The Best American Essays 2011 Part 9

So I sucked in my breath and asked the young partner in the television production company. He didn't ask what it was for. I had been obvious, sniffling and red-eyed around the office. "I'll talk to the accountant," he said. The accountant gave me a check the next day.

It wasn't such a rare occurrence, I learned later.

I had money to fly to Puerto Rico, stay a couple of nights in a motel, and have the procedure taken care of by a doctor in a hospital. I bought a ticket on Pan Am for a Sunday evening flight there and a Tuesday night flight back. The airfare was $100. I picked a place to stay a short distance from the hospital, the White Castle Hotel. There was a White Castle on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Eleventh Street, a block from my apartment, which served a quarter-inch-thin gray burger, pellucid squares of chopped onion on top, on a saccharine sweet bun that dissolved in your mouth without a chew.

I climbed down the stairs from the Pam Am flight at San Juan airport, and as I stepped onto the tarmac, my white patent-leather kitten-heeled shoes sank in, ruined. I had a change of clothes, a nightgown, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a copy of Henderson the Rain King, $350 in American Express traveler's checks, and $150 in cash.

I checked into the White Castle Hotel after dark and gave the clerk $100 in traveler's checks. The rest were for the procedure. The cash was for taxis and food. The room smelled of disinfectant and stale cigarettes, but it was air-conditioned. Lucky. I hadn't thought to ask. It was one hundred and three degrees that dark night in San Juan.

In the morning, the clerk gave me directions. I didn't want him to know my destination, but I couldn't risk spending money on a taxi. The hospital, I gleaned from the map, was a long walk away.

It looked like a friendly suburban inst.i.tution, built of clean white brick with a sweeping U-shaped driveway. As I walked up the steps under the white-columned portico to the entrance, I allowed myself to believe for the first time that this would work.

The lobby was quiet. Behind a desk stood an official-looking young man in a white coat. I approached tentatively, standing in front of him, praying that he spoke English. He looked up and asked, "Jes?" I had practiced this speech a million times. On the plane. As I tried to sleep. When I woke that morning. On the walk over. Out loud, I said that I had been told on the telephone from New York that I could get a D & C. I want to make an appointment. For today. Please. He nodded and slid me a form to fill out. This was going to work.

He asked me my age.

Nineteen.

He shook his head.

"Oh, no no no. Too young. Only after twenty-one."

I begged, pleaded, told him I had borrowed money to get there, that I didn't have any more, that I was desperate. He told me to leave.

As I walked toward the door, the rain began to fall, splashing back up a foot or two, a few people on the road outside caught in the downpour, running to escape but instantly drenched. I stepped outside, but it was useless. Already dripping, I ducked back in and asked meekly if I might wait until the storm pa.s.sed. I sat on a brown couch, the backs of my thighs sticking to the plastic surface.

I would be returning pregnant. I wept silently, hoping that anyone who saw me would mistake the tears sliding down my face for rain from the deluge outside. My paperback copy of Henderson the Rain King was sodden. Outside, it rained on. I would go back to the White Castle, call Michael, tell him the news, get a plane back to New York that day. I would be able to save a few dollars. But I would have to keep this baby.

I sat and waited. And waited. As I started to pull myself together to leave, a tiny brown man in the green uniform of an orderly approached me, skittish, surrept.i.tious. He held a crumpled piece of lined paper in his hand torn from a notebook. "Go dere," he said in a stage whisper. He offered me the sc.r.a.p, then disappeared.

Written in pencil was a name and an address. My dress was wet, my tarmacked shoes stuck to the ground as I walked. I had proud long hair then that I ironed straight. It frizzed in the humidity. I handed a cabdriver the paper. He spoke no English, but I could tell that he thought I was mistaken, that I didn't want to go there. That it was far. Yes, yes. I nodded emphatically at the paper, taking it back from him and pointing with my finger at the address. Finally I understood his words: twenty dollars. I handed him money and off we went, out of San Juan, on dirt roads for what seemed like hours, to a small village built around a gra.s.sy square. The square was still, empty save for a few mangy-looking dogs, a couple of chickens, and two old men sitting on a bench playing a board game. He dropped me in front of an open building, which appeared to be someone's house.

