,” he coughs through the laugh.

“Hi boys,” Amy says, looking us up and down. “Who’s this?” she says to Paul.

Paul knows Amy Buzick from his history class last year. They talked about music all year. I’ve never met her, but I’ve been studying her for months, like I’ve been studying Shane and his girlfriend Gabby, looking for the combination of signifiers I could adopt to let people know who I really am—no, who I might become. “This is my friend Jason,” Paul says.

“Cute,” Amy says. “The mascara works. But you could use some lipstick.”

Relief. I’ve done it. “And this is Nichole,” Paul says.

“Hi there,” Amy says. “What do you think of these boys?”

“They’re just Jason and Paul to me,” Nichole replies.

Edward Hoaglund has written an “Opinion” essay in The New York Times–“Pity Earth Creatures”–about the human penchant for using other species of animals as metaphors to explain our weird behavior while we bully them into submission or extinction:

By our own account we’re pigs, yet bearish, owly but mousy, catty and bovine. We beaver at work, hawk merchandise, and ape others by parroting them. We’re lemmings, wolfish, snakes in the grass, weasels, bucks, hens, leonine or sharks. We’re beaky or tigerish, doe-eyed, raven-haired, foxy, chicken-hearted, slow as a tortoise, meek as a dove, sheepish, dogged, old goats, goosey, sitting ducks or vultures. We butt in, bull ahead, change our stripes or spots, strut like a peacock, weep crocodile tears, ram through or swan about. We’re rabbity, calf-eyed, we beat our chests like gorillas, buzz off, or act like a jellyfish.  

The essay doesn’t feel like New York Times writing, which is what’s delightful about it. No offense to the Times, but it tends toward self-seriousness, even when it’s over-simplifying the science, or the history, or the politics. Hoaglund’s essay reads like an old-school essay: exploratory, playful, meandering, juxtaposing, synthesizing. It offers no conclusions, but plenty of evocative language:

Power to the people is a worldwide revolutionary slogan advancing democracy, but presupposes a more ancient meaning: the prehistoric conquest of every other vertebrate on earth. When I lived on Samos myself in 1965, I heard about perhaps the last wild leopard killed in Europe. It had swum across the strait from Mount Mycale in Turkey, only a mile or so away, presumably a bachelor seeking virgin territory, and when discovered and chased, had taken refuge in a cave, where the Samians promptly walled it in to die of thirst. Wouldn’t you have done the same? I suspect that Aesop, however, might have advocated setting it free to garland the 27-mile long island (and thus Europe) for a few more years with a last whiff of the eons preceeding modernity.

Who would refuse that leopard a last whiff of the eons preceeding modernity? Not me. But Hoaglund does have a kind of thesis:

Call it progress or metastasizing, what we have done as a race, a species or a civilization is dumbfounding. Every inch of the planet is ours, we claim, and elements of clear improvement are intertwined with cancerous excess: the two-car American dream empowering women’s independence but engendering horrendous African droughts.

So here I am, recommending Hoaglund’s essay; imagining more graceful relations among humans and other species; and feeling curious about this novel Hoaglund is publishing soon: “Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse.” Thanks to Nicole Wallack for calling my attention to the essay. It was a good way to start the day.

I’ve noticed a recurrent phenomenon in contemporary literature: scenes in which brains (or other body parts) are  touched or explored for signs of immaterial elements of self: mind, consciousness, affect, emotion, imagination, desire–what the philosophers calls “qualia”–the subjective, ineffable qualities that characterize our perceptual responses to the world around us. This happens in a variety of texts and genres, including (but by no means limited to) what some are calling “neuronovels” and what I’ve been calling “brain memoirs.”

From David B’s graphic autobiography Epileptic (Pantheon 2005).

In this scene from David B’s Epileptic, David fantasizes that he might exchange brains–and therefore identities–with his epileptic brother Jean-Christophe, who lives with severe generalized epilepsy and whose grand mal seizures are a terrifying routine in their family’s life. He draws the fantasy using some stock imagery from science fiction depictions of the mad scientist’s lab: those tanks whose tubes seem to plumb and connect the brother’s brains. But the tubes are interconnected with a serpent, which plays the role of Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy throughout the book, slithering through the family. Its shape is no accident. The serpent, like the disease, twists and turns its way through the psyches of everybody involved. Jean-Christophe’s brain manifests its symptoms in the family as a whole. Notice also the brain matter entwined with the tubes and and the serpent. It’s that stuff that looks like spaghetti. The image of the two brothers’ brains touching is ironic in a devastating way, because it stands in for the connections they can’t maintain in life. David’s fantasy is a surrogate for empathy he can’t muster for his brother in life.

My second example is from a so-called neuronovel, Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In literary studies we use the term interiority as a shorthand for the representation of a character’s mental experience. We don’t tend to recognize the fact that we are using a metaphor when we do so. If an experience is immaterial, there is nothing to get inside; there is no physical location for the mind. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the novel to which McEwan pays homage to with Saturday, is promiscuous in its representation of its various characters’ “interiors.” In Saturday, the narrator is third-person limited, offering access to the thoughts and feelings of its protagonist, neurosurgeon Henry Perowne.

The novel features numerous brain surgery scenes, during which Henry expertly cuts open people’s skulls and cuts into their brain matter in the hope of changing, or saving, their lives. The scene I’ll quote from is five pages of extremely detailed description of a surgery Henry performs on a character named Baxter. Henry’s colleagues don’t know it, but Henry caused Baxter’s brain injury, by pushing him down the stairs, after Baxter breaks into his house, terrorizes his family, and threatens to rape his daughter. (Yes, this is fiction; and  yes, it almost feels Dickensian in its reliance of plot-driving happenstance.) Henry keeps another secret from his colleagues. In addition to his injury, a blood clot on the surface of the brain, he suffers from fairly advanced Huntington’s Disease. Notice how Henry’s skill as a surgeon is reflected through McEwan’s skill as a prose stylist, one who might be forgiven for showing off a little:

“Now, using the same dissector, he lifts the whole free flap away from the skull, a large piece of bone like a segment of coconut, and lays it in the bowl with the other bits. The clot is in full view, red of such darkness it is almost black, and of the consistency of set jam. Or, as Perowne sometimes thinks, like a placenta. But round the edges of the close, blood is flowing freely now that the pressure of the bone flap has been relieved. It pours off the back of Baxter’s head, over the surgical drapes and onto the floor.

  ‘Elevate the head of the table. Give me as much as you can,’ Henry calls to Jay. If the bleed is higher than the heart, the blood will flow less copiously. The table rises, and Henry and Rodney step back in quickly through the blood at their feet and, working together, use a sucker and an Adson elevator to remove the clot. . . . But they can’t close up yet. Perowne takes a scalpel and makes a small incision in the dura, parts it a little and peers inside. The surface of Baxter’s brain is indeed covered with a clot, much smaller than the first. He extends the incision and Rodney tucks back the dura with stay sutures.”

In place of Clarissa Dalloway’s flights into other characters’ psyches, Perowne penetrates other characters’ skulls. As with Epileptic, readers are asked to indulge the fantasy that we’ll learn something about the mind by touching the brain. What’s he looking for when he peers into Baxter’s skull. As you might imagine, it’s more than a blood clot:

“For all the recent advances, it’s still not known how this well-protected one kilogram or so of cells actually encodes information, how it holds experiences, memories, dreams and intentions. He doesn’t doubt that in years to come, the coding mechanism will be known, though it might not be in his lifetime. . . . But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?”

You hear this kind of thing a lot from neuroscientists, who tend to sound like Enlightenment naturalists when it comes to predicting epistemological revolutions just beyond reach. You could call these predictions rhetorical sleights of hand, whereby what we might know in the future stands in for what we don’t know now, but you might also call them fantasy. What we might know, in this case, is how the relationship between matter (our brains, our bodies, the physical world around us) and the immaterial or ineffable experience of consciousness–what some philosophers call phenomenology, what the literary critics call interiority.

And that brings me to William A. Cohen and what he calls “material interiority.” In an essay on Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Cohen coins this term to describe Victorian moments that work a lot like the “touching brains” scenes I’m seeing in contemporary literature.

“By portraying in palpable terms the human body’s enclosure of intangible subjectivity, she exploits the paradox of an immaterial soul, heart, or mind inhabiting the flesh. Pervaded by metaphors of entombment and boundary violation, the novel’s language exaggerates and estranges the conditions of embodiment. In using the term “material interiority,” I mean to designate this literary depiction of ethereal inner qualities in a language of tangible objects, a practice that collapses dualistic conceptions of mind and body (or body and soul) by making subjective inwardness and bodily innards stand for each other.”

