Interviewed by Anthony Rhoades

/One/: What drives you to make photographs and what is your goal in doing so?

Larry Silver: The reasons I take photographs have shifted over the past 60 years. My work started with my growing up in New York City. At the age of 15, I set out to record what life was like, photographing the things that surrounded me. This was a documentary approach where my interests and observations guided the subject matter. Documenting the event eventually became less important, and my work grew to reflect shared interests with photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson. This meant emphasizing a larger area of the environment I was photographing. Because I have spent many years in the darkroom, I have a great deal of control and use many methods to create specific qualities in the print—my darkroom practice has always been a vital element in enhancing the subject matter.

Ten years ago, however, I took my photography in a totally new direction where documenting and designing my images around a subject became less important. This new body of work is, in part, a response to the onset of digital photography. People were (and still are) constantly telling me that digital photography was going to replace the darkroom, and that I should be doing it. This inspired me, conversely, to take my darkroom work and produce photographs that cannot be produced digitally. This is what I have been preoccupied with for the past five years.

Now my work is less allied with documentary photography, and more in line with contemporary art practices of any medium. Today, contemporary artists often use photography as a medium. This also frees up photographers to approach the medium in ways that are more expansive. The necessity of producing a perfect print like Ansel Adams or Edward Weston is no longer necessary. This freedom has enabled me to break many of the established rules. In violating these rules I have created new photographs that are moving, exciting, and unique.

The work I am submitting includes images with and without recognizable subject matter. The images that are recognizable are older, and I have added the element of color to them. Every image started out as a photograph printed on silver paper in my darkroom, but was then manipulated using light, chemistry, pigments, and stains. Most recently, I am using my existing knowledge of the darkroom to do something that does not begin with an image, but instead treats the paper as a blank page on which I make marks using light and chemicals. I move around my work while I manipulate these elements on photographic paper. It is a physical process, not unlike Jackson Pollock’s action paintings.

/One/: What was the impetus for moving from a commercial photographer to a fine art photographer?

LS: I had a commercial studio in New York City for 40 years working freelance for advertising agencies on major accounts. While I was doing commercial advertising photography I continued my own personal work. I would use weekends, holidays, and whatever down time I had to either shoot or print, which I am doing to this very day. My current darkroom is in Shelton, Connecticut.

/One/: How has your image-making process changed with the advent of digital photography, if at all?

LS: Digital photography does not enter into my creative work. The only use I have for digital is to copy my original silver prints because curators and galleries prefer receiving e-mail or CDs rather then slides. I find that the best way to view my work is by seeing the original prints.

/One/: How do you see the progression of your works from the beginning to now and in what ways has your focus changed? Why do you think it has changed?

LS: I no longer think it is necessary to be able to distinguish a subject in an image. I believe an artist can move people by the dynamics of a picture, just like a composer does not need lyrics to move an audience. The sheer dynamics of the music can move and excite people.

I was looking to alter the image and still maintain it as a photograph because photography was always my life and I wanted to maintain the integrity of the photograph. While making my prints, I crumpled what I thought was a discarded photograph and threw it in the garbage, then turned on the lights in the darkroom and left. When I came back to continue my work, I glanced at the discarded print and removed it from the trash. It looked very interesting; it had stained and fogged, causing black streaks. The wrinkles in the paper caused a mottling effect and it actually looked more interesting than the print I was laboring over. I decided to try to re-create that effect, and I started wrinkling the paper and opening the lights. I found it very difficult. Then I started to take measures that were designed to purposely get that effect and the prints became more interesting and I decided that maybe violating the established rules of printing would be more interesting. That started me on a whole new world of photography. That happened about five years ago, and in viewing the work of other artists I realized that it is no longer necessary to follow the past. Since then I have been experimenting and not all of my attempts have been successful, but I think the usage of photographic techniques I have discovered is a new way of creating. This technique is all photographic and I believe totally out of the range of the computer. It is widely believed in the art world that in order for an artist to find a new direction he or she has to be young. I feel that because of my long career in photography at the age of 75 I am still finding new horizons.

—

Larry Silver

Larry Silver is an American born artist and was a member of the Photo League. The artist’s work resides in various museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Gallery and George Eastman House. Larry Silver’s artwork has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions.

1. About the Dead Man and Plastic Man

Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, the dead man has been following you.
Like you, he has reached beyond his corporeal origin, that turf of
sinkholes.
Like you, he was taught by the inmates of prisons and hospitals and
those at sea in their heads.
Like you, he thought he could jump out of his body to be free, but he
wised up.
He made his body more visible and familiar, more malleable, more
osmotic, more heady and base, more painful, and yes, more
plastic.
William James, writing past the threshold of consciousness, merely
entered the realm of plasticity.
Plastic Man is the model, he of the pop-out eyes and rubbery
shoulders, of the slingshot, of knots and bows, he the
ensemble of the self.
Surely James knew automatic writing was only the perpetual
morphing of a plastic consciousness.
Like this, like what you are reading, and seeing, and almost thinking.
A poem is about what is happening as you read it.

2. More About the Dead Man and Plastic Man

Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, you became the one who could reach for the
moon.
The one who could hold his beloved’s hand from afar.
You went straight.
We pictured the twisty road, the switchbacks of a life, the hard
breathing in the passes, the sweating and the thirst.
We believed in you for thousands of years before you arrived.
The lever and pulley were stopgaps, the wheel and screw were
expedient, we were on our way.
Later, the twisted stasis of the yogis, the whirl of the Sufis, the
immobility of the monk were precursors to a new self.
The dead man is your true progeny.
He is the new self that is many.
He is the self defined by more than shape.

—

Photo: Tom Jorgensen

Marvin Bell’s nineteenth book was the wartime collection, Mars Being Red (2007). His twentieth is a collaboration titled, 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, co-authored with poets from Hungary, Malta, Russia and Slovenia, as well as the U.S. Long a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA program based in Oregon at Pacific University. A song cycle, “The Animals,” commissioned by the composer David Gompper, premiered in October. A back-and-forth with the songwriter, Marvin Tate, appears in the current issue of Make. He is at work on a new book of “dead man” poems and a collaboration with the photographer, Nathan Lyons.

