Fall 2016 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

The past days I have spent falling into the blue vortex. What’s really scary about the internet is that it goes on forever. Websites— urls, bookmarks, forums—are only a method of organization, like chapters in a book or the Dewey decimal system. Scrolls disseminated human knowledge before books were able to organize them more efficiently. The Bible was a series of scrolls, lore and prayers merely, before some monks stitched it all together. If the entire collection of Widener Library was a scroll, I wouldn’t be surprised if it reached the moon. If the internet were a scroll, it would be an infinite expanse. I’ve been consuming news at a faster rate than I have ever before. I can’t stop clicking down my Facebook feed, I’ve started reading Twitter. I can’t sleep, and my wrists frequently itch. I see a conspiracy theory behind every virtual door.



I think this is a kind of coping. Some people listen to music or paint, but I can’t stop behaving like some kind of internet-bot, mindlessly combing through short text and long text and grainy images and sharp images until some kind of reality unfolds in my mind like a ghostly program. The more I fall into the blue, the less real my real memories become—friends, family, childhood begin to feel terrible unhinged. This is ongoing insanity. I cast a message out to the web to attempt some kind of empathy. Someone replies.



Her name is Eleanor, married to a white American, retired mortgage banker, 63 years old, with a daughter, and one grandchild. She was born in South Korea, but moved to Kansas in 1975, where she became a born-again Christian. Eleanor is also an active member in the “Asians for Trump 2016” Facebook group. The first thing she demands of me in our first exchange is to reveal whether I was in the country illegally. I write that my parents, who grew up in families left destitute after China’s civil war, had moved to the US on work visas when I was three years old, and that I became a citizen in 2015. Eleanor warms up after this. She tells me she voted based on Christian reasons, and that she thoroughly aligns with Trump’s nationalism, his stances on sexual identity, immigration, and reproduction. She sends me a laundry list that justifies Trump with selected passages from the Bible. How is it possible for me to refute this distilled core of her very being?



I then write to Eleanor that I am 22 years old, was born in China, and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, not so far from Kansas, and that I was worried about the future. This time, Eleanor does not respond with doubts about my citizenship. She becomes sympathetic. She tells me she had left Korea when she was very close to my age, 21. In her words, she was born Catholic, and even at young age she knew that there was a God, someone, somewhere higher than anybody. She joined the Church of Christ at age 19, but that church felt “empty” to her. One day, she was listening to a Christian broadcast by a Baptist pastor in Georgia. His messages intrigued her, and she started to read the Bible on her own. Her prayers began to be answered during times of personal tribulation. To assuage my worries, she recommends that I attend church and read the Bible, which had given her so much comfort. She writes to me, “God will put you in a position so desperately... so that you’ll get some clarity with what’s troubling you, with Trump’s election—FEAR? Right?”



Eleanor is right. I am afraid. I’m afraid for my friends. I’m afraid for those who are intimately acquainted with hate. I’m afraid of the world. I’m afraid of my ignorance, suddenly sharply afraid of my body, of my face, of my eyes, of my skin, of how easy it is to slip into that endless blue vortex. Is Eleanor a human being that I can feel that through the pop- up window that connected us, or was that a sham littered through platitudes of love and acceptance? I don’t want it to be a sham. I want to believe that a few sentences sent over the internet can bridge a wide chasm of fear. In another world, would I be like Eleanor?



People throw us into a group called the millennials. We are “snowflakes” who are easily offended, “narcissists” obsessed with social media popularity, we are the “participation trophy” generation, constantly seeking gratification and incapable of empathy. The Bible has been replaced by the glass tablets in our hands, the black screen reflected in our eyes.



But it was not the millennials who chose Donald Trump, a man who has used tools of hate to gain his popularity. We feel empathy just as sincerely or hollowly as people always have, but our new world allows us a wider network to share our lives. We feel less antipathy to difference than any previous generation. We are criticized for political correctness, but until very recently in the course of history, women, people of color, and LGBT persons were not citizens with full rights—perhaps our “correctness” is a necessary balm and divergence. Perhaps our neatly tuned emotions allow us to sense something sinister is afoot.



I was brought here as a kid because my parents believed in the American dream. The story that I learned was that America is exceptional because it has been, is, and always will be a nation of immigrants. As a kid I bought the story. I swallowed it. Apprehensions of terrible wrongs were soothed by it. This is the story they told me as I grew up in Nebraska, a state named after the word for “at water” in the Chiwere language. This is the story they told me: African-American and Irish pioneers moved west, followed by Polish immigrants with stockyards, Germans with their breweries, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese rail workers on the Union Pacic, Mormon migrants who never made it to Salt Lake, refugees from Sudan, immigrants building layer upon layer of that great and innite dream. Now, that was only the rst generation, they told me. We weren’t “millennials” back when they told us the story—we were kids. You kids are the future, they said, we love you and have hope in you.



In 2016, 60% of Nebraska voted for a vision of American identity and nationalism that, to my mind, never existed in reality. People like Eleanor, people who were my surrogate grandmothers in childhood, openly admitted that the dream they peddled was a sham, at least in their minds. They loved many of us when we were children, loved us so deeply that they told us stories to calm our nightmares—was that love so hollow that now they see us grief-stricken and frightened, and laugh? Maybe we can reach each other over that great divide. For me, the best thing that can happen now is that the president’s policies will somehow move compromise. The worst thing is that his words will become normal, that his vision will corrupt the American dream into a twisted, shrunken, shattered, demented version of the beautiful dream of my childhood. And then I don’t know if I will be able to believe it. Can you? 