Any English major will recognize the term interiority. English professors (and some writers) use it as shorthand for the representation of a character’s consciousness. But the term has been so ubiquitous for so long that we’ve forgotten it’s a metaphor. Immaterial phenomena like consciousness or emotion or memory are not things and they are certainly not places. They are placeless. There is nothing to be inside. No interior. The metaphor, deep down in its roots, contains the seeds of what Cohen calls “material interiority,” because it suggests that our bodies are like houses for our psyches. There’s undeniably a relationship between a person’s body and psyche, but there’s no evidence that the psyche is housed inside that body. Does your consciousness feel like it’s inside you? Mine doesn’t.

Cohen’s essay makes it clear that looking for the psyche by opening up characters’s bodies is a literary tradition dating at least to the early Victorian era. I want to argue that fantasy is intrinsic to the literary representation of what Cohen calls “material interiority”—the fantasy that by touching or violating or exposing or cutting open the brain we’ll find answers about the mind.

It doesn’t require a sophisticated reader to recognize the irony of these scenes. Touching brains to find minds is a fantastical and illogical enterprise, which is why these scenes are popular in parodies of science fiction. It’s the province of literature to deal in counterfactual representation, often as a means of exploring ideas and questions that elude the sciences or the social sciences. Finally, I want to argue that these moments of material interiority are thematic analogues to a formal principle: aesthetic experience involves the inexplicable traffic between the material and the immaterial in ways that feel automatic and often go unnoticed and seem to conflate the physical and what Cohen calls the “ethereal.” Words on a page, images on a screen, or sound vibrating from a speaker act upon the bodies of readers, spectators, and listeners and in the process trigger a spectrum of immaterial experiences—affective responses, acts of inspiration or imagination, emotions, desire, memory—whose physiological correlates, felt and unfelt, trigger still more immaterial experiences. And so on. And so on.  In this sense, a form of “material interiority” is fundamental to aesthetic experience.

Now, I have a favor to ask. I’d love it if readers would let me know about examples of scenes in literature, film, or other art forms where brains or other body parts are probed, touched, examined, held, or cut open with the motive of finding immaterial stuff like the psyche or consciousness. A few examples come to mind: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (and Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of it, famous for the scene in which Anthony Hopkins sautees the living Ray Liotta’s brain and feeds it to Jodie Foster); Lauren Slater’s Lying; Howard Dully’s My Lobotomy; Thomas Pynchon’s V (involving a nose job, rather than brain surgery); Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Primate; any number of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta mysteries; Dennis Cooper’s novels, especially Frisk and Closer; some of Fred Tomaselli‘s collage paintings. I want to write a longer essay about all this, working out the nuances and examining more variations, so if you have some to share, I’d love to know about them.

Finally: special thanks to Jason Nielsen, Judd Staley, and Paul Hebert for their work organizing the recent Minding the Body conference at the CUNY Graduate Center. Preparing for a panel they organized motivated me to start formulating some of my vague ideas about what it means when characters touch brains in contemporary literature. I’ve only just begun, so I’d love any and all feedback. For more on the conference take a look at panelist Samir Chopra’s blog article, “The Mind Is Not a Place or an Object.”

“Stephen has been diagnosed with a learning disability,” I hear our neighbor Brenda’s British accent on our doorstep. She’s talking about one of her sons. “It’s a problem with his brain. If Stephen looks at a tree in the distance, he’ll see one leaf, but not the tree. The rest of us wouldn’t see the leaf at all.” I don’t really know what she’s talking about, but Brenda’s accent makes living in Del Dios seem less horrible. And I know that everybody in my family is always blaming our crazy Portuguese blood for problems with our brains.

“Is there anything they can do about it?” my mom asks. Her lung disease was recently cured, by a doctor who studied eastern healing. Stanley calls it a Lucky Seven miracle, courtesy of Ralph Neves. Miracle or not, it’s got my mom in the mood to search for cures, and I’m next.

“Well, the school has a new program, The Perception Center. He’ll spend part of every day there. In a way it’s a relief. We just thought he was slow.”

“Steve is a great kid,” my mom says. “He’s so kind.”

“Sometimes that worries me. He’ll trust anybody.”

“In the long  run, that’s better than not trusting anybody.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, I just popped by to say that if you still need to me to look after the kids this afternoon I can do it.”

“Read it again,” Mr. Warfel  says, each breath a little warm cloud swallowing my neck and ear. I’ve just started first grade at Miller School, in the middle of the year, because my mom finally won her battle with my stepdad who didn’t want us going to schools where they brainwash you.

“I am Sam. Matt the Rat,” I repeat. “I see Kay. Ann the fan. Tad is sad.”

“Okay, now listen to me, “Matt the Rat. Kay I say. Ann the fan. Is that what you read?”

I can tell he wants me to answer this question for real, but I can’t. I don’t know if that’s what I read. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess so.”

“Okay,” he says, mussing my hair with his huge hand.

I glance over him to the book, open to the first page.  If I stare at the letters I can make them anything I want. I just need the right answer. Siam Ams. Miamis. I am Sam. Sam I am. Maimas.

I hear Mr. Warfel talking to my mom:

“He’s seeing stuff that isn’t there. He has several of the symptoms. The reading, lack of coordination in sports, difficulty with spatial relationships.” Stanley was right. I’ve been in school just a few weeks and they’re already handing me a diagnosis, the first step toward brainwashing.

“He gets confused about right and left,” my mom says.

“That’s another one. And confusion with time.”

“We had a seminar on dyslexia here at the school a few months ago. The latest theory is that the brain of a dyslexic exhibits a different pattern of cerebral dominance from the rest of us.” My mom’s been cured, and I’ve been diagnosed.

“Cerebral dominance?”

“Meaning that no single hemisphere in the brain is in control.  You’ve heard of right- and left-brained people?”

“Yeah—creative or business-like.”

“Basically. Well, if Jason turns out to be dyslexic, he may be ‘both-brained’.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is if he can’t learn to read the way the rest of us do.  Luckily, there is a great deal of awareness—and funding—when it comes to learning disabilities in California schools these days. I’d like to get him started on some cognitive therapy?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not as scary as it sounds. To him it will just seem like playing games. Blocks, word games. Stuff like that. We’ve got a program called The Perception Center.”

“I’ve heard of it,” my mom says, smiling. “Our neighbors son has a learning disability. We’d better do it. Can I help in any way?” I’ve got a learning disability, like Steve.

“We need all the parent volunteers we can get.”

“Sign me up.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Messin, you’ve been great about this.”

The potential of black marks on a white page to shape mental pictures, to build wholly imagined worlds or ideas, is a fact that deserves wonder. It’s become routine to talk about dyslexia and other cognitive differences as “gifts,” but in the 1970s nobody was doing this. Dyslexia was a crisis.

For Steve Lewis and me, those black marks suffered from malleability. We were neighbors, but our lives—and our mothers—couldn’t have been more different. We had little in common, except that for both of us, letters mutated. We were out of synch with Miller School’s curriculum. Between us, we exhibited many cognitive phenomena that prompted leaders at the National Institute of Mental Health, in 1976, to invite an international group of educators, psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, and neurologists to a present their hypotheses about dyslexia—definitions of the condition, what causes it, what challenges it causes for those who experience it, and what treatments might help.

The researchers met in 1977 to discuss their hypotheses, but in the preceding year they were examining children and adults like Steve and me, devising and refining methods of gathering data, and forming a massive variety of conclusions.

Dyslexia just means “language problem.” But research turned up by the NIMH’s call made it clear that it was a mistake to assume that dyslexia was a single phenomenon with a single cause that could be treated with a single set of therapies.

The black marks are shapes before they’re letters. To read, you have to be able to perceive distinctions among these squiggly shapes. Look at these letters: F and E, U and V, M and W, or C and O. The differences are obvious, but if you pay attention, which we don’t usually do, you see how slight they are. Add variable typefaces and handwriting styles, and the subtle differences proliferate. Shape matters, and so does order. To see that god and dog are different words, you have to conform to the directional laws of your language. And to conform, you have to be able to stop yourself from trying out other directions.

To determine the causes of dyslexia, researchers began looking for correlates, other common cognitive peculiarities, in children struggling to read: delayed speech or speech impediments, lack of coordination, difficulty interpreting pictures or naming colors, trouble with spatial relationships, confusion between right and left. The tentative conclusion that emerged from the conference proceedings was that the neurology of dyslexia comes in three forms: a general language deficit (63 percent), a speech deficit (10 percent), or a visual-spatial deficit  (5 percent). In every case, “the presence of social disadvantage” increases the likelihood that a child will exhibit reading difficulties.

