Ficciones

The Sleep Architect..............................................

In the first moments of the grayish morning, Lolo Lefkowitz knows that the architecture of his sleep has been gravely altered. Children spend the substance of their formative years decoding the details of reality and refining a sense of control over the world. Lolo, from his birth to his twenty-fifth birthday, has never stopped. He has made an unbending effort to hone this skill into a precise science. Lolo was never able to escape the primordial allure that experience is not the sum of random incidents, but elements of a system brought together by the grace of design. It is his dogma; one that forced him to replace the preferred theology of religion with logic. A crude replacement, he was to learn, that merely imposes a numerical equation on the duties of faith.

The previous night had been Lolo’s first acquaintance with a normal eight-hour sleep pattern. It was his only night away from his childhood bedroom and the distressed yellow pullout sofa-bed he had inherited from his father’s smoking den. It was that same morning Lolo was obliged to accept that randomness is not diametrically opposed to order.

His attic bedroom was directly above his parents. For the entirety of his twenty-five years, Lolo had tread lightly with uneasy steps. Despite three layers of carpeting and other assorted soundproofing measures, he always felt conscious that his parents could hear the creak of his every footstep. Adolescence disagreed with him on the whole; it was unsatisfying to the extent it always felt incomplete and void of substance. He was bothered by inconsistencies in personalities, unseasonable weather patterns, even a plastic bag that refused to dislodge itself from a tree despite the willful urgings of the wind. Lolo still craved what all children desire -- a comprehensive understanding of reality.

Lolo has never been able to maintain a respectable grasp of his internal chronology. His compulsion for logical consistency coupled with a conspicuously offset circadian rhythm has resulted in severe sleep dysfunctions. Up until the night before, his sleep disorders had effectively distanced Lolo from the full workings of reality. From the redundancy of being born on Christmas to missing an acceptance on the Dartmouth admissions grid by a single question on the SAT, Lolo has been plagued by lost details. Consequently, his entire existence has been blemished by a muted shade of unreality and ill-timed unravelings.

All normal organisms adjust their internal timing from an instinctual twenty-five hour schedule to a twenty-four hour rhythm to match the pace of the solar day. Lolo’s rigid rhythms were unable to make the necessary adjustments to the twenty-four hour day. The consequences of a vestigial sixty minutes have been indelible, staining nearly every crevice of his biology and altering his most basic biological processes. The proper movements of sleeping, waking, and dreaming never made their presence wholly known to Lolo until that fateful morning his circadian rhythm was jostled into alignment.

***

At twenty-five he strived for a moderate lifestyle, but missed the essence of the concept. Lolo worked under the premise that moderation was somehow a balance of existing equally between both extremes. After waking in the early afternoon, Lolo would begin his morning routine with yoga sun salutation asanas. Then, he would dress in a form-fitting chocolate and tan sweat suit and jog nearly six kilometers along a not particularly scenic route. He would stop at the Plantation Coffee Shop to purchase an obnoxiously large latte and smoke a series of slim joints in the neighboring parking lot. He would then walk across the street to the fast food establishment and order a bacon double burger, super-sized fries, and a small diet soda. While his parents did not quite understand his routine, they were understandably excited to see their son fully dressed and doing something.

The Lefkowitzs had always longed for a normal circadian rhythm for their son, going as far as to envy other parents for their childrens’ intrinsic attachment to the shifts and disruptions of temperature and light.

“Very late to be waking, no Leon?” His father asked in a husky Polish cadence. Lolo paused at the front door and adjusted his socks to fit snugly along the meat of his calves. He tied his laces with a double knot. Later he would be amazed at his own futility when the sneakers would unlace themselves near the chain video store built nearly three years ago, but still registered as ‘new’ to Lolo. He reached for the knob, paused, and answered in a slow drawl atypical for Binghamton, “It is rather late, isn’t it Pop?”
“Where are you going? Running to this coffee place of yours?” his mother inquired in a similar accent, only slightly more refined and reminiscent of the sing-songy tone Europeans use when speaking English with a level of command.
“Yes Mother, just like every morning.” Lolo shrugged.
“Only my son calls one in afternoon - the morning,” she says with her back to him.
“Still smoking cigarettes? A good Polish boy -- eh?” His father interjected.
“Later Pops.” The Lefkowitzs had made it clear to Lolo that he was capable of more than the routine into which his life had fallen. It was not that Lolo disagreed with his parents’ assessment, it was that there was nothing he felt accountable for. Parents, Lolo understood, have an overwhelming genetic claim in their children’s welfare that is destined to suffer a series of disappointments. Children, Lolo reasoned, have no corresponding duty to their parents.

Each Wednesday and Friday while he jogged, he anticipated an encounter with Arlette. He knew her name only from her name tag. She was a forbiddingly cute barista that worked the coffee machine with an intimacy that captivated Lolo. He liked Arlette for her aloofness and her disinterest in others; it was sign a of honesty that transcended the vacancy of niceties. Unlike Arlette, Lolo had never been able to treat strangers and acquaintances with the presumption of doubt that they deserved.

He was severely attracted when she asked, “Low fat or whole?” with a slight, involuntary sneer as she stared off over his shoulder. He was not the least bit put off by her giving ‘his’ coffee to another customer and responding, “Oh, I forgot” without even the faintest glimmer of sincerity. He did not mind her impractical loyalty to tank tops in the central New York winter, a thinly-veiled effort to brandish her tribal tattoo that gripped the thin circumference of her left tricep before it snaked around to the base of her elbow. A sigh teamed with an exasperated, “What did you want again?” was enough to drive him into a fervor. He was content merely watching her move in her barista grace; to get another showing of Arlette in her coffee dance was not only acceptable, it was encouraged.

He studied her as she moved: twice, she tapped the coffee dispenser with the thump of her two longest fingers filling the metal basket at the end of the espresso holder. With a nimble force reminiscent of a well executed tennis forehand, she jammed it into the entrance station, and curved it hard into a soft arc toward the locked position. She ignited the water pressure with the firm push of a button. While most push buttons feebly, taking for granted a machine’s sensitivity, Lolo noticed that Arlette pushed buttons with all her weight and intensity. She triggered buttons mistrustingly with definitive movement, expecting -- almost daring the machine not to heed her command.

With the nonchalance of a woman that has lifted milk at every conceivable weight, she swept the unsuspecting gallon off the counter and poured into the squared stainless steel pitcher, and filled it with the white glue-like consistency that milk takes on when poured from a height. Lolo’s excitement climaxed when Arlette pierced the steam nozzle into the pitcher and circulated it with a movement so slight as to foam the milk without bruising it. When it got sufficiently hot, she tilted the pitcher sieved by a spoon that protected the foam and filled the mug with steamed milk. Quickly, this was followed by an insistent dump of espresso. Finally her long, thin fingers would deftly spoon the remaining foam on top of the spun coffee, only to conceal her labored creation with a white plastic cap. His only complaint was that she was often premature steaming the milk, preventing his drink from reaching its optimal temperature.

He never expected their first encounter to unfold as it did that same afternoon his father wondered aloud if he had awoken too late. She called after him in the parking lot and saw him smoking his grass. “I felt weird asking inside, but can I get a pull off that?” she asked. “Hey, I’m Arlette,” she said, still half exhaling the smoke.
“I’m Lolo.”
“Why Lolo?” She smiled.
“Because Leonard became Leon, then Lolo.” As she passed the joint from her fingertips to his, he snuck a caress from off the tops of her fingers and disguised them as customary to the pass. She noticed and said nothing. They passed a few moments sharing the joint in silence and Lolo began to think. She’ll find it odd if you keep silent. Say something to her, anything. Don’t let her think she’s got you intimidated. If she’s the least bit cool, a silence can be profound. It creates an unspoken intimacy, I like that. She’s not real talkative either; I always had her pinned as the rather serious type. Not so much prudish, but reserved. She won’t laugh at corny jokes, just for the sake of laughing to break a silence. It would take something legitimately funny to make her laugh.

