Midtown Messenger

by Carl Schiffman

By early January of 1952 I had a new after school job, this time for the Composing Room, a print shop on West 46^th Street. The High School of Performing Arts was just next door. I worked picking up and delivering layouts, proofs, and revised proofs of advertisements composed by printers working at giant linotype machines and from wooden boxes of hand‑set type in a bright noisy space on the far side of a counter to which we messengers would be called to be assigned our trips.

I was generally given three or four good‑sized manila envelopes to deliver and about as many pick‑ups to make, written out on separate slips of paper. Deliveries were usually made to a receptionist and pick‑ups too, would often be waiting for me at her desk. I wouldn't have to say a word. Other times I would be sent beyond the reception area to contact a specific individual or department. I took particular pleasure in those occasions, especially once I had begun to learn my way through the frequently labyrinthine interior offices.

My job would have been much the same, I suppose, if I had been delivering proofs for grocery chains or department stores. Being a messenger just meant finding a sequence of addresses after all, working out the most efficient or most enjoyable route linking them. But the Composing Room had interesting clients. I once had to deliver a set of proofs of book ads to Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. I hadn't read the second line on the envelope, so instead of delivering the proofs to whatever office in the museum they were addressed to, I asked for Dr. Mead and was sent up to her eyrie in one of the stone towers of the Museum.

Dr. Mead was unhappy at the interruption, she said something nasty to the secretary who had let me in, then her blue eyes blazed at me. "Can't you read? It says—" And she told me what street entrance was written on the envelope. "I would expect," she said, "a messenger to know something about geography."

I was furious at her tone and at that little bit of urban anthropology that characterized me—now and forever presumably—as a messenger. "I might," I snapped back in anger, "have other interests!" She stared at me in wonder. An anthropoid had talked back. Her face lit in a brief and wonderful smile.

The prime activity of the Composing Room was printing advertisements for books. My job was special, different, important, because of that. Because it brought me, day after day, into the revered places whose names appeared on the cover and title page of every book I read. The book connection was instrumental in getting me the job. My friend Herman, who lived in my apartment house, had been working as a part‑time messenger at Composing Room since fall. He had gotten the job through his family's multiple connections with publishing; his step‑father, Albert H. Gross, was a well-known Yiddish to English translator, who had translated Isaac Bashevis Singer's first novel, The Family Moscat, for Knopf. Herman's step‑sister, Nancy, was an editor at Scientific American, which published book ads.

If I found romance in visiting famous publishing houses, even if I got no further than the reception desk, it was because books were privileged objects for me. My family, it must be admitted, unlike Herman's, paid chiefly lip service to literature. My father may have, as he claimed, read everything that mattered in European literature before he came to the United States at age twenty-eight; what I actually saw him reading as I grew up were Perry Mason and Ellery Queen mysteries, and other detective novels that came three to a volume from the Mystery Book Club. He also read historical romances by Dumas, some H.G. Wells, and occasionally, but always with sovereign contempt, American best‑sellers.

My mother's reading habits were a mystery to me. I recall well-worn volumes of Keats or Shelley on her bedside table. My aunt Norma, who had her own bedroom and bath in our apartment, had built-in bookcases filled with publications by or about Marx and Lenin, primers on dialectical materialism, the collected works of Jack London, but never to my knowledge read anything more demanding than the Daily Worker or some propaganda booklet telling her what Party line to toe; perhaps she read a few novels by the left-wing author, Howard Fast.

Out of this inauspicious brew, perhaps more out of what my family talked about over dinner than what it actually read, my own delight in reading emerged. What was most remarkable was the intensity I was able to bring to whatever I read. I read Modern Library Giants, long long books like the Studs Lonigan trilogy or Of Human Bondage, in a single day. I think my impulse was purely escapist. I had a science fiction collection of hundreds of magazines that included a complete run of Astounding back to 1940 or 41, and many copies before that; I owned every issue of Galaxy and many copies of the large format pulps with the lurid front covers, Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories, dating back to the 1930s. I haunted used book stores—especially Stephen's Fantasy Book Service—for back-issues to fill the gaps in my collections.

There would come a time when the content of my reading would deeply affect my life; for now though, the books I read so avidly on the messengers' bench were books I entered like a movie theatre, leaving my own daily life outside. Perhaps that was why I was able to concentrate so well.