I’d have been the kid with social disadvantage, and Steve would’ve have been the one without. Somebody could have done a study, using us as controls for one another. Part of me appreciates documentaries like Dyslexia: The Unwrapped Gift (part 2 here).

Part of me appreciates comparisons to famous people to whom dyslexia is attributed: Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Agatha Christie, Keanu Reeves. The comparisons make the point that cognitive difference isn’t all disorder or deficit. It can also make certain kinds of thinking possible. It can reveal a productive malleability in the black marks on the page. I can’t quite get down with the idea that the future is entirely visual and that somehow dyslexics will ascend to heights of leadership and innovation in this visual utopia. Partly because I’m not really a visual thinker. I’m a dyslexic who learned to love to the malleability of black marks. No two brains are exactly alike, and no two dyslexics are quite the same, as those gathered under the auspices of the NIMH began to discern.

Most of all, I want to say cheers to those black marks! Life would be dull if we couldn’t use them to simulate worlds full of people and other animals and objects and thoughts theretofore unthunk.

From the manuscript of my memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (represented by Carrie Howland at Donadio & Olson).

At first, I thought I was hearing routine chicken squabbling. The hens get loud when they tangle with each other. But Dave (my beloved partner in life and domesticity) seemed to know right away this was something else. Within seconds, the screech was unmistakable: it had something to do with life and death.

This is not the actual hawk. There was no time for cameras. But this is what it looked like.

“Run outside,” Dave said (apparently, though I don’t remember hearing him). I like to think I followed the order unconsciously. I was wearing socks, and the deck was covered in snow. A red-tailed hawk had our Rhode Island Red pinned under a shelf unit where we keep our recycling–in a space about six inches high. The color of the two birds was similar, so at first I didn’t know what I was looking at. Then the hawk glanced my way–looking decidedly ungraceful smushed under the shelf. The beak and eyes gave it away. You probably know just what a red-tailed hawk looks like. They’re gorgeous creatures, with rust-colored breasts and tails, strong wings flecked in browns, reds, greys, and whites, with talons that look a lot like chicken feet, though obviously much more powerful.

I yelled. Dave appeared. The hawk flew into a tree maybe twenty yards away, resuming its usual grace, looked at the scene of its near-kill for a little while, and flew off into the woods. The hen, who’d lost a lot of feathers, crawled out from under the shelf, paused, glanced at us, and trotted to the end of the deck and hopped off. She spent the rest of the day under cover, and went into the coop at dusk, as usual.

I called our friend Melissa, because I thought she’d enjoy the story of our dramatic encounter with this wild creature. I’d never been so near a hawk–about three feet or so. She enjoyed the story, and I enjoyed telling it.

That was a Thursday afternoon. Friday morning, we let the hens out as we normally do. A mistake. It was a melty day, and they spent it picking through soggy grass and leaves, presumably munching on (and of course killing) whatever grubs and bugs they could find. The Rhode Island Red seemed more cautious than usual, but not overly traumatized. (How does a human recognize trauma in a chicken?)

Around 3 o’clock, after Dave had gone to the lumber yard, I heard the screech again: high, loud, relentless, and insistent. I ran outside, with shoes on this time, but I couldn’t find the chicken. After circling the house three times, I saw the head of a black chicken (an Australorp) poking out from under the deck, in an area where there’s only about two or three inches of space between the deck and the earth. She seemed to be trying to crawl out, but there wasn’t enough space. She seemed to run to the other end of the deck, where the bottom is about eight inches above the ground, plenty of space for her to get through. But she didn’t.

I ran inside and got a flashlight. I laid down on the ground, and moved the light around under the deck, until I saw the chicken, pinned by what appeared to be the same hawk, whose beak was nuzzled in the feathers around its neck. If you didn’t know they were predator and prey, you might have thought they were cuddling. I realized the chicken hadn’t been running back and forth under the deck. It had been dragged. Imagine being dragged around by a hawk. Imagine it for a second right now and see what you feel.

I grabbed a pitchfork. Yes, that’s what I did. I laid down on the ground, placed the flashlight where it would illuminate the birds, who were about three feet away from me under the deck. I tried to pry the hawk off the chicken, using the tines of the pitchfork as both tool and weapon. It worked, for a moment. The chicken got loose. It ran toward the edge of the deck. The hawk pulled it back. I went back to work with the pitchfork. I thought to myself, “I will kill this hawk if I have to,” though I really hoped I wouldn’t have to. I knew the hawk was only doing what hawks do to live. I mean–come on–I eat chickens too. But I live with this Australorp, and it was very clear to me  that I’d do anything to save it. This was an instinct, but it was confirmed by conscious reasoning–albeit an adrenaline informed form of rushed reasoning.

I prodded, poked, and stabbed at the hawk for several more rounds. The hen would get free. The hawk would retrieve it. I’d go back to work with the pitchfork. I have no idea how long this went on. Time was invisible. Finally, the chicken made it to the edge of the deck, poking its head through. I dug into the ground to make more space for it to get out. I put my hands and around its neck and tried to pull it through. I was already engaged in the tug of war when I realized what was going on: the hawk had the other end of the chicken and was pulling with what seemed to be strength about equal to mine. I wondered if I was doing something stupid and reckless. I pulled. I dug. I jabbed the hawk with the pitchfork. And I pulled some more, worrying that I might crush the chicken. Finally, I pulled her through. She was free of the hawk and in my hands. She had lost feathers, but seemed okay physically. I took her to the coop and put her into one of the nesting boxes, wondering where the other chickens were.

I went back to the scene of the battle, breathless and filthy. My nerves were atwitter, and I felt like the air around me was buzzing. The hawk was standing near the edge of the deck, looking at me–apparently calm. We stood a couple of feet apart. I yelled at it, but it just looked at me. Was it hurt? Had I hurt it? Did I need to contact somebody who could help it? I loved the idea that somebody might come and take this predator off our property. I ran inside and got the phone. I called Dave. No answer. I called Melissa. No answer. I didn’t expect to reach them, given the spotty cell reception around here.

The hawk went back under the deck. I grabbed the flashlight, but couldn’t see it. Then the screeching: the sound of life and death. Again. There was another chicken under the deck. I finally found the birds with the light and saw that it was our other Australorp. I grabbed the pitchfork. The phone rang. I told Melissa what was going on. She asked if I needed help. I said I wasn’t sure. I hung up and went to work with the pitchfork. The events of the second battle were nearly identical to the first–and lasted about the same amount of time, as far as I can remember.

I didn’t really believe I’d save the first chicken, and I felt the same about the second. But I knew it was possible, since I’d done it once. When I retrieved her, I was exhilarated, spent, and astonished. I took her to the nesting box with her sister. (And yes, it is literally her sister.)

The hawk hopped onto the deck, then the picnic table, leaving claw marks in the snow. It stared at me. It hung out. It flew into the screens of our porch a couple of times–perhaps as dazed as I was? It made its way back under the deck, but on the other side, where there’s more height–two or three feet between it and the ground.

A hawk standing, wings spanned, is a menacingly graceful creature. Just ask Dave.

Dave pulled in the driveway. I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite that relieved to see another human being. I stammered the story. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t quite convey the primal drama I’d been involved in. I was freaked and I wanted him to understand exactly how I felt–something one human can never quite do for another. He tried. He did seem astonished. We looked at the hawk together. It stared back at us. Dave put on some big leather gloves and scooted under the deck. The hawk spread its wings, for the first time since I’d seen it, and started trotting in Dave’s direction. “Get out,” I yelled. He did. The hawk stood still and tucked its wings back in.

Now that there were two of us, I decided to look for the rest of our hens. We have six. A third had already entered the coop. I found the Rhode Island Red and two others (Buff Orpingtons) in the hedges in front of the house. By this time it was dusk and they should have been going into the coop. They didn’t seem to want to make the trek across the yard. Who would?! Finally, they did. The sun had set, the chickens were safe, and the hawk remained under the deck, out of sight. We went inside.

Since that day, nearly two weeks ago, the chickens have been tucked away in the inner, covered part of the coop, a place where they’ve seldom hung out, except to lay eggs, eat, and drink. They seem to want to stay out of sight. We’re keeping them enclosed, but they don’t seem to know they’d be safe in the outer coop. They’re not laying any eggs. We’ve seen hawks fly over the yard a couple of times. We can’t know if we’re seeing the hawk, but people tell me it’s likely that it has a nest nearby, possibly in the woods on our property. Nobody can really estimate how long it may be before the hawk might give up on our chickens as an easy source of food.

