*Mark Chiusano is a Features Board alumnus who, during his time on The Advocate, published six feature articles in the magazine, as well as six short stories. Following Chiusano’s graduation from Harvard in 2012, his creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park,was published by Penguin and received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Mark is currently an editorial writer for Newsday and amNew York (you can read his column at [www.amny.com/amexpress](http://www.amny.com/amexpress))and is at work on his second book. *



 



**You were able to professionally publish your creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park. What is it like to have succeeded so quickly?**



So many of these things are luck. It was kind of…I was in the right place at the right time, having a book that was finished, and usually agents don’t want to waste their time on you unless you have a finished book to show them. The nice thing was, I was doing stories, but they were fairly linked stories, and it kind of formed a somewhat comprehensive whole, so I had a full project to show people. But you know, it was amazing. It’s one of those things that kind of happens in little leaps before bounds, I guess. By the time the book comes out you kind of forget how awesome it is. But the whole thing was so much fun, and so lucky.



 



**What kind of relationship does it put you in with other writers your age, who are still trying to get published for the first time?**



I think that most people understand that there’s no rush to getting published. Actually, a handful of mentors of mine, and friends, advised me not even to try to get this first book published…saying that it’s best to wait and make sure you get going with your best foot forward. But I kind of felt that this was what I had at the moment that was worth putting out. I think that it’s…very near a competitive game, but it’s better to avoid that sense of competition. Hopefully, one person is publishing your book, and another person is publishing another person’s book.



 



**You’re not currently pursuing an MFA. How do you feel about MFA programs?**



I thought I was going to try for an MFA. I was going to take a year after college [to apply]. I took the GRE, which was a horrible waste of time. And sadly, I think my GRE scores are about to evaporate. But I think, when I was graduating from college, I sort of wanted a break from the workshop environment, which I love, and which really helped me a lot. But at some point you have to go out on your own and make terrible, terrible mistakes, and not really have anyone to point them out so quickly. The other thing to say is that most of your readers in an ideal world aren’t college students or MFA [students] or in an academic environment. They’re usually in a working place environment. So it’s useful to have a sense of what actual occupations are like…what an office job is like. So I was kind of interested in going into the “real world,” or work world, and learning what that was like. The thing about the MFA is it gives you time to write, but through the Advocate I had already had that for two, three years.



 



**How do you balance having a real job with having time to write?**



It’s a constant struggle, and I’m figuring it out as I go along. But what I did from the beginning was do my writing first thing in the morning, for as long as I could—half an hour, an hour—then essentially forget about it for the rest of the day. Which is useful when you have a full time job. For a while I would write at nighttime when I got home from work, but that was just really depressing. You know, I would be tired, I would want to go out and meet friends. And if you do it at the end of the day, it’s easy just to decide not to do it, whereas if you do it in the morning it’s kind of out of the way.



** **



**Have your literary tastes evolved since leaving college?**



I think in college I was reading pretty much exclusively fiction. And after I left college I started working at a publishing house for a nonfiction editor, so I started reading a lot more nonfiction. That’s kind of what I’ve been floating toward these days. So I probably read about 50 percent fiction, 50 fifty percent nonfiction. I feel like we read so little nonfiction in English [at Harvard], which makes sense. But now I’m sort of catching up from college.



 



**Is that more because you enjoy reading it, or because you think it has a positive influence on your writing style?**



It is definitely very crucial for research. I read a ton of nonfiction for the fictional characters I’m writing. But I also think there’s also something to be learned from the prose style of nonfiction writers—very simple, very to the point, just getting across the information. And it’s good to have that in your arsenal.



 



**What’s the trend that poses the greatest threat to literary fiction today? What do you hate about contemporary fiction?**



I think there is a trend in contemporary literary fiction to be preaching to the choir...and the fiction that I like the most is the fiction that feels most urgent, and speaks to the broadest population. I worry that if writers screw themselves even more into academia and the MFA path and are writing for those people… The last line of *MFA vs NYC *says something like, “eventually we’ll make writers of us all.” So, if you have everyone with an MFA that’s fine, and you can write totally toward MFA students, but right now I work as a journalist and I think that that informs my writing a lot. I enjoy being out of the world, thinking of real problems, if not all problems.



 



**Who are some contemporary writers that you enjoy reading, and why?**



I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s *Americanah*, and I really like her. [Americanah] is in one sense a phenomenal inward-looking story. It’s a beautiful love story, but it’s also a fantastic picture of race relations in America, and also of immigration patterns in both England and America. So there’s so much in it; it’s such an outward-looking book, in addition to having characters who are incredibly real.



 



**After you started working as a professional writer, what is the first thing you realized about the real world, that Harvard insulates us from?**



I think that at Harvard I was a lot more interested in aesthetic concerns…character, how beautiful a sentence was, etc. I read the Jennifer Egan book, *A V**isit from the Goon Squad*...I always really liked that book, but I think that what I liked about it changed after I graduated. In college…there’s one story that’s in the second person, and is very technically impressive, and I love that story. Then the last section of the book goes into the future and talks about this strange world controlled by corporations…. In college I sort of thought, well, whatever, unrealistic, that doesn’t have anything to do with me. But after graduating and being in the real world, and seeing what “real people” worry about, it became much more powerful. What you focus on does change, when you have to make money. I think that both sides of that real world divide are very valuable.



 



**What is the best thing that you’ve read all year?**



A really fantastic thing that I read recently is the Jimmy Breslin autobiography,  *I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me*, which I have been sort of reeling from ever since. He’s a columnist, a New York columnist, one of the very first newspaper columnists, as we think of them now, and it’s a memoir about being sick and recovering. And he has a great line about the way he wrote this very famous column right after JFK was killed. He had to cover it, and the way he decided to cover it was to talk to the gravedigger. It’s a great story about journalism from the inside, and looking at a different perspective, which I think is useful in journalism class, but very useful for fiction as well.