A small man glanced at me from inside, and pointed to the whitewashed stairs that rose along the wall. At the top stood a second man, dressed in white pants and an undershirt. His ma.s.sive shoulders and arms were those of a wrestler. He must be a bodyguard, I thought. But he immediately started talking about the money in fluent, barely accented English. He could take care of me, but traveler's checks were no good to him. I didn't have enough money for the cab fare to the hotel and back again on top of the $250 that he was demanding. Are you alone, he asked? Yes, I said. We agreed on $200. He would wait. I returned in the twilight with the cash.

A wooden table, no anesthesia, a sc.r.a.ping sound, and a newspaper-lined metal bucket. I moaned. Be quiet, he demanded. Or did I want him to stop? No, no. Go on. Please. Go on.

When it was over he warned me not to fly for two days, gave me two sanitary pads, and called a taxi. By now it was night. The roads seemed ruttier in the dark, every b.u.mp jarring my sore body. It was still Monday. I had to change my flight to Wednesday. At the hotel I slept on and off, not knowing day from night. Tuesday, in the dark, I went out to the little bodega across the street and bought some cheese and peanut b.u.t.ter snacks in little rectangular cellophane packages. Peanut b.u.t.ter sticks to the roof of my mouth, so I grabbed a bottle of Coca-Cola. That didn't seem healthy, so I added an orange. I had nothing to cut it with in the hotel room, and the peel didn't want to come off, so I bit off the top, sucked the juice out of it, and threw it empty but whole into the garbage.

Michael met me on Wednesday night at Idlewild. We rode the bus in to the Port Authority. I was tired and craving red meat. We took the IRT downtown to our favorite place for a cheap-enough steak dinner. It was owned by Mickey Ruskin, who became famous later as the proprietor of Max's Kansas City. I had a filet steak, a baked potato, a salad with blue cheese dressing, all for $9.99. The vodka was extra. So was the carafe of house red. Michael paid for dinner, and I felt full and satisfied and safe. The name of the place was the Ninth Circle, the lowest region of Dante's h.e.l.l, below which lies only Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

In the morning I called Emily's gynecologist. He saw me the same day. He examined me and wrote a prescription for penicillin just to be sure. He told me to call if the bleeding got worse. It didn't. I was one of the lucky ones. According to the Guttmacher Inst.i.tute, in 1962-the year I made my trip to Puerto Rico-nearly sixteen hundred women were admitted to just one New York City hospital for incomplete abortions.

In the New York Times in June 2008, Waldo Fielding, a retired gynecologist, described his experience with incomplete abortion complications.

"The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous 'coat hanger'-which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in-perhaps the patient herself-found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it ... Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion-darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-gla.s.s salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off."

Three years after my trip to San Juan, illegal abortion officially accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S. It is speculated that the actual number was likely much higher.

There Are Things Awry Here.

Lia Purpura.

FROM Orion.

I FOUND A PERIMETER, THANK G.o.d, and I'm walking. I'm making an hour of it, finding a way to get my breathing going hard. These four big lots with big-box stores must compa.s.s a mile. Measuring helps. I am here (quick check: yes, panting and sweaty) but it feels like nowhere, is so without character that the character I am hardly registers at all. So I'll get to work, in the way I know how: Here is a farmer entering the black field. He's a proper farmer, bowlegged and leathery, with a serviceable rope looped over his arm. But the farmer comes out of a logoed truck and the rope links up to a ChemLawn can and off he goes to tend the weeds a.s.serting through the asphalt. He p.i.s.ses I don't know where during his long day in the sun. His hat's a tattered red GO BAMA cap. His tin lunch pail is a bag from Popeyes, just down the road (I mean highway).