The Ladies of Forman Road, ensconced to avoid the notorious hawk eye, their own eyes aglow in the face of my camera phone's flash.

I’d have thought a red-tailed hawk (the famed “chicken hawk”) would have an easier time killing a chicken. I’d have thought a hawk like that would flee when faced with a human wielding a pitchfork.

I wouldn’t have known that I’d fight quite that hard to save a chicken. I didn’t know if what I was doing was stupid. I wasn’t sure the hawk wouldn’t wound me.

I’m aware of the fact that this hawk was doing nothing wrong. It was doing what it does to live. I’ve never understood war. Intellectually, it has always seemed like a big mistake to define distant others as enemies who may be killed because they represent the other side in a battle (for property, wealth, ideas, whatever). But in this case, I acted like a warrior. I don’t mean I was some big hero. I just mean that I was willing to kill for what I wanted: to save the chickens. I’m glad I didn’t have to.

It’s just a basic fact that many species share our world, and that the sharing is often harmonious and often violent. Our cats and chickens hardly acknowledge each other. Various species of bird peck at each other for the seeds in the feeder. Worms poop in the ground and our vegetables feed on it. Our chickens kill and eat those bugs and grubs every day. If you give them table scraps, they’ll always go for the meat first. They kill and eat mice on occasion. Once, we saw the flock tossing a small snake back and forth. If we hadn’t stopped them, they’d have killed it.

Nonetheless, I wanted to save those chickens from a hawk inclined to live by feeding on them. I became territorial–somewhat equivalent to the nationalism I object to when people adopt it to justify conflict between their own cultures and others.

My friend Gabrielle, who’s worked with raptors for years, gave me this advice: “They do call them ‘Chicken Hawks’ for a reason! My best advice (although it may be hard w/ your busy life!) try to be out with the chickens when they are out, if you see ‘him’ yell, shake a aluminum can with change in it, or festively shake garland! The up side is if he doesn’t get ‘rewarded’ eventually he will seek a better hunting ground. . . . I wish I had a better remedy, but as you know, nature can be cruel.” Yup. That much I know. Let’s hope this hawk decides the rewards are not worth the trouble.

My friend Cima joked that I should have snatched one of the hawks talons, to wear around my neck. When I suggested maybe I should have the hawk stuffed, he objected: “Nah… Just a talon hanging around ur neck and some gnarly talon battle scrapes across ur face. Better that the hawk barely made it out alive and looks to someday return for revenge. However, you learn–through a vision–that you must return that talon to the hawk…. for it is the last of its kind. Aaaand, without it’s magic talon–the entire species is in danger of extinction. Thus begins the fellowship of the talon.”

Since the battle with the hawk, I seem to be feeling–and acting on–my convictions more emphatically than usual. I seem to have developed a need to defend what I believe in. I’ve been more confrontational in personal and professional situations. These confrontations haven’t all been graceful, but they’ve had a clarity about them that feels like it’s connected to my battle with the hawk. Something about this is good, but I’m not sure I want to sustain it. Conflict between species inevitable, just as it is among members of the same species. Sometimes conflict exhilarating, sometimes satisfying, sometimes troubling, and always exhausting–physically, emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually.

Some conflicts are graceful, some scrappy and mean. When a hawk plucks a rodent from a field, there’s a grace to this violence. When a hawk pins a chicken in an enclosed space, where the predator’s strengths are not at play, the fight is ugly (and the chicken, on its own, actually has a chance of winning the battle).

My favorite definition of grace is a disposition toward kindness, clemency, generosity, and justice. I think those qualities would define The Fellowship of the Talon. Cima’s making a joke about an imagined myth, but it’s one rooted in a longing for graceful interactions among species. For the moment, I’d love a break from conflict. I crave harmony. But when I find myself involved in conflict, I’ll strive for grace.

The kid is on a bench, planted in overgrown grass. The canvas is thick with paint chunks, but the image is all hazy outlines, the kid’s hair the same soft greens as the grass and the bench. The kid’s wearing a smock painted in lavender textured with inky purple shadows. The view is mainly of the kid’s back. No eyes, no features other than an ear and a cheek. She’s a girl, but sexless in the way that only orphans from another era can be. If you were to walk around her and look her in the face, you’d see her staring into the grass, looking at the spaces between its blades. The kid is suspended in a green and purple haze, her own ether force field. The frame, both rough-hewn and ornate, traps her. If I’m staring hard enough at the precise minute when this happens, Nanny and I and the whole room might float through the dissolving frame and lie around in the grass with the kid.

The green-haired girl, stuck in her frame.

The painting will always hang in the most prominent space in all of Nanny’s many houses. By the time I am nine, when I am old enough to try on Nanny’s sarcasm, I will say to her, “When you die, I inherit that painting.”

“Killing me off already?” she will reply.

“Yep,” I’ll say.

Of my early memories, the dream is particularly vivid, maybe because it was recurring, whereas real life events happen only once.

I’m skipping on a road made of pink ribbon winding through outer space, in the body of the kid in Nanny’s painting. My hair is long again, thin and green like hers.

I skip along the ribbon at a clumsy glide, wearing the smock-dress, purple in the painting but green in the dream I have her skinny legs and expressively still face. I’m fragile but tenacious. I’m Christopher Robin. I’m the Little Prince.

I’m skipping in pure, calm terror. I know I can’t keep this up. It feels like my body might shatter into shards of atom and become floating debris. So I change my pace, to a frantic run. The running is chaos and feels almost like spinning, but less graceful, more agitated, like I’ve lost my footing, permanently. It’s excruciating but preferable to the calm terror of the skipping.

I start to realize that I know what scares me. It’s something like God, more remote than Satan but no less powerful or frightening, an omnipresent but disembodied male figure somewhere in space. He has in his hands a large nuclear bomb and is planning to drop it on me. The force of the threat propels me. I can’t shake it. I can’t outrun it. All I can do is alternate between the skipping and running, hoping the combination will keep my fear from killing me before he can. Skip, run.

The pink ribbon road has no surface, so I never feel it when my feet hit the ground. There is no ground. I skip, for minutes at a time, then run, slow to a skip, and break out running. I will do this eternally, as long as sleep persists. Skip, run. Skip, run, skip.

I had this dream so often that the calm, pure terror became a permanent element in my life. I called it the dream feeling. It still sometimes seeps into waking life, but it did so regularly when I was a kid—at my mom’s weddings, later when I was alone skipping rocks at Lake Hodges, in a crowd at a dance in high school. It neutralized me each time.

I couldn’t tell anybody about the dream, because telling brought up the dream feeling. Before I knew it, not telling became a way of life, a personality trait. I spent a lot of time around Nanny’s painting. My comment about inheriting it was a running joke between us, but I never told her I needed to inherit that painting because it was a version of me I was afraid of.

Of course, I’d never heard of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, the most influential dream theorists of the twentieth century. If I’d been a patient—and they were both fascinated by the minds of kids—they’d have coaxed the dream out of me. They’d have put it under the microscope of their competing theories and diagnosed my terror.

Freud and Jung disagreed about the nature of dreaming. Freud argued that dreams fulfilled wishes repressed during waking life. Through dreams, he believed, the more primitive, socially uninhibited self makes its presence known. Jung agreed that dreams are expressions of the unconscious, but he argued that their function was more positive, that they compensate for psychological imbalances and create mental harmony. My dream did both. It put me continuously in touch with a father figure who terrified me, but it also took me outside time and place—which is what I wanted more than anything as a kid. The dream made me think about a father I wanted to pretend didn’t exist and it gave me a new place to live, where I could battle his giant ghost.

But there’s more to it. Children dream differently from adults, and according to psychologist David Foulkes, dreaming is integral to development. Dreams help build minds and selves. According to Foulkes, children between 3 and 5 dream in isolated, static images, and they report a lot of dreams involving animals and few about people. Between 7 and 9, a dream self develops, becoming a hinge for the images in the dream, and emotions become associated with these images. The images begin to form stories. After 9, the dream self becomes active, and dreams become emotionally charged scenarios involving other people. I’m sure I had this dream before 9, and I’m convinced that it changed very little over time. Still, I think Foulkes must be right when he argues that dreaming serves a cognitive function (as opposed to Freud’s psychological function or Jung’s metaphysical function)—that dreams help build our minds. If Foulkes is right, this kid in the dream wasn’t just a product of my imagination. That kid gave me somebody new to be, somebody who could live in Nanny’s painting and in outer space while the rest of me lived in a string of tiny houses my mom was fixing up, houses where we might start over after the disaster that was Charlie. And then after the disasters that replaced him.