 



**One of the reviews quoted on your website says, “Chiusano’s voice isn’t fresh. It is knowing.” What do you think of this description? How would you characterize yourself as a writer?**



What I feel like that person was trying to get at was that [Marine Park] is not a flashy collection, but ingrained in place and neighborhoods, and I do agree that that’s very important…that focus on the people I’m writing about, the places I’m writing about, that I’m trying to get at knowledge of them as opposed to a superficial, flashy picture.



 



**Do you think you will continue to write about similar things? Or will you ever take on a project that’s wildly different?**



In terms of the book I’m working on now…it’s mostly set in New York but is definitely much larger than the neighborhood of Marine Park. It sort of jumps back and forth in time…and even includes something outside of New York entirely. So who knows, if I’m lucky enough to finish a third book, maybe I’ll be outside of America. It’s important to keep changing and keep writing, but I am finding that I do always return in some way to Marine Park or to that part of the world.



 



**Do you find the challenges of writing a novel different from those of writing a short story?**



It is definitely a struggle. I think the hardest thing is continuing day after day…continuing to write the same story day after day. One thing I like about short stories is that you can follow your interest. Obviously there is a certain amount of time that you’re working on a short story, but maybe that’s two weeks, and then if you have a really good idea for a new story, you can just run down that rabbit hole for a while. With a novel…I’ve been trying to channel what I’m interested in into writing the novel, but you do still have to open that page of the novel, where you are at the novel.



 



**What do you think distinguishes the emerging generation of writers from previous generations? **



One thing, maybe, is a hopefully more inclusive group of writers… We’re hearing from more voices, or we should. I wonder…if there will be a move away from the small, precise short story collection—the idea of writing that first and then moving on to a novel. I wonder if people will be working on big entertaining novels from the beginning, depending on how tastes change. I wonder, are novels going to become something that’s for very few, almost like poetry in some ways…or will novels be this very important thing that people search out, because it’s the only form of media that lets you kind of drop into it without the interruptions of Twitter, or whatever. Maybe that’s the direction.



 



**How has being a young, published writer impacted your social life?**



I’m not so much in the sort of published writers scene, partially because I haven’t been invited into it yet. I worked in a NY publishing house for a while, so most of my friends were editors. Really most of my close friends are journalists…which is great because I think journalists are probably the smartest people in the world. You can so much from listening to journalists.



 



**Is there anything that happened at the Advocate while you were there that you would like us to remember happened?**



I love the *Advocate*, first of all. There were two readings in particular that I loved for different reasons. The first one was a Denis Johnson reading. He was the hero when we were there. He came and read…and someone asked him about his process, how he wrote. And he said that he made a pledge to write every day. He started out writing three minutes a day, that’d be his minimum. Some days only three minutes, sometimes more. But he could always find three minutes. And after I heard that I tried the three minute a day rule, and it totally works. It’s incredible. It’s a really good way to get yourself started. And I’ve written at least three minutes a day ever since then. The other one was a Jim Shepard reading…. I was the one who organized it, and he sent me a funny email on the before, asking if we were advertising for it, will there be any people there, and I said no worries, there would definitely be people there. But then I started to worry. So I started telling all my friends, go to the reading. And I got to the reading, and was letting him in, and was still kind of worried, and…you couldn’t move, there was standing room only… And he read his story “Boys Town” from the *New Yorker*, which is a pretty long story. He read the whole story, it was like 45 minutes long, and everyone was so into it. It was such a great example of how if you’re a great writer and a great performer you can hold a room captive by doing nothing else but reading your words.



 



**Do you have any advice for current Advocate members who want to pursue similar things?**



First of all, you’re in a really good place for it. I learned a ton from other *Advocate* members. I would learn a lot from them when we were in fiction classes together, but also on the side, reading each other’s work. Personally I borrowed techniques and tactics from other writers, and I’m sure they did same with me….But I think that really it’s just finding a way to keep writing. I mean it’s easy to not do it. So I really do think that writing everyday is a good tactic. Just keep going, and don’t worry so much about how much you’re doing, or if it’s good or bad. It does add up after a while…you look back, and you have a couple months’ work that really gets you somewhere.



 



**In honor of the issue theme, what is the most dangerous thing you’ve done recently?**



I as a rule am pretty danger averse. This is a good example of how risk averse I am: For a long time I wanted to jump into the tracks at the subway. It’s a fascination I have; almost every day I think about it. And a couple of nights ago I was waiting for a train, and you know, the garbage train comes by, there are workers on track. So there were probably no trains coming. And I thought to myself, this is the time! I can jump on the tracks, and pretend like I did this successfully, and you know, take care of that. And I was kind of bending down, giving it a shot, about to do it, then a worker looks at me and is like “what are you doing,” and I was like “sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I just walked away.



 



 

 I.



 



When I was about six weeks old and still inside my mother, my milk lines formed. This happens in every mammal: the skin of the fetus suddenly thickens along two parallel lines that run diagonally from the groin to the armpits. Then, just as quickly as they form, the mountain ranges collapse back onto the skin. Within just three weeks they have disappeared almost completely, leaving behind only two small peaks at the chest. These are the buds from which future nipples will form. Other mammals have different rates of milk line recession, resulting in more nipples later on. Pigs, for example, can have as many as eighteen nipples from which little piglets can suck.Humans would ideally have two nipples, and in some cases where the recession does not happen properly, third nipples will grow out from the improperly reduced milk line. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily for me, I came into the world with the correct number of mammary seeds planted in my chest. 



I felt them when I was nine, sitting in front of the computer after dinner and playing Snake. Something compelled me to reach under my shirt. Perhaps it was just natural childhood inquisitiveness—students in my class that year had started to whisper things they somehow knew should not be heard by our teacher. Or perhaps it was an odd new sensation of my shirt rubbing against something that had not been there before. 



The giggling curiosity that compelled me, as well as all the other blushing boys and girls, was a byproduct of having new chemicals inside my body, in all of our bodies. My ovaries, having received some very specific chemical inclinations, had begun seeping estrogen into the bloodstream. When the signals reached my chest, the seeds started to grow, evolving into a lump of milk, tissue, and glands, otherwise known as a breast bud. The more precise term is *thelarche*, which derives from two Greek words: *thele*, meaning nipple, and *arche*, meaning the beginning, or onset.