            This past January, I attended a concert at Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church. The audience in the church’s dimly lit basement was tattooed, bedecked in social justice slogans and, like most punk show crowds, predominantly white. Two hours into the show, a local hardcore band with both white and Black members took the stage. As they launched into their blistering set, I followed my instinct and, bobbing to the rhythm, started to work my way forward through the crowd. By the time the band had finished playing their first song, I had made significant progress toward the stage. That’s when the band’s lead singer leaned into the mic and yelled:



            “It’s fuckin’ 2016! BROWN PEOPLE TO THE FRONT!”



            As the drummer counted in the next song of the set, I began to experience a minor identity crisis. I am a person of mixed Jewish and Vietnamese heritage, and my skin is several shades darker than that of the average Anglo-American. Indeed, even during the dimmest days of winter, my complexion never brightens beyond an even tan. But at that moment, I asked myself: am I *brown *or not? And if not, then what was I doing pushing myself towards the front of the crowd? I didn’t know the answer to the first question—or maybe I couldn’t decide—and so I found myself frozen, rooted to my spot, unable to even pogo.



            That confusion—that sense of misplacedness and strangeness in the face of a racial binary—is nothing new in America. Since anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1967, the population of multiracial Americans has grown to represent nearly seven percent of the country. Today, multiracial America is expanding at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population at large.



            The true history of the mixed-race struggle for identity in America, however, goes back for centuries before *Loving v. Virginia*. It’s a fundamental part of our country’s historical confrontation with race. Yet it is often forgotten, something all too evident in the story of one of America’s most obscure communities: the “Melungeons” of Southern Appalachia, mixed-race mountain-dwellers whose encounter with rigid racial norms in the 19th and 20th century led to the near-complete erasure of their multiracial identity. Examining the story of the Melungeons reveals some lessons about the complex nature of race in America—lessons that, ultimately, should serve as a warning to the contemporary activist left as it grapples with race and racism in the 21st century.



 



**The Melungeons**



            First: who are the Melungeons? To answer that question, we must revisit the history of Southern Appalachia. After that region opened to American settlement in the late 18th century, the first pioneers who moved in were poor and peripheral inhabitants of the lowland South, among them mixed-race individuals from eastern Virginia whose “mulatto” status was a source of social stigma in their home region.[[1]](#_ftn1) White Appalachian settlers began to call these mixed-race people “Melungeons,” possibly from the French *mélange*, or mixture. Even in Appalachia, multiracial people often had difficulty fitting in; while unmixed white and Black settlers were known to inhabit the same towns as one another, church records show that Melungeons were sometimes forced out of non-Melungeon communities for their “wickedness.”[[2]](#_ftn2) These ostracized multiracial people came together in settlements of their own, and thus, self-contained Melungeon communities—with a distinct multiracial identity—came into existence in early 19th century Appalachia. In the racially polarized American South, however, this could not last.



            Starting in the mid-19th century, persisting social forces and legal shifts led to the negation of the Melungeons’ mixed-race identity. “Colored” residents of Tennessee were banned from voting in 1834.[[3]](#_ftn3) After eight Melungeon men were sent to court for voting in the federal elections a decade later, their attorney was able to exonerate them by having their “beautiful hands and feet” (evidence, apparently, of a lack of nonwhite ancestry) examined in court.[[4]](#_ftn4) The lesson to be learned from this trial, and from the law that it concerned, was clear. Despite having both “colored” and white origins, Melungeons could legally only be one or the other—and it was better to be white.



            In 1930, mixed-race classifications were struck from the federal census. Instead of being marked down as multiracial or even “mulatto,” individuals with both white and “colored” heritage were now required to register solely as members of their nonwhite ancestry group.[[5]](#_ftn5) Soon after, Virginia Registrar of Vital Statistics Walter Ashby Plecker brought this “one-drop rule” directly to bear on the Melungeons. Plecker was frustrated by the Melungeons’ attempts to list only their white ancestry on the census; he wrote that all the other mixed-race “mongrels” of Virginia were eagerly watching the Melungeons’ efforts to pass as white, “ready to follow in a rush when the first have made a break in the dike.” In 1942 he went through the census records of each county in Virginia and compiled a list of mixed families’ surnames, distributing it to local officials so that all multiracial individuals could be correctly classified as “colored.”[[6]](#_ftn6) In this way, the Melungeons were forcefully relegated to a single racial category, their mixed background expunged from the historical record.



            The greatest distortion of the Melungeons’ identity, however, arose not from external attempts to classify them but from their own desire to classify themselves. Pressured by society to deny their multiracial past, the Melungeons forgot it entirely; from the mid-19th century onwards, they began to ascribe all manner of “pure” ethnic origins to themselves. Most often, Melungeons claimed Mediterranean descent—Portuguese, Turkish, and even ancient Pheonician ancestry.[[7]](#_ftn7) This was a way to account for their non-Anglo appearance while still enjoying the rights afforded to white people. The myth of the Melungeons’ Mediterranean origins became so established that as late as 2005, one author of self-proclaimed Melungeon descent wrote about how centuries of endogamy had preserved in her people “an almost ‘pure’ Mediterranean type, complete with associated genotypic and phenotypic traits.”[[8]](#_ftn8) Only in 2012, after the completion of a genetic study, were the group’s mixed-race origins conclusively proven.[[9]](#_ftn9) Prior to that study’s publication, many modern Melungeon descendants considered rumors of their ancestors’ multiracial pedigree to be simple misinformation.