Here is a rancher coming over a rise, backlit and stiff, sure hands on the reins, eye for the dips that would wreck a fetlock. He's nearly cantering over the brown gra.s.s, cropped short to begin with, but hey, he's on contract, it's the fifteenth of the month, so he comes to harrow the gra.s.s at the edge of the lot. The rancher rides masterfully and the mower goes fast; he turns sharply, leans into the bit, and the beast resists not at all.

Here are the animals branded and waiting, they're tired, they stopped where the gra.s.s was fresh and a pond provided. It's dusk coming on, a slight chill picking up that turns them toward home, but they don't raise their heads, catch a scent of dog, of roundup coming. The herd's mixed. "MsBob" is all in with "Luvbun" and "GoTide." "Bubbaboy," "Nully," and "Sphinx" are there too. The stock are purebred Camaros, Explorers, Elantras, Legends. Docile and ragged; worn, overfed.

More is wrong.

The flags are frozen. They're fifty feet high but don't move in wind and they carry no sentiment, like "these we hoist high over our small town/farm/ranch to keep alive spirit, memory, fervor..." The flags have names: Ryan's, Outback, Hooters (best saloon in town, I'd say, judging by all the horses tied up out front). IHOP. Waffle House. Walmart on a far-I'd like to say hill but that's out of the question, the hill's been dozed, subdued into rise.

Here is a field between parking lots-real gra.s.s and dirt with bottles tossed in, amber longnecks, flat clears of hard stuff. The word artifact comes, but it's b.u.mped out by garbage, the depths are all wrong, and in a matter of weeks it will all be turned over. Not a field's breaking. Not loamy and clod-filled. More Tyvek and tar. By which things are wrapped, laid in, erected. How easily the new names for "seasons" come forth: undeveloped, developing, development, developed. Skirting the site, I lose options like fallow, that yearlong rest wherein land regains strength. I'm losing the language for thoughts about gleaning. Crop goes to cropping as in Photoshop fixing. (And Photoshopping-wow, that gets confusing.) Here is a farm woman, her shawl held against wind. It's late February in Tuscaloosa and the tornadoes that hit farther south last week are still lending their kick. She leans into the gust as she crosses, with bags, the black earth (that black below tar), the damp earth (I say earth out of habit, I see), but it's very well marked, white lines intersect, and the acre or so she's covered (I'm holding on here, with acre as measure) is field distance, but it's not a field anymore. She's juggling bags and pinning her nametag, she works at the Cobb, the town's multiplex, and she's late for her shift. On my next turn around the series of lots (where, remember, I'm walking, trying to get my own body into the scene), she'll be behind gla.s.s, with money and tickets. Smoothing her hair. Gulping her Big Gulp. Settling. (Settler. Settlement. Sigh.) A bit farther on, here is a mailbox with its red flag flipped up, in front of the Marriott, my closest neighbor (I'm a Hilton Tuscaloosa guest for a week). It's a wooden mailbox on a wooden post, which means "rustic"-and truly, it is weatherworn. Around each fire hydrant-the hotels here in parking-lot land are each fitted with two stumpy blue ones-grows a thicket of bushes. To hide the hydrant. Though in any small town, hydrants are red and freestanding on actual street corners. This greenery means to convey "tended garden." Which makes the hydrant a reverse sort of flower, one that emits water. Which I guess fits the whole upended scene.

Here are four tall trees in a tangly grove-former trees because now they're dead, though a grove, I know, accommodates all forms of growth and decomposition, all cycles and stages. Long, bare branches and rough, broken ones alternate all the way down. It's the kind of ex-tree that might draw an owl (that's what I'm conjuring, a native barred owl), it's got to be full of grubs just beginning to stir, and it offers a safe, clear view of the land. In the air is the scent of burning something. Highway and rubber. Diesel and speed. In fact, it's all over-a smell, if I'd known it as a kid, I'd hardly notice, or only on days when the wind kicked up. Poor farm wife in her booth, her hair tangled and blown. Gusts helping my rancher into his stable, right up the ramp and the tailgate slams shut. And my farmer-he's holding his rope low and firm while it leaks a bright poison as yellow and brief as a corn snake, sunning, then startled, then disappearing back into the ground.