I have to ask him: So how did they get you out there? To California? How did they move you 3,000 miles? How, in fact, did they get you out of this place? Down the pine-scented hall and out that front door? I lay it out there and all he does is nudge his straw, the striped plastic one that bends at the neck. It’s fallen on his tray. Too bad he can’t manipulate it anymore. Those fingers haven’t had that kind of precision in years. Not that I’ve ever specifically noticed until just now, nor would I dare say it aloud. I’m thinking about tapping it back into his vanilla drink, but I’ll leave that to those who are paid to bear that honesty. I pay them good money to deal with the intimacies of his deterioration. He’s lost his interest in his lunch anyway. I ask again: What was the mode of transport?

“I couldn’t tell you. I fell asleep after the Jewish services downstairs to find Mass in full swing on that TV hanging over there. I missed the homily and was out again before Communion.Next thing I remember, I’m in San Francisco and Uncle Jim is there. He was making vanilla sundaes and waiting for Bianca. She can be late, he said. No kidding, I told him. I waited for her for every minute of our marriage, and now I’ve been waiting for twenty years alone. Jim’s ridiculous, anyway; he knows I like desserts more than I should, but he keeps making them for me. There was a lot of hubbub and party preparation, so there was no one I could ask about how I got out to the coast. I didn’t want to be in the way. And, frankly, I was more concerned about whether my wife would be long at the salon.”

The guy can smile, put on a happy face, but this transcontinental jaunt must’ve killed him. It must still be killing him. He hasn’t gotten a decent shave in at least a week, it looks like. Those little gray hairs are creeping down his neck. Being clean-shaven and presentable is important to him, even at this age. Even as a kid, I never saw a trace of hair on that face. If they thought it so important for him to make this trip, to some birthday party in California, couldn’t they at least have shaved him? If he went out there mangy, that alone would be tearing him up. But, the prospect of Bianca, dangling his wife just out of reach—that’s like offering a rabbit to a greyhound. Look at him. The physical strain alone. Muscle atrophy and ossified joints—I bet they had to crack him before they put him on the elevator. He’s laughing the whole thing off. Just pluck a guy’s wife out of thin air and throw them together. Or make him think that’s going to happen. That ain’t easy. Not by any stretch. So I ask him again: What kind of flight? Charter or commercial?

“I don’t know. I did see the rabbi on the way out the door, though. He told me to enjoy myself. I think he’s the best of the whole gang. He’s sharp, and he treats me like I am too. That priest’s a royal S.O.B. That’s why I have to rely on the TV for God. Out West I met a minister. Presbyterian. Uncle Jim was there, and he’s a convert. Not when he got married, but ten years later. Aunt Laurel (who you never met), she was from the Midwest, so she was Protestant. Jim hasn’t stopped going to her church since she died, every week. If I had more time out West, I would have gone with him. But I had to get back.”

The guy knows every man of every cloth; what the hell can I do for him? What could I give him? What is the perfect gift? It’s the least I owe him.

“After the vanilla sundaes, they hung up bunting. I wanted to help, but I’m in no shape to be climbing up stepladders. These fingers couldn’t even fold a decent napkin. So I waited outside in the sun. It’s different out there in California. California shines more like Japan, or Wake Island, at least. It feels good, better than the patio at this place. But that was the tough part of my trip. Across the parking lot I saw your father.”

Hold on. Goddammit. This is too fucking much. Bianca’s his. But this one’s ours. Or maybe mine. I’ve got to do something. Those prickly little hairs are crawling down his neck. And he’s got patches on his cheeks, patches that never had a chance to grow before my father was gone. There’s only one thing I can give him: a hot shave. A hot shave from an aging barber. There’s nothing so curative, so decadent, so healingsoothingwarmgratefulright. Nothing so appropriate. I ask him what my father was doing out in California.

“He was getting out of his car. It looked like he was coming in, to the birthday party. He held up his hand, as if I should wait a moment. Then he disappeared behind the building. That’s when Uncle Jim (he was throwing the party) pushed me back inside. He reminded me that Bianca was on her way from her hair appointment. I don’t know if he even believed me when I told him I had seen Little Gerald, your father, out there. He was standing there, towering over his car, smoking a cigarette. It was unmistakable. Things are clear in that California light. The filters in the sky are more complete. Like above the water, off the coast of Asia. It was Little Gerald. No one stands that high. I could smell him clear across the blacktop. But I went back inside and waited for my wife.”

I would call an attendant over right now if I wasn’t worried about leaving him alone, even for two minutes. What if these incompetents decide another field trip is in order while I’m gone? If I could just grab one of these attendants—by the wrist—he would get a mouthful. Did they know my father would be out West when they sent the old man on this trip? Look at him. The smile and the glassy eyes (leaking enough mucus to fill a trough). He keeps saying ‘Little Gerald’; that had to be a punch in the gut. Don’t they need a waiver before they pull this shit? Before they take him outside? Into the open air? No one asked me to sign a waiver. Did they charter him a private flight? Who’s going to be billed for that? Did they even think to get a priest to bless him before he left? And not that usual stiff.

“I was glad that I saw the rabbi on the way out. His rites suited me nicely. Especially considering I didn’t know how far I’d be traveling. You always want to be blessed before you step out into the open air. Outside: that’s where everything happens. Out in California, I spent hours inside, waiting for that birthday party to begin. And not a blessed thing happened. Bianca never showed up, and Little Gerald never made it inside. But I know it was him I saw out there. I asked one of the men hired to hang the bunting if he’d push me back outside. He did, during his next coffee break.”

I thought the flight was bad enough, but this back-and-forth business with his wife and his son seems downright sadistic. I thought they had a staff of doctors, head doctors to oversee these things, to ensure that his life is without shock; I pay highly educated professionals to keep him inside. They fucked up and now I’ve got to make it up to him. I don’t pay them because I have money to burn; it’s because I understand the dangers of the outside. I live out there. I know the outside threatens the infirm, my infirm. An encounter with the past is likely, pretty much inevitable, if you let the guy fly all the way across the country. He ran headlong into the past, and amazingly he’s still sitting here—intact. Whatever plane they flew him on must have passed its safety inspection with flying colors.

“He was still out there smoking a cigarette, your father. He never turned toward me, and these lungs didn’t have the capacity to call him over. I stomped my feet, but all he did was cough a little and clean something out of his ear with his pinkie. I thoughtabout rolling over to him, but it used to be him who pushed me. There was a grassy hill that went down from the parking lot, and that’s the direction in which he walked away. I saw his head pause for a moment; I thought he might come back. And then he’d see me sitting there, out in broad daylight, waiting for him. But his crown disappeared and Uncle Jim came back out to get me. He said the party was starting and Bianca would arrive any minute. He looked over at the green hill nervously and I said, Why?