 



**Racial binaries and the left**



            What, you may ask, does all this Appalachian esoterica have to do with contemporary race issues? I’ll explain. Last May, I helped put on a concert organized by Renegade, a Harvard student organization dedicated to art and advocacy in support of people of color (POCs). The event’s purpose was to showcase the work of POC artists and, accordingly, it featured a number of talented musicians of color from both on and off campus. I have the utmost respect and affection for Renegade. Their formation, two years ago, was an utterly audacious act, and their goals—to empower POC voices, fight race-based oppression, and encourage creativity within the campus community of color—are noble and laudable. The individuals involved in the collective are inspired, welcoming, and “woke.” As for the concert itself, it was, in my opinion, nearly perfect: all the performers sounded great, turnout was solid, and it truly felt as if we had created a positive space for our community.



            Yet in retrospect—and in light of the Melungeons’ story—one aspect of the event now gives me pause. In the lead-up to the concert, some of the other students running the event posted a brief message on its Facebook event page. The post, aimed at white attendees, emphasized that the event was intended for people of color; it mentioned that in the event of a line forming out the door of the venue, POCs would, accordingly, be invited in before white people. At the time, this idea made total sense to me, and when the venue’s authorities ordered us to take down the post, I grumbled along with the rest of my co-organizers.



            After reflecting further upon that incident, however, my opinion has changed. I now firmly believe that such rhetoric is ultimately harmful. Letting in people of color before white individuals, in practice, means classifying all of humanity into two discrete identity groups and then enforcing a hard divide between those two groups. According to the rules of contemporary racial discourse on the left, mixed individuals of partially white descent are considered people of color; if I had been in line for the concert, my Asian heritage would have gotten me inside sooner, despite my half-whiteness.



            This dualistic division between white people and POCs is deeply misleading. As the early Melungeons knew, multiracial people face a lived experience totally distinct from those of unmixed people of all races. I may not be “white” according to the contemporary left’s definition, but by descent I am as white as I am Asian, as Jewish as I am Vietnamese. I have grappled with issues of racial identity my entire life, only fairly recently coming to terms with this duality; I identify with both sides and, just as deeply, as a mixed person. To enforce a binary distinction between the two halves of my ancestry, and place me in a group including only one of them, is to force me to abandon one half of my racial identity and, thus, my mixed-race identity. It also confronts me with difficult, potentially unanswerable questions like the one I encountered at the concert in Philadelphia. If I am partially white, and possess some of that identity’s benefits and privileges as a result, should I have gone to the back of the crowd? Or should I have gone to the middle? Presented with a dual choice between white and “colored,” the Melungeons abandoned their mixed identity and contrived an entirely new one. In my case, I am left feeling confused, out-of-place, and alien.



            I should emphasize that I object neither to the existence of a rhetorical distinction between POCs and white people nor to the inclusion of mixed non-white people in the former category. What worries me, rather, is hard-edged enforcement of this boundary that forces individuals to make a binary choice. In the current political climate, the (non alt-)right is far less likely to employ such a tactic than the activist left; identity policing on the right is likely to be seen as racism, while on the left, it reads as empowerment. To an extent, this seems legitimate to me. If people of color want to create a space solely for themselves, who am I to protest? Then again, if whiteness is not wanted in that space, how should I, a person whose mixed identity contains an immutable component of whiteness, feel about sharing in it? Given the existence of intermediate identities, can exclusionary application of the racial binary ever be justified?



            In summary, it is my belief that the activist left should be mindful of its tendency to actively divide individuals in a way that negates mixed identities. To be sure, the roots of this tendency lie not in the ideology of the left but in the pre-existing racial boundaries that have long upheld white supremacy in America; white supremacists were the first to institute such divisions, and they initially did so from a position of power. In the 21st century, however, as America’s racial binaries are fading away, I urge an understanding of race that better acknowledges the complexity of mixed experience. Otherwise, we risk a revival of the one-drop rule—and is that the conception of race we truly want to uphold?





[[1]](#_ftnref1) Hashaw, Tim. Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2006, p. 27; Ibid., p. 8



[[2]](#_ftnref2) Ibid., pp. 9-10



[[3]](#_ftnref3) Estes, Roberta J., Jack Goins H., Penny Ferguson, and Janet Crain Lewis. "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population." Journal of Genetic Genealogy (2012): 6



[[4]](#_ftnref4) Hashaw, “Perdition,” p. 13



[[5]](#_ftnref5) "1930." US Census Bureau - History. US Census Bureau.



[[6]](#_ftnref6) Plecker, Walker Ashby. Letter to Local Registrars of Virginia. Jan. 1943. Virginia Department of Health, Richmond, Virginia.



[[7]](#_ftnref7) Hashaw, “Perdition,” p. 14



[[8]](#_ftnref8) Hirschman, Elizabeth Caldwell. Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2005, p. 46



[[9]](#_ftnref9) Estes, Goins, Ferguson, and Lewis 2



 

“I’ll go first,” I say.



 



*keesssshhhhh. hhuahhh-pffhhhhh. kfhuohhhh-KSH. *My lungs are painfully turgid with what I have just inhaled but I hold them that way and pass the apparatus to my friend.