I made sure that no one else was close by and slid my right hand up to my chest, massaging the area under the left nipple. A hard lump, like a little stone, was lodged underneath the skin. At first I was unsure if it truly existed, but each trial resulted in the same discovery: a nickel sized lump nested right under the left nipple. It hurt when I squeezed it too hard, and I kept pinching, as if in a dream, the pain affirming its existence. I checked the right side, and sure enough, it had its own bump. It was smaller, but it ached the same. The stones were real. I could not excise them from my body, and I could tell no one. 



What I did do, however, was observe. I figured whatever happened to my older sisters would inevitably happen to me. My middle sister, seven years older than me, bore the biggest breasts, the most slender neck, and the daintiest wrists. Her unique combination of beauty traits made her a pageant queen many times over, but we will not get into that.I knew that my neck was shorter and that my bones were thicker than hers, so there was never any hope of competing with that. However, I gauged that there was potential in my breasts. On the weekends I sat on the bed examining the way she applied mascara and lipstick, brushed on rouge and eyeshadow, and put every hair in place. Most of all, I admired the portion of fabric that stretched between the two mounds of her chest, wondering when the day would come that my body could impose the same physical effect on the fabric surrounding me. 



 



II.



 



I came home from the fifth grade one day, and my mom handed me my first bra. “You’re a big girl now,” she said, “You need to wear this.” This first one was a simple sports bra, with the most intricate part being the elastic band that clung like death to my chest. I could not see any practicality in wearing it, only that it helped me fit in with the other girls in the locker room. It still seemed possible, perhaps, that these things were temporary, and by tomorrow we would be free of them. That same year, I was taught that the sun would someday die, and I, feeling the pressure of the contraption beneath my shirt, realized that my childhood, too, would eventually dissipate just like the sun.



The sports bras turned into slightly more shaped training bras, where the cut and design suggested something a bit more feminine. The day came when my two sisters took me to Victoria’s Secret to buy my first real bra, like the ones my mom wore. “See the numbers? That’s for the diameter of your chest.” They said. “You’re a 32.” They explained the meaning of the letters, the clasps, the straps, and how the cups should never ride up when I raise my arms to the air. If they do, then I should loosen the straps, and they taught me how to do that too. We settled with a black bra with no metal reinforcement or padding, frills or laces. It was a polyester and spandex breed that sat smoothly on my skin, invisible to anyone but myself. “You’re an A cup,” my sisters said. I repeated that in my head. My breasts seemed so inadequate next to theirs, but at the end of the day, I was glad to have my letter.  



Aside from the excitement of having something that all the other women in my family wore, I still could not see the purpose of bras. And so, inevitably, there were times when I neglected to wear one. This happened when I was ten and traveling back to Vietnam. My grandfather was a monk, and we visited him at his temple. When we arrived at the ornamented gates outside his residence, my eldest sister looked at me, furrowed her brows, and asked me why I was not wearing my bra. I had simply forgotten. Though I asked why it was so important, she did not explain her concern and instead just told me to keep my arms folded over my chest. 



The temple had a courtyard at the center with statues and bonsai trees. When we had finished drinking tea outside my grandfather’s dormitory, I ran to the courtyard, sat down beneath a Bodhi tree, and posed as the meditating Buddha. Then we all lined up along either side of my grandfather and smiled at the camera. When we came back from the trip, I looked back at the photographs and was shocked to see that my nipples were very clearly protruding through the shirt in every picture. It then became clear why my sister had told me to cross my arms. I learned that nipples were something to be ashamed of, and since then, I have worn a bra every single day of my life. 



 



III.



 



It turns out that the body carries its own natural brassiere. Coopers ligaments, a set of connective tissue, are accredited for maintaining the shape and position of breasts. The ligaments descend from the clavicle and stretch through and around breast tissue. The clavicle thus becomes the line demarcating the beginning of breasts, and this may partly explain the sexual allure of that bone. 



Cooper’s ligaments are named after Sir Astley Cooper, a British surgeon and anatomist who first described these ligaments in 1840. He also named many other anatomical parts, including Cooper's fascia, a thin film covering the spermatic cord; Cooper's pubic ligament, the superior [pubic ligament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pectineal_ligament); Cooper's stripes, a fibrous structure in the [ulnar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulna) ligaments, and a variety of diseases. 



Cooper is not the only man to insert his name into various aspects of the female body. Roughly a century after Cooper coined his ligaments, a pediatric endocrinologist by the name of James Tanner, who was also a Brit, came up with a system to measure breast development. Aside from breasts, he also demarcates stages in the development of genitals and pubic hair for both girls and boys.His scale, appropriately called the Tanner scale, defines five stages of physical development based on external sex characteristics. 



In Tanner’s world, Stage One features nothing but the nipple floating on a sea of skin. There are no glands, ducts, or lobules, only the remnants of the milk ridges from the fetal landscape. Stage Two, and the thelarches form; I am playing Snake, feeling the buds. Stage Three, a continuation of Stage Two as I sit with my nipples exposed underneath the Bodhi tree. In Stage Four, the nipples start to protrude from the surrounding breast tissue, and I have sex for the first time. During those years, my left breast was frequently bigger than my right, as is common in many women, but my boyfriends didn’t seem to mind. 



 



IV.



 



At this point in my life, I have reason to believe that my breasts are mature, and that if Tanner, were he still alive and could analyze them, would surely place me in that fifth and final stage. But for several years, from when I was nineteen to twenty-two years old, I put no thought into my breasts. They seemed inert and happy as they were, and I conducted my relationships fairly confident in my body’s ability to allure. 



It did not occur to me that they had grown silently until I went to Victoria’s Secret to replace my old bras. The sales representative asked me what size I was looking for. I told her 34B, at which point she made a face and said, after glancing at my chest, “Really? No, you’re definitely a C.” I felt a bit violated that she could look through me like that, but also flattered. A part of me also questioned my feeling of flattery as a product of her attempt to sell a bra, knowing that Victoria’s Secret sometimes uses vanity sizes to make women feel more accomplished about their sexual development. Nevertheless, I tried the C’s, and they fit better than the B’s. 