Why what?, he laughed.”

I would have been too nervous to eat cake. He can’t even sip down his vanilla nutrition supplement. It’s like we violated a contract. We, as a family. And they went straight to the top to punish us all. They struck at the patriarch. And he won’t give them the pleasure of squirming. Won’t give God the pleasure; God is who he attributes these things to. He just sits there and wipes the mucus out of his eyes and smiles about his free trip to California. Couldn’t they have at least made him presentable? Just given him a shave?

“The cake was frosted with chocolate. Chocolate is usually too rich for me. They offered me a slice but I wanted to make sure some was left for Bianca. She loved rich—even cloying—desserts. They ate the whole cake and I sat beside the final slice. I kept watch and guarded it until the last balloon was deflated. Then they came to take me home. Bianca had never arrived to eat her cake. I told them to wait, to give me five minutes. And I shoveled it down. I shoveled down that sweet chocolate cake in a manner so enthusiastic and disgusting. And then we left.”

I have to ask him. I want to forget this detail, but I can’t risk the temptation. I ask him definitively. Did you see my father again?

“The parking lot was empty. The road was empty. It was clear of familiar faces all the way to the airport.”

I stand right up and push him. We go straight out the doors, and I don’t check once to see if an attendant is watching. We hit the open air and he gasps, necessarily. I stop to button his sweater before we rush to the parking lot. As we leave, I know I’ve exposed him, I’ve done the same thing as those incompetents who sent him on a trip to the coast.

* * *

They came in nervously. Really, the young one, the grandson, was nervous. The old man didn’t know what was what. He was laughing, actually. He kept asking if he was going back to California. Apparently, he knew some folks out West. He said he’d had enough vanilla ice cream, though. It didn’t look like the barber was offering desserts.

The kid closed the blinds on the front door behind him, as the welcome bells still tinkled. The barber stopped to take in the sight: the skinny kid, peeking out at the street he’d left behind, scratching his unshaven cheeks, and his old grandfather, sitting snug in his wheelchair, smiling at the bottles of Barbasol. The kid asked for a hot shave. One for him and one for his grandfather. “Do you still do hot shaves?” he asked. “The old-fashioned kind?”

The barber laughed. “Is my funny-looking pole still spinning?”

The kid couldn’t decide who should go first. Finally, he sat in the chair. His grandfather looked out the covered window and laughed. He said that he had no idea that his wife and son had been living out on the West Coast. “Some facts are more shocking than a battlefield,” he said.

The barber shaved the grandson’s face with swiftness and precision. He traced his jawline with the soft metal edge of the razor, then brushed it up and down his cheeks. He stayed silent, let his customer meditate. But the kid couldn’t relax. His muscles twitched each time his grandfather muttered something or laughed. He even sat straight up a few times, mid-shave. It was whenever squeaky brakes eased a car to a stop on the street outside. The barber kept his head down and let him settle back, then set back to work. Still with swiftness and precision. He ran his fingertips all over the kid’s scalp then placed hot towel after hot towel on every bald and reddening patch of his neck and face. Talcum applied, the kid jumped up, nervous as the moment he entered the shop, and pushed the old man over to the chair.

He took his grandfather by one arm and the barber took the other. The kid shook him off. He wanted his grandfather to rely on him alone.

The old man settled into the barber’s chair and smiled at his scruffy face in the mirror. He touched his gray stubble and looked at his grandson. “How long has it been?”

“Too long,” the kid said. “They haven’t been watching you as closely as they should.”

The barber set to work, the same soft razor gliding over the same red jaw. The old man sighed and his eyes half-closed. His grandson watched closely, standing hardly a foot away. Watching the barber’s manner, swift and precise, he forgot the world beyond the blinds, the one that conspired against him and his grandfather, the one that moved them against their will.

—

John Dermot Woods

John Dermot Woods is the author of the novel, The Complete Collection of people, places & things (BlazeVOX, 2009). His stories and comics have appeared in many journals, including The Indiana Review, Hobart, American Letters & Commentary, Salt Hill, and 3rd Bed. His comic chapbook, The Remains, is forthcoming from Doublecross Press. He edits the arts quarterly Action,Yes and organizes the online reading series Apostrophe Cast. More information can be found atwww.johndermotwoods.com

Ulrich Boser

Ulrich Boser is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. He analyzes a variety of social policy topics and is particularly interested in education and criminal justice issues.

Prior to the Center, Boser was a contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report, special projects director for The Washington Post Express, and research director for Education Week. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and Smithsonian. He is also the founding editor of The Open Case, an online criminal justice magazine and currently serves as the research director of Leaders and Laggards, a project that evaluates state systems of education.

In February 2009, HarperCollins published his book The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft, and it received glowing reviews in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Today, and the Associated Press, among others. The book spent more than a month on the Boston Globe bestseller list and became a national bestseller.

Boser’s writing and research has received a variety of awards and citations, and Washingtonian magazine recently described him as “a writer to watch.” He has also served as a commentator for CNN, National Public Radio, and The New York Times.

Interviewed by Josh Korenblat

/One/: What piqued your original interest in investigating the theft of the paintings at the Gardner Museum?

Ulrich Boser: In December 2004, I began working on a story for US News & World Report about Harold Smith, one of the world’s most successful art detectives. He had recovered lost Renoirs, exposed forged Da Vincis, and cracked the country’s largest gold robbery. Smith worked the Gardner heist for years. But within weeks of our meeting, Smith died of skin cancer, and after his death, I decided to pick up where he left off and search for the lost paintings.

/One/: What are some of the themes of your book? You bring to vivid, trenchant life the theft of the paintings, down to the slice of the knife to wrest the Rembrandt canvas from its frame. There seems to be a tension between beauty and vulgarity in this theft; the love of art and the love of money; the timelessness of the museum and the fleeting nature of both life and theft. Can you articulate your thoughts regarding these polarities and how they might compel various forces in your book?