“Lolo, that’s a funny name,” She said giggling. Say something ambiguous enough so that it sounds cool, but without really revealing anything. “Yeah, it has its advantages,” he replied. Not bad, not bad. She was wearing an amber ring of no particular distinction. Lolo reached in and lifted her hand to get a better look at the ring. “Is this amber?” he asked. “It’s really nice.”
“Thanks, I got it in California.” She didn’t seem to mind when I pulled her hand toward me. If she had, she’d have pulled it away. Ask her for a drink. Don’t mess this up. Be breezy, but stay natural. ‘What are you doing later? Do you want to have dinner -- maybe a drink? I won’t take no for an answer.’ Or maybe the more sensitive approach? ‘Hey, I was wondering maybe, if you weren’t doing anything later…’
“Hey Lolo, thanks for the smoke, but I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Yeah – sure - later.” It’s probably better this way.

***

His parents never doubted the severity of their child’s unnatural patterns of sleep. Initially, they blamed themselves. “If you had not insisted on naming the boy something so bohemian like ‘Lolo,’ he would not be compelled to act as odd as his name,” Jadwiga stated matter of factly.
“His name is Leonard.”
“Stop being silly Tomasz. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now the child truly is ‘American.’ Are you proud?”

His off-kilter circadian rhythms had not merely disrupted his sleep cycles, they had made it difficult for him to distinguish between his self-image and the image that his peers had constructed of him. Psychologists theorize that human intelligence began with the ability to delay immediate gratification for greater future rewards. Lolo had come to believe that self-consciousness, or the ability to distinguish your perception of yourself from others’ perception of you, is what accounts for the mild genetic differentiation between humans and chimpanzees. A less clumsy distinction, Lolo believed, was necessary to maintain the proper ambiguity when generalizing about the tendencies of humanity.

The possibility of his perceptions conflicting with what other people thought undermined any sense of objectivity, and accordingly the order he so desperately desired. He was unsure if it was the hazy sense of unreality that somnolence carried with it, or if it was simply a manifestation of his compulsion to isolate the different foods on his plate, but Lolo found the sound of worlds colliding often louder than their formation. He was forced to spend the better part of his adolescence on taxonomy, arranging the spheres of his life in precise, compartmentalized containers. Lolo was always careful never to blend them. Each one neatly labeled and segregated appropriately: Family; School Friends; Girls; Camp Friends; etc. It was not his preference to live in the dark matter between human interactions, in fact Lolo considered himself quite sociable. His distance was a design of necessity.

***

In the fall of his thirteenth year, the same year his parents had sent him away to a summer camp for athletic children, Lolo was forced to feel the impact of his first collision. He was not surprised by the agility of the other boys who were physically superior, or by his ability to separate himself from the mediocre boys who suffered from being neither good nor bad. What awed Lolo was the amplification of weight and gravity that sports radiated when girls were watching. The Darwinian parallel between chest pounding apes jockeying for status to court females and making a slick floater in the lane to impress Bunk Six had never touched him so plainly before. He was not particularly graceful, but skillfully adept at converting broken plays and missteps into wonderful, circus-like acts of calculation. Lolo came to understand that it is not the unfolding of the act that is important, but how it is remembered.

He loved camp, and not merely for its leisurely solace, but for its organized leisurely solace. He was enamored with the simplicity of routine: Flag Raising; Breakfast; Bunk Inspection; Morning Activity; Lunch; Boating or Swimming; Sports; Free Time; Arts and Crafts; Dinner; Evening Activity; Canteen; After-Hours Raids. Everyday was fundamentally the same, but the details varied greatly. Without knowing what every single person was doing, it was nevertheless possible for Lolo to know something about how the camp as a whole behaved. It refined and encouraged Lolo’s desire for order and calibration. Years later Lolo would look at his camp experience as a medication for his sleep dysfunctions, fending off apathy with structure and routine.

Everything was permitted to be ritualized: amusement park field trips, camp outs, and even sexual play. To this day Lolo credits that graceful floater in a crowded lane to the sudden interest of Leyla Sandusky later that night at evening activity. They had a normal and even somewhat routine romance that followed the established summer camp practices of rarely interacting during daylight hours aside from whimsical dining hall glances, and late night precocious sexual play. Sneaking out of his bunk, traversing nearly two kilometers to the girl’s side, and into the wood cabins toward the proper bed in a room scattered with sleeping girls and frilly sheets was both pronounced and elaborated, but never obstructed by the accommodating counselors who, like disinterested parents, neither facilitated nor hindered the ritual. The process offered him the comfort and legitimacy of normalcy that came so easy for the other children. For the first time he was not reprimanded for his sleeping habits, but encouraged and even praised (yes, even praised) for lurking around after all the campers had fallen asleep, but before the counselors had returned drunk from the woods sluggish, smelling like sex and cheap beer. During the days no one questioned his lethargy, or asked why he could not clearly distinguish between the dream world and the responsibilities of waking life. Camp life thoroughly agreed with him.

Lolo’s trouble with Sandusky (the campers and staff were exclusively referred to by nickname or last name) only arose in the denouement of August when she graciously pronounced, “We don’t have to say goodbye Lo! You know I live in Endicott. I can’t wait to visit your house.”
He dreaded the possibility of such a tryst, or worse yet, a formalized encounter. It was not the instability of her hair color, her tendency to speak in greeting cards, or even her inability to etch herself into his memory that offended him. He was repulsed by the prospect of observing the careful image he had constructed of his home life collide with the reality of Sandusky touching and smelling his actual home. Lolo was not concerned about how Sandusky and him would interact outside of camp, as much as he anticipated the interaction between her and anyone he knew, but who had not known one another.

Lolo looked on helplessly as Leyla and his mother conversed, each one quietly assessing the other. He watched them judging one another in the living room while sharing assorted nuts, tortured by their unwarranted conclusions and generalizations. Without him as an intermediary, Lolo was certain they would misinterpret each other without the full context that only he could offer. He imagined his mother confusing Leyla’s moronic bubbliness of being the product of “such a nice and happy girl,” or Leyla mistaking his mother’s foreign accent and mannerisms as a sign of simpleness. He felt a responsibility to defend both of them, and that a judgment on their virtues and shortcomings was a judgment on him. He did not want either of them invading or dismantling the reality he had laboriously constructed. Their interaction tainted his exacting sketches of reality, bringing into question any opportunity for order or even a fleeting sense of objectivity.

Lolo suspected that his father suffered from a similar ailment. After reminiscing on his cold-war childhood in Poland with both affection and disdain, his father would unfailingly offer a long audible sigh followed by a well known Polish proverb that served more as a caveat than a life lesson: “Nostalgia nie jest jak wiele uczucie dla historii jak jest opłakujący zgubę okresu dojrzewania.” (“Nostalgia is not as much the romanticizing of history as it is grieving the loss of adolescence.) Lolo wondered if his father was alluding to the preferences of memory, or if he was again insinuating that Lolo was “squandering his youth.” Either way, Lolo understood it was nostalgia for a reality that had never fully introduced itself to him.