I remained incredulous for quite some time. I never thought that I would someday be able to match my sisters in breast size, but since then multiple incidences have me think that my breasts have become substantial. My boyfriend, whom I was in a long distance relationship at the time, told me each time we met that they were bigger. They were also more or less the same size which suggests that they had reached beyond the growing phase of Stage Four. At one point, out of the blue, he also told me that I had nice breasts. I asked him why they were nice, and he explained that they were very round and full, and the nipples pointed in the same direction. Though the relationship did not last, I will always remember him fondly for those words.



More recently, a young man asked me while we laid in bed if my breasts were fake. I sat up, wide eyed, and exclaimed that they were real. “Are you kidding me? Fake boobs are hard and cold, and not nearly as sensitive.” I said. “Mine are soft!” 



I said these things with confidence because my aunt has fake breasts, and she let us touch them. A week after her operation, she sat with us at dinner, and the topic settled on her implants. “Do you want to see?” She asked. Before anyone could give a response, she unbuttoned her shirt halfway and pulled out her left breast. My mother, father, sisters and I took turns pressing down on the engorged organs as the food grew cold on the table. They felt stiff and plastic, nothing like what their roundness implied, and judging from the blank expressions on my aunt’s face as we probed her chest, they were not very sensitive either. Nevertheless, they were beautiful.



After telling him that story, I cupped each breast in my hand, as if checking that my assertions were true. Each one filled up my palms with heavy, soft flesh that bulged out between the fingers. They felt solid and warm on my body. The weight of my womanhood suddenly felt very clear to me.



 



V.



 



The baby looks a lot smaller than he does in the pictures. “Be prepared for flashes of nudity,” my sister says. “The boy has to feed every two hours.” She paused, as if thinking about something, and a look of vague revulsion creeps onto her face. “My breasts are huge now, look.” She lifts up her shirt. 



I stare, wide-eyed. They are immense. I feel inclined to look away but cannot stop staring, as if her mammary demanded worship. Both breasts have inflated to about twice their size before pregnancy. They sag with the weight of milk and hang from her body like ripe papayas, dripping with sap, from the tree. Fresh veins, which have grown to supply blood to the glands now in full operation, decorate the surface of her pale, smooth skin. The nipples, once small and innocent, have darkened and grown into long, meaty tubes that now give milk. 



The source of this milk comes from deep within the breast, inside little chambers called alveoli. Like underground caves with dripping stalactites, the alveoli are lined with secreting cells that trickle milk into little holding places called lobules. Bunches of lobules congregate to form a lobe, which empties its contents into a lactiferous duct that flows all the way to the nipple. Each breast contains ten to twenty of these lobes arranged like flower petals around the center. I can see the ends of those ducts clearly on the surface of my sister’s skin. They appear as little elevated dots that sprout in a circle much like the way mushrooms grow around in a fairy ring. 



“This is a good learning experience for you,” she says as she breastfeeds the small, squirming child. He clings to the softness of her chest, and I think of Henry Harlow’s monkeys. 



The experiments started in the 1950s. Harlow used Rhesus monkeys. He took the babies away from their mothers at birth and raised them on two types of surrogates: a bare wire mesh monkey and another one covered in cloth. They were both equipped to dispense milk through a nipples at the chest. Harlow found that the baby monkeys held onto the cloth mother for longer periods of time. In modified experiments, both surrogates were available, but the cloth mother no longer provided milk. Despite the wire monkey’s ability to feed, the baby monkeys still spent most of their time hugging their fuzzier option. If they were hungry, they would clamber up the bony frame of the metal mother, feed themselves, and then run back to the softer mother, their eyes wet with need.   



The way these monkeys held onto the cloth surrogate is not too different from the way Joseph lies on my sister’s body. His head fits perfectly into the crevice of her breasts, and his arms splay out comfortably on top of her milk-filled pillows. It is as if everything beforehand, the bras, the beauty pageants, the cleavage, attraction, and the buildup of glands, all existed in order to build up to this one moment when the breast, engorged to its limit with milk, can expunge its contents into the hungry mouth of an infant.



It is two in the morning, and I tell my sister that after witnessing her sleep deprivation and hearing of the rips and tears and screams that occurred during her fifteen hour labor, I do not want to have kids. She doesn’t respond, but I know she is listening. When she finishes feeding, she asks me, “Does Auntie My Ngoc want to hold Baby Joseph?” 



I nod excitedly, and pick him up with both hands, making sure to support his neck. The baby lies cradled in my elbow, gurgling. He looks like both his parents. He has his dad’s long torso and limbs, his eyes, and his lips. He has the tip of my sister’s nose perched on a bridge that resembles that of his fathers. My sister goes to get some rest. 



I rock Joseph back and forth. His mouth points towards my breast, and I am painfully aware of how incapable my body is to nurture him. His eyes start to close for longer periods of time, and I can tell that sleep is settling. Something gives me the idea to hum jazz melodies to him, for they are the only melodies I know at heart these days. I start with Stardust, then Someone to Watch Over Me. By the time I am halfway through Misty, the baby is fast asleep. I hold him for just a bit longer, even though his tiny body was starting to feel heavy against my chest.

My roommate has some sort of condition where she gets freaked out by small holes. Trypophobia is what she calls it. It is hard not to make immature jokes about the fact that she is scared of holes, obviously, but for her this fear is very real.



 



I’ve never understood it. There is nothing frightening about holes. Holes are empty. If you dig a hole in the ground you can hide inside it, you can cozy up and feel the edges pressing in, nice and safe. A small hole in a sweater is something you can poke a pencil through, drag your fingernail around when you are nervous. Comfortable and secure. Nothing to fear.



 



What *I* do not like is the idea of small particles; miniature bits of a thing. Amathophobia, my friend Frank explained once. Fear of dust.