Here in the lot is some corrugated cardboard I thought was an animal's vertebrae (sign of hope, life in burrows!). Here the Brink's truck is outside the Cobb, and the driver is armed, as he's been since transfers of loot began. Here, with a thought to my love up north, I pluck a dandelion (it escaped the farmer), the gesture complete as it's always been, small, flowery symbol of tender missing. I pa.s.sed a shard of-it looked like pottery (domestic life/human scale!)-but close up was a shorn chunk of thick plastic.

And before the Committee on Irrevocable Mistakes chose this to do to the land-plant tar, seed commerce- here was what?

What was here, that a body moved through it?

Back in my room I can't shake the sensation (despite my dandelion in a plastic cup, curtains wide open, basket of apples to naturalize things). A strangeness, an insistence is hovering. The strangeness makes me say aloud to myself, Something had to be here, something had been.

Something made me make stand-ins, cutouts, cartoons. It made me possessive, led me to say "my rancher, my farmer, my good farmer's wife"- mine, because I had to make them. From scratch. Out of something. Had to make them look like. A past. "The past." I conjured cliches (they come fashioned with roots). I had to make something, because the land couldn't do it. The land gave nothing. Gave nothing up. There was no plan, no narrative here, or tether-back-to. Just boxes to eat in. Big boxes for shopping. One boxy theater with nine movies plexed in. The parking lots gaped. Snipped, sprayed, and divided. Unpeopled. Tidied for no one.

Real land is never sad in its vastness, lost in its solitude. Left alone, cycles dress and undress it, chill-and-warm so it peaks, hardens, slides, swells. Real land hosts-voles, foxes, cicadas. Fires, moss, thunder. Rolls or gets steep. Sinks, sops, and sprouts. But this land didn't read. It babbled the way useless things babble-fuzzy bees with felt smiles, bejeweled and baubley occasional plaques, ConGRADulation mugs/frames/figurines. Capped, crusted, contained, so laden with stuff-how can it breathe?

Here, surely, went people with thoughts, in the past-and not as I conjured them, fleet, makeshifty odes, dumb stock-a.s.sumptions, citified cartoons, with force of wind and vast stretch of blacktop shaping my story of them very poorly. (Points, maybe, for hale traits I a.s.signed: reticence, dignity, industriousness, skill!) My folks were as flat as those cowboy silhouettes slouched up against mailboxes, but the drive to olden them, tie them back to the earth, give them good pastoral work was real.

Let me start over, since this is America, land of beginnings. I'll try again, since after one night's stay, here doesn't clarify at all. Let me start very simply with my simple problem: Here, it's February 2008, and I can't figure out how to get my body to land in a land where the present's not speaking. Where stories won't take, and walking is sliding. I found a cadence to quiet the chatter, a word useful for focus and pacing out steps- refuse, which I used as both re-FUSE and REF-use, resistance-meets-garbage, iambic/trochaic, singsongy, buoyant-but alas, it ordered not much. So today I go searching in earnest. To the library first (always, always), then around the corner to Special Collections where I blurt my question to the expert on duty: At the site of the Cobb-that whole south side of town ("mess of emptiness," I'm conveying with pauses)- by the Big K and Hooters ("that awful nowhere" suggested by sighs), before all that, what was there? Ah, she says, disappearing in the back, then returning with a stack of yellowing magazines. Here, try these.

I find a clear table, spread the magazines out, and turn the dry pages.