Maybe someday you’ll be able to put a kid like me in a scanner while he sleeps and reconstruct his neural connections, trace the origin of his dreams. In doing so, you’d be seeing my response to Nanny’s painting, my running away to her house, the fact that God in this dream is also Charlie, my absent father threatening to steal me back, my inadvertent decision to become mute about the dream and anything else I felt. Could a researcher stand before this kid, white lab-coat precisely pressed, and ask just the right questions, the ones that would get the kid to offer up his mind so his brain might be visible?

Probably not, I guess.

From the manuscript of my memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (represented by Carrie Howland at Donadio & Olson)

“Ma’am, I’m Agent Brown and this is Agent Blonde. Secret Service.” They flash their badges at my mom. “Your dog seems to be in some distress.” Mona, our black lab, has been acting weird for a couple of weeks. We’ve all gotten used to the yelping, but you have to admit the lunging toward the sky is pretty weird.

“I’m taking her to the vet,” my mom says. I wonder if it’s true.

“But that’s not why we’re here,” Blonde says. “We’re here to discuss a Stanley Messin. We believe you were married to him.”

“Yeah?” she says.

“Mr. Messin was heard making a threat on the life of President Ford.”

“What?” my mom says. They’re going to arrest Stanley. I’m really starting to like police.

“Goddamn Stanley Messin kill the fucking ex-President?” my  mom’s friend Cheech says. “Now that’s hilarious.”  Cheech waitresses with my mom at the Seafood Market. She’s Portuguese too. She’s got the same shag as all the Yourgales guys who own the restaurant, except even blacker and more wiry. Her Portuguese skin is darker than ours, and her nose is bigger. She could easily be a man. She talks like one. She and my mom hang out all the time now.

“We take these threats seriously,” Brown says.

“Not this one, Honey,” Cheech says. “It’s a fuckin’ joke.”

“Cheech,” my mom says, shooting her a shut up look.

“Is that your impression, ma’am,” Blonde says to my mom, “that the threat is not serious?”

“Stanley just likes to talk. He gets drunk and talks.”

“Thank you for your time, ma’am. We’ll be in touch if we have further questions.”

“Okay,” she says, shutting the door.

We all go to the window and watch Brown and Blonde pull out of the driveway, Mona’s yelps deepening to a growl as she tries to leap in the direction of their car. At the side of the shed, we can see JP and his friend Sonny looking down at the ground like two archeologists who just found buried treasure. JP’s been living in our shed since he got out of prison. Everybody but me knows he OD’d on PCP, which is why he’s been acting weird. Between him and Mona, our dusty yard is like a psych ward.

“JP is out of his mind,” Cheech says. “He buy you that sheep yet, Jas?” JP and I are going to start a business. He’s going to buy me a sheep, and I’m going to use it to make money mowing people’s lawns.

“No,” I say, starting to think he never will. “I could have been making money by now.”

“Don’t count on it,” she replies.

“Cheech,” my mom reprimands.

“Well, he’s out of his fucking mind. He shouldn’t get the kid’s hopes up. What the fuck are they doin’ anyway?”

When we get down there, we see that they’re kneeling over a pile of dog poop. Mona poop. “What’s up?” Cheech asks. What’s up is that the poop is dotted with shreds of what looks like construction paper with colored patterns on it. “Oh, shit,” Cheech says.

JP’s eyes are wide like a toddler’s. His mouth’s a little open. “We found it,” he says.

“What?” my mom asks.

“The acid Sonny buried.”

“That was two-hundred hits,” Sonny says.

“What?” my mom says.

“That’s it. In Mona’s shit,” JP says, pointing at the pile of dried up Mona poop from which Sonny is prying little bits of mangled orange and blue paper.

“Goddamn dog ODs,” Cheech says, “and the cat leaves another dead fuckin’ rabbit at the back door.” Everybody looks. Misty’s not around, but her gift is curled up on the back step, its tiny ear sticking up and its white ball of a tail. Mona’s on her side now, exhausted, whimpering.

Mona wags her body down Lake Drive, a frothy rage growing out of the discomfort she feels with the freedom. JP and his wife Sue Ellen were sitting on the porch, sunning their new baby, Jimmy Freddy. Mona had the same idea. When the sun is straight up at the top of the sky, it makes her black fur shine in this way she can feel beneath the skin. She likes to lay with her two front paws stretched straight out in front of her snout. The baby was right in her line of vision, on Sue Ellen’s lap, naked, a pink ball of fat with droopy blue eyes. It was something about the squishy velvet of his skin. Mona pounced in one straight glide, her teeth bared so that all she had to do was clamp and she could feel her teeth sink in before Sue Ellen, screaming and hitting her hard on the top of her head, pulled the baby into the shack.

She can still feel the sun under her skin, and she can taste the baby’s blood under her tongue, where some of it lodged itself. She passes Riley, whose lanky Irish Wolfhound gait and greasy matted fur intimidate her into snarling. When he just trots past, she releases a high-pitched bark, the kind that makes an animal sound like she’s lost control.

She’s just passed the mile point when she sees the cage—a wooden rectangle on stilts covered in chicken wire. She has to climb a bank of ice plant to reach it, but the fur poking through, a light grey dusted with cocoa at the ends, is worth the effort. Her paws get tangled in the vines more than once, but she just keeps her eye on the fur, which moves almost imperceptibly every few seconds, like good bait should.

The humiliation of the tangled ice plant still in her eyes, she reprises her pounce, diving straight at the cage and breaking one of the old wood posts that it holds together. The angora inside is trying to adjust to the new slope in its floor when it sees Mona’s snarl invade. Barking maniacally now, Mona goes straight for a mouthful of wide round eyes and droopy cocoa ears. The crush of bones and the stringy resistance of muscle become the sum of her reality while she chews at the carcass, until she hears a scream a lot like Sue Ellen’s, but deeper. Without bothering to see the gray hair or turquoise necklace attached to it, she dives straight down the ice plant and lands her pads hard on the concrete of Lake Drive. Her mouth is a matted mess of cotton-dry fur and salty blood.

From the manuscript of my memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (represented by Carrie Howland at Donadio & Olson).

It’s a delight to welcome my friend Scott Cheshire. For his californica debut, he and I decided to publish our conversation about a book that got under our respective skins, Sheila Heti‘s How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life. (Also, for a treat, check out the playlist of songs Heti devised to accompany the book, on Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes.”)

Jason
You recommended How Should a Person Be?, and when you said Heti’s book read like no other, I picked it up immediately. I guess you’d call it a docu-novel. Most of the characters are based on Heti’s circle of friends, named as they are in life—with the apparent exception of her love interest (er, fuck buddy) Israel. (I’ll get to him later.) I’d love to hear more about what you thought was so unique about Heti’s writing. For me, it’s not just that she’s walking the line between fiction and nonfiction, which writers do all the time. It’s the wavy, vernacular path she carves between documenting and fictionalizing her own experience. In the process of fictionalizing art and feeling and drugs and sex, she manages to document a very right now cultural moment and to feel like more Keats or the Shelleys than your Kerouacs and Ginsbergs (who did something similar in their time). And she’s rawer than most contemporary writers, offering a close look at her own scrapes and humiliations. There’s some prurience involved. But there’s also plenty of reflection and philosophy.

Scott
I like your Romantic take on the book. I hadn’t precisely thought of it that way and yet that does describe how I feel about the book. It reads like a deliberate and genuine search, and less like experiment, which is how most critics seem to be reading it (although I did think of Kerouac, too, while reading). I believe Heti. The book feels honest. Which is sort of an odd thing to say because for some it’s absolutely not that because it explicitly presents itself as a distortion of the “truth.” But for me that is what makes it such an exciting read. The book reads as a sort of middle finger at truth and authenticity, two words that I hear a lot more lately, especially by younger people. These are also words I don’t particularly like or trust. And yet this book comes closer to what I think we imagine those words mean more than most books. I find that tension thrilling.

Jason
A lot of critics have suggested similarities between Heti’s novel and Lena Dunham’s Girls and Tiny Furniture: the post-feminism, the degrading yet somehow empowering sex, the frank worry and failure, the gallivanting. The same critics often point out that Heti’s a decade older than Dunham, to explain differences between them. How Should a Person Be? is philosophical and intertextual, for one. Sheila celebrates drugs and sex, rather than watching others celebrate them. All this may be a product of genre as much as generation. She doesn’t have to worry about scaring TV or movie execs.

This is what Sheila Heti looks like.