 



“I’ll show you what to do,” he says to the girl to his right. He picks up one of the two remaining blue capsules from the little pile – they’re a little bigger than your thumb and coated with blue plastic like a metal M&M. He fits the capsule into what looks like a giant plastic thimble with threading up the inside and screws it onto the corresponding threading on the apparatus: *keessshhhhhh. *The hollow needle on its neck punctures the pressurized capsule, and the gas leaks into the tank. If the thimble wasn’t there to hold it on the capsule would rocket backwards and its contents would spill out into the atmosphere.



 



            “You have to pant a little bit. Take a deep breath and let it out and then take a little bit of a deeper one – stretch your lungs out. Then exhale until they are really, really *really *empty. Then start to press the button – just really, really lightly at first, otherwise it’s going to hit you too hard. Once you feel the gas coming out you can press a bit harder – here, watch.”



 



            *huah-pffhh. huaahh-ppffffhhhhhh. *He seals his lips around the nozzle of the apparatus and depresses the button. *kfffhuoohhh-KSHHH. *He holds it.



 



            Finally: *pffhhhh-huaahh. *“Hold it in as long as you can, then take another breath in–“ *huaahhhh “*–and out–“ *pffhhhh “–*and take the rest.” *kfhuoohh-KSH. pffhhh. *“Here, I’ll load it for you.” He grabs the third capsule and screws it on. *keeshhhHH. *He passes it over.



 



            The girl handles it gingerly. *huaahh-pffhhh, *she breathes, *huaahhh-pffhhhh-huaaaahh. PFFhhhhhh. *Her fingers find the button: *KFHH–*her cheeks puff up and her eyes pop (“Slowly!” says my friend)–*khuoooohh-KSSHHHH. *She holds it, lets it out.



 



            “So how long until we feel it?”



 



*Blue*



 



At some point we realized that what we experienced as three-dimensional depth could be represented in two dimensions. Maybe Brunelleschi did us in the day he saw the reflection of a building in a mirror and took a paintbrush to it, tracing its contours onto the glassy surface and creating the picture plane. Maybe it was the camera obscura. You can try it: build a box and poke a tiny hole, and all of the waves of light will come flying through the hole and continue in a straight line to strike the dark surface of the opposite wall. The outside scene, projected on the inside wall, will be rendered flat, creating the illusion of depth. This is a fake window, like the one through which you momentarily mistake your own reflection for a doppelganger in the next room. 



 



The obscura was the disincarnated absolute eye: cold, hard, objective and predictable. Vision became the experience of taking what is outside (static, deducible and geometric, following the rules of perspective) and bringing it in, projecting it in the dark interior of one’s head. Our eyes became apertures, policing the boundary between inside and out. We forgot our bodies as we looked outside of them with a stilling Medusa gaze. World out there, stay still. I am looking at you.



 



The blue capsule contains the rippling sky and the bubbling asphalt. The sky will wiggle and you will have a sense that there is a ceiling up there – like the edges of the space coded into a computer game, where you bump up against an invisible barrier. It’s not out there doing that – it’s on the back of your eyelids. It’s wiggling at you and saying that it is inside of you. And then you register that there is nothing behind the screen: there may or may not be something out there. The window to the outside does not go outside it just goes into the next room. The building does not have a door. You are in here and you are never leaving. If you feel nauseous, do not be alarmed. This is normal.



 



*Orange*



 



The orange capsule will make you an acolyte of the Church of the First Person Plural. You will become a transparency of yourself and your edges will be permeable and you will not be able to tell your insides from your outsides. The category “you” will no longer really apply. You will become the crowd, and this will not be scary but rather an utter relief. You will not have to police your boundaries. You will not be alone anymore. This is a flash preview of the sweet quiescence of being dead: you won’t have to exert energy to bind the cells of yourself together any longer.



 



A bunch of us take some orange capsules at what sounds like it’s going to be the bacchanalian bash of the year. For nine hours we float in and out of conversation and put our hands on shoulders and move our bodies through the fray. When we close our eyes we see a heat-map of the house – the bodies are a cool blue with a hot orange core. A single tendril of orange stretches out from each one to connect with each other core in the house.



 



*Pink*



 



I’ve never taken a pink capsule but I know someone who has. A little boy from rural Arkansas took a gun to a party. He had too much to drink and he pulled it on another little boy. The other little boy and his brother beat him to within an inch of his life. The other little boy and his brother spent the night in jail. The other little boy and his brother spent their next decade in a fiendish lawsuit that made national headlines and drove their washed up rockstar of a father to bankruptcy.



 



At some point mid-lawsuit the other little boy took a pink capsule with some buds and things changed. At the party where we all took the orange capsules he pulled me aside. “Margot,” he said, “Need to tell you something.” His face was very close to my face and sweating like you do after an orange capsule. “You need to transfer schools and come to my college,” he said, “and we’re going to take your face off your skull and put it on top of my face and then everything’s going to be alright again.”