Once it was February 1942 here. It was British Cadet Cla.s.s 42E at the Alabama Inst.i.tute of Aeronautics, a wartime flying school operating in cooperation with the U.S. Army Air Corps. Here First Captain Wheeler wrote in Fins and Flippers, the cadets' magazine, a note of grat.i.tude to the American trainers "for interpreting their training system in a manner intelligible to we British Cadets."

Here, in their monthly, the cadets and their officers noted the welcomed small acts of American civility and laughed over their own displacement (moors! Tuscaloosa!), all in the literary conventions of the time-yearbooky, vignettish, clean-cut, and well-mannered.

And just for a moment, the ugliness recedes (note of grat.i.tude for the cadets, as they hover around, high in the blue, learning dials and gauges and jostling each other; note of-I can't help it - pleasure, as I read to myself and their lovely accents kick in). The pour of blacktop, the gray icing of curb, I'm being a.s.sured now, isn't the earth. That's its burned crust. That's its sackcloth for unholy times, before the rapture comes and restores, a.s.sumes the earth back to woods, fields, sh.o.r.es where I might ramble and stroll - little myth I can't help invoking, which more commonly goes, in my head, wordlessly: It'll get better, it'll be righted, cleaned, and made pure, it will, how bad could it be, see how perfectly blue the sky is! (That's stock-Lia talking, brightly, brightly because the ugliness hurts, the wincing is constant; that's the me rucksacked up and ready for hiking, neverminding the dark and gathering clouds, grabbing a poncho, and let's go everyone!) Here, near the Cobb, is the land where Mac wrote, in Fins and Flippers, a little piece called "Our London": I remember the sun setting over the last rugged corner of Britain in a blaze of crimson magnificence, that we saw when the ship sailed in August. I remember seeing the lights of Toronto start to blink from a small island on Lake Ontario. But best of all-I remember London.

Though I am many thousands of miles away, I see her constantly, not as she stands now, bruised and battered, but as she was when I spent my adolescent initiation within her walls; and I am sorry that I was not able to appreciate her then as I do now. For in those days, Regent Street just signified to me the road that led from Piccadilly Circus to Oxford Street. Charing Cross was just a station that served my purpose in going south. The same applied to Fleet Street, Cheapside and Soho, and a host of other fine places...

Here, my students and I are reading Virginia Woolf, who worked in Mac's London, right through the war, this very same war, on her own piece, "A Sketch of the Past." Almost every entry begins with a mere nod to the war outside her window. Instead, it's her past, her lost houses, land, family-whole eras gone, irreplaceably gone-that demand recounting: As we sat down to lunch two days ago ... John came in, looked white about the gills, his pale eyes paler than usual, and said the French have stopped fighting. Today the dictators dictate their terms to France. Meanwhile, on the very hot morning, with a blue bottle buzzing and a toothless organ grinding and the men calling strawberries in the Square, I sit in my room at 37 Mecklenburgh Square and turn to my father.

...Yesterday ... five German raiders pa.s.sed so close over Monks House that they brushed the tree at the gate. But being alive today, and having a waste hour on my hands ... I will go on with this story...

Here, it's London for us, when we gather, my students and I, three hours each night to talk about books, language, art-forms of flight, forms of landing. With my cadets, it's getting less strange. All this sitting and reading together helps.

Here, Ryan, one of my hosts, brought me an umbrella since I came unprepared for sudden storms. Here, Group Captain Leonard Thorne notes, as I do, the Tuscaloosa residents' "wonderful hospitality and friendship."

Nights, here, I am much impressed by my Hilton stack-up of pillows. (I can easily be made to feel rich by an abundance of bedclothes, plumping them while watching bad late-night TV, letting the excess fall to the floor.) Seems I would have played nicely with RAF Hazlehurst, who "still thinks a pillow is a weapon and not a headrest." We'd have blurred the room with soft flying weapons. "Born and bred in Derbyshire. Educated at Winchester. 'd.i.c.k' to his buddies..." He's the bareheaded one, no leather helmet-and-goggle set, or dress cap all the others wear, in their Fins and Flippers photo.