***

A few months before his parking lot encounter with Arlette, Lolo had begun spending three nights a week at the Bartle Library at the State College on the midnight to 7:00 am shift, technically as the Night Circulation Supervisor although there was no one to supervise. The schedule allowed him to sleep from 9:00 am until 1:00 pm, traditionally his strongest hours of sleep. His nights working primarily consisted of flipping through periodicals, reading through books and copying out sentences of interest, searching for the resident cat Percival, and returning misplaced books. After a few months working, he nurtured a great affinity for the Dewey Decimal Classification system and its noble goal of imposing order on chaos.
Many nights surrounded by books and numbers Lolo would create parallel hierarchical systems arranging emotions, moments, and even individuals from the general to the specific. Arlette was a 523.74: 500 = Women; 520 = Beautiful; 523 = Aloof Sensuality; 523.7 = Mediterranean Features; 523.74: Presumptive Intimacy. His fascination with mathematical mysticism was encouraged by his readings of the Osiris Cults who based the construction of the Pyramids according to an intuitive understanding of Pi, the Pythagorean school that was as much a religion as a study of mathematics, and the Kabbalists that believed they could channel God through numbers. Lolo had never done better than a C in Math throughout high school and junior college; an irony, that he would freely acknowledge, that was not lost upon him.

It was the nights he was not working that troubled him. The average person spends about twenty-five years of his life sleeping, at his current rate Lolo would be lucky to reach fifteen. He was unsure of how his sleep debt was accumulating since he began work at the library. He thought the contrary seemed true. According to his alarm clock Lolo was sleeping for more consistent hours than he had ever before. He also noticed that he could no longer remember the detailed blueprints of his dreams, aside from a faint recurring one about the banality of writing.
His dream recall had been completely lost, ending a practice he had loyally followed since childhood. He would recount tales of the fantastic to his parents at meals, assembling an orderly account of his dreams, shading in the necessary details he could not recount with the proper depth in order to organize the commotion of dreams. Six months into his librarian job the integrity of Lolo’s sleep had completely dissolved into unworkable limits.

***

Since he was born Lolo’s sleep dysfunctions have naturally transformed, and revealed themselves to him differently over time. As a toddler, Lolo was unable to satisfy the requisite twelve hour sleep cycle required for children his age. Due to his inability to adapt to set times for sleeping and waking, he would remain awake for days; manically finger-painting geometric hopscotch patterns and mathematical sequences on the kitchen tile as his parents slept. Eventually, he would collapse and over-compensate with a prolonged hibernation period that once extended to nearly fifty-six hours, causing him to miss the largest snowstorm of the decade.

As Lolo reached adolescence his difficulties with sleep and order persisted, but grew more acute and subtle. His circadian rhythm developed into a less erratic system, yet profoundly more disturbing. Lolo’s desired sleep time was delayed precisely sixty minutes each evening, which carried over into a sixty-minute delay of his desired waking time in the morning. Lolo spent much of his adolescence in a constant search to retrieve his “missing hour” by running up downward moving escalators, asking the bus driver to drive to school in reverse, and excitedly changing clocks throughout the house to the previous hour without telling his parents.
Recently, Lolo’s disorder again transformed itself. The mind treats waking, sleeping, and dreaming as distinct. For Lolo the ususally rigid mental states are seperated by imperfect, sometimes porous boundaries that results in waking, sleeping, and dreaming overlapping and even bleeding into one another. He had always wondered if his seamless access to altered states had made him susceptible to odd synchronicities and the manner in which waking and dreaming are enmeshed.

Fifty-three minutes after falling asleep, Lolo would prop himself up against the back cushion of the sofa part of the bed, pull the blanket up to his waist, and reach down in the narrow alley between the sofa and the wall. He would retreive a black leather bound journal with an attached pen that his Uncle Stefano had bought for him on his trip to The Tatras. For roughly three hours nightly, Lolo proceeded to draft an elegantly composed novel in the economic prose of Hemingway.

When he awoke, he would have no recollection of it or the contents of his novel. Lolo would never remember that the dream world was more vivid than the waking one or how naturally he was able to navigate it. In the margins between dreaming and waking Lolo was unhinged by endless possibilites, dreaming yet able to exert some measure of his own will, weaving new landscapes and personalities into the fabric of a reality that he had constructed. Lolo would never know that he was happiest when he was sleep writing.

***

Arlette wanted to name the novel “something postmodern like The Consequences of an American Diaspora or A Casualty of the Gaze.” Lolo figured that he should at least entertain her ideas for the title; after all, it was technically Arlette that ‘discovered’ the novel in the Christopher Columbus sense of the word. They had started dating seriously rather quickly since their encounter in the parking lot; an inertia that progressed at speeds beyond Lolo’s better judgment. He did not feel powerless to stop the forces set in motion, but he was unsure if that was what he wanted.

It had been this way since their first date at Tony’s. “Lolo, do you find me attractive?” she asked while breaking off a piece of garlic bread and dipping it in the residue of the marinara sauce on Lolo’s plate. Okay, that’s a real softball question. “Yeah, I think you’re… you know… beautiful.”
“Do you want to fuck me?” Oh God, loaded question feels like such a understatement right now. Who says something like that? Don’t answer yes, she’ll think you’re a meathead who just wants to sleep with her. Not that she’d be entirely wrong. Don’t answer no, she’ll pin you for a wuss, which she’s probably done already. Say something funny, change the subject, anything. “You mean right now?”

Despite having her own apartment not more than half a mile away with an absentee roommate, Arlette made herself quite comfortable in Lolo’s household. She began immediately by referring to his parents by their first names; a feat of such boldness that Lolo had fully expected his mother to remove her immediately from the property in a slew of Polish curses that would transcend the language barrier. To his amazement, his parents were not merely comfortable with Arlette’s presumptuousness; they seemed to revel in her unapologetic demeanor and her air of instantaneous intimacy. Never before had Lolo seen two worlds overlap so fluidly.
His mother took an instant liking to Arlette despite her obvious “goyishness,” and began teaching her to roll potato piroshkis and dessert blintzes on Wednesday evenings. “Jadwiga, why are you wasting time with the potatoes? Show her the meat piroshkis.”
“Tomasz, she is a vegetable-a-tarian.”
“Well, actually I eat fish and seafood occasionally. Just not red meat. Mainly for political reasons, but its also just healthier.”
“Ahh! This is why you are so skinny. I used to wait four hours in line just to buy half kilogram of meat. Also for political reasons.”
“Tomasz -- please.” Although he remained skeptical about her vegetarian tendencies and the confrontational size of her tattoo, within a few weeks of the expedited romance Tomasz remarked to his son, “Lolo, do not scare this one away. She is sweet and she has a fire to her.”

***

Arlette was graduating from State College in May, and was a devout advocate for the majority of eastern philosophies and medicines. Lolo had told her about his sleep disorders on their second date, and she has been on a mission to cure his ailments ever since. Her most recent fascination with feng shui was a method in which Lolo had little faith. “Okay Lolo, we’re going to have to do a few things to the get the energy flowing around your bedroom. We have to clean this place up, shed some of these carpets, and get rid of all this ungodly clutter and electronic equipment. Electronics are a no no, they’re known to disrupt sleep cycles.”
“Don’t touch the stereo Arlette.”
“Okay Lo, what about tossing that map? It takes up half the wall.”
“The map stays too,” he said firmly. It was a yellowing wall-sized map titled The Dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire since 1683 rendered nearly illegible through a tangle of weather charts and illustrated tide and wind stream patterns. It had been a gift from his grandmother who had passed in her sleep the morning of his sixth birthday. Lolo’s only remaining memories of her are the evenings that he meticulously watched her bloated, parchment-like fingers as they played hours of backgammon. If he was distracted for a moment, without fail she would sneak pieces over a few spaces and pretend to be deaf when Lolo would confront her.
“Okay we’ll worry about the clutter later. We need more yin flowing; maybe some more blues and greens can lighten the place up. An easy thing we can do is move your sofa or futon around, or whatever you call that thing.”
“It’s a sofa-bed.”
“The bed should never be lined up with a door so that your feet are facing it when you sleep. It symbolizes death.”
“What?”
“Can’t you just grab the other arm and help me move this thing? It’s a lot heavier than it looks,” she said, struggling to pull it from the wall. It disturbed Lolo to watch her struggle with anything.
“Lolo!” His father yelled from the living room. “Lolo! What are you doing, playing musical chairs?”
“We’re moving stuff,” he yelled back down the stairs.
“It’s heavy because there’s a bed inside, a sofa-bed.” Lolo grabbed the other end to help Arlette, fully intending to move it back to its original position as soon as she left. As they both lifted the sofa forward, a black leather journal wedged between the wall and the bed revealed itself and lay innocently on the floor. “What’s this Lo -- I didn’t know you kept a diary?”
“Neither did I.” It was not until the following afternoon that Lolo realized that Arlette had not only excavated a fully composed novel from beneath the sofa-bed, but the secret hiding place of his dreams.