UB: I don’t know if I can identify the themes that run through the book. I think that’s for readers to decide. That said, I think the history of Boston, the history of the museum, the history of art theft, all have an upstairs/downstairs, high-society/low-society tension, and I wanted to highlight that—I think it’s a key part of the story. I also think that the Hollywoodization of museum crime prevents recoveries. People often glamorize art theft. They think that art thieves are sly and skillful, Pierce Brosnan types with a passion for Impressionist paintings. But the reality is far from it, and the people who steal art are largely run-of-the-mill crooks—aging drug dealers, out-of-work bank robbers, ex-cons looking to pay the rent. They want the cash. They steal art because it’s easy.

/One/: Did you see these themes at play in the art and artists themselves? You briefly mentioned Rembrandt’s moral failings despite the overwhelming moral pulse most can feel in his art, and Vermeer’s financial problems have been well documented—he died at age 40, destitute and reportedly a mere shadow of himself. Is the contrast between the impoverished, suffering artist and the timelessness of art part of the final painting’s appeal, both in your imagination and in the popular imagination?

UB: Yes and no. I think the tension is there. No doubt. You cited some good reasons. But I also think that these works stand on their own. They are masterpieces regardless of whether their creators were poor or rich or criminals or saints.

/One/: The twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin once feared the potential lost “aura” of original art in an age of mechanical reproduction. In the case of the Gardner paintings, which are truly lost and available only in mechanical reproduction, what do you think this aura means to art lovers? What is lost by getting to see only reproductions and not having access to the originals?

UB: Great question. And so, yeah, I think people often forget how important these paintings are. I mean, there are so many reproductions out there—it’s so easy to become numb to the magnitude of the heist. But these works are masterpieces because of the details, and the details are lost when you steal the original.

Here is what Gardner director Anne Hawley once told a reporter—and I think it’s a good summary of the magnitude of the loss: “For us, it’s like a death in the family,” she said. “Think of what it would mean to civilization if you could never hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony again. Think if you lost access to a crucial piece of literature like Plato’s Republic. Removing these works by Rembrandt and Vermeer is ripping something from the very fabric of civilization.”

/One/: In the book, you are clearly motivated to find the paintings in part because there is a hefty $5 million dollar reward for their return. And yet near the end of your book, you concede that your growing obsession with the case might have less to do with tangible results—that the mystery itself has lured you in with a pull that many artists must experience while creating their works, and that many can attest to while viewing a Vermeer or Rembrandt painting. Can you explain this emotion that you felt and that you witnessed in others who were searching for the lost paintings?

UB: The Gardner case does have a lot of strange angles. I ended up chasing down all sorts of curious tips and angles. I interviewed all kinds of people. I hired private investigators. I visited prisons. I once flew to Ireland to see if Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger might have the art. It has been nearly 20 years—and the masterpieces are still missing. And I think that’s the rub. The case is a mystery, an unknown, and that means that almost anyone could be a suspect, from a retired guard to an ex-curator to a guy who lived near the museum for a few months in 1990 and seemed to come into some money a few years later. I think that’s what attracts so many people to the case. That and—of course—the $5 million reward.

/One/: Did the work become more meaningful to you by its absence? There is a long tradition in art of exploring this theme. Consider this poem by Emily Dickinson, which asks if yearning is better than having: “It might be easier/To fail with land in sight/That gain my blue peninsula/To perish of delight.” Did art itself become more meaningful to you during the course of your research for this book?

UB: Absolutely. I often had a John Steinbeck quote rattling around in my mind. I think it goes something like this: “Wanted loses value on being had.” That said, I want to see those paintings back at the museum. In this case, at least, yearning is not better than having.

/One/: How did you change over the course of the book?

UB: Hard question, as that is essentially the story of the book. I mean that’s the narrative arc.

/One/: Many art museums exhibit work taken during World War II, and of course famous pieces like the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Pantheon, are highly controversial in terms of their provenance, having been lifted in imperial times from the original locales. Do museums take into account the provenance of their works and how they are attained with more acuity these days?

UB: Yes, museums and galleries are working a lot on these issues. Yet, the art underworld remains huge—and the Art Loss Register’s database of stolen art has swelled over the years to include 609 Picassos, 181 Rembrandts, and Caravaggio’s priceless masterpiece Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco. According to experts, the stolen art trade is one of the world’s largest black markets, a $4 to $6 billion illegal business.

I learned fear at the age of 4. When we, as a family of a Soviet diplomat, moved from Norway to Moscow.

The chaotic and intense Moscow frightened me. What a contrast with the orderly, hospitable, and much smaller Oslo! Apprehensive and gloomy people, just five years after the end of World War II. The scarcity of the most common necessities—bread, milk, sugar, salt, potatoes, rice, fruits, and vegetables. I could not any longer walk freely on the streets—my parents never let my hand go. I could not leave anything outside our room—it would be stolen.

I demanded we go home. My parents never managed to legitimately prove to me that we had come home. I started to stutter and then stopped talking altogether. In six months when I did begin to talk again, I could speak only Russian, but not my native Norwegian.

I began the learning process of an elaborate system by which the Soviet totalitarian regime installed fear into the souls and bodies of its vassals.

Our communal apartment felt like a prison, where my younger brother and I could not talk in full voice, or play in full view. Our parents were afraid that we would say or do something that could be construed as the reflection of their critical opinion of the communist order. I felt restrained and suffocated, as if I was wearing clothes several sizes smaller than I needed.

The same feeling I had in a day care center, where I was exposed for the first time to all those rules and regulations that limited my freedom in any possible way. It also was my first initiation into conformism and propaganda, although I did not know those terms at that time.

But it was the hidden, subtle ways that truly injected fear into my displaced and wounded emotional and mental bodies. My sensitive inner self immediately picked up on my parents’ fear and discomfort. They abruptly stopped speaking Norwegian, German, or English in fear of being misinterpreted and informed on by their neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens. During a May Day parade and demonstration that we all watched from a sidewalk, I exclaimed, “Hip hip hurrah!,” as I had in Oslo, instead of the Russian “Ura(h).” My mother shushed me so forcefully that I could not make myself talk the entire day. I remember she cried that evening while talking to my father.