And here is E. G. Gordon, transferred from the Royal Artillery Anti-Aircraft, born in London, educated at Kingsbury School, Middles.e.x, whose chief sport is boxing, who "claims to be the shortest man in the RAF and so lives in constant dread of six-foot blind dates." Here, layered over the land, are his jitters, which, from his photo, it seems he makes light of: his flight cap is precipitously tilted, one side of his mouth hiked, mischievous, laughing, his tie expertly knotted, his meticulous uniform sharp pressed and not especially diminutive-looking. Whatever he left behind of himself, whatever I sensed on my walk, subatomic, molecularly present-that which I now know to call E. G.-was right here. Was so young. In the photo, he's no more than twenty. If he's alive now, he's older than my father.

Here, I walk into cla.s.s thinking, Really I have nothing to say to these people, the proper study of writing is reading, is well-managed awe, desire to make a thing, stamina for finishing adoration of language, and so on about reverie, solitude, etc. Here, sitting down, I'm going over my secret: I don't want to be inspiring, I just want to write, and they too should want that-let's all agree to go home and work hard. I walk in, I see people with books, stacks of books I've asked them to read. Besides Woolf, there's James Agee (let's take that out, cla.s.s), who lived with and wrote of the poorest white sharecroppers of Alabama (nice convergence-Alabama!) and whose force of nature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was published in 1941, as he might add, Year of Our Lord, to dignify the event. Event: I choose my word carefully, friends, for, as Agee writes, "This is a book only by necessity ... let's turn to [>]..." Now I'm cooking. I, in my flight suit (black sweater and jeans), look into the faces of my cadets. Everyone's eager. We walk to the runway. We find the ignition.

Here, I am escorted to the Dreamland for barbecue, and with Brian, my student, eat my first banana pudding. Here, A. T. Grime, flight lieutenant, wrote, "Anxious experiments are being carried out by the devoted Mr. Davies, our Dietician, with the object of providing an acceptable Yorkshire Pudding a la Tuscaloosa, to satisfy the palates of our gourmets. This I think is typical," he continued, "of the efforts made by all at this school ... to make your pilgrimage a memorable experience." The banana pudding is so sweet, so custardy, full of bananas and cakey white fluff, so heavy and childish, if I'd grown up with it, I'd miss it too, when abroad.

Here, in 2008, the a.s.sistant in charge of visitors is a "Fifi." (That's Ryan.) Here, in 1942, the novices en route to becoming pilots first cla.s.s were "Dodos." Fifis and Dodos. What a menagerie this land raised up.

Here, the novices have their own games: flag football with elaborate e-mail invitations. "As you can see, we at the UAEDFL-University of Alabama English Department Football League-are incredibly dedicated to our sport; we always give 110% and we play hurt ... come play this Sat.u.r.day at 11 and feel the RUSH." Here the cadets' training program offered "archery, horseshoes, swimming, tennis, tumbling, softball, volleyball, boxing, relays, calisthenics and for recreation golf, checkers (Chinese and regular), chess, cards, music, reading, singing and movies." Posted at 10:59 one night: "After incessant whining on the listserv and the occasional snide (yet sheepish!) remarks in the graduate student lounge, the English Department comes up with an unbelievable plan to raise money by playing flag football ... Can this ragtag band of writers, researchers, instructors and critiquers settle their views on Derrida before it's too late?" And stanza one of an eleven-stanza poem called "Cadence, Exercise," by cadet J. S. Peck, goes: Throughout the U.S. Armies wide.

Stand formations side by side.

Their contempt they'll never hide.

for Calisthenics!.

Here's Flight Lieutenant Garthwaite, RAF administrative officer, in his monthly bulletin "Over to London": "To those at home we send our sincerest hopes for the future. Although not on the field of battle ourselves, we do but gird ourselves for the great and final overthrow of n.a.z.iism. Let us hope and trust the coming year will see this war through ... and ... not a little by the fruits of our learning over here."