***

The most amazing part of the novel was its cohesiveness. There were no side annotations on theme and tone, character scribblings, or even the faintest sketch of chronology anywhere in the journal. The dating of the novel seemed intentionally vague, but could probably be placed somewhere between the fifties and the seventies in the south of France. It was told in the first person and was assembled through the overlap of unsolicited encounters and romanticized landscapes.

On the shores of the la Cote d’Azur, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, I was staying at a rose-shingled villa. It’s barely noon and I’m starting to feel tight off my third drink. I can tell it’s going to be the kind of afternoon that Marcus will pay a visit, and will want nothing more than to impress me with the details of his life. I realize now that this is the very basis of my love for Marge. She is the only woman I know that is as charming drunk as when she is sober.

As a self proclaimed adversary of anything French, Lolo was scornful of the French backdrop of much of the narrative. He blamed his parents for successfully indoctrinating him with flowery Francophile rhetoric.

Always I had Marge. I assured Mother that had I never known anyone so proper, so thoroughly stunning as Marge was in the early morning hours of the masquerade ball. It was same night that JT Pickering and his lady friend from Lyons fell asleep on the deck of his sailing yacht without securing it to the dock.

After his initial reading of the novel, Lolo was devastated. The first thing that grabbed him about his work was the remarkable use of punctuation and correctly spelled words, a feat he was not capable of in his waking life. Mainly, he thought it was trash. “Why would anyone be interested in the rantings of a disgruntled ex-patriot who discovers that the actual Riviera does not coincide with his idealized vision of it?”

Three years earlier, a similar woman roomed next to me in a repugnant villa on a Greek Island whose name I cannot recall, but it smelled like Ocean Perch. She was a scrunchy-faced girl raised at the poker table. She walked the island each afternoon in sandals too large for her feet. I have not forgiven her for the grating flip-flopping sound that trailed her wherever she went. That same summer she drowned from a 40-foot cliff dive after misinterpreting the tide.

Arlette showed the manuscript to an English professor of hers, who thought of an agent friend of his that may be inclined to work with it, who shopped it to a few interested publishing houses, creating a bidding war that would eventually earn Lolo a minor literary status and a relatively large sum of money in the span of a few months.

I spent the afternoon on the beach, drinking tart Cuban drinks and eating shellfish. Marcus had finished playing tennis and insisted on making pleasantries despite my disinterest. He mentions Judith. I was beginning a new glass of gin when Marcus ordered the garlic potatoes and a pitcher of sangria. I cannot help despising him for saying her name when he knows how it tortures me.

His father was dumbfounded by the entire phenomenon. “Only in America, can a boy do nothing and still make money.” His mother was unaffected by the experience, outside of not being able to understand why his sudden good fortune would prompt her son to move out. It was not the prospect of an income above minimum wage that induced Lolo to move out of his parents’ house; it was Arlette’s subtle coaxing that eventually convinced him that “at some point everyone has to leave the nest.”

***

Immediately as he awakes in the new apartment overlooking Binghamton’s modest-sized red light district, Lolo glances at the alarm clock in disbelief. Unusually refreshed after sleeping a full eight-hour block, he frantically rushes to the drawer imbedded into the frame of the bed. He runs his hands anxiously across its base fondling spare sheets and towels, searching for the black leather journal and pen he had deliberately inserted the night before. Checking each page again and again, Lolo searches for anything, a few notes, even a doodle, only to discover the journal untouched.

Arlette had foreseen the possibility that Lolo may not be able to re-create his sleep-writing behavior in a new environment, but she had not verbalized it. She reasoned fears only transform into reality when acknowledged aloud.

Solemnly laying in their new bed, half-naked and half-covered in a flat white sheet, she gazes intently at him grasping his journal. Captivated by his eyes vibrant with a lucidity that she has never seen in him before, Arlette understands that this is the first morning that Lolo has ever been fully awake, and that they will never again sleep together in the same apartment.

Traveling .................................................................................................................................................

Refereeing a pickup basketball game is an art form like any other, one that Jookie is exceptionally suited for. “Traveling! Traveling!” he pronounced vigorously, clenching his fists and rolling his forearms over one another in a disco-style motion. “Come on Jookie man, I get my two steps! Where my two steps at Jook?!” He grabbed the ball from the offender who stood a solid foot taller, and with a misplaced confidence that assured him the color of authority, he gripped the ball with his left hand, snapped his right arm erect, pointed his finger toward the far basket, and blew his whistle hard. With his black and white polyester shirt form fitting and cleanly pressed, he declared, “Skins basketball! Play on!”

Jack Mann has worked the street courts since he was sixteen, and has refereed pickup and organized games under the Jookie moniker for even longer. His career began somewhat officially in the second grade at Our Lady of Faith and Earnestness Preparatory School for Boys during physical education when Father McReynolds - who later declined into a rabid atheism due to the Boston Red Sox’s biblical World Series failures –stepped out for a cigarette during kickball one afternoon and designated Jookie as “the ref pro tempore.” In class he was rather dull and was once accused by a particularly surly nun of infecting the children with his malaise. But with a whistle hanging from his neck, Jookie was vibrant and deft in his movements: strictly enforcing the no pegging rule with a do-over, ordering the pitches with even the slightest of spin to be re-rolled, and preventing the impatient from leading off before the ball was kicked.

It was not the power that intoxicated him, but the boldness of the structure. A referee is not subject to the momentum of the game, nor does he draft the rules; the referee sustains logic, balancing chaos within the organization of principles. His passion for the craft began soon after the absurd death of his elderly parents, who did not survive the eighty-six foot drop from atop the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island. The farcical nature of the event never completely abandoned him.

On a whim, he took a long weekend licensing course at the Five Star Basketball Referee Camp in Monticello. It was there that his professors introduced Jookie to the spirituality of rules. As the memory of his parents accentuated the absurd, the High School Basketball Rulebook and Guidelines to Officiating offered him the elegance of design. It was not the actual rules that resonated with him so profoundly, but the exception to the rule, or the exception to the exception. He admired the minor distinction between a player’s grace flouting the laws of gravity and a traveling violation. He was fascinated by luck and those with a talent for fortuity. Watching a ball bounce off a point guard’s foot and roll through the defender’s legs into the hands of a wide open center under the basket who slammed the ball home, made Jookie question the makeup of chance. Perhaps the untended consequences of formulated plays were not arbitrary, but some form of accidental sagacity that escaped him.

Nearly a decade after the death of his parents, Jookie still lives in the same gabled attic bedroom in The Bayside Manor for Assisted Living and Mature Adults that he shared with his geriatric parents. The room remains in its identical state, regally decorated with Persian rugs, assorted antique bric-a-brac, and Victorian furniture that impose a certain amount of gravity onto the room. It is the largest room at the Bayside Manor and aside from Matteo, none of the other residents has braved the extra flight of steep, narrow stairs that lead into Jookie’s room. He insisted on keeping everything from the monogrammed Limoge china to the burgundy Louis XV Provençal chaise lounge immaculate and orderly. He sleeps in his deceased parents’ canopy bed, on a king size mattress nestled in a mahogany frame ornately crafted to resemble a sailing ship. On warm nights he falls asleep to the whoosh of cars passing on the street below. Late at night when the traffic moves fluidly, the flow of passing cars is indistinguishable from the sound of breaking waves.