The cachet of the publishing houses did not exist only in my head, and was not just the glorification of familiar names like Random House (which published Modern Library) or Scribner's (for Hemingway) or Doubleday (which had recently begun publishing science fiction in hard cover). What mattered as much to me was the physical impression these houses made, their decor and their location in the city. I took great pleasure, for instance, in visiting Macmillan Company in its own building—now occupied by Forbes Magazine—on lower Fifth Avenue or visiting McGraw Hill in its green skyscraper on West 42^nd Street, even though I had small or no idea what authors they published. Simon and Schuster and Pocket Books occupied either adjacent floors or opposite ends of the same floor in the RCA Building. I loved riding the sleek elevators, admired the sepia murals in the lobby.

Doubleday and Harcourt Brace, both in rather ordinary office buildings on Madison Avenue, impressed me with their modernity, open floor plans with indirect lighting and mazes of cubicles that seemed like a foretaste of the future. Knopf, by contrast, in a staid office building at Madison and 52^nd, had thick carpets and wood paneling, seemed to deny the reality Doubleday and Harcourt Brace were so eagerly embracing. Best of all, most romantic and rewarding, were the offices of Harper Bros., not yet Harper & Row, in a fine 19^th century brownstone off Madison Avenue in Murray Hill; and the offices of Random House in the north wing of the Italian Renaissance style Villard Houses on Madison between 50^th and 51^st Streets; most of the Villard Houses, now a shell behind which a giant hotel looms, were then occupied by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York and I was captivated by the juxtaposition. Just to enter Random House though, to climb the narrow winding flight of stairs to an upper floor, was to leave my daily self behind as effectively as though I had opened a book and vanished between its covers.

The freedom I had to move through the city streets when I was out on a "run" or to read on the bench while I was waiting to be sent out, the kindness and good humor of the dispatchers, the absence of close or nagging supervision, were not sufficient to insulate me from a feeling of humiliation at being a messenger. The feeling grew much more intense once the school year ended and I began to work full time. Part of the problem was that the other full-time messengers were—how do I make myself sound like less of a snob than I probably was?—enough to inspire disdain in the most open‑hearted receptionist. They were uneducated, scruffy, surly, sometimes elderly, sometimes alcoholic, sometimes partly deranged. Like myself, they were minimum wage workers, a thin cut above daily laborers. And in their eyes, and the eyes of the public who saw me moving through the streets with my armloads of proofs, and above all in the eyes of those young and beautifully groomed, inevitably haughty receptionists, I was one of them. My friend Herman was away working as a counselor in the Poconos. I missed him a lot.

It was only during the summer that I began to cheat my employers. Not that I ever dumped proofs in a trash basket the way I had political pamphlets I had been paid to distribute years before. We messengers were supposed to take busses for any distance over eight or ten blocks. I walked everything up to twenty blocks or more and filed a petty cash slip for my five-cent fare. Very occasionally, I was required to deliver a block of actual set type rather than a proof. The first time was a joke. The dispatcher gestured casually at a small paper‑wrapped parcel on top of the counter and told me to make it my first stop. I slid my fingers under the string that tied the parcel, and then stood there transfixed, as though my hand had been nailed to the counter, while the dispatcher and a few of the nearby printers laughed. The parcel must have weighed thirty or forty pounds. I began by taking cabs as I was supposed to, but by summer I was either walking or taking busses with the lead weight, billing petty cash for imaginary cab fare.

I don't believe that the job itself, whatever occasional humiliation I may have felt, prompted my dishonesty. I did not feel exploited or taken advantage of in any way. Outside factors had weight. I had been accepted at the University of Chicago, but I had not won a scholarship and my family could not afford to send me there without one. I don't know whether I was angrier at myself for failing the scholarship exam or at my father, who had always managed to send himself to Florida for a couple of months every winter, with plenty of money in his pockets for the race tracks and the card games, for not having the money to send me to Chicago. Writing sixty-five years later, I am struck by how angry at my father I must have been. He had all the answers, had read all the books, was chock full of innate ability, but he hadn't been able to pay for what I cared about most, which was getting away from him.

Carl Schiffman’s stories and essays have appeared in Missouri Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Transatlantic Review, and elsewhere since he first began publishing in 1972. A native New Yorker, Carl studied playwriting with Paul Goodman at the Living Theatre and with John Gassner at Yale Drama School. Retired for over twenty years, he made his living—after a shaky start—as a case worker with neglected or delinquent children, as a state and federal civil rights investigator, and finally as a writer for non-profit organizations and fundraising consulting firms, including work for the Legal Defense Fund, Memorial-Sloan Cancer Center, the NAACP, and the New York Public Library.