 



The thing about tiny particles is that they used to be part of something bigger but broke off, seceded from the mass, or maybe the mass disintegrated. I do not like these particles because it is not clear to me at what point they stopped being a part of the larger mass and started existing as their own small things, and this ambiguity makes me nervous. It is impossible to sort out when the particles lost the essential nature of the thing they used to be and became a flake, or a kernel, or a tiny morsel that is absolutely nothing at all besides the flake kernel morsel; that stands for nothing bigger than its atomic unit; that has no higher meaning than its small, miserable self.



 



We shed 1.6 pounds of skin every year. Live skin cells become microscopic dust. When my skin peels away from my body can I stare at the tiny skin flakes on the ground and say, *there is Eliya*? Of course not. So what does that mean about the skin flakes that are attached to me right now? Are they any more Eliya than the skin flakes on the ground? Structures of identity begin to crumble very quickly when particles get involved. I do not like it at all.



 



***



 



I know that I do not want to be here as soon as we step out of the van. I can feel it all over, my whole body sinking into itself, sending my brain a firm *no, thank you*. The sky is a bumpy sort of grey, like there are a lot of tiny particles floating around, like pointillism without any of the colors. But I am here, so. My brain with apologies sends my feet trudging forward.



 



My classmates and I sip coffee while we wait in the security line. We arrived in Poland the night before, and none of us have slept. We’re all in that kind of dull sleep-deprived stupor that feels a little bit nice as long as you’re with other people. But every time I look past the line of people and see the hazy sky in front of me, I have to fold my hands together to keep my thumb from twitching. *I would like to leave*, it is telling me, stretching of its own accord to point in the direction where our van is parked.



 



A group of girls glides to the front of line and hovers at the entrance. When there is a gap, they slither forward, approaching the security counter.



 



“Cutting the line at Auschwitz?” my friend Mitch whispers, eyeing the girls. “Jeez. Not a good look.” We all giggle quietly.



 



After security, a mittened man hands us headphones. The tour is thoughtfully orchestrated so the guides do not have to yell; because even on a day as windy as this one, the information we are about to hear is not meant to be screeched. The guide murmurs a greeting into her speakerphone; it lands directly in our ears. *Thank you for being here*. Crisp and clear. So we will not miss a word.



 



We follow her to our first stop: the metal ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign that hangs over the entrance to the camp, and this moment feels like plunging my head into ice-cold water, because suddenly there it is, here I am, that sign, this place, really really.



 



I am thinking back to the young adult Holocaust novels I pored through as a child, many written autobiographically by survivors of Auschwitz, most of whom, on their way to a hell they cannot yet contemplate, pause underneath the lettering, which seems to loom incredibly, monstrously large, to have a think. Arbeit macht frei. Work will set me free? Hmm. These soon-to-be-heroes never seem to believe the sign’s promise. Clever Jews.



 



I know it concerned my parents, the ferocity with which I flew through these concentration-camp memoirs. *Are you sure you feel okay reading this? my mother would ask me gently. Can we talk about what you learned from your book? Are you upset about that? *It was an oddly maudlin habit for such a cheerful child, but I couldn’t help myself. I was doing research.



 



Mostly, my interest was theoretical. I was curious in a clinical, distant way: what is it, exactly, about me and mine that made a whole lot of people want to make us go away forever?



 



But every once in a while, I heard about how someone painted a swastika on a highway barrier nearby, or a kid in my Sunday school class who went to an elementary school in rural Ohio told me they made fun of his yarmulke, and I thought about how Granny was born in 1938 and Hitler did his thing in the forties and Granny wasn’t all that old, really, and if one person (Granny) could live long enough to watch the world swing from scary to safe, it was not out of the question that another person (me, maybe) could watch the world swing all the way back.



 



And in those moments of paranoia, the YA Holocaust books became how-to guides. This boy, how did he escape? This girl, she lied about her age. That is a good trick. I will lie about my age, too, when the time comes.



 



I used to ask my friends: If there is a second Holocaust, can my family live with yours? Are you sure? My dad eats a lot, can you promise to feed him? You’ll need extra groceries, you know. And a sliding wall, do you have one of those? One girl I read about lived behind a sliding wall. Well, maybe you should build one. Just in case.



 



So when the guide starts talking about how someone stole the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign recently, a tiny little part of me is thinking: I should practice how to cry quieter. If the people who ever stole the sign come to steal me, I will hide in the attic and they will never hear me. One of the girls in one of my books did that and they never found her.



 



But the mature, rational part of me knows this is silly, knows I am safe, is focused on staring ahead, like the rest of the group, calmly taking in the sign. It’s smaller than I expected, I decide. Like when you see a macho celebrity in the airport and discover he’s actually only 5’7”. Not so intimidating, actually.



 



Often in my books around the time the narrators encounter the sign, they have some sort epiphany about the sky. They stare up, as high as their necks can crane, wondering if anyone is up there thinking about the people on the ground, but all they see are flecks of ash dotting the sky, spreading out infinitely in every direction. And then they realize that these small dots comprised, until very recently, a person who was actively producing thoughts and feelings and sweat and excrement and is now a tiny piece of white flake drifting dully through the sky.



 



And sometimes these books have an additional horrific moment wherein a character has been assigned the task of cremating the dead bodies, and comes across his own father, inert in a pile of similarly cold naked emaciated Jewish men. Or watches her sister march into the gas chambers and hours later smells the scent of burning flesh. Smelling is just inhaling tiny particles of a thing into your nose.



 



***



 



Our arrival in Poland comes just a few months after 60,000 white supremacists march in Warsaw; a month or so after the government announces a ban on the labelling of death camps as “Polish” in an attempt to remove implication from the Polish people for the massacre of Jews, to refocus the conversation on the non-Jews who suffered and died during the Holocaust; and just weeks after backlash against this law spurred increasingly virulent anti-Semitic epithets, sentiments, and demonstrations, like the march where Polish nationalists carried signs that read “Take off the Yarmulke - sign the law” and “stop Jewish aggression against Poland.”



 



It is also a month or so before a survey emerges concluding that people are forgetting about the Holocaust: 66% of millenials cannot say what Auschwitz was. I do not know this particular statistic when I am there, but I know the trends. Rising white nationalism, Holocaust denial, xenophobia, anti-Semitism.