After his parents died, Matteo, the owner-slash-manager of the Bayside Manor, let Jookie stay on in exchange for certain duties and upkeep. Jookie liked Matteo enough, but was always skeptical of Matteo’s ambiguous eye color that moved freely between blue and green. His movements were so exaggerated, and intonations so punchy that Matteo exists as if being filmed. He spoke perfect English in a Puerto Rican accent to Jookie, but when conversing with the eclectic mix of immigrant residents that stayed at the Bayside Manor, his articulation decomposed into fractured sentences of broken English. He would tell Jookie, “Remember, lock the front gate and courtyard before sleeping.” When Mi-Hoh, the resident Chinese gardener who shared a 300 square foot room with his twin sister Mi-Heh, was asked to perform the same function the order was translated into “lock door – before sleep.” To which Mi-Hoh replied, “Yes sir, Mr. Matteo, right away sir. Would you like me to lock the courtyard as well?”
“Yes, lock-garden.”
“Matteo, you realize Mi-Hoh used to be a Physics professor in China,” Jookie would remind him.
“Hey puto, he also sleeps in the same bed as his sister, your point is what?”

In addition to the occasional cooking and upkeep of the Queens brownstone, Jookie was asked to run the bank during Monopoly night, officiate over the Sunday afternoon bocce ball tournament, and to deal out the weekly poker game in Mr. Mandelbaum’s suite.
“Jack, my friend, tell me again, who is stronger the flush or the straight?” Asked Mr. Mandelbaum.
“The flush.”
“Yes, of course, the flush. Otherwise, you’d always be full of shit. How can one forget such a thing?” Konrad Adenauer Mandelbaum is the only person who calls him Jack. Outside of his duties as Entertainment Coordinator, Jookie’s most intimate responsibility is the many tasks that consists of caring for Mr. Mandelbaum’s morning routine.

“Jack buddy, get this bedpan out of here, I can smell my own stink.” Nothing disgusted Jookie more than quickly walking a bedpan swirling with feces and urine to the toilet. He made the mistake of wearing sandals only once, and never entered Mr. Mandelbaum’s quarters without gloves.
“Give me a sec over here, can’t you see I’m switching tanks. I got you some of that fresh oxygen you like.”
“Oxygen is good, Nitrous is better. Do you me a favor and unplug that thing. It’ll be better for the both of us. I get to dance with the ex-wives in heaven, and you’ll have one less old schlump to bother with. Deal?”
"No deal. Why do you feel the need to bust my balls this early in the morning?”
“Who’s busting balls? I’m only massaging, a mild rubbing at best. Be a good kid and get me my hand towel. I’m schvitzing over here.”
“You’re always sweating Mr. Mandelbaum. That’s what you do, sweat, shit, and bitch.”
“I’m Austrian, we’re hot-blooded.” Mr. Mandelbaum ran a steady temperature of 99.9 degrees Fahrenheit at all times and had been slated to pass away “in a matter of weeks” for the last three years. To his dismay and with the aid of numerous machines, implanted technological devices, and a robust regime of pharmaceuticals, he survives rather remarkably with a high running temperature that simultaneously fends off infection and renders him just ill enough to teeter on the cusp of death. He has spent his last remaining years bed-ridden at the Bayside Manor watching daytime television and reading assorted newspapers and periodicals. “Just take your meds so I can be out of here,” Jookie said impatiently. Slipping a pill into the back of his throat and forcing it down without water, Mr. Mandelbaum replies half swallowing, “Enough of this white man’s medicine already.”

In his spare time, Jookie picked up a few functional hobbies. He spent afternoons liberating plastic bags captured by the menacing branches of city trees. He manufactured a retractable device from a series of plastic broomstick handles and a metal coat hangar that was surprisingly effective in extending, snaring, and then dislodging the filthy bags from their captors. He also assisted Matteo in treating his mild hoarding issues, by gently coaxing his boss to remove a few pieces of mail a week from his junk mail collection that over time has consumed the entire office closet from floor to ceiling.

To only see oneself is a form of blindness. Jookie recognized it in others with contempt, but would never concede it was his most profane vanity. After spending much of his adolescence in the attic, he began harboring an irrational disgust of old people sneezing or coughing. Lying in bed, he cringed beneath the sheets at the symphony of illness hacking and moaning through the thin walls. Fearful they would infect him with the disease of aging, he would shirk from the slightest cough or exit the room if he sensed an ensuing sneeze from any of his geriatric housemates. Much to Mr. Mandelbaum’s amusement, Jookie never ate the cooking at home and avoided the common bathrooms. To reach his bathroom in the attic, he would travel through two lounges, a cafeteria, and two flights of stairs merely to satisfy an ambivalent need to urinate that may or may not have fully ripened. “Do you pee sitting down too?” Mr. Mandelbaum felt obligated to inquire.

Most things were biding time in between opportunities to referee, and all other games were practice in anticipation for the Saturday night doubleheader at the St. Anthony’s Midnight Basketball League. At fifteen dollars a game, refereeing did not cover his grocery bills, but it allowed him the luxury to rightfully claim to be a professional referee.

The midnight league drew the best players from around the city, and after a brief transitory period they learned to respect Jookie as a “for real” referee. He never bought into the conventional wisdom that the best referee is the one you don’t notice. Initially and rightfully so, the players were confused at the level of ardor he brought to the game, and his willingness to call the most obscure of fouls not recognized by amateur athletes. No street-baller had ever been called for an illegal use of the hands before, or had an idea what combination of subtle factors constituted an illegal defense. Soon word got around that Jookie was a “no joke ref,” and that he called a game rigidly, but consistently. Some players knew him from pickup games around the city and even preferred him to what Jookie called “the other hacks that didn’t possess the nuance to distinguish between a pushing and a blocking foul.”

Jookie was never comfortable telling people that he was professionally schooled as a basketball referee. Despite his formal training, he considered himself self-taught. They may have taught him the rules, but Jookie claimed, “No one can teach you passion.” He was convinced that he reffed “on a more philosophical level” and “on instinct with an inherent feeling for the flow of the game.”

During the second game that began after 2:00 am, he noticed a mild decline in the geometry of his craft. He did not favor the Austin Street Crew initially, but late in the game he caught himself unconsciously leaning ambiguous calls in their favor. Jookie knew a few of the Austin Crew guys from the neighborhood, but he held no particular affinity for any of them. He may have admired the natural fluidity of their game, the intimacy of their teamwork, and even their adherence to the rules. To qualify, Jookie never made any obvious bad calls that decisively altered the outcome of the game, but merely called a few extraneous touch fouls on the opposing team, or perhaps leaned toward the Austin Street Crew in a vague out of bounds ball. While not guilty of fixing the game, Jookie realized he had shifted the momentum and exposed himself to the ethical missteps that he prided himself in avoiding through structure and discipline. He allowed himself to wonder briefly if he had always been susceptible to the same transgression or if he only recently entered the realm of moral misconduct that all referees dread.

His initial reaction was to try to brush the incident aside and convince himself that he was just tired, or that it may not have even happened. Skilled in the repression of unpleasant facts, Jookie has been working with a damaged sense of truth since his adolescence in the attic. He had come to believe that problems are not solved, but left behind. In his defense, most people don’t require truth as much as a corroboration of reality.

Jookie was not friendly with everyone at the Manor, but with Mr. Mandelbaum he was fluent in idle chit-chat and able to talk for hours about nothing of substance. After some mild prodding, Jookie began to confide in the old man that both repulsed and intrigued him. There is something cathartic about confiding in a dying man who knows nothing about your life outside of what he is told.

