January 27, 2022 First Person Crush By Kathryn Davis Still from The Seventh Seal courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream, and as a disc set. We’re in a room on the ground floor of a hotel, the bed facing a wall of curtained windows that in turn faces the street. It is nighttime. Rain is coming down, steadily, reflectively, a stream of passersby visible through the curtains, which are sheer. Everyone is moving in the same direction, bent slightly forward and holding an umbrella, from left to right, the good direction, from past to future, the opposite of where Death leads the knight and the squire and the monk and the smith and the mute in their final dance against the backdrop of time in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The umbrella is the canopy of the heavens; the rain is never going to let up. We can see the passersby but they can’t see us, though Eric has turned a light on above his side of the bed. Read More
January 19, 2022 First Person Teonanácatl By Alejandro Zambra Illustrations by George Wylesol. Teonanácatl. That’s what the Aztecs used to call the mushroom known today as pajarito, or “little bird.” My friend Emilio recommended it as a treatment for my cluster headaches, and he got me a generous dose in chocolate form. I stashed the squares in the fridge and awaited the first symptoms with resignation, though I sometimes fantasized that the mere presence of the drug would keep the headaches at bay. Sadly, soon enough I felt one coming on, and it was the very day we had planned a first-aid course. My wife Jazmina and I had just had a child, and after attending a clumsy, tedious introduction to first aid, we’d decided to call in a doctor, and ended up inviting other first-time parents to an exhaustive four-hour program that would take place at the house next door. But in the very early dawn of the designated day, I woke up with that intense pain in the trigeminal nerve that for me is the unequivocal sign of an imminent headache. My wife proposed that I forget about the course and stay home to take pajarito. Read More
November 17, 2021 First Person My Father’s Mariannes By Aisha Sabatini Sloan Lester Sloan in Paris. Photo: Aisha Sabatini Sloan My father is lingering a bit too long on the subway platform. The doors of the train are about to close when I grab him by the lapels and pull him onboard. I must be shouting, “Dad, come on,” because when the doors slam shut my ears are ringing with the sound of my own voice, and everyone on the train is staring at us. I feel flush with shame. We ride in silence. I’d surprised my father with two tickets to Paris, a chance for him to be a stylish photographer in his favorite city again. To put on a new suit and tie and retell his favorite stories. To hit the streets after a good rain, when the cobblestones refract the light like so many scattered gems. But he is in his late seventies. He walks more slowly now, has trouble remembering the last time he took his insulin. His arthritis has made it harder for him to negotiate the f-stops on his camera. I become the parent on the trip, and my concern becomes monotonous: Dad, watch out, you’re going to bump into someone. Dad, don’t follow her down the alley, that’s stalking. Dad, don’t put that glucose strip on the table. So far our days have been beset by unexpected detours. My father wanted to stand in the middle of Hotel de Ville and reminisce about the summer we spent there watching the World Cup on a giant screen in an enormous crowd. He wanted to echo the sound of a passing siren by shouting “Tambourine, tambourine” into the wind. I trailed behind him as he followed a woman with his camera because she was wearing red shoes, and, Oh look, that looks so good against the graffiti. Read More
November 9, 2021 First Person Divorce Does Funny Things By Tabitha Lasley Benjamin Shaw, Aberdeen Quayside, 2003, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The man I was meeting worked on the Brent Field. He was a kind of Typhoid Mary, having worked on the site of several accidents, always escaping unscathed. He was staying in a large, anonymous hotel behind Holburn Junction. The lobby was a columnar space several floors high. Its windows were covered in a kind of mesh, which muted the daylight and cast everything in a cool, neutral gloom. I took a booth, upholstered the same indeterminate shade, and waited for him to appear. There was some splashy abstract art on the walls, and a long, curved reception desk at the back of the room. People were moving about in the shadowy recess behind it, like stagehands in the wings of a theater. No one showed any inclination to come out. Read More
October 6, 2021 First Person The Happiest Place on Earth? By Albert Samaha Tuxyso, Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland Anaheim, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons. My formative understanding of world events had two acts: the ancient history conveyed in the Bible and the modern arc approximated at Disneyland, which opened in Southern California in 1955, four and a half decades before my first visit. I was ten. My mom and I took a 4:30 A.M. Greyhound bus from Sacramento for the fifteen-hour ride through the Central Valley, past fruit fields, oil rigs, and speed traps, around the Grapevine Hills, and into Anaheim. My mom slept or prayed the rosary most of the way, while I reviewed the two-day game plan I’d drawn up on a piece of binder paper, which I kept in my pocket, folded four times over for protection. Read More
September 28, 2021 First Person Three Letters for beyond the Walls By Caio Fernando Abreu Caio Fernando Abreu. Photo courtesy of Adriana Franciosi. First Letter for beyond the Walls Something happened to me. Something so strange that I still haven’t figured out a way to talk about it clearly. When I finally know what it was, this strange thing, I will also know the way. Then I’ll be clear, I promise. For you, for myself. As I’ve always meant to be. But for now, please try to understand what I’m trying to say. It is with significant effort that I write you. And that’s not just a literary way of saying that writing means stirring the depths—like Clarice, like Pessoa. In Carson McCullers it hurt physically, in a body made of flesh and veins and muscle. For it is in my body that writing hurts me now. In these two hands you cannot see on the keyboard, with their swollen veins, wounded, bursting, with wires and plastic tubes attached to needles inserted into veins inside which flow liquids they say will save me. Read More