Government-imposed bans and limitations permeated even the most trivial aspects of life. If your life’s purpose was some kind of progress, you could not help but violate those rules. You would always feel guilty and fearful of the retribution of an omnipresent and omnipotent authority. This fear kills your personal willpower and bravery and wastes away your critical mind and sense of self-worth. Only collective bravery and group dependence are left. As a child, you first resist and then adapt. I adapted, but I never resigned to that fear, anxiety, and panic. I never lost my critical mind. A stranger, I never fitted in. As a thinking adult, I began to question the established order and eventually resist it again. I went beyond that order by turning my sight into my inner world, investigating all available spiritual practices.

People’s response to the strict system of group dependence was the creation of a parallel system of personal interdependency—the network of like-minded friends and friends of friends. That was how one would survive the oppressive regime and go around the rules and limitations. The negative side of that network was that it could burn you. I remember a Soviet-time joke about two men talking to each other while riding on a Moscow bus. One says, “Do you know the difference between our government and our bus driver? Our driver knows the point of destination, but our government has no idea.” Another man comes up to them, shows his KGB badge and says to the man who just talked about the difference, “Do you know the difference between you and your friend? Your friend will continue riding, but you’ll go with me.” The man replies, “Do you know the difference between you and me?” Then he shows his KGB badge and says, “No difference.”

We all there lived with a constant risk of inevitable exposure. The risk that created both fear and courage. A very specific type of courage—the courage of an inner dissident.

It is not easy for those who have never experienced life under a totalitarian regime to understand that people can be cowardly and courageous at the same time, and that many courageous actions took place in private. This dichotomy was the way of life and survival.

Nobody was an open dissident during the Kafkaesque time of Stalinism. If they say otherwise, they are either lying or dead. Very few were during the Brezhnev era. Yet, practically anyone who had retained their power of observation and critical mind was an inner dissident to a larger or smaller degree. Most of them were “invisible” people, whose courage was simply knowing and dreaming about the eventual end of the dictatorship’s nightmare, or just keeping alive that power of critical mind. Even if they had done actually nothing to destroy the regime, they would consider themselves inner dissidents.

Only some of those inner dissidents were disturbing for the government. They usually were great thinkers, scientists, writers, and artists of the era, such as Pasternak and Shostakovich. Neither was an open dissident. But they both projected a humanistic philosophy and recurrent faith in the creative miracle of life itself, reaching beyond political matters to universal human values in their works. And both survived Stalin’s repressions by accident.

But an inner dissident is, by definition, a hypocrite. He has an army of external lies and deceptions at his disposal. He has to be a sycophant, a briber, a flatterer.

He has to ingratiate himself to all those who are above him on the pecking order and who use their power for material enrichment or emotional satisfaction of feeling their superiority. The more fraudulent that superiority is, the more sycophantic proof its holders demand from their subordinates. For them, it is both a survival technique and entertainment. For the rest, it is a balancing act between fear and bravery—the act that can destroy your psyche and body.

Contrary to a popular belief, constant exposure to fear does not immunize you against it. No matter how much you progressed in a spiritual direction, you still have to live and work in your physical manifestation of that moment. In this aspect, I had never managed to get rid of the feelings of fear, dis-liberty, dis-independence, dis-comfort and dis-ease.

I just did not want to waste my life on fighting that system of fear any more. I had to get out. I had to be born to freedom again.

“To Freedom” is an excerpt from “Between Two Halves of a Journey,” Prokhorov’s unpublished memoir.

—

Vadim Prokhorov

Vadim Prokhorov is a writer, artist, and composer as well as a concert pianist and choral director. He is an author of Russian Folk Songs: Musical Genres and History (Scarecrow Press, 2001) and author and illustrator of Little Red Riding Hood (to be published next year). He has written numerous articles on classical music for the Encyclopedia Americana, for which he served as associate editor. He has contributed cover and feature articles to The Guardian (London), Parade Magazine, Air&Space/Smithsonian, The Moscow Times, and Gramophone Online Magazine, among others. He was a features writer and classical music critic for various daily and weekly newspapers in Connecticut, where he lived before moving to New York. As an artist, he had numerous solo and group exhibitions. He recent solo exhibition, “Visual Music,” was in November 2008 at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. His paintings sold to private collectors in New York, Washington, D.C., and Connecticut. His choral compositions and arrangements of Russian vocal compositions and folk songs have been published by Oxford University Press, Hal Leonard, EC Schirmer, and Musica Russica. He is a member of the Authors Guild and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

He has given lectures on Russian music at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Wesleyan, and Boston Universities, among others.

Paintings by James Williams II

Text by Lisa Preston

Little Rooster, a series of oil paintings by James Williams II, tells the story of a young boy who lives a seemingly idyllic life in the United States during the 1930s. The boy has a loving mother and a wealthy scientist father who direct all aspects of his life. When adversaries of the family are introduced into the story, the boy is assigned a bodyguard, the ultracool and courageous Red Rooster, who possesses strengths the boy doesn’t see in his own father. As the boy’s admiration for Red grows and their relationship deepens, the boy adopts the name “Little Rooster.” Eventually, despite his longing to remain a child, events force him to confront the burdens of adulthood, including the life-changing decision to continue Red’s heroic legacy on his own.

The idea for Little Rooster came to Williams about a year ago, in a dream so vivid he began to write down the details. Williams was listening to a lot of blues music and the name for his Little Rooster character was inspired by Sam Cooke’s version of the Howlin’ Wolf song of the same name. Williams was also particularly moved by the lyrics of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” a melancholy testament to parents’ loving protection of a child who will someday leave them:

One of these mornings

You’re going to rise up singing

Then you’ll spread your wings

And you’ll take to the sky

But until that morning

There’s a’nothing can harm you

With your daddy and mammy standing by

The work dramatizes many scenarios from the artist’s childhood while also tackling broader concepts that resonate with us all: how we define right and wrong and how we make life decisions.

Williams feels that while adults often see the world as gray and monotonous, children visualize color and endless possibilities. He illustrates his epic story with bright color palettes and stylized figures that reference vintage comic books and the moral lessons of children’s books. Marrying the lexicon of pop culture with his more painterly sensibilities, which are informed by more “high art” sources such as John Singer Sargent, Williams is on path toward mastering the formal aspects of his craft.

For Williams, painting presents a challenge that is deeply rewarding. He first started using watercolors, then acrylics, and eventually oil. His peers observe Williams as contemplative, almost exacting in his work. “I take pride and pleasure in building the frame, stretching the canvas,” he explains. “I think in layers, so it comes natural to work in oil. Oil presents many possibilities—you can mix it with other media to create many different mixtures and textures.”