But something else stood out for me in this book, something I haven’t seen people talk about. Heti is intent on showing that how much the person Sheila can be depends on the people around her, how her relationships with them and her responses to their feelings and actions make her who she is. Sometimes they help make her great: creative, enthusiastic, daring. Sometimes they make her pathetic: jealous, competitive, groveling for sex. The book documents her search for relationships that will make her the person she hopes to be. I’ll try to explain.

Early on, Heti recounts the story of her divorce, and the story of her marriage becomes the frame for her narrative about the split, a story about how a person shouldn’t be:

Since the beginning, there had been an empathy between me and my husband; there had always been a sweetness. It was like we were afraid of breaking each other. We never fought or pushed, as though the world was hard enough. As for difficult conversations that might hurt the other–we left those matters alone. It could have gone on–our life and our love–but a few years into my marriage, I tripped. I tripped and stumbled and I regained my step, but in the wrong place this time, and my days began to mirror exactly, in smell and sensation, a monthlong period when I was eighteen: a hot and sticky August. I’d just moved out of the house I had been living with my high school boyfriend, and was now in my father’s basement. It was a month of limbo, between life in a house with my boyfriend and the freedom of theater school in another town.

            That month, I experienced a tense idleness waiting for my new life to begin. It was a month of impatience, of stillness, like being set in amber. A certain smell followed me everywhere, like the smell of rotten candy. My insides were queasy. My skin was always sweating. 

            A vivid echo of those days, a living memory of it, entered my life again, came into my marriage, and remained with me for a whole six months. I wanted to break out of that loop–it felt terrible; something a person should not experience. Just wrong! Every day should feel new, but I was back in that atmosphere of another time; one I had lived already. 

            Every morning I woke up beside my husband and looked around to see if the feeling was still there; it always was. And I would get up for the day, exhausted already, sticky with the same tense idleness I had felt back then.

It takes a divorce to rid Heti of this feeling. But to call it a feeling downplays its significance. It’s a constant state of sticky remembering that defines her. As an experiment in how a person should be, Heti’s marriage is “just wrong!”–despite the empathy, kindness, and easy understanding between her and her husband. Through marriage, she becomes somebody she doesn’t want to be. Divorce becomes another phase in the experiment. Can she find the “just right!” Sheila Heti? Of course, nobody ever holds onto to a feeling of “just right!” for very long, but she pursues it through her relationship with her friend Margaux (Williamson), a painter, with whom she debates and fights all the time. With whom, she feels confusion more than empathy. The relationship soars into high drama—which made me cringe fairly often, even though I was rooting for both characters. For Heti, though, the friction seems to be a catalyst for a feeling of the sublime that sounds a lot like the feeling Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley were after, except that she finds it in coke-fueled nights roaming urban streets, rather than the alps or the ruins of an ancient abbey. They want life to be art and vice versa, a point made kinda perfectly in Lee Towndrow‘s photo (below).

Sheila Heti, Margaux Williamson, Ryan Camstra, and Sholem Krishtalka imitate art in this portrait by Lee Towndrow (http://leetowndrow.com/).

Scott
I can certainly see how the high drama of their relationship (Shelia and Margaux’s) could be unappealing, but for me that was sort of the point. High drama can’t last very long, and I think the Sheila character (all her friends, really, but especially Sheila) is ultimately looking to get and feel “high,” for lack of a better term. Actually the term is perfect, when I think more about it, and it’s our general lack of respect for that notion that’s a problem. I think Sheila craves a life experienced at a more intensely lived level, one that is more acutely felt and understood. She says so herself, she wants to “Live!” And drugs give her and Margaux that feeling: “A good night of drinking and smoking, or a night of doing coke, and the next day Friday, far from being hungover, our brains felt still and refreshed. It was like our insides had been set back to 00:00:00…Margaux made the paintings of her career the morning after….”

I know that feeling, and I think it’s totally valid, and it does work, but only for so long. Sheila says as much:

In the beginning…[i]nstead of developing the capacities within, we took two roads: the delusion and oblivion of drugs—which didn’t start off as cheating, but as access to the sublime; and treating ourselves as objects to be admired—the attempt to make the self into an object of need and desire by tending to the image of ourselves. We have found that, in our freedom, we have wanted to be like coke to the coke addict….

These roads are rocky, yeah, but in service of a noble cause—to live! Now this may seem dangerously juvenile and sort of too simple, not really epiphany-worthy, but let’s remember the context. Drugs, coke, and booze—a left-handed way to God, you could say—are just one of several ways Sheila tries to “be” more intensely. There is sex, really dirty sex. And there’s the whole notion of mimicry in the novel, a kind self-help sympathetic magic, as in, do as others do and you too will be happy (but are they happy?). I think the co-dependence between Shelia and Margaux (especially Sheila’s) is more a symptom of their disease (a disease I would say most of us also have to some to degree, if we’re lucky), one that comes from manic and deliberate attempts at coke-fueled uber-conversation, and from the constant modeling-herself-on-others Sheila is forever wrangling with, and of course from their shared love and ambition with regard to art, the most prevalent and relevant way Sheila uses to “be” more intensely in the novel.

Jason
I agree. It’s about the high—and the many meanings of that word. That’s what feels capital R Romantic about this book. The high is the sublime. Sheila and her friends are after it. Even Israel is after it. That brings me to Israel.

I admit that I developed a crush on Israel while I was reading. I went online trying to figure out who he was. Or if he was based on a real person. A quick search will pull up all the book’s other major characters, whose names are not changed to protect them. But not Israel. He gets to be fiction. Maybe because he is fiction? Or a composite? Or maybe because the guy—or guys—he’s based on wanted to be protected from Heti’s Technicolor portrait of his obsession with his self-appointed superpower: his dick (and the precious semen it can deliver).

A quick example. At one point, Sheila and Margaux are at Art Basel in Miami. She’s talking to some art collectors:

As we were talking, my phone rang and I answered it. I recognized the lazy voice and at once felt faint, and I moved away from my friends. “Are you having a good time?” Israel asked. I said that I was. I tried to explain that we were talking to some rich people. “Would you like to have my cum in your mouth right now, talking to those rich people? That would be pretty good, wouldn’t it?” Not knowing what else to say, I stammered, “Yes.” When I got off the phone with him, I made a new rule for myself: that I would never again take his call—or, anyway, not until I finished my play—so never.

Of course, she does continue to take his calls. The feminist nightmare of this relationship has got to be intentional. (As in Dunham’s stuff.) But it’s that faint feeling Heti’s after, I think. As with the coke and the drinking and the fights with Margaux, Israel’s relentless love of his dick and what it can turn her into to makes her feel something. She also feels the degradation, and she has a feminist response to that, sometimes, but she refuses to reduce her own experience to the feminist response. Part of her wants to feel what it’s like to be a submissive girl. Part of her believes that’s part of living. Israel can make her feel faint, and in that way he’s part of the universal sublime, one of nature’s creatures whose effects on her are intense and interesting. She wants that.

There’s another passage that offers a twist on the question of feminist sexual degradation:

The night before, I had made out with a man in a bar. On his hands were warts–big ones covering his palms and wrists–and I let him put his acrid saliva all up and down my face and neck. It had given me satisfaction that he was so ugly. This is the great privilege of being a woman—we get to decide. I have always welcomed hunchbacks with a readiness I can only call justice. 

I think she’s saying that all straight men want all women, so women get to decide. It’s not quite that she’s doing the warty guy a favor. It’s that she gets to feel like an arbiter of justice when she makes the choice to favor him. I’m not saying we should call this feminist, but it is a nuanced take on desire. And I guess that’s one of the tings I think Heti’s after.

Anyway, Heti managed to get me to identify enough to develop a crush on Israel, who is as gross as he is hot. I’m curious to know how you responded to him. Or to her. Or to Margaux. Did you get crushes on these girls? Did any part of you want to be Israel?

Scott
Hahahaha. I can either carefully avoid answering this question and make believe that I did, or I can tell you how I really felt, that part of me absolutely wanted be like Israel—or better, to have been like him at one point in my life, but no longer—and that I absolutely crushed on the Sheila and Margaux characters.   

Jason
We should talk about Sheila’s play. In the Israel passage I quoted earlier, she implies she’ll never finish it. Her unwritten play is the catalyst for the novel, which is a portrait of an artist who can’t write the thing she’s supposed to write, so she writes the novel instead.