 



*Green (White)*



 



I used to really like the green capsules, and then I was at a party a few years ago and a friend and I took a green one a piece without realizing someone had left the contents of a white capsule in the apparatus. We felt fine initially – the usual softening and blurring around the edges. We had taken them in the backyard so we went back inside and in a hallway she grabbed my arm and said that wasn’t a green one. I looked at her. I thought about it. I decided to move, to walk. Something was rattling in my chest. And then the white – what I didn’t know what the white one at the time – sunk its teeth in. Screaming: the party was screaming at me. I was feverish and cold and breathing shallow. My first thought was that this was one of those rare capsules that is mislabeled and is actually a goldenrod capsule and if you take a goldenrod capsule you’re fucked for life. If you hold a goldenrod capsule in your lungs for longer than thirty seconds – which I had done – then you’re as good as dead. I felt sweat on my face and began to sprint like I could get away from my own bloodstream. For eighteen  the world slid over me like mint jelly down a white-hot baking sheet.



 



*Gray*



 



If you take a gray capsule with someone you will start to miss them whenever they are not around. You will always want to know where they are. You will make meaningful eye contact across rooms. You will know the timbre of their voice and the particular curve of their posture like the back of your hand. You will settle into their presence like a well-designed armchair.



 



*Yellow*



 



At the party where we took the orange capsules my friend and I encountered the host, an acquaintance of ours. He was standing on the front porch outside of the noise smoking a cigarette. We chatted for a bit and then he asked if he could interest us in a capsule or two. We told him we were already up on the orange ones. He said no matter: yellow and orange can go well together. We raised our eyebrows at each other and agreed, so he took us down to his basement. There were velvet couches in the large, dimly lit space, all in varying states of decay. He lifted a cushion off one of the couches and brought out a wooden cigar box filled with many-colored capsules. He scooped out three lemony pods and tossed them around. 



 



Inside of the little yellow capsule there was a maze I turned right and I ran and then left and then right but all the walls were just cobalt blue everything was the same tone of cobalt blue. I looked up and there was the big orange sun bearing down on the cobalt of these impossibly smooth walls not like glass but like silky cobalt porcelain so impregnated with blue I could hardly breathe for all the blue radiating off into the air I pressed my bare skin against one of them and it was both hot with the sun and cold with the icy milkiness of retained wind.



 



*Lavender*



 



            Somewhere in Ohio there is a room which is absolutely silent. They have figured out how to vacuum out noise. No one has ever lasted more than forty minutes in this room, because your ears adjust to the lack of stimulation and you start to hear your organs doing their work. Your heart is a great bass drum. You can hear your liver; you can hear a blink.



 



This works in reverse as well: we must always maintain the appropriate level of stimulation.  Freud believed that our consciousness was there as a filter, a selectively permeable membrane meant to protect us from the constant bombardment of stimuli. Our consciousness – the original camera obscura – has a little pinprick aperture of focus.



 



I did a lot of lavender capsules last year when I was in a long-distance relationship and feeling down and lonely and was looking for some kind of feeling (any kind of feeling).  They really fill you up with sensory input and last for about thirteen seconds. This is the kind of thing you do alone in your room at five am after you’ve run out of cartoons: a little bit sad, a little bit trashy. The contents of lavender capsules stretch their way through the aperture of your mind like a finger in a too-small ring. At least in my mind – which to be fair, may be defective – this aperture works like muscle fibers. When broken it grows tighter to compensate. Less will get through. Do enough lavenders and you may start to live your life with the volume turned way down.



 



*Goldenrod*



 



If you take a goldenrod capsule you will have to take a goldenrod capsule every hour on the hour for the rest of your life.



 



At 12:30 am every morning they shut down the subway. The transit police have to go down into the bowels of the station and root out everyone squatting down there. Some of the people who don’t have anywhere to go but that station are on the goldenrod capsules. Some of them can’t afford apparatuses anymore and have to puncture the capsule tips with a pen and eject the frigid goldenrod contents straight into their warm lungs. Sometimes by the end of a long day of trains rushing through the station someone has frozen their lungs taking that goldenrod stuff. I’ve seen the transit police carry them out at closing time, sometimes still shaking. I don’t know what they do with the bodies.



 



*Silver*



 



Don’t try this one. It takes you out of circulation. One capsule will render you mute and solitary: you will say things to other people but the words will feel gutted of meaning. For weeks conversations will be hollow. Hello. How are you? I am not so good. Aw, what’s wrong? I feel lonely. I’m sorry; I am here for you; let me know if you need anything. Thank you (I still feel very alone).



 



If words were cups someone has poked holes in all the bottoms and now they won’t really hold water. You will read books and not be able to parse the sentences. You will know what all the words mean but the process of figuring out the precise denotations and connotations based on context will become fraught with self-doubt and understanding a sentence will come to feel like attempting to smash through a marble wall with your soft body alone.



 



If you are feeling especially overwhelmed by the people around you and take two silver capsules in rapid succession you’ll wake up on an island called Asymbolia. It’s a white marble wasteland of plaster white cube-shaped buildings, crumbling victorians, bougainvilleas and cornflower sea. You’ll wake up there entirely alone. It's a snow-globe world, and if you swim far enough in one direction you'll eventually arrive right back at the same shore. When I was on Asymbolia I got the sense that there were other islands out there: I could see hints of land on the horizon. But any attempt to make it there – rafts, boats, what have you – gets turned around without me realizing how.



 



I couldn’t leave so I decided to start trying to understand the island. I did a lot of walking. I tried to make a map and started to wonder how they ever managed map-making before helicopters, before skyscrapers. Envisioning a place from a bird’s-eye view is very hard from the ground: I have to extrapolate from moving through the space how all the streets fit together. My drafts contradict each other and describe what seem to be different islands entirely. I am always finding new pockets of town: new buildings and alleys seem to spring up when I’m not looking, squeezing their way between old haunts. I can’t tell if I just missed them before.