The next morning, he brought the paper into Mr. Mandelbaum’s room and was welcomed with a “What, no coffee?” Mandelbaum read the newspaper from back to front like the Talmud and felt a greater empathy for international affairs than for the local news. “Look at this in the Sahara, they say by 2060 North Africa will be all desert.”
“I thought it was already a desert,” Jookie asked.
“It’s like a desert in here, I’m sweating in places I didn’t know I had.”
“I’ll get you the hand towel,” Jookie responded lethargically.
“Jack, what’s wrong with you this morning? You stay up late coaching the delinquents again? Me, I’m in bed by nine, still I wake up cranky.”
“They’re not delinquents. And I was refereeing, not coaching. Shit, do you listen to anything I say?” Jookie said growing impatient.
“Always so serious Jackie boy, if I taught you anything it’s that solemness is a false virtue.”
“Easy to say for a dying man.”
“And I’d be dead already too, if you’d unplug all this nonsense.” Mr. Mandelbaum retorted.
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
“Listen. Last night at the game, I sort of let it slip. I let my objectivity fade and I made some loose calls for a team of guys I kind of know from around the way. I mean I actually cheated and I’m not really sure why.”
“Because you could, that’s why,” Mr. Mandelbaum interjected.
“I guess… It just felt right, bending the rules just far enough so no one would notice,” Jookie thought aloud.
“Who cares about a bunch of punks playing games past their bedtime?”
“Obviously not you,” Jookie noted peeling of his gloves as he prepared to leave the room. “I take refereeing very seriously. Can’t you respect that?” He asked framed in the doorway.
“Look at me Jack. Look at me attached to these machines buzzing and humming. The only thing I take seriously anymore is irony.” Jookie remained silent for a few awkward moments and closed the door behind him.

It was not the first time that he dabbled in the moral gray area. When he first started out, Jookie would referee pickup basketball games in the projects that people should not do, and much to the amusement of the players and onlookers he was not afraid to cold deck a player who got up in his face. On one occasion after clocking an undersized small forward in the jaw for pushing him into the fence, a melee broke out on the court that erupted into a gunfight where a twelve-year old girl was shot dead. That was last game he worked in Brooklyn.

There was also the occasion when he was asked to clean out Sylvia Neto’s room after she fell down the stairs in the middle of the night and died in a pile in the foyer. In gathering her personal effects he discovered and quickly pocketed $978 in single dollar bills from her underwear drawer, proceeds from her bridge and pinochle swindling in the Queens geriatric community. Similarly, he had always suspected Matteo of running some sort of scam at the Bayside Manor that he was unknowingly complicit in, and had always harbored some vague guilt about it. This time was different. He felt no guilt for his refereeing indiscretion, but guilt for not feeling guilt.

On his way out, Jookie stopped in Matteo’s office, who was looking busy at his desk shuffling papers. “Mi amigo, just the man I was looking for,” Matteo said as Jookie opened the door without knocking. “Make yourself useful cabron, run to Movie City for me and grab a video for movie night.”
“I thought movie night wasn’t until tomorrow?”
“Now its tonight, and don’t bring me anything about dying or with subtitles again, it gets the chochos depressed. Think happy. A romantic comedy or some sappy shit like that.” Matteo remarked still scribbling at his desk.
“I thought you liked the last one, it was Spanish you know.”
“And I’m Puerto Rican, your point is what?” Pulling his glasses up and over his brow revealing a greenish iris for the day, Matteo asked, “How is Mandelbaum holding up?”
“All right, I think. He’s getting crabbier though, he keeps asking me to pull the plug.”
“You would do the same if you had to spend the rest of your life in bed,” Matteo said.
“It doesn’t sound all that bad to me.”
“Don’t be a wiseass.” Matteo placed his glasses on the table slowly, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and creased the skin between his eyebrows in an expression that telegraphed a serious statement was about to ensue. “Look Jookie, the doctor says he doesn’t have much time left.”
“They’ve been saying that since he moved in three years ago,” Jookie reminded him.
“It’s for real this time Jook. Be good to him, he needs you,” Matteo said putting his glasses back on and going back to his paper shuffling. Jookie stood there in silence, staring. “Leave already,” Matteo said without looking up. Jookie rolled his eyes, opened Matteo’s junk mail closet, grabbed his plastic bag snaring tool and a sizeable pile of outdated supermarket circulars, and ran out. “Hey, where you going with my mail? I need those. Pendejo!”

Jookie walked a few blocks until he saw a taupe colored shopping bag, the most common of tree bags, dangling from a lamppost by a single handle. He tossed Matteo’s junk mail in the trash and stretched out the device to its full fifteen-foot reach on the sidewalk and attached the curved hangar to the top. Supporting the butt with one hand and gripping the wobbly contraption with the other, he easily snared the bag, dirty with soot and smog. Still holding the bag-snagger vertical, he caught sight of a pair of sneakers across the street splayed out over an electrical cable. Jookie waited for a green light and crossed the street with the bag-snagger fully extended. In his periphery, he caught sight of a decent ball game starting to brew on the Forest Hills Courts. He finagled the late model Air Force One sneakers from the wire, threw them over his shoulder and headed toward the game.

He did not like refereeing without his uniform and whistle, but they also created additional liabilities in a street game. Before he could recognize any of the players, one recognized him. “Ah man! Not that kid, I’m trying to ball over here, not win no sportsmanship merit badge.” His name was Gregory Anthony Karp, but he went by his graffiti tag of GAK. Jookie remembered him from last night’s midnight league game; he had called a particularly egregious traveling violation against him late in the second half. “Look at this kid with his sloppy hair and raggedy-ass tennis shoes.” Jookie was used to being razzed by players before, but hostility was not something to be taken lightly. As a matter of course, he found staying quiet and handling himself professionally was the best response to aggression.

Jookie sat down by the fence and laced up the well-aged Air Force Ones, which fit snugly around the ankle but were still tolerable. “What you putting on those dogged out kicks for? We ain’t in no gym, no need for a ref out here son,” GAK taunted. The mob separated out into two teams, and began to take warm up shots at their respective baskets. Jookie made his way out toward center court, feeling out the assorted balls, looking for the one with cleanest bounce and about eight pounds of pressure. He usually had an air gauge, but today he dropped the balls from eye level and chose the one that bounced back evenly to his waist. He allowed the players ten minutes for warm-up, before calling over both team captains for tip off. “Look, I want a clean game with no bullshit,” Jookie stated in his customary boxing referee tone. “Oh, call me Mr. Clean bitch!” GAK warned. Jookie waited for the players to gather themselves before he yelled “Game on!” and tossed the ball high and vertical between GAK and the opposing center. Moments before the ball left Jookie’s hand, GAK soared over his opponent, slipped his entire palm beneath the ball, and flung it to his point guard. Jookie noticed the foul instantly and instinctively reached for his phantom whistle. As he realized he had no whistle, the game was already in full swing and GAK’s team had set up their half-court offense. For the first time in his career Jookie decided to not make a call based solely on intimidation. “It’s just not worth it,” he rationalized.

The skill level of the players was tolerable, although like most pickup games, there were more indulgent displays of individual talent than any signs of cohesive teamwork. The game proceeded without much fanfare, he called a few hacking calls that did not elicit any protests beyond the ordinary whining. Jookie was not as concerned with the game as he was with his ability to referee objectively and hold onto the semblance of an orderly world. He desperately wanted to prove with each game he worked that the structure of order, which had initially seduced him to refereeing, was more important than luck or emotion. It had to be, otherwise what was the point?