Similarly, Williams does not feel bound to present the Little Rooster story in strict sequence. If he needs to skip a few moments to create another moment he can. His job as artist is simply to identify the relationships between the characters. Observant of the oral tradition of the blues music that originally inspired his story, Williams is open to audiences interpreting elements of the Little Rooster story differently than he may have conceived them and discussing their own versions. “I have made my story, so someone can take something out of that and make their story. What doesn’t change is Little Rooster himself.”

—

James Williams II holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts and a B.S. from The State University of New York College at Cortland. He is a recipient of the 2009 MICA Bromo Seltzer Award and the 2009 MFA Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and was awarded the Tom Miller Scholarship and the Mount Royal Scholarship at Maryland Institute of Arts. Little Rooster has been shown at IAM Gallery in New York City. Williams’ work has also been exhibited at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse and RTLK Architecture Gallery in Baltimore.

We hope that art and literature can provide a much-needed diversion from the realities surrounding us, if only for a mere few moments. Through the innovations of /One/’s contributors, readers can also find some insight into what it means to be human–which, after all, is what compels us to make art. Individuals are often unable to fully comprehend large-scale human suffering. The artist helps us understand the larger narrative by sharing a specific story that we can relate to via our own experiences.

Thank you, readers, for giving the works of our contributors their deserved attention. We at /One/ wish you healthy and happy days in this new decade.

The editors
/One/

Interviewed by Anthony Rhoades

/One/: You often explore dissociation in your photographs.

Sarah Small: Yes, I’m fascinated by themes or characters that are entirely separate from each other brought together into the same space. I contrive scenarios that combine people with distinctive visual personalities and then look for the tensions between the ordinary and the implausible. I photograph a lot of animals, too, particularly in close interactions with humans. This ongoing series of work is titled The Delirium Constructions. Usually I work with sets of models who might never meet in real life—constructing unsettling fantasies, like the elderly with people in their physical prime—who are experiencing one another’s presence in an intimate context for the first time as I shoot and direct them together. When my perception of a scene shifts all around without landing, when I see an undetermined dynamic that seems endlessly explorable, I know an image has been made. I enjoy dynamics that are hilarious and serious simultaneously. I’ve experimented with this dynamic—this feeling that cannot quite be identified—in still photography, singing, and in performance in a recent Tableau Vivant, held last winter. I brought 35 models together in various states of undress and in interactive narratives as a centerpiece for a party.

/One/: What makes this an interesting subject for you?

SS: Thinking about my upbringing, much of what occupied everyday family conversation was observing and analyzing all the absurd and mysterious contrasts within the human condition. And to this day, most casual family conversations revolve around this topic. Ideas and human themes that can contain both seriousness and silliness are endless sources of empathetic connection and laughter in my family dynamic. My mother’s father was a psychoanalyst and she grew up on the grounds of a mental institution. Through her observations in these surroundings, as well as her immersion in her own immediate and extended family, she has countless stories that are at once tragic, mysterious, and hilarious. My father’s family upbringing was also unique. His mother was a jazz pianist and his father was a colonel in the army as well as an opera fanatic. My parents are both musicians, my dad a pianist/modern composer and my mom a Renaissance lutenist. I grew up with few emotional boundaries but a long list of structural and practical rules that made little sense to me but had to be followed. I was taught by my mom to be deeply empathetic to all humans around me and not to judge anyone, while simultaneously I was offered the tools to make light of everyone and everything around me. We love to laugh. We also tend to study our surroundings closely.

/One/: What about the human condition inspires you when making photographs?

SS: Humans are unpredictable and layered with surprises at every turn. I very much enjoy working with the passion and unpredictability of human subjects. Unlike some photographers who use storyboards, I do not work with preconceived ideas. Instead my work is created through improvisation and unpredictable outcome. With or without a camera, this is what I enjoy most about being around people. I love navigating the search for truth and being a witness to all the in-betweens. I love observing people on the subway or on the streets. And I also love watching people watching other people. This is where I gain most of my personal and photographic inspiration and this is one of the reasons I love New York so much.

When shooting, my subjects and I theatrically improvise, collaborate, and experiment together. I talk a lot—sometimes nonstop—and ask a lot from my models. It is important for me to create a playful environment so that experimentation in any form is emotionally cushioned and safe. I direct models into spontaneous interactions and try to encourage the idea that anything goes. I move my subjects and myself around in the space until something sparks my attention. When an experiment takes life I start to shoot faster. The rhythm of my shoots tend to go in waves, moving from slow and deliberate to fast and frenetic, and back again.

I am just as interested in graphic expressions in humans as I am in thematic ones. I love working with models with unique facial or body structures, interesting skin textures or other textural elements which to explore.

/One/: If you weren’t an image maker, what might you be doing?

SS: I actually do spend quite a bit of time not being an image maker, and I don’t think I’d feel happy or complete without creating both photography and music. When I’m not photographing, I spend my time singing, performing, and composing vocal arrangements with my a cappella quartet, Black Sea Hotel. When I discovered Les Mystere Des Voix Bulgares in college, I became entranced immediately and started playing the one album I had all the time. Shortly after moving to New York, I saw an ad on Craigslist about auditions being held that same day for a start-up Bulgarian Women’s Choir. I was the last remaining founding member of that choir before forming into my current band, Black Sea Hotel. Now we rehearse out of my kitchen and perform at rock venues, bars, parks, and the occasional concert hall. We create contemporary arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs (mostly Bulgarian, but some Macedonian, Romanian, and Greek). I recently realized that my sonic compositions are not so far away in intent from my visual constructions in photography—uneasy, sensual, and on the edge of dissonance, while also being simultaneously playful and densely harmonic.

If I wasn’t image or music making, I think I would be doing some form of social work or psychology. No matter what, I’m sure it would involve interacting and collaborating with other people in some capacity. I have also considered acting. I took an improv class last year, but it was more challenging that I could have ever expected. I was sort of terrified in class, trying to come up with catchy methods on the spot for captivating myself and those around me. I thought I’d be great at it because I’m rarely nervous around people in real life, but I was wrong. If I wanted to go into acting, that would be a vastly different professional trajectory.