 



There are some entrances to the subway, which is comprised of dripping pink tunnels with no cars. This is the kind of structure a truck-sized worm with a hundred-year lifespan might burrow: the walls are rough, damp, and fleshy, like the inside of a great lung. You can walk miles on the tracks through the twists and turns and when you come to yet another unnamed station and ascend to the surface you find yourself exiting in the same station you first entered.



 



Soon it seems like the thing that would make sense would be to swim out and tread water until you drown. Maybe the rest of the world is at the bottom of the sea.



 



Somehow you always wash up, alive, on the same shore.



 



I don’t know how I did wind up getting out. It was similar to how sometimes you’re in a dream and you’re watching a television show. You’re holding the remote and sitting on a couch and looking at the screen – you’re watching the show’s characters, identifying with the protagonist and feeling all the feelings the show’s writers wanted you to feel. At some point you stop paying attention to your body. Suddenly you have merged into that protagonist and entered the diegetic flow – your body outside of the screen no longer exists. The mise en scene of your dream has entered the television. The room with the couch and the remote no longer exists. The television no longer exists. You’ve identified with the protagonist so thoroughly that the show itself has become your dream-reality.



 



I guess I was watching a television program on Asymbolia about the mainland and wound up getting sucked in without noticing. Now I can speak again, but the island is still out there somewhere. I am terrified that one day Asymbolia will take me back for keeps. All of the televisions will be gone and I will walk down empty streets which loop back on themselves until I collapse on the pavement. I am still not sure whether I am really back on the mainland or just on the inside of an Asymbolia TV with a bunch of facsimiles of the people I used to know.



 



*Black*



 



 Hours later at the same party where we took the orange capsules my good friend pulled me aside.



 



“Did you see what he had in that cigar box?” he asked.



 



“No.” I said.



 



“He had like eight black capsules.” I’d never done a black capsule but knew they were really hard to get.



 



“What do they do exactly?” I asked.



 



“I’ve never tried one,” he said. “But apparently you completely dissociate. Like total ecstasy. Ego dissolution. Doesn’t last more than thirty seconds.” His eyes were glowing. I looked at him hard.



 



“We know where the box is,” I said.



 



We went to the basement and we found the cigar box. My friend took two and put them in his pocket. “Let’s not do them here,” he said.



 



We took them back to my place and waited for the orange ones to wear off. It was four or five am. He reached into his pocket and opened his palm to reveal the two shiny black ones. He screwed one into my apparatus. *keeeeesssshh. *We looked at it.



 



“I’ll go first,” I said. *huah-pfhh. huaaah-pffhhhh. huuahhhhhh-PFhhhhhhhhh. kfhuOOOOHH-kshHH. *I closed my eyes and held it in. *pfffhhhhh. *



 



It came on immediately. The beating of my heart moved in a large spiral around me. The large spiral of the beating of my heart moved around and around it, fragmenting outward. The fragments branched into further fragments second by second, and each second frayed so that I could pick it up like a large piece of diamond and hold it and peer through it. Peering through it there was a vibrating in my chest that wound around and around the helix of the spiral of my beating heart and I thought *everything is moving around everything else*, and then the train of that thought began to spiral around the vibrating winding around the helix and so on. My noticing the train winding around the vibrating caused the spiral-on-spiral of the train, the vibrating, the helix, the spiral, the beating heart to fracture into infinite spirals which inhabited each fraying branch of the seconds as they continued to fray. I thought I would never get out. Time would pull up to the station and it would be the last stop. The train reached its terminus. There was a vibrating in my chest. The multiplicity of gem-like seconds fell and shattered on the floor. My heart beat backwards. I opened my eyes.



 



My friend was looking at me. My eyes were wide. The room was warm and I was not the only one in it. I wanted to tell him about the seconds and my heart and the train, but the words slipped through my fingers like oil. “That was a big one,” I said instead, handing him the apparatus and settling back into the couch. He smiled and raised his eyebrows just so and I knew he knew just what I had meant.



 

You are new to Georgetown when you arrive the first week of June. All you see are rainbows—flags of them, banners, geotags, advertisements, merchandise. Restaurants and clothing stores covered in streamers fluttering heavily in the thick humid air. It’s kind of South, you think, but Georgetown is so beautiful. Your mother had said, “Don’t walk alone here, people will wonder what you’re doing in this place.” She has already trained you to make a habit out of being very good. She thought it would protect your body from all the people who wanted to break it. But here in Georgetown, flags waving, colors streaming, you explore sidewalks in the daytime, awe-filled and fearless.



The museum you work at is only a few minutes away from your apartment. All the walking reminds you of Cambridge, blessed Cambridge, your real home; all the walking makes you feel good, like you can breathe again after the monotony of sleeping, eating, and staying awake. Long Island’s suburbs are wooded, bleak, and empty. When you step outside there is silence. When you sit inside you turn on the TV and leave it going for hours, even when you’ve gone downstairs, even when you’ve gone to bed. Only nature, disordered, suffocating the skies, motivates you to sometimes bask in the quiet.