Yes, here they learned their recitations: maximum speeds and service ceilings; flight ranges, fuel capacities, and armaments carried by the Arvo Lancasters, Armstrong Whitleys, and Bristol Beau-fighters they'd be flying over the skies at home, soon, soon.

I knew in this vacancy something a.s.serted. Something strange-that is, real-and insistent was here. The land didn't mean to be torn and tar-covered, wasn't meant to sprout stock farmers, farm women, and ranchers. The land asked to be considered, and seriously. The land wanted to speak-past the bunkers of rolled insulation, past the earth-eating backhoes and yellow concoction my farmer (okay, working stiff, bare hands in the poison, then wiping his nose) force-fed the gra.s.s. Here, the land must have been green by the runways. Some of the big trees still here must have seen it. Yes, it must've been lush once, before hotels started turf wars along Marriott/Hilton lines, and thick vines choked the trees, and the tractors came and the hot blacktop poured, so the SKUs of Big K-hundreds of thousands-might take root and flourish.

I was returned-but not to an Eden, for there were airstrips and the screams of takeoffs, supply roads were laid down for fuel and equipment, the contrails of jets streaked the air, burned, scented, inscribed the quiet so the feel of the whole experience-the desire to serve, the fear of serving-would return whenever humidity, fuel, barbecue combined rightly for the novices.

I was returned, but more in this way: someone dreamed of getting the word, high over Berlin, to top-speed it east toward the Polish border, the Fuhrer, he's there!, it's the hamlet of Gierloz, fix your sights, son, load, steady, and-. Someone considered the glory, the fame, posing for photos with requisite wounds. Family pride, shining future. The world's grat.i.tude. Because the boys must have thought it, because I had the thought, it must have been lingering. The thoughts must have held on, hovering, jittery, wanting some rest. Such thoughts were preserved, but nowhere on the land. Nothing cadet was marked here, not poems or pudding, jaunty caps, homesickness. Instead, here were lots, grids, boxes, all manner of automata-doors that opened without human touch allowing the body to float right on in and get down to the business of buying.

Here's where the splintered, close barracks were raised-and then razed, plowed under into a new kind of cloverleaf: blacktopped, clovery only from air.

When the land would not speak and my characters failed, when the land was m.u.f.fled and my characters stock, this piece was born.

Here is my seed. Here is my search, trail, map of convergences.

Here is the thing I made in place of- what, exactly?

What did I find myself wanting? Something simple and telling-say a shop revealing the "character of the people upon whom the town depended for its existence." Even better (and this from Thomas Hardy's England), "a cla.s.s of objects displayed in a shop window ... scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bell-hooks, spades, mattocks and hoes at the ironmongers; beehives, b.u.t.ter firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay rakes, field flagons and seed lips at the cooper's, cart ropes and plough harnesses at the saddler's; carts, wheelbarrows, and mill gear at the wheelwrights and machinist's; horse embrocations at the chemist's; at the glover's and leathercutter's, hedging gloves, thatcher's kneecaps, ploughman's leggings, villager's patterns and clogs..." Oh, boots to lace up against scalding and sc.r.a.ping! Commerce boiled, reconst.i.tuted-oh, made rhythmic with breath, heavy with being-even objects transparent as the jewel-colored jars of preserves in the pantries of farmhouses I've known-apricot suns, the flushed hot-dawn tomatoes, deep dusk-purple plums put up, sealed, stored away, would shine with this presence.

I wanted a footpath, a field edge-a sidewalk. People at ease with neighbors and chatting. A simple plaque at the site of-whatever: Here the cadets of 42E sat to eat their first grits. Sc.r.a.p of wing or propeller on the Hilton's faux mantel. Fins and Flippers next to every Gideon's Bible.