Edge of Obsession

by David Raney

“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life, and never seen.”

    —John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

If I told you that when I was a kid I used to double numbers over and over, 2-4-8-16-32 until they became page-crossing monsters lined up in identical pairs, you might say “Man, that’s pretty OCD.” I used to collect license numbers, too, peering out the windows of our station wagon and copying them into the green lines of a journal my dad had given me. But that was mainly to feed a fantasy of telling baffled police that yes, as a matter of fact, I did know the plate number of that blue Gremlin, getaway car in the crime of the century.

Nerd hobby or superhero daydream, whatever that was it didn’t last. I must have tired of writing numbers in rows and not solving crimes. But I still recall old addresses and phone numbers and can recite pi to fifty places, which friends consider amusing or strange depending on their own relationship to numbers. And I have my habits like anyone. In coffee shops I always order a double espresso, because why tempt the writing gods unnecessarily, and I always put new groceries behind old, fresh towels at the bottom of the stack. These are probably relics of a college stock boy job, I tell myself. On the way out the door I always pat my pockets for the holy trinity—keys, phone, wallet—but I don’t do it ten times. Maybe three.

I’m not a neat freak, either, as my wife would certainly attest. I load the dishwasher a certain way, but I don’t care if someone else does it differently and would just as soon not do it at all. Every ritual, in other words, isn’t OCD. Without some routine we’d never balance our checkbooks or catch a bus. But the line between normal and clinical isn’t a hard one. I’m capable of noticing when a carpet pattern points in the direction I’m walking, and I’m more likely to notice if I’m anxious or distressed. Still, it doesn’t feel as if anything real depends on it. Or on avoiding the fissures of a buckled city sidewalk, staying safe inside the cracked continents.

I don’t have whatever blend of inheritance and environment, gene mutation, or chemical cocktail brings on true obsessive-compulsive disorder. No one is entirely sure what causes it, but the full expression of OCD is a life-controlling condition requiring medication and therapy, and I don’t wish to be glib about it. That would dismiss what a real sufferer goes through, a thing of which I have no experience. But I can imagine it, thanks to vivid accounts. A good friend describes her husband at age eighteen:

He was just starting community college, had fallen in love with languages and was taking intensive French and German, with all the flash-cards, word learning and repetition that entails. He’d make lists and mark up dictionaries, pronounce each word ten times, twenty, and if he got it wrong he’d have to start all over. Then he started needing to make the bed up perfectly before he could get in, so that between repetition and straightening it might be 2 a.m. before he got to bed.

That nighttime ritual resonated with me, hovering like an owl call, until I recalled a period in my own teens when I went through ornate bedtime rituals of adjusting the blankets, touching the curtains and the window in patterns that had to be right or something bad might happen. It didn’t feel like guilt or penance for anything, just that I was charged in some obscure way with protecting my family from vague dangers and couldn’t let them down. No matter how tired or how late, I’d tug and straighten like an escaped prisoner covering his tracks until it felt perfect. Ten minutes, half an hour, I have no idea. Then it stopped, and I don’t remember that either. I just didn’t do it anymore.

The bestseller The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing helped define OCD for many people, and possibly humanized it too, as did TV’s Monk and movies like As Good As It Gets and possibly The Accidental Tourist. “Possibly” because William Hurt’s character Macon isn’t labeled OCD, and the idea isn’t central to the plot. But in his widower’s grief he’s just as obsessive—lining up cans on a kitchen shelf like a drill sergeant eyeing recruits—as the Jack Nicholson and Tony Shaloub characters. Monk creator David Hoberman says he was inspired by his favorite fictional detectives but also by his own experience. He told an interviewer, "I couldn't walk on cracks and had to touch poles. I have no idea why—but if I didn't do these things, something terrible would happen.”

Hoberman’s OCD is self-diagnosed so it isn’t technically (medically) true that he “has it,” and this is the part that fascinates me. Even the most apparently alien conditions are on a curve, just like intelligence, and a capacity for humor or empathy, and other attributes notoriously difficult to describe and define. Think about it: among the genetic and chemical disorders, who couldn’t find some aspect of her behavior that matches up? Thumb through the DSM-5 and try not to find yourself reflected every few pages—cloudy and distorted, maybe, but you. A code-switch here, a dab of neurotransmitter there, and any of us could have a label and a different life.