 



A few days after we tour Auschwitz, we visit the Schindler Museum.



 



I like historical museums–these places of quiet communion with the past. Sometimes in museums I stare at an antique uniform or a cluster of words on the wall and I feel like it’s just me and history, alone together. And then I look around and there are so many people inside our little museum cosmos; there is a pleasant hum of empathy because we are all here, we are all absorbing these narratives of times long ago, forming silky threads of connection, soaking up the past and thereby affirming our faith in the future.



 



I assumed this museum would be about Oskar Schindler, but I find very little of the information on him. Most of the museum’s focus is on World War II in Poland. There is also a lot of preliminary information on the history of Poland. I learn things like how Poland was sort of tossed around by a lot of Big Kahuna colonizers that kept trying to inhale it, like Russia, and how World War I was a good thing for Poland because it finally became an independent nation. And how when World War II came, the government told the citizens not to worry, that this war would be quick and neat and they would all go back to celebrating their newfound countryhood lickety split.



 



I also learn a lot about how much the people of Poland were not in charge of their fates, and how such loss of agency therefore disqualified Poles from being in charge of the fates of other people, like Polish Jews. How the Nazis pinned posters everywhere with lists of Jews and intellectuals and other unacceptable people for whom they were searching; how they threatened to murder entire families belonging to adults who knew but did not disclose the whereabouts of these listed people. How they cut the Polish people off from credible news sources and distributed newspapers that justified the Nazi cause and played propaganda films in public squares.



 



I am thinking about today’s Poland, the way many people are sick of the interminable guilt. It makes some amount of sense, I conclude, that they are fed up with the rhetoric of blame. Maybe there is a difference between atrocities committed out of malice toward others and those committed out of fear for the self, and maybe the people in this country have felt seventy years of guilt for the things their great-grandparents did because they were confused and afraid. And maybe the recent push for new laws came from this place of frustration.



 



“Polish people are people,” our guide tells us. “They need art and entertainment to live on just like everyone else. Of course they were going to…” she trails off. “To watch the films.” And turn in Jews, I think she means to add.



 



***



 



In Auschwitz, I am not thinking at all about the Polish land we are standing on or the Polish people who may or may not have condoned the atrocities here. I am thinking about the Jews and the others and myself and death and the Banality of Evil and mostly trying to cry quieter because people are starting to look at me and I feel like an idiot. Plus I only brought one tissue and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find dry real estate for nose-blowing.



 



We pass through dark rooms, empty except for the glass display cases. Each has a different theme. A pile of silver pilfered from prisoners. A mountain of shoes. One display case is full of baby’s clothes–tiny dresses, period onesies. A whole room of hair. So much hair, heaping piles of it. I don’t understand how it is in such pristine condition. Doesn’t hair decay? Perhaps seventy years is not so much time after all; not enough for decomposition to set in.



 



Our guide explains that the Germans wanted to use every part of the people they captured. Redistribute the precious items. Turn Jewish bones into hairpins, skin into couch cushions. Waste not.



 



In one barrack, we pass through a long hallway. On its walls are photographs of people who died in Auschwitz.



There is a Polish theater artist named Tadeusz Kantor who made a lot of avant-garde art about both world wars and he has this thing about how photography complicates the idea of death. According to Kantor, if you can look into someone’s eyes in a picture and see life inside, this person can never truly die. This makes sense to me intellectually, but in reality, I think it just makes the pain of death more acute.



 



Like the picture of Anne Frank on the cover of her diary, my favorite of all the YA Holocaust memoirs I ever read. I thought Anne was hilarious and cool and self-aware and brilliant and everything I wanted to be; I felt that she understood my angst and I—so far as I could empathize—hers. Plus everyone told me I looked like her, which I loved. In this picture, she stared up from her desk, caught mid-sentence, a huge grin, bright eyes. I used stare at her face for hours and think how easily, with a simple cosmic switch of birth years and locations, this girl could have been me, how horrible it was that this person had to stop living.



 



In Auschwitz the people on the walls feel the same. The hallway is so long and the pictures do not end, it feels like, there is just face after face, staring me down, eyes that believed they would keep blinking until the new millennium and on but that instead went cold just years, months, days after this image froze them in time.



 



Eventually the hallway of faces ends and we go down a tiny staircase that is dusty gray–like everything at Auschwitz, except the lower we go the dustier and grayer it gets until it is very difficult to see anything. It begins to smell a little bit, and I try very hard not to think about the tiny particles flying up my nose.



 



We go lower and the guide is murmuring about how down here is where they kept disobedient prisoners. They implemented all different kinds of torture regimens, she says, take your pick, empty dungeons everywhere. On your left is the cell where insubordinate prisoners had to stand up without a break for days and weeks and sometimes months, too narrow to sit so they just stood until they died. Or look to your right, this one’s a bit roomier, that’s where they starved people to death. Shuffle forward please and here if you peer into this peephole you can see the tiny room for suffocating which is exactly what it sounds like, just a lot of Jews in a small room and not enough air to go around. Voila.



 



My tissue by this point is so saturated with liquid it has no more capacity to absorb anything and as I am futilely wiping my nose, my thumb begins to twitch again, like it did at the beginning of the tour before I knew quite how much I did not want to be here, and I drop the tissue on the ground. The tissue is so wet and the ground is so dusty; I cannot pick up the tissue because in its wetness it has attracted specks of brown and if I use it I will be wiping tiny parts of dead Jew, little molecules that once were faces on the wall, onto my sticky lip. I stare at the tissue where it sits collecting pieces of jew and my snot, untissued, begins to plunk itself in droplets in the dirt. Does snot contain DNA? I decide it does. * **I am leaving a piece of myself here*, I think, and I can’t tell if I like this.