What did I find? Some Februaries that matched-one then and one now; some novices each with their good fights and good words, their grat.i.tudes, civilities, and homey soft puddings.

I wanted to know what happened here, on land like this.

Now I know.

People learn to fly through it. And then they go home.

Patient.

Rachel Riederer.

FROM The Missouri Review.

1.

THE BUS WILL HAVE TO MOVE. I'm under its rear tires on the pa.s.senger side, and with the crowd, the driver can't see me in the mirror. "Can you please tell him to move?" I say to someone leaning over me. It is easy to be calm because I cannot really have been run over by a bus.

I look for my friend Simone. She is short and curvaceous, with warm brown Caribbean skin and long black hair. We have been out together, dancing in a sweaty blue-neon nightclub with pulsing music and dancers with seductive silhouettes gyrating on pillars. Earlier, she had helped me pick out the pink-and-red shoes that are now squished under the tires. She would make the driver move the bus, but I can't see her.

In an emergency, you cannot just say, "Somebody call 911," because everyone will a.s.sume that someone else will do it, and no one will call. This is called "the Problem of Collective Action." I pull my cell phone and driver's license out of my jacket pocket and hand them to a stranger and tell the stranger to call an ambulance.

It's about two in the morning, a weekend in late November; there can't be a bus on my leg. I am a junior in college, and tomorrow I am going to a big tailgate where I will drink beer and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, laugh with my friends in the cold. A few minutes ago I was standing on a corner in downtown Boston, in a crowd of about two hundred students waiting to be taken back to campus. The tall charter bus, with gleaming white sides and purple lettering, its tinted windows well above eye level if you are beside it, came around the corner. We were standing on the street, and it pulled up fast, right by the crowd. And then those of us standing furthest out in the street were up against it-the hot, smooth flank of the bus on one side, the pressing crowd on the other. Someone beside me fell, and then I fell. While I was still lying on the cold asphalt, the bus moved forward a little, and its tires rolled onto my leg. It stopped there, breathing its exhaust and the smell of hot rubber on me. Do all buses have four tires in one cl.u.s.ter like this, two across and two deep? Two of the tires are sitting on my left leg, and my right leg is wedged into the little crevice between the pairs.

But this isn't a real event; it is a saying: "I feel like I got hit by a bus." You say this when you have gone for a long run without stretching and wake up the next morning with soreness in long-forgotten muscles. It does not happen in real life, certainly not to me.

The bus moves forward, off my left leg, over my right leg, and then off me altogether. The weight must have been deadening my nerves; the sensation that was uncomfortable a moment ago has exploded, the pain in my leg taking up all the room in my brain. Someone picks me up and moves me to the sidewalk. I feel small. The cold cement feels good. There's an ambulance, and now Simone is here. She will go to the hospital with me, but she has to ride in the front. I lie in the cargo hold and beg the EMTs for drugs. They cannot give me any and ask what hospital. I shouldn't have to make this decision; I don't even know the names of any Boston hospitals, and what good are EMTs who are powerless to choose a hospital or relieve pain?

At the hospital, everything is moving; my stretcher is being thrust into wide, swinging doors. White coats and bright-colored scrubs flash against the bright white walls. There is forceful talking and the beeping of machinery. People surround me. They put an IV in my arm, and a beady-eyed nurse says that she put morphine into the IV bag, but she is a liar and a s.a.d.i.s.t, I can tell from her pinched face, which cannot even approximate a look of compa.s.sion. I know from the feeling in my left leg that there is not a single drop of morphine in the ridiculous plastic bag.

My left leg is purple and scarlet and mustard yellow. It would be grotesquely beautiful, but the tire mark and gravel embedded in the flesh ruin this effect. The s.a.d.i.s.tic nurse touches my ankle and says it is broken. They will do an x-ray to confirm and send me home in an air cast, with crutches. She is wrong. If broken ankles felt like this, people would not have them so often.