He refereed much of the game in a philosophical haze, and only started paying attention again when it was nearly over. GAK was posting up near the basket on a smaller defender and inadvertently shuffled his pivot foot. It was the same traveling violation that Jookie called on him about twelve hours ago in the midnight league. He did not want to call the foul and deal with the inevitable confrontation. “If I don’t call it, then what am I even doing here,” he thought. On reflex he shouted, “Traveling! Traveling!” from across the court, quickly rolling his arms over one another. “What the fuck!” GAK exclaimed slamming the ball hard against the blacktop, launching it into the air, over the fence, and down into the crevice where the curb meets the gutter. “You didn’t just call that bullshit on me! Oh no, you-did-not.” GAK shot Jookie a hard glare, and walked quickly toward his gear behind the basket. Jookie saw him shuffling through his gym bag wildly, tossing through his clothes, and intently looking for something. Without hesitation, Jookie took off at full speed and started to run home. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw GAK posturing in the gated entrance to the court, brandishing some sort of weapon in his right hand, while yelling indecipherable taunts at him.

Jookie never broke stride the entire sprint home and panted on the stoop for a couple of minutes before entering the Bayside Manor. “Hola amigo! You look terrible, what crappy video have you brought me today?”
“Leave me alone Matteo, I didn’t bring home a fucking video all right,” he said as he began the long ascent into the attic.
“Gracias maricon!” Matteo shouted as Jookie stumbled up the stairs. After almost crawling up the final set of rickety, narrow stairs into his bedroom, Jookie slammed the door shut and set to fix himself a cup of tea. He undressed slowly as the water boiled, closed the shutters, and lightly sugared the bottom of Limoge teacup before pouring a steaming cup of chamomile. He settled into the chaise lounge with a slim joint and a cup of tea. He blamed himself for falsely believing that dogma is susceptible to common sense and then passed out with his tea still warm.

Jookie awoke in the middle of the night to a cacophony of moans and hacking coughs creeping up from the floors below. He winced in recognition of Mandelbaum’s watery chest cough that wheezed for a long second before it faded into a light whistle. His afternoon nap that lasted into the early hours of the morning infected him with a pseudo-jet lag disorientation. The sound of Mandelbaum’s wheeze and whistle grew progressively louder, and Jookie thought he could feel the warmth of Mandelbaum’s diseased breath surrounding him. He peeled his face off a small pool of warm drawl, crawled out of the chaise lounge, and put on an over-sized terry cloth robe with matching slippers. He opened the shutters and the window to let in the sounds of the street, but the cadence of the wheeze and whistle become unbearable.

Lethargically, he unlocked the door and began the long descent downstairs. The wooden staircase seemed to give more than usual under his feet and he could hear every squeak and crackle of the wood clearly pronounced. He walked down the second staircase and followed the lingering trail of the wheeze and whistle into Mandelbaum’s room. Jookie opened the door and was not surprised to find Mandelbaum wide-awake and sweating profusely. Neither of them spoke. The sound of the machines humming merged with the rhythm of the wet cough. They exchanged glances quickly before Mandelbaum turned his head to face the wall. Jookie stood over the end his bed, silently staring. He walked toward the machines and the knotted wires and cords entangled around one another. Methodically, he pulled each plug from the wall, one at time, until the only sound that remained was the wheeze and whistle. Jookie gently placed his hand into Mandelbaum’s sweaty palm, and could feel the gentle squeeze of recognition. He waited there until the wheeze and whistle gradually dissolved into a gentle hum, and then into silence.

the morning lena discovered color.......................

Many years later, as she faced the altar on her wedding day, Lena was to remember that pale morning when her father took her to discover color. He led a languid Lena - who had yet to fully awaken - by the hand to a small creek on the outskirts of town. In his pronounced and calculated manner, he unsheathed a quartz prism from a tainted handkerchief and angled it toward the tops of the rigid chestnut trees to capture the white light for his daughter.

As her husband revealed the glimmer of the wedding band, Lena recalled the wonder that consumed her little body upon seeing the pallid light pierce the quartz and dissolve into seven distinct colors ranging from the fantastic to the mundane. She remembered the granular texture of the tree stump coarsely brushing the underside of her legs and the distinct sound of each color as if it were humming the tune of its respective wavelength. But it was with the utmost lucidity that Lena relived the frustration and sudden distrust of her body that enraptured her as her father explained in a voice of unassuming gravity that he usually reserved for diagnosing his patients, “Lena, our eyes are blind to the full spectrum of color all color possibilities.”

Lena wept profoundly. On the most basic level of human understanding transcending the limits of her toddler-hood, her kindergarten consciousness disrobed and compacted a rainbow into a mere fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum of light. The idea of not being allowed to see every color seemed absurd, like a librarian barred from reading all the books in the library. As the doctor brushed the moist, limp blond hair from his daughter’s face, she imagined all the spectacular colors that she was forbidden to see swirling around her head in an dance of shadows and light. The sound of his daughter’s sobs upset the ophthalmologist, the resonance of which had always scratched upon his soul. In a futile attempt to console Lena, he impassively promised “whatever colors you have in your mind, I will paint them for you.”

The remnants of that day lingered with Lena throughout her childhood to the day of her wedding; a day on which she wept for many reasons, not all of which she could explain with logic. She was wept some for the fulfillment of love and some for the lost entropy of rainbows. But only on her wedding day did her father realize the fateful implications of exposing his only daughter to the stark reality that humans are physically incapable from seeing the vast number of existing light waves.

***

At seventeen, on the day of her graduation from high school, Lena was confused. She was born into the tail end of the American immigrant cycle[1], and was the first in her family to be conceived without the immigrant drive for self-made prosperity, yet still beneath the weight of expectations. Although never succumbing to the sin of lifelessness that infected her younger brother, Lena often referred to herself as “rather aimless.” Her self-diagnosed aimlessness was not merely a play at girlish modesty, but a mild attempt to regulate sporadic undulations of passion. She often wondered if passion (for the overlooked details of things such as the vestigial fifth pocket of blue jeans or for the animated mannerisms her friends used when exchanging saccharine niceties in public) was merely a sublimated form of her grandparents’ immigrant drive for achievement.

Lena was comfortable with the fact that she was born without the human drive for efficiency, and on occasion, even grateful. The root of her affliction with colors and reality was an involuntary adherence to the elementary principles of logic, which constantly compelled her to learn as much as possible and unravel the fiction of so many alleged ‘truths’ that children are indoctrinated with. But she also possessed the remarkable ability to ignore logic and proceed in the abstract. She was proud of her zen-like ability to react with an “engaged listlessness” and resented the negative connotations of her “conscious disinterest.” It was her only cure from the absurd, her medicine from the intrinsic contradictions of reality.

She would try to explain herself at the brief intervals of silence during dinner. “Even lions are lazy. They spend most of their time lounging in the sun or playing by the watering hole. They’re not studying.”

“Yes, they rest; after they are done hunting,” her father retorted.
“What should I be out hunting for? Wild falafel?”
“They are not worried about examinations Lena, because they are worried about surviving.”
“That’s my whole point Dad, they aren’t worried about surviving. They aren’t worried about anything.”
“What am I supposed to do with such children?” Perhaps, it is my own doing the father thought.

Lena relished the carefree demeanor of soccer-moms and children of privilege who were permitted to not have ambitions that stretched beyond the approaching weekend. Isn’t such aimlessness a customary rite of passage and even a committed lifestyle for the native slacker? Every young and affluent American is entitled to the luxury of mediocrity, but it was humiliating for the child of immigrants.

It was on her graduation day that the culmination of her family’s expectations and her personal aimlessness were forced to intersect. Indifferently, she sat amidst the sea of flat caps, dangling tassels, and starch black gowns attempting to partake in the unfamiliar ceremony of high school graduation. Earlier that morning her father had asked “What will you major in at the university? What would you like to become Lena?” She did not have an answer.

Just as light simultaneously maintains properties of both particles and waves, Lena was simultaneously aimless and driven, wooden and delicate, immigrant and American. Like light, she was not fickle, but fractured – she embodied both passion and indifference concurrently, alternating freely between the two. Lena was sad to leave her adolescence and excited to welcome a world beyond her home. She resolved to submit to neither passion nor aimlessness, but would act with the cohesive inconsistency of light, shifting forms at her whim.