/One/: I’ve read that you go into a photo session with only a vague idea of what you wish to get out of it. Essentially creating an atmosphere, setting the stage so something interesting may transpire. In the end, how much is you and how much is the collaboration of your subjects and the environment that you’ve created for them to interact in?

SS: It really is a collaboration. I create the environment in which to explore my models interacting and I set the tone through a combination of directing and simply waiting and watching.

I love my models so much. It is their trust in me and our trust in our collaboration that make my work possible. And the more I work with the same subject, the more synergistic our collaborations become. Generally my repeat models become close friends.

/One/: Your parents are artists and musicians. Do you think that your upbringing has had an effect on your art, or exposed you to a side life, so to speak? If you were raised by an accountant and an insurance salesman, how might your images be different?

SS: I’m sure my images would be totally different had I been raised by different parents. I may not have even become an image maker or musician. They instilled in me curiosity about people and generated in me an openness to endlessly explore human behavior. Also, my mom and grandmother were both photographers, so maybe the passion is in the genes, too. I think my mom is an amazing photographer and wish she still took as many pictures now as she did when I was growing up. Like me, she loves observing people and capturing emotional moments.

It’s funny to think of someone in my family as an insurance salesman. I don’t know anyone who does work like that in my entire extended family. I kind of wish I did… I think.

/One/: Tell us something we don’t know about Sarah Small.

SS: In Fall 2010, I will again bring to life The Delirium Constructions as a living, breathing image. This will be my second Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions, preceded by several work-in-progress mini tableaus with question and answer sessions. etc. for which to workshop the final vision.  As referenced above, last spring, I arrayed 35 models in various stages of undress into interactive narratives on platforms as a centerpiece for a party I threw in Brooklyn.

I brought the models together into improbable, close interactions to examine the social and graphic contrasts of youth and experience, hysteria and discipline, tragedy and hilarity, and sexuality and desexualization. The next tableau vivant will continue on the same path but will be on a grander scale and with new axes of experimentation. Tableau II will feature 120 models, a larger audience, and will introduce musical elements in collaboration with singer Shara Worden and my a cappella group, Black Sea Hotel. Using original vocal arrangements, we will provide live soundscapes interplaying harmony and dissonance within the visual experience. I am so thrilled for this event.

I wear black and gray mostly but I have a bubblegum-pink bedroom with a chandelier and frilly pink things everywhere. My sister Rachel has red hair and freckles and is going to school for forensic mental heath counseling. I’m kind of scared of dogs but love cats. I will travel to Tanzania at the end of the month. I dream about bears a lot and collect them around my house. I’ve taken a self-portrait Polaroid every day for 13 years.

—

Sarah Small

Sarah Small was born in Washington DC in 1979 into a family of musicians and writers. She fell in love with photography when she was 13. In 2001, Small graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and work in Brooklyn, photographing, singing, and teaching at Parsons School of Design.

The Delirium Constructions is her current and ongoing body of still photographs exploring disassociated characters brought together into the same space. Small brings her models into improbable, close interactions to examine the social and graphic contrasts of youth and experience, hysteria and discipline, tragedy and hilarity, and sexuality and desexualization.(www.sarahsmall.com).

In Fall 2010, she will gather together 120 models in various stages of undress into suspended interactions to create a large scale Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions. (www.livingpictureprojects.com).

Since 1997, Small has taken a Polaroid of herself everyday. She plans to pursue this project for life.

Her work has appeared in publications including Life Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. It has been exhibited at Exit Art, The Corcoran Gallery, and The Australian Center for Photography. Small has also been the recipient of several awards and was recently named by American Photo as one of the “ Top 13 Emerging Photographers” working today.

When she is not photographing, Small sings, arranges music and performs in Brooklyn’s Balkan Vocal Quartet, Black Sea Hotel (www.myspace.com/BlackSeaHotel).

In between these clouds
coming together like hands and parting like ships,
she stands at a brook of beige leaves,
thinks of three friends who made
a monastery in the woods.

Stag moves through the hillside.
Everything, every tree falls in love with its neighbor.
It’s chaotic and messy — springtime    nothing to be done

Quick — Name three people who make you feel

pure
and special
and extraordinary.
Name them now —— go.

She arrives, sets down her luggage, and smiling, asks,
What kind of soul is mine?
And accepts whatever answer is given.           Jibes
and jealousy go right over her head,
used as she was
to living with them in the other house.
Like a mermaid learning to live on land, she explains
on the stairwell, I was blind as to who to trust.
(Though he loves her, he doesn’t believe her.  None of them do.)
Until

four years later

when she’s

“getting over” her little love affair, it occurs to her.  Comes rising up
like a lake of dark pain.  She begins to see.  Not just about him, but about the other   the                                                                                                                               first man

It was so beautiful, she writes.
He was beautiful but then  totally crazy.  And ugly  bitter
ugly.  Vile.

Crazy love.  We even looked like twins, people said.

But you know  even while it was happening and good, way out          there
I would leave him, inside I would leave, and go flying away
To the outside windowpane of some universe   eternally caught in the furies at Act Two

— and so but I cared, I did —
but I was also there,
barely hanging on
(I mean, I was there when Mother Mary said, “Go to the outer edge of your greatness”)

eternally rush-rush-missing my other-century companions so—
my broken down-on-their-luck bohemians, ragged soul brigade
I barely stopped to look for them anymore—
(it was the one thing I accepted as a constant in this life, my missing them)

And anyway with this wild wild wind raging shaking
the window pane and the universe
its curved howls banging.  Me
in coattails hanging on
and looking in             big-eyed

“The outer edge of your greatness,” she said.   I was there —

Then I wake up and say, Oh, it’s my own Spirit
scares me so.  My own Self.  I have been that mutable and reckless,
streakful and open too.
Like driving in his car the very first time, I knew.
I just knew.  Like magic, he’d showed up at my door.
He said things about dreams, but I already knew.    I knew about the Light.
He held disappointment — my twin
Of some kind — So
my reckless leaving into the Sea of Light.

Always, I knew:  That was the whole triumphant ordeal.

Now, remembering.
Now bleared with tears and love that just won’t go away — it exposes me —
Like a love for those beautiful cryptic ghosts who tell me they love me back

Reckless like stars of joy.
Need I be?

Three swallows just flew overhead.