 



Our group is leaving so I grab the tissue, carry it between my nails so my fingertips don’t have to make contact with the powdery brown specks. We are shuffling so slowly and now there is another tour group blocking the stairs but we go up them anyway, pushing past limbs and torsos and feet. Over our headphones the guide is saying how we are passing by the place where they tested the first gas chambers and ssssss–the feed cuts out and I cannot hear what she is saying–the first time they tested the gas chambers they didn’t put enough sssssss and when the guards went to check after a full day the people inside were still alive so ssssssss coughing wheezing prisoners trapped inside forced their way toward clean air but the guards ssssss slammed the door, locked the Jews back in the sssssss put another dosage of poison so ssssss the next day ssssss some dead some alive sss and sss two full days sss slowly dying until ssssssssssssss—By this point I am shoving people out of my way, which I have not done in my life ever, but all I am thinking is that I have to get out of the underground place so the static in my ear will turn clean again because now I’m taking shallow breaths so I can stop inhaling dead people particles up my nose, because I’m getting a little bit dizzy, because it is hot and crowded and the air is goopy and I’m getting droopy and—



 



But I am being silly. There is no Zyklon B seeping through my skin, no one slamming a deadbolted door in my face. The only thing between me and clean air is a few tourists walking a little too slowly.  I shove my way toward the top of the staircase and emerge into the gray sunshine.



 



***



 



Apparently Hitler wanted to make a museum about Jewish people once they were all gone. That’s why we have most of the stuff that the Nazis didn’t burn or redistribute—the piles of hair, of baby clothes.



 



I can’t stop thinking about this as we explore Krakow. Because in this city, I am coming to understand, Judaism has become not much more than a relic, something fragmentary from another time. A poorly curated museum.



 



A tiny mural on the corner of a building, handpainted: “IN MEMORY OF THE BOSAK FAMILY, RESIDENTS OF KAZIMIERZ 1633-1941.” The occasional Jewish star paved at the foot of what might have been a synagogue. A Jewish museum where the man tells me there are no Jewish employees, “but we had a Jew intern here a few summers ago. Josh. From California. Maybe you know him?”



 



At the Schindler museum, the guide mumbles something about “One hundred fifty left” in the middle of a vague sentence about demographics, so when she is done speaking I pull her aside and ask her to clarify.



 



“Were you saying there are 150,000 Jews left in Poland?” There were 3.5 million Jewish people in Poland before the Holocaust, so I suppose this number makes sense.



 



“Sorry,” she says. “We have to keep moving.” I cannot tell if she is being odd or if she does not understand me. After the next stop, I ask her again, loudly. What does this number mean?



 



She stares at the ground. “One hundred fifty, yes. In Krakow today.”



 



“One hundred fifty thousand?” I ask.



 



“One hundred fifty. Jews. Living in Krakow.” She does not look at me once during this conversation.



 



After we leave the Schindler museum, I call my parents and tell them about what I learned—the way the Nazis coerced, threatened, propagandized the Poles. Maybe it isn’t fair to be so angry about the Polish bystanders, I say.



 



Maybe none of us are very good anyway and maybe these people were scared and misinformed and knew not what they did and who are we, really, to say that these people were so evil.



 



“Yes,” my mom says. “Fair. But Polish people turned in Jews at far higher rates than practically any other country. A lot of people there really hated Jews.”



 



“Did and do,” my dad chimes in. “Poland is like, massively anti-Semitic. Probably the most anti-Semitic nation in Europe. Sorry, sweetie.”



 



I hang up the phone, feeling silly. I knew this, of course. But in the warm, cobwebby narrative I began to tell myself of this pretty city, I switched out hatred for apathy, and the whole thing felt a lot easier to swallow. An easy mistake, I suppose.



 



***



 



Halfway through the Auschwitz tour my leaky face dries up, because the human body can only store so much water, and I drank a lot of coffee waiting in line.



 



We have landed in the center of Auschwitz I, facing the camp’s wide gallows. The guide points in the distance to a picturesque yellow house. This is where the head guard lived with his family, she says. In front of me, another man on the tour has reached his hand over to cup his girlfriend’s ass, and watching this interaction makes my stomach churn, so I turn away from the group and stare at the house for a while.



 



It really is very pretty. In a tasteful way. Pretty yellow house for a pretty yellow-haired family. Pretty pretty, and suddenly everything is pretty, and I am watching this pretty Aryan family, so happy, blonde and coiffed, bouncy pink cheeks; cozying up in quilts when it gets cold, driving to the beach when it is warm. It is nice, I see this; nice to have so much space, to be able to stretch their strong arms and legs wide, yawning into the *lebensraum *nice Herr Hitler made good on: throwing open the curtains to let sun beam down on the manicured carpets, peeling the windows open to breathe fresh air on calm days. And then, on days when the breeze picks up, discreetly shutting the windows, so the ashy particles floating by don’t contaminate the tiny lungs tucked safe inside the tiny blonde children tucked safe inside this pretty cottage tucked safe inside this horrifying death factory; lungs that will stretch and grow and inhale for years and years, even as tiny lungs this very same size wheeze and expire elsewhere in the camp.



 



The guide has turned her attention to the gallows. These ones were for group hangings, she explains, but the nooses are gone and everything still looks pretty, so all I can think is that the structure looks like a big swingset frame. You could probably fit six or seven swings on it. Six happy children, swinging, shrieking; fourteen little legs, Jewish legs, pumping higher and higher; stretching to reach heaven, I imagine, like babel.



 



And then the man in front of me who was fondling his girlfriend has now pulled out his phone and is scrolling through Facebook, and it is not pretty and nothing here is, but before I can decide whether I should punch this boy, the guide is saying “here is a crematorium” and my Mortal Enemies have chosen this time for a photo-op. They crouch next to the smokestack, this couple, and pose for a selfie. In my head their smiles stretch so wide their gums are shining and the smiles turn to grimaces and blood oozes out of their mouths, staining the ground.



 



I want to sit down, I want to call my mother, I want to scream. Why did you come here? Why the hell did you come here? Because if here in *this place* we are not all feeling the same pain then dear god how can there possibly be any potential for shared empathy anywhere else?