Scott
The play-project in the novel becomes a way for Sheila to artfully arrange her life, have it be beautiful, and make sense, have it mean. This is what reminded of Kerouac, especially his great and sort of unclassifiable Visions of Cody, in which he transcribes conversations between himself and Cassidy and others, and seems intent on using those lived moments to make art read more meaningfully realistic, and in turn to make those transcribed moments suggest a life lived more artfully. Plus there’s plenty of sex, booze, and drugs. The effect is powerful and tense. What is this book? Do I trust the characters? Do I trust the writer? Another book I was constantly reminded of while reading How Should a Person Be? was Max Frisch’s novel Montauk, which is sort of a mirror version of How Should a Person Be? It’s is a slim novel about an older gentleman, a successful writer, who is looking back on his life and is trying to asses his life’s value, but largely by way of his relationships with friends and lovers. It’s also beautifully suspect with regard to how fictional it really is. It reads like autobiography, and yet he is constantly frustrating the novel’s form by trafficking between first person and third person, tossing away traditional paragraphing (the book is comprised of long sections and mini-sections each with their own sub-title), and offering plainspoken philosophical phrases like this: “DO YOU STILL FIND MARRIAGE A PROBLEM?”; and: “TO WHAT AGE DO YOU WISH TO LIVE? DO YOU LOVE ANYBODY? HOW DO YOU KNOW?” You can easily imagine a HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? in that same company.

The entire novel could be taken as an attempt in the opposite direction of Heti, that is to find out if a life already lived under what Frisch calls “artistic discipline,” spent partly measuring oneself according to the work and manor of your peers (in Frisch’s case, and explicitly in Montauk, Roth, Beckett, and others), and spent casually philosophizing (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) is a better one? In one of my favorite moments in the novel Frisch succinctly presents the very problem with living “under artistic discipline,” a compulsion toward narrative-based thinking and an appreciation for compelling and aesthetically pleasing artifice.  He writes: “The writer is afraid of feelings that are not suited to publication; he takes refuge then in irony; all he perceives is considered from the point of view of whether it is worth describing, and he dislikes experiences that can never be expressed in words. A professional disease that drives many writers to drink.”

Heti’s book has the same concern but examines it from the opposite end of the timeline. Sheila wants for her life to mean something and desperately (thank goodness, otherwise we wouldn’t have a book) tries to use art to make that happen. The impossible challenge however remains, that life is random and art is selective. And so the formal tensions in Heti’s (and Frisch’s) novel. Hell, even her sub-title vibrates a little bit: A Novel from Life.

There is a lovely double-moment in Heti’s novel that nicely presents this problematic impulse, that is to just “be” and to be artfully. From the opening paragraph of chapter seven:

There’s so much beauty in the world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live—if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.

I am writing a play. I want to write a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy.

Just pages before, Sheila has a dream: she is “waiting at an airport… trying to get someplace higher and better.” She then finds herself on a plane “flying so low to the city, just above the highways, flying in between the homes, dipping down sharply, then up”; they “flew over a vast recycling center… bags of garbage forever and ever.” She wakes up and immediately calls her Jungian analyst (that is too funny), and tells her analyst the dream. The analyst responds: “‘Did you imagine writing the play would get you somewhere higher an better, just like an airplane does?’” And Sheila responds: “I didn’t know how to answer such a plainly obvious question. “‘Of course!.’”

Jason
Speaking of dreams. I think it’s worth noting that Heti was the curator of the online projects “I Dream of Barack” and “I Dream of Hilary”—during the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary. Do you remember that? She collected accounts of dreams people had about Barack and Hilary and put them online, with some commentary from dream researchers. My paramour for life, David Driver, had a dream about Hilary included. Some of my colleagues in dream studies—Bernard Welt and Kelly Bulkeley—provided some pretty great commentary. I know you’re also interested in dreams. Did you pay attention to the site at the time?

Scott
How funny you mention this because I’m just now realizing this is not the first time we have talked about Heti’s work. Although that first time it was incidental. You tipped me off to that dream project, back then, too, which I found fascinating. So I then wrote a short piece for the Huffington Post about presidential dreams and more specifically apocalyptic dreams. I’m guessing you’ve totally forgotten about this, like me.

Jason
I love that history. I remember the article well, but I’d forgotten the connection to Heti’s project.

One last question: How would Heti answer her own question? How should a person be?

Scott
I saw her read from the novel and someone there asked the very same thing. If I remember correctly she said she didn’t really have the answer and that the book was her way of asking the question. I like that.

Jason
I’m sure that’s the actual answer, and I like it too. I’ll just add what I took from the book more than anything else: A person should be attentive to the traces of other people in us. Maybe even cultivate these traces, make life a personal science experiment.

Scott Cheshire has published both fiction and non-fiction, and he teaches writing at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. His forthcoming debut novel High as the Horses’ Bridles will be published by Henry Holt. 

I’ve been enjoying the “asap Science” videos, YouTube’s “weekly dose of fun and interesting science.” They’re brisk, brightly colored, fact-filled tours on topics like the power of music, the creation of pearls, or the physiology of orgasm.

I’m curious about the making of the videos. Somebody’s doing some serious homework, which must involve sifting through dozens, if not hundreds, of scientific studies to find the bright and shiny facts. In the process, though, the videos replicate an all-too-common tendency of science education: display the facts and erase the wonder and complexity that drives real scientists pursuing those facts in real labs.

There’s a back story to every fact. Take a few from this video: orgasms average 3 to 10 seconds for men, 20 seconds for women; fMRI scans show 30 “discrete regions” of the brain active during orgasm; the brain chemicals dopamine (“feel good”) and oxytocin (“bonding”) involved; PET scans show that brain activity associated with reason, control, self-evaluation, fear, and anxiety are dampened “shut off”; trancelike states ensue in women, but not necessarily in men, at least according to brain scans; men’s orgasms, it seems, are so quick that it’s difficult to see what their brains are doing.

I want to know more. I wish the folks behind “asap Science” would include “behind the scenes” videos, pointing us to some of the more interesting studies on oxytocin and love or the difficulties of scanning men’s brains during orgasm, or women’s orgasmic trances.

I’ll give you one admittedly idiosycnratic example that just happened to resonate with my own experience. “The Science of Orgasm,” begins with a diagram that reminds me of Aristotle’s famous description of plot structure–a diagram seared into my consciousness as a college English major in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

High school students have been introduced to Aristotle's description of plot with diagrams like this for decades, if not centuries.

The story of an orgasm–Excitement, Plateau, Orgasm, Resolution–follows the same trajectory as Aristotle’s story of everything: Exposition, Rising Action, Conflict, Climax, Denouement, Resolution. I remember learning to pronounce denouement in English class, feeling like the word was a secret pass to a literary club I was foaming at the mouth to join. I didn’t know then that there was actually a debate among literary critics about the analogy between plot and orgasm. Narrative theorist Robert Scholes, among others, proposed that “the archetype for all fiction is the sexual act” (in an essay entitled “The Orgastic Pattern of Fiction”). Of course, it’s usually a bad idea to make statements about “all fiction” or all anything, really. The literary scholars in the room will know that feminist critic Susan Winnett objected to Scholes account of fiction, suggesting that it described only certain kinds of orgasms–men’s–and certain kinds of conventional fiction modeled on the quick release and retreat of male pleasure. This is a long way of saying that it’s not surprising that asap Science‘s account of the orgasm looks so much like Aristotle’s account of plot.

To compile these facts into 2 minutes and 44 seconds of entertaining educational video, the producers had to do their research. If they did it well, they’d have traced the facts to dozens, if not hundreds, of scientific articles. Many of these articles would offer a more complex picture of the “facts” shared in the videos. For example, the video informs us that various brain areas are “shut off” during orgasm. Does this mean they are not active at all? Surely not. What’s happening in them? What might the shorthand “shut off” really mean? A “behind the scenes” video might point us to sources–from an article in Nature to an episode of Radiolab–that could tell us mores.

According to the video, the back story of an orgasm’s plot is arousal, which stimulates blood flow to the genitals and increased heart rate.  Arousal is a state of consciousness whose manifold causes and effects surely elude current brain scanning technologies. I’d love to know what research has been done on orgasm’s back story.

To cut a long story short: “asap Science,” I love you, but you can do better. Richard Feynman, I’d imagine, would think you could do better. In his famous lecture, “The Value of Science,” he suggests that wonder and doubt go hand in hand:

I would like not to underestimate the value of the worldview which is the result of scientific effort. We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvellous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us to be stuck — half of us upside down — by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea. . . . It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

My mom has married Stanley, and we are now The Messins. By 1974, Ralph has a new wife and is long gone. Midge is living in La Jolla, surviving on sporadic alimony and the sale of an antique or piece of art now and then. The Neves children—Gary, Craig, and Cathy—have dropped out. We’re all part of an experiment, a generation of southern California hippies raising kids on sea and sun instead of plastic and microwaves.