—

Katayoon Zandvakili

Katayoon Zandvakili’s collection of poetry, Deer Table Legs, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series prize, and the book’s title poem was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been anthologized — American Poetry: The Next Generation, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and The Poetry of Iranian Women — and published in journals such asLumina, caesura, Five Fingers Review, Rattapallax, Arte East, Private Photo Review, and narrativemagazine.com.

Katayoon has completed her novel, In the Lap of the Gods: My Eight-&-A-Half-Month Marriage to an Impostor, while working on a second volume of poetry, The Girl King Sings Songs of Epic Leaving, Red-Leafed Shame & Yellow Uprising, and the screenplaysWonderful Her and To Live As I Like: The Marie B. Story.

She is also a painter.

I remember his body, the drops beaded across his pale belly, the dark hair plastered in web-trails across his chest, how he tousled his gray head with a towel; how he leaned over me, close and warm, to pat smooth an overturned pail of sand. We shrieked with laughter when he tossed us into the waves, the chill water that stung our eyes and left our bodies gritty with salt.  Afterward we wrapped ourselves in towels and walked to the concession stand, where he bought us red and blue slushes in paper cones.

At the end of the day, when the sun was low, he packed up our sun-lotion and sandwich wrappers and told us it was time to go. But I was never ready to leave; I didn’t want the day to end.  So I ran, laughing, a tall shadow across the sand, and plunged into the cold water, taunting him to come and pull me out, to drag me home.  I believed I would be able, always, to grasp his strong hand just as a wave came plummeting down on us.  I can still see him there, blurry above the water-line, a distant golden figure coming closer; I can see what he meant when he promised that even without his arm under my belly to hold me, I could stay afloat.

Hank Feldman looks nothing like my father. Daddy was a tall man with dark eyes and broad shoulders who never got old. Hank is tiny, at least 70, hunched and wrinkled. His eyes are a vacant, wintry blue. He sits quietly in the window seat as I shove my duffel into the overhead and collapse into my place on the aisle. He waits a few moments, until I fasten my seatbelt, lean my head back and close my eyes, before tapping my shoulder.

I am tired, but agree to give Hank my seat when he explains he will need to rise repeatedly to use the restroom during our two-hour flight from Chicago to Boston. I like to be near the window, anyway, to look down on clouds.

When we are settled into our places he asks, “Are you coming or going?”

“Coming,” I reply, resigning myself to a few moments of small talk. “Coming home.” I will tell him I live in Boston, that I am a piano teacher, that I grew up on the north shore of Massachusetts. I will not tell him this was my first visit to Chicago, or that the so-called specialists at the hospital there can’t help me.

But he asks nothing else. He tells me he lives in a small Illinois town called Palwaukee, and is going to his granddaughter’s high school graduation. “She’s off to college,” he says, his voice wavering. “I can’t believe it.”

During the safety demonstration Hank watches, alert and interested, as the flight attendants explain how to breathe, how to float, how to escape in case the plane should catch fire or plummet from the sky. I look out the window to the paved runway, where men in brightly colored jumpsuits are scurrying about, as if searching for something.

“You know what?” he asks, as the plane lifts into the air. “Things have changed since I flew myself. I was a crop duster in the sixties.”

I am half-listening, thinking instead about the oncologist I’d met the day before, the experimental treatments, waiting lists, the unpredictable nature of what lay ahead.

“It’s different technology,” Hank continues. “It’s all done with computers.”

Out the window the ground spirals away from us, dissolving into atmosphere. I close my eyes, in awe of this technology, of the miracle that carries me 30,000 feet into the sky; of the measurements these pilots make, using instruments of time and wind.

“Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”

I wake to lights below; they blur and waver as though I’m peering through the glass at the iridescence on a sea floor. Hank shuffles down the aisle, and returns to his seat beside me.

When he smiles, I notice his face droops on one side—the effect of a stroke, perhaps. I hadn’t seen it before, as that side was turned away from me. His pale eyes are cloudy behind their glasses. He says, “You, know, the worst thing about getting old is the surprise. You’re just surprised all the time by what your body does to you!”

I laugh as politely as I can. Not knowing how to respond, I say, “Well, I think you look great.”

“That’s nice of you,” he says. “Don’t listen to me, anyway. You’re young and beautiful. You have a lot to look forward to.”

The lights in the cabin shut off, then, and a bodiless voice intones, Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our final descent. I turn to the window and feel myself floating, submerged in a futuristic womb, staring not into the sockets of my eyeless reflection but out to the night silence. The plane circles Boston Harbor where a peninsula juts like a crooked finger. Around it the blackness of the harbor joins the blackness of the sky, and I try to imagine Hank and I are adrift in space, ageless and untouchable.

But Earth ascends; the world comes back to us. Now I can make out illuminated stadiums, lawns lined with streetlamps, freeways of white headlights streaming in one direction, red taillights in the other. As the plane lowers billboards and office buildings glow into focus. Hank says it’s nothing like when he landed in the cornfields of Waukegan Illinois, where two rows of light were the only thing marking the solitary runway from surrounding darkness. It was like landing in a jungle, or an African plain, he says; some wild, undiscovered country. Even now, as an old man, he feels the same slight tensing of his muscles, the same inner steadying of himself, as if he grips the yoke in his own age-mottled hands and prepares to touch down.

You’re taught where to focus when you land, he says; to look ahead at the horizon and the end of the runway, rather than down at the ground. I have spent my recent life afraid to think of what is coming; able only to glance back, occasionally, at the receding landscape of places I’ve been. I wonder if my father can still see me; if he would even recognize me now. It seems a lifetime has passed since I knew him. But maybe that’s better. I like to think he remembers me as the child, sun-warmed and laughing, who learned how to swim at Good Harbor Beach.

Now I press my forehead to the glass, watching the pavement below whiz past like a gray river, and my breath catches in anticipation. “This is it,” Hank says. Reaching for the armrest between us, he accidentally touches my arm, and for a moment I feel his fingers cold against my skin. We sit watching, waiting, knowing at any moment we’ll feel the lurch and rumble of the plane’s wheels touching ground—that always surprising jolt of reconnection.

—

Meaghan Mulholland

Meaghan Mulholland’s writing has appeared in The Colorado Review and Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine, among other publications, and her writing awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy.  She worked for several years at National Geographic and is currently hard at work on a novel set in Sicily while completing her MFA in Fiction at the University of Arkansas. To learn more about Meaghan’s writing, visit her website at meaghanmulholland.com.