 



The guide is saying that one of the big-name Hitler cronies was killed here after the war, that his war crimes judge sentenced him to hang from the same noose he had forced thousands upon thousands of Jewish necks into. I know this man was probably not born evil, was likely just one of those strong-jawed sheeple who wanted to feel special, who fell under the spell of a system that told him he was born superior. He was just following orders, following rules, I know. I know that a life is a precious thing to lose. In this moment I do not care.



 



When I imagine the man’s stiff body swaying languidly in the breeze, tiny flecks of skin drifting off cell by cell, until he is no longer one body but a million pieces of indistinguishable dust, it is my turn to smile real big. Cheeeese. It is pleasing to me. Molecules of Nazi, signifying nothing. This death is sweet.



 



***



 



In a gift store on the streets of Krakow, I find rows of tiny porcelain figures sitting on a shelf. They have cute bug-eyes and cartoonishly large noses and payot—traditional Hasidic hair curls—and yarmulkes and prayer shawls. And they are all clutching a real one-cent Polish coin the size of their tiny porcelain faces.



 



I show the figurine to Mitch, who is with me in the store, who is also Jewish; I hold it in the air with my eyebrows high and he stares at it for a moment and then says—



 



“Aw! So cute!” and returns to the chess board he is inspecting as a gift for his grandfather, the one who escaped Krakow with his family when he was a little boy and the Nazis were just about to close in and never not one time came back.



 



“No,” I say, and point at the money my figurine is clutching. “It’s a Jew begging for money.”



 



“Oh,” he says, and we stare at it for a little while. “Or is he showing off how much money he has?”



 



The version of me that I would like to be in this story pockets the little Jew and glides out of the shop and then throws it on the cobblestones outside, smashes it to tiny pieces, bashes its head in so that no one can have this perfect little Jew, so that no one can take it home and put it on the window sill to laugh at. And then this ideal-me picks up the little Polish penny that the Jew used to be clutching from where it has landed on the sidewalk and adds it to her wallet alongside the abundant America coins that my plush paint-bearing ancestors earned in a place that was not Europe while people less fortunate than Mitch’s grandparents choked on poison. Because waste not a single part of the Jew.



But in the version of this story that actually happens, I just return the figurine to the glass shelf from whence it came and nod shyly at the stoic lady manning the counter. Sorry, I try to say, except I don’t speak a word of Polish.



The thought of stealing the figurine doesn't occur to me even until much later. I follow the rules. I am a rule-follower extraordinaire.



 



***



 



The town we pass on the ride home from Auschwitz is dilapidated and feels very empty. There are rundown gas stations and graffitied signs advertising something via photos of sexy, windswept women. Presumably people live here, because there are all the requisite signs of civilization, although we don’t see any of them.



 



I wonder what it is like for the people who live within walking distance of this place where millions of people took their last breath. Does it feel haunted? Probably it feels like nothing at all. In America we live in a country that has taken land from people and killed other people and subjugated even more and I think that if aliens learned our history and then came to visit they would wonder how we could possibly live with the knowledge that our ancestors did this thing and we’d be like “idk I don’t think my actual ancestors did the actual thing so it’s not really my emotional burden” and they’d be like “yeah but you inherited all the benefits of the thing they did” and we’d be like “yes” and then we’d go back to our knitting. Probably life in this rundown Polish town is unremarkable.



 



I don’t feel much like chatting on this bus ride, and I have seen enough of this town, so I pick up my phone. There isn’t any service, not much to do; I flip halfheartedly through my photos.



 



I took two pictures in Auschwitz, both of them in the final segment of the tour, Auschwitz II Birkenau.







While Auschwitz I was created for torturing and punishing and killing enemies of the reich of all sorts, Auschwitz II had a much simpler mission: it was constructed after the head honcho Nazis decided on the Final Solution for the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. Complete extermination of the Jewish race. Auschwitz II Birkenau is where the massive gas chambers once stood, before the Nazis burned them down to cover their tracks.



 



This section of the tour is less directed, so we’re all sort of wandering around, staring at the rubble. I expected to be able to feel the evil rising up from this place where so many hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives. But there is no sense of anything powerful buried in the charred wreckage. It’s just vast structures crumbling into increasingly smaller pieces. Someday there will only be piles of soft ash left, someday even this will be gone entirely.



 



I wander around until I come upon a series of rectangular stones with words inscribed into them. I find the one written in English. Its message is bleak—“For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity,” it begins. But what I like about the inscription is that lower down I see the word JEWS, and that next to the English stone is another stone and another and another, maybe twenty stones that all say the same thing, each in a different language, each language’s word for JEWS. JEWS JEWS JEWS.



 



And here amidst the ruined gas chambers, surrounded as I am by charred lumps devoid of meaning, suddenly the plenitude of JEWS is something I would like to quantify. Because they tried to make us go away but here we are, everywhere; the massive diaspora endures. So I take a picture.



 



I am still trying to fit all the stones into one frame when our guide wanders past. She doesn’t appear to be doing anything, so I make my way over to her. I ask her awkwardly because I do not know how to phrase it, why does she do this thing that she is doing. She is very nice and does not seem offended. She tells me in a voice much softer than the tinny one I had been hearing over the microphone that her grandmother was forced to do manual labor for the Nazis and her grandfather was part of the Polish resistance and tried to save Jews. She says that she gives tours at Auschwitz because of them.



 



I ask her, because she seems amenable, what she thinks of the recent laws restricting the way people talk about concentration camps. “I do not support my government,” she says, looking steely.



 



She tells me that she has been doing this for twelve years, Monday through Friday most weeks. I ask her how she does this every day, because I cannot imagine that I would be able to return here ever again, least of all make this place into a habit.



 



She shrugs and shakes her head, like she doesn’t know how to answer this. Does it help to not think about what she is saying? I ask. To make herself a little bit numb?



 



“No. Never,” she says. “I will never be indifferent to what I am saying. Not ever.”



 



As for the second photo: this one happened on our way out of the last barracks we visited, the very last stop on the tour. I noticed an etching here scratched into the wall. So high in the sky I almost missed it, all caps, no punctuation, scratched so faintly into the light brick I could only just make it out.



 



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