The museum is surrounded by gardens. Google Maps doesn’t recognize any of them so they are unnavigable on the first and second tries. Your boss gives you a tour one evening after work, pointing at fountains and identifying trees as you lag behind, swatting at mosquitoes. He says, “The founder modeled this one after Eastern spirituality, all the rage at the time,” and you remember all the teenage Buddhists you fell in love with in high school. When he starts moving again you pause in the center, sigh inwardly and swear that someday you will marry someone interested in landscaping these kinds of things in white-fenced backyards. On your way home in the afternoons you see millennials jogging, parents walking children back from school. Whenever you pass people pushing baby strollers you conjure up a family here in D.C., with all its rainbow madness, and picture your rearranged future.



The citizens around are almost always neighbors, because the apartment building is about ten minutes away from 32nd Street. You love the apartment, its coziness, the biggest bed you’ve ever slept in alone. You like the ease but also the independence, and the proximity of the streets. They can be yours—as you take photos of decorations on shop windows, tripping over tourists and beggars and large groups of people—*this can be your city.*



But your streets black out beneath you in the nighttime, heading back to the apartment alone or on a muggy morning through an isolated walkway. Here in Georgetown proper, *Blue Neighbourhood *on repeat in your ears, the streets tell you to be scared of ghosts: men lurking on sidewalks darkened by trees, hiding behind bushes, smoking on their front steps. The streets tell you not to scare the woman walking her dog at nine p.m., because you are black in this background, so black and so frightening, all 5’5 of you wheezing uphill in Old Navy shorts and a three-dollar tank top. The revelations come in pieces, visions on your way to work in the morning: there are no black hands unlocking these doors, no black children skipping past the gardens, no black women taking their toddlers into the Dumbarton Park. On a daytrip to Howard the campus shows off its mecca of dark-skinned, thick-limbed girls and you want to sigh with all of them, bring them back to Georgetown, condemn the R street suffering together.



Thewaterfront is where you feel okay staring shamelessly in a way you have not since childhood. It is a boring place, full of wooden bridges and ducks in waves and festive people drinking coolers on speedboats. You lean longingly over the edge of the deck, imagining the kissing, drunken motions, *Oh Wonder* and *The 1975* floating softly above the Potomac. Someday when you are rich enough to live in Georgetown you will take your family to eat seafood here and your children will play in the fountains. Someday the streets will not run so old under your feet, and the heat will feel like home, and your partner will fold their fingers into yours on the way, the softness of their smooth palm colliding with your aged, weather-beaten life lines. You will make space for them on the sidewalk, as you make space for all the upper class people of Georgetown with nothing to do in the heavy heat of summer. You will make yourself smaller so that you do not frighten the women by accidentally brushing against their shoulders, or stumbling beside them, or turning their way. Close your eyes and face another direction.



Mother’s sights are set on the boroughs. She calls from the Bronx and it’s almost like 9/11 in real time, a natural disaster you can actually remember, when she says, “Hillary Clinton paves the way for you.” You get goosebumps washing lettuce in the kitchen. Over the sink you tear up for your fourteen-year old self who somehow found meaning in the state of New York and slowly, desperately, wanted to be President.



“But will they like you?” somebody had asked you, and still today you’re not sure what that means.



The wonderful people working with you are well-liked and they are all from other states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas. They don’t care about Long Island. They coax you in front of laptops and squish together with you on tiny couches and lead you on the rocky trail towards the beautiful parts of the gardens. Your foreignness isn’t hefty all the time. The sun goes down but 30th rustles life, sound of cars about to crash, and your hands, cupping aimlessly at fireflies on the window screen, bleeding all the world’s ambitions down against the waving branches.



Here slammed into fact [you are too new here] and history [they say you built Washington underground], you visit museums with the wonderful people and everything you know and love becomes invisible. You become invisible when you can’t find your stories in captions, when your face is rubbed out of black and white photographs. At the museum you fall centuries behind, nauseated by the sight of the original American flag and the thought of taking your children to see it. Over the weekend one person murders forty-nine people and your mother on the phone says, “Nobody ever *really* accepts the deviants.” You are tolerated by Abraham Lincoln on his throne, casting shadows on the lawn, and by the soldiers who keep giving themselves; you trace plaques and think, *For what? *any time the cameras flash. You are tolerated by the people of Georgetown, glancing up for proof of your existence with their bare eyes, afraid to touch with their bare hands. A homeless black man shouts, “Hey gorgeous, hey gorgeous,” and you remember standing in front of the mirror in the museum bathroom, witness to your own emasculation, hating the flimsy nature of bodies. M Street sneaks through you. M Street calls you Little Girl and Woman all at the same time. M Street violates you. Swallows your spouse whole in its cobblestones.



In the gardens, dry-eyed among the gods and the angels, you get tired so fast worrying about being broke and unloved. There are fancy grownups drinking wine out of plastic cups, elegant ladies sitting on the grass against their husbands, bees swarming the flowers behind them. Evening sets. You go back to good friends, food in the apartment, love on the opposite side of the coast. Mother calls, says, “Find a Catholic church.” She wouldn’t understand why you take photos of political posters on Sunday mornings, tiptoeing alongside the highway underneath the pride flags fluttering over the Hilton hotel. June is coming to an end and you are waiting for everyone to shatter; you snap a picture of hydrangeas tumbling over a gate top and learn that this house costs six million dollars. *Will I, *you wonder, *at this moment, get arrested for Possession of Otherworldly Image?*



At the station a black woman is crying, weave in a bandana, makeup smearing. Rare on this block, new in this city, which is old as the world. You do not want to be her but you do not know what to think of your hair, hidden beneath smoldering twists, or your naked cheeks and forehead, charcoaling by the minute. She can’t see your eyes through your very tinted glasses. Instead of watching her you swivel to stare up at a statue of Gandhi: “I’ve been to India,” you’d joked. “Where’s the geotag for the Embassy?”