***

In the summer of her twentieth year, Lena fell in love. Her courtship with her future husband started quickly and in accordance with most of the customary formalities. The ritual officially began on the campus of the small liberal arts college they both attended in rural Massachusetts under the auspices of a series of fortuitous happenings. Although both medieval literature majors from neighboring dorms, they had never overlapped until well into the Spring Semester of Lena’s sophomore year. While there is no definitive mating season for humans, Lena only began new relationships in the Spring or Summer. A practice she was loyal to more out of habit than because of timing or superstition. They met in the Chaucer section of the library under the legitimacy of daylight. A good omen for Lena, who held a strong presumption of doubt against anyone she met under the veil of night.

A full moon appeared reluctantly on the evening that Lena was to fall in love. He walked deliberately slow according to the design of the stone footpath between their dorms, striving to be neither early nor late. He liked to keep his hands in his pockets when was nervous, fiddling with coins, methodically counting them again and again by feel. He arrived at her all girls dorm with one pocketed hand counting coins, the other gripping a slightly wilted red rose he had torn from a bush along the way. He knew that ladies appreciated flowers, but was unaware of Lena’s strong affinity for roses for rather incidental reasons. She was not merely drawn to a rose’s organic seductiveness, but to its technical value. An immaculately crafted rose satisfied her childish penchant for geometric patterns, symmetry, and primary colors cultivated during an adolescence filled with mobiles, coloring books, and ophthalmology journals.

Lena opened the door of her room revealing a serene, parched-white dress spattered with infinitesimal sun-drenched daisies that flowed over her slight frame with the intimacy of a child’s first blanket, illuminating the contours of her frame without ever touching it. He found his words inadequate to communicate with her ethereal girlishness. It was obvious that she was a young woman, but the glaze beneath her rounded eyes embodied the vacancy and intuitiveness known only to young girls. It was an innocence blended with snobbery. He learned from the candlelight shimmering behind her eyes that a soul never gets old, only drained of its vibrancy through the accumulation of responsibilities. Gathering words to recite felt excessively labored in light of her bold timidity, and all he could offer was the rose.

Lena graciously accepted his flower offering, first delicately sniffing the rose bud then allowing herself to be led across the lobby, out the foyer and down the entrance hall steps. Before reaching the bottom of the stairs, she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the atmospherics of the moment. The smell of his shirt, the cut of her dress, the jealousy of her roommate’s gaze, the calm of holding his hand. The gravity of the moment grew too intense, forcing her to wilt and reluctantly sob as she loosely let the rose fall. She did not cry because she released the flower or for the beauty of the wilted rose, but only for the lost veracity of color. She sobbed because the rose was not red, but red light waves reflected off the petals after the rose had already ingested the remaining six colors. Lena was disgusted at her constant struggle with reality, her inability to be immersed in the moment. “Beyond a rainbow’s inherent inadequacies,” she mumbled beneath her sobs, “there are no colors – only assorted waves of light in varying lengths and amplitudes.”

“Are you alright Lena?” He awkwardly gasped in confusion as he knelt to speak to her.
“I’m sorry, I know I’m being just awful. It’s just that if there are no real colors, then the world is only a playground of illusions. It’s like two bald men arguing over a comb.”

He was not so much confused as he was surprised. He didn’t let go of her hand and spoke in a whisper because it seemed appropriate. “Lee - nah” he softly rolled off his palette and spoke like a child reciting a memorized poem for the first time. “Saying there are no colors is like saying everything is relative. Even relativism depends on constants and the stability of universals.” Lena was skeptical, she had heard similar rhetoric from her father before, who refused to comprehend her affliction with color.

“Your perception of red is subjective because different people understand red in different ways. But the use of red has an universality across cultures and languages. Color is subjective, but we all work with the same tools of observation.”
“I know” she sighed. “My father is an ophthalmologist.”
“All I’m trying to say is things are as real as you want them to be.” She knew from that moment on that their marriage was an inevitability.

***

At 23, on the day of her wedding, Lena was vibrant. Usually, she never felt alive unless asleep - distant - creating her own universe far from the constraints of reality. On the day of her wedding, she felt that good awake.

A fourth of the cerebral cortex and nearly twenty percent of brain activity is devoted to sight and the mind’s creation of color. Standing between her husband and father, she wondered what percent of the mind was dedicated to marriage or monogamy, or the instinct to procreate. If so much brain matter and energy was dedicated to create a world of color, what other blueprints for reality is the brain encoded with? Was love logical or programmed? “Both,” she answered aloud - she liked that. “Excuse me,” the rabbi whispered. “Go on,” she said slightly embarrassed.

The ophthalmologist stood proudly beside his daughter in a contrived regal stance. Lena noticed he had grown more rounded since the onset of his blindness, and that his belly was pushing the limits of the cummerbund. She had warned him about attempting to remove his own cataracts, but the consequences were indelible. A few extraneous slights of the hand caused by a misperception of the movements of his reflection in the surgical mirror had left the capsules in both of his eyes completely opaque. Although nostalgic about the ability to see, Lena found he took a mild pleasure in the marked improvement of his posture since that cloudless afternoon he inadvertently blinded himself.

Lena caught him staring toward the direction of her voice, struggling to imagine the shape and color of her smile. She recalled the morning he took her to Moose Creek and how she cried terribly when he showed her that only a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the human eye. Later that afternoon, he tried to comfort her by telling her of Stomatopods that have the ability to see polarized, infrared, and even ultraviolet light. Lena recalled being temporarily eased, and crying even more profoundly upon the discovery that Stomatopods operate with sixteen primary colors, while she was limited to the monotony of red, blue, and yellow.

Ultimately, it was the ophthalmologist’s blindness that made his daughter’s affliction of color. She began to notice changes in her father that surprised her, alterations that chiseled away at her caricature of him as a clinical man only capable of reserved affection. He had learned to empathize with her suspicions about the fidelity of reality and understand the listless sensation of unreality that a mistrust of your senses carries. Blindness led him to the same unnerving axiom that Lena was forced to consume as a child: so much of reality - or other people’s reality - is so drastically different than our own.

He had told her that it was many years ago in medical school that for the sake of science, he had resolved to stop believing in coincidences or in the tenets of chaos. “If you believe in a sustained chaos,” he professed, “then you give up on any order in the universe. Even the simplest of children understand that beauty is observing patterns and symmetry in chaos.” Lena was one of the few children who grasped this concept all too well and it tortured her. She blamed her asphyxiating sense of consciousness for forcing her to pierce holes in the details of existence and find the inevitable dissonance in design.

On her wedding day, her father’s blindness finally allowed him to see what his daughter had already learned that fateful morning, and what her husband had understood so clearly on the night of the full moon. As her father elegantly whirled her across the dance floor beneath the gaze of their family and friends, he came to see the paradoxical beauty of showing Lena the limits of color as child, and finally understanding the grace of world’s absurdity on the night he was to give her away. He grew both pensive and proud. “Dad?” She asked. “What are you thinking about?” His stare was slightly askew. “Everyone sees everything Lena, it is merely a question of whether or not you decide to pay attention.” Curious words of encouragement Lena thought, but she found them poignant nonetheless.

[1] America’s magnetism has always attracted rigorously entrepreneurial immigrants willing to leave the familiarity of their native culture in exchange for the freedoms of America. This self-selective system attracts only the most devout believers in individualism embodied by America’s founders. The children of first generation immigrants are injected with the expectations and dreams of their parents seeking fulfillment in the success of their children. The third generation is free from the burden of having to watch their parents struggle to earn a comfortable lifestyle. Although the offspring of an identical genetic line, without the physical memory of their immigrant roots, the subsequent third generation is easily lulled into mediocrity. Lena is a member of this third generation.