The Neves wealth and celebrity elevate them beyond the establishment, so dropping out comes easy. Their friends raised in traditional homes send chills through the spines of their family trees when they announce their plans: play rather than work whenever possible, expand the mind with drugs and explore the body through sex, grow hair until it tickles the ass, and reject the tract home futures springing up alongside San Diego highways. Despite the spinal shivers epidemic in the county, the dropouts are joining communes, renting fixer-uppers full of character and potential, and renovating school busses into roving homes. They’ll cultivate a generation never hampered by the bullshit rules, fear, and dogma that have led the world into war, conspicuous consumption, and soul-numbing conformity. Gary, Craig, and Cathy associate luxury with the aforementioned bullshit, even though it rescued them from the status quo.

We, the Messins—Stanley, Cathy, Jason, and Aaron—are scions in the experiment. We’ll live aboard a school bus, which Stanley has converted into a home on wheels. We’ll travel Stanley’s map of the world, which starts at Baja runs up the California Coast, to Big Sur, the Santa Cruz, and ends in Portland, Oregon.

The Pondo, short for Ponderosa, is a key point on the map. Anchovie’s place is a big rocky hill of dry dirt named after the ranch on Bonanza—pure desert just two miles from the sea. Everybody knows the Pondo. The house, white paint flaking, tin roof rusting, sits at the top of the hill, shaded by a giant Pepper Tree, branches dangling like the tentacles of a tired octopus, pink peppercorns swinging with the wind. We park here when it gets chilly at the beach.

Anchovie’s Love-ins are living mythology. The Pondo is his Olympus, haunted by the soaring psyches, liberated souls, and naked bodies who have gathered to mark the coming of the age of Aquarius. You can sense them in the landscape, spirits whose ecstatic reception of an enlightened future has left an indelible imprint in the rocks and brush and cactus.

But life is not one long love-in, not when you’ve got a kid like me in the bus, who keeps pissing the bed. Stanley’s going to put a stop to this.

We’re in Santa Cruz, three-hundred miles north of any place I’ve ever been, and I’m soaking in my own pee. After the border incident, Stanley decided it was time for a trip north. He’d been wanting to do it anyway, and it seemed like a good idea to get some distance between us and the border. My mom had to agree, so they pulled me out of school. I was there for less than two months. Kindergarten and Stephanie are my past.

To break me of the habit, he hauls me out of the bus each morning before dawn and forces me to bathe in the coldest water he can find. I lie in my piss, checking now and then to see how much there is, how wet the sheets feel. They’re drenched. I practice my evaporation skills. I conjure my ether force field and think myself inside it. But thinking so hard keeps reminding me that I’m here. When Stanley gets up—to take his own piss outside like a normal person—I am ready.

He strides by and runs his hand over my sheets. “Fuck. You fuckin’ baby. He pissed the fuckin’ bed again.”  He’s loud. “Get up.” I just lie there, my body tight like a corpse.

Stanley grabs me by the neck, the way he grabs kittens and yanks me out of bed. I’m filthy in my own piss, disgusting to touch. Stanley climbs down the stairs of the bus, and I feel the burn of cold air on my face, feet, and hands. “You’ve gotta fuckin’ learn. Hear me? Huh?”

“Yes,” I say. Stanley has to walk down a hill slippery with frost to get to the stream. He dunks me a couple of times. “Wash,” he demands. The water is icy. I hate him. “Take off your pajamas. Wash them.” I whoosh them around in the stream. I’m shivering, but I keep busy.

“Do you think it’s any goddamn fun for me, to go outside when it’s freezing cold?” Stanley asks. “Do you think it’s fun for your ole lady to clean the goddamn sheets everyday?” He knows that if he’s consistent, I will stop the bedwetting. He’s right.

Here’s where I get to use the neuroscientists to get back at Stanley.

A perceptual signature is the unique way an individual brain processes sensory input. Our signatures create the world in our heads, like Stanley’s map. He didn’t even know about it, but it shaped his world, and therefore my world.

Genes predispose us to our perceptual signatures, but people who spend a lot of time together will pick up each other’s habits. Genes plus habit make for shared perceptual tendencies among family members. You can pick out common ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling within a family. It took me a long time to admit it, but my fascination with the almost seen—vanishing sand crabs, Anchovie’s Love-In Ghosts, the ether world—is a product of my hippie childhood. I learned to trust hallucinations.

Signal and noise are basic concepts in cognitive science. Neurons send constant signals, whenever they are electrically stimulated by the chemical message of another neuron, as much as several times every second. The neuroscientists call this constant random firing noise. A meaningful signal, they postulate, is one that breaks through the noise and become perception. Thought is the ability to synchronize the electrical activity of the brain. How we synchronize depends on our perceptual signatures. For Stanley, the coast from Oregon to Baja was signal and the rest was noise.

My New York apartment, where I’m typing now, was so far off the map it may as well have been another planet. As I type, I glance to my right, out my apartment window, and focus on the four black-capped towers of the power plant near the East River. I hear a faint siren. Then I’m distracted by the geraniums on the windowsill. The big one is in a green pot and the little one, originally a cutting, is in glass, its roots visible. They both sprout magenta blooms. I’m surprised to see that the cutting has grown enough to bloom. Their leaves strain toward the light, so my view is of their undersides, bright green like grass in full sun. The petals give the illusion of transparency. But my aesthetic meditation shares space in my head with Stanley’s image. I’m recreating him by writing about him, giving him a new kind of life when what I really want to do is kill him. Let’s face it: he’s signal for me, not noise. My perceptual signature was shaped by and through him at a crucial moment of development. I’ll never escape that.

Each of these perceptions—the black-capped towers, the sirens, the light through the leaves and petals, the specter of Stanley—cuts through my mental noise to become a signal. Why? Maybe because my brain, fatigued from an intense focus on finding language to describe itself, was looking for a distraction that would give it time to rest. But another part of my brain, the conscious motivator, overruled the impulse to rest and transformed my daydreaming into an illustration of the idea I was already writing about. An idle perception is not noise; it’s a signal without a clear motive. The neuroscientists postulate that the constant random firing of neurons is functional: a neuron already in motion will react more efficiently when it’s needed than one at rest. Those signals often produce order by accident and come to feel meaningful. As I write this thought, I’m aware how much life with Stanley primed me to think it.

Living on a school bus was an education in accidental order. Mornings became afternoons became nights. Stanley drove, parked, drove. We slept, woke, ate, swam, argued, laughed, slept. We stayed in some spots for weeks, others for hours. The bus was the roving center of our universe, the place from which we looked out onto the world, the place we went to escape its input. When we drew the curtains, the interior was shady and cool. When we opened them, it was bright and hot.

Mexico is just a border away when you live on a bus. Baja is on Stanley’s map of the world. The rest of Mexico is blank white space, but not scratched with black marker the way most of the U.S. is. “Bores and Prigs” is scrawled vertically along the east coast. The Midwest is a mass of messy black smiley faces with blocky horn-rimmed glasses. There is just enough of New England showing for me to imagine where everyone is educated, rich, well-mannered, and snobby. It scares me to think about, but I picture living a clean, luxurious, snobby life there. Instead, I am absorbing the soft desert sand, chipping paint, and scrubby vegetation of Northwestern Mexico.

No one can explain how, in 1975, a bunch of hippies and their stringy-haired, dirty-faced kids on a school bus are not detained every time they cross the border. Usually we aren’t, but today we are.

“Pull over to the side, please.” Stanley puts the bus in reverse and backs up at an angle, trying to maneuver through the small detaining lot. My mom is wheezing. A car honks behind us. “Shut the fuck up!” Stanley yells. “What the fuck is going on.?” he asks JP, a friend who tagged along for the trip.

“Goddamn pigs are harassing us,” JP replies.

JP is  6’3”, 300 lbs, with black hair. His initials stand for James Polk. His great-great grandpa was President of the United States. He never stops laughing. “That JP is a character,” Nanny likes to say.

We are escorted to a beige linoleum waiting room, with hard, plastic chairs. Ominous female heads ignore us from behind a high counter. Aaron and I are seated next to each other. The adults disappear through a door behind the counter. “Everything will be okay,” my mom said between coughs as they were escorted out. Hours pass. My butt hurts.

“Just sit tight,” one of the ominous heads says at one point.

Finally, my mom and Stanley emerge back through the door behind the beige counter. JP’s staying. He stashed—Stanley’s word—a trash bag full of pot in the storage container under the floor of the bus. He’s going to jail. Miraculously, the police are satisfied that my mom and Stanley didn’t know about the pot.

From the manuscript of my memoir, The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (represented by Carrie Howland at Donadio & Olson).