But again, within the Circle, you shove in your earphones, blast *The Life of Pablo, *and remember the museum fences glinting under the sunlight. The wonderful people like listening to pop. The wonderful people sit beside you in an Uber as you discuss Chance the Rapper with the black driver who talks too much. He brings up gentrification, as the two of you exist only incidentally in this country, reminded to make space for other people—rich lives, blue lives, all lives. He mentions Freddie Gray, as your bodies are so prone to breakage.



“Yes,” you respond. A fact of life, this unfortunate condition.



Another fact: the death.



When Alton Sterling is killed and you can’t bear to look at the monuments any longer, bleeding for “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW,” bleeding for your unborn sons and daughters who will be black because of you, Georgetown keeps on shining in the morning. Black nannies fixing pigtails on the sidewalk. Black security guards staring at you when you walk into stores. Black women huddled in corners, distraught like the crying woman in DuPont Circle, begging bare-backed on the street. Your masculinity is a kind that still leaves you enchained and so you no longer know how to cry when you need to. The tears fail to come a thousand times, reading Huffington Post at work, taking snap chats of the Library of Congress. They shoot Philando Castile the next day. It is a Thursday. You worry that someday God will give you a son.



Once you step out onto 30th you are back in Georgetown and making everyone uncomfortable with your quiet grief. Illegal, even when you’re not on these streets. Painfully new, again.

*God is a set*



*of certain values.*



*He is the values*



*and they are him.*



 



We are one



and the same.



He, if he punctures



my face with leathery



 



hands. Me, when I slam



through the glass



library door, and puncture



my mouth with a cigarette.



 



I become the library but it



is not me. I am not yet defined.



Define is a proposition. I swear



I couldn’t read until the tenth



 



grade, and not because



I was locked away,



but because of my occupation



pouring concrete or playing



 



basketball. *The set must*



*follow a rule. The*



*predicate and the subject*



*must be in an order.*



* *



*The Bad Man is just*



*God with an empty set.*



*He is not God, and God*



*is not him, but God is*



* *



*that set of values that will*



*get lost the next time you*



*misplace it or forget*



*to pass it on to your children.*



* *



*The Bad Man becomes*



*the hereditary trait and mixes*



*with God’s set. Soon, there*



*is no set or no God, but only*



* *



*empty. They become each*



*other, and the doors, and my*



*father. The bad man is God*



*if his set were empty.* I become



 



my body, the communion,



you, take it as the sacrifice.



I am the bad man, and he



is I, but we are not one.



 



He, if he takes



his leathery hands



and slams them through



me, even though I know



 



they are my hands too,



and even if I shout, father,



I am me. *God cannot*



*shout this, he is one*



* *



*with his set. So his*



*shout is the same*



*as his words and his father*



*and his hands are not*



* *



*leathery, because he is perfect,*



*or at the very least*



*he is constrained to be.*



Unlike me, he is



 



the boundary and his



very own set, and he



doesn’t need to shout,



*Father, why have you*



* *



*got hands that are so*



*leathery when you haven’t*



*once left the office, other*



*than to drive home too*



* *



*fast and drink a little*



*too much and touch your*



*hand to my face, too fast*



*for affection, with your hands that you*



* *



*haven’t ever washed or knelt*



*down to take communion*



*the right way, like me,*



*without belief in God,*



* *



*Father, I am you*



*and me but I am only*



*me, the bad man.* He is God. 



He is an empty set.

*For LR*



 



At first



I saw just one light



crisp blue



 



line, nearly



skylike, there, high above



the rest



 



of the stone,



unkept, a bright slice



of the



 



fine mosaic



sets, unstressed. I reached out:



*Hey, look*



* *



*up, excuse me*



*there, look up.*



 



She looked



like an exceptional criminal,



or a cranial



 



angel, or



like something of a lazy



hunter with



 



eyes unmet.



Faintly, she ground her



shoulders



 



down one



by one, falling taut: *Look*



*up, please,*



* *



*this is a very rare*



*picture of the earth.*



 



Then, I saw so



many more, as if the blue slice



said, ‘at once



 



go’ or, ‘time



for vespers,’ and all of the shy



lines, the shier



 



colors, burst



forth and up, untaming, a light



and limited



 



take off not



to space of course but to the very top



and back:* Look*



* *



*up, my sister,*



*look up, my sister.*



 



Suddenly I saw



that all of the lines were gone, even the sky-



like first lit



 



slice, gone, swift



as a storm’s turn, and in the dark



she looked



 



just like the



poet, but so much stonier than



stone, a wax-



 



ing statue for



all beautiful men and stone, so I looked



up: *Silhouette,*



* *



*linger me dimly,*



*then extinguish.*

September, 1945

Mr. Sohn, a slender, ginger-breathy old man who lived on the next block, said they were here to take Korea away from us. He died within the first month.

A squat yellow bungalow trimmed neatly in white, with twin wooden planters that had never been filled by anything but tidy beds of gravel—this was the church where Rick and I first met as kids. Inside, a wide-open room, empty until we set up ten rows of metal folding chairs before each service, empty after we stacked the chairs in two teetering columns off to the side. Near the windows, the table set with plates of cookies and lemonade for after the service.