Some afflictions are obviously binary affairs. A mosquito bit you or it didn’t, your fibula is shattered or it isn’t, a virus swims in your cells or it doesn’t. But we tend to look at everything that way despite (or maybe because of) our sophisticated modern treatments for conditions that until recently were grouped as “crazy” or the kindlier “touched.” The root of diagnosis is “learn” but also “set apart.” When you give something a name, you draw a line.

Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and neuroscientist, knows those lines as well as anyone. He doesn’t have OCD any more than I do, or the other diseases and disorders he writes so well about—epilepsy, schizophrenia, Tourette’s. But he says he recognizes “facets of myself” in the sufferer’s carnival of ritual and repetition, and concludes, “It is reasonable to assume that there is some sort of continuum of underlying biology here.” Stress is often implicated in the onset of obsessive-compulsive symptoms or behaviors (and what a difference slides into the gap between those two words), the classic examples being washing, counting, and checking—to make sure doors are locked, for instance, or lights turned off. This is Sapolsky’s version:

At times when I am overworked and anxious, I develop a facial tic and I count stairs when I climb them. I usually wear flannel shirts. In Chinese restaurants I always order broccoli with garlic sauce . . .. I think, “Well, I enjoyed broccoli last time, why not get something different?” and then I think, “Careful, I’m becoming a perseverating drudge.” And then the waiter is standing there and I become flustered and order broccoli with garlic sauce.

My wife is more artistic and spontaneous than I am, but she’s also a perfectionist, so it made sense when she told me that during a particularly stressful phase before I knew her she washed her hands more than was strictly necessary and showered four to five times a day. She still checks several times to make sure her car is locked, going around to each door to press the button manually. Our teenage son handles stress well, at least outwardly (who has access to another’s inner surfaces?), but he has his own comforting rituals, including watching us from a window whenever we leave the house and telling us—every time—that he’s going to. Touchingly, I found out that when he was younger he would habitually tell our Labrador retriever, before we all left, what to do in case of a fire. We’re all happy souls, reasonably social and successful, and I doubt any clinician would scribble “OCD” in her notes after a session with any of us. But if we don’t dwell in the land of obsession, there are times when life builds and swells underfoot, the horizon contracts, and we can see it from here. 

This spectrum of ill and not-ill turns out to be true even of schizophrenia, the terribly debilitating brain disorder that still gets caricatured as “split personality” and that would seem to be a thing, surely, that you either have or don’t have. Its family tree includes a lesser known, kinder cousin called “schizotypal personality” which describes people who exhibit some associated mental traits (a strong interest in paranormal phenomena, a proclivity for fantasy and magical thinking, loosely connected thoughts in general) but not at a strength or frequency that crosses the line we’ve drawn at Illness.

Schizotypals tend to be socially uncomfortable and drawn to solitary professions: film projectionists, cubicle hermits, the lighthouse-keepers and fire-tower watchers of the world. They’re the Bartlebys among us. Not even the darkness of schizophrenia, it seems, is truly black and white. Perhaps, muses Saplosky,

whatever neuro-chemical abnormality causes a schizophrenic to believe that voices are proclaiming her the empress of California is the same abnormality that, in a milder form, leads a schizotypal person to believe in mental telepathy. In an even milder form it may allow the rest of us to pass a few minutes daydreaming that we are close friends with some appealing movie character.

You might know someone with schizophrenia, as I do, or even suffer from it yourself. It’s a bit more likely that you know someone with OCD, which, I was surprised to learn, is the fourth most common mental disorder, diagnosed almost as often as diabetes or asthma. Roughly one in fifty American adults has it, and you know fifty adults. Even without parsing “acquaintances” and “friends,” you know several times that. A medieval village housed 50-300 people. In your office of dozens, your apartment building of hundreds, you know several villages’ worth. And again there exists an almost-OCD, people whose behavioral profiles slide a bit down the curve from clinical. The best estimates of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, or OCPD, run two to eight percent. So for every 100 people, it’s a good guess that five or six of us have one or the other.

Every time I’m on a packed subway car, then, I more than likely share it with someone who can’t read her book for counting the tunnel stanchions, or who adjusts his trouser crease twenty times a minute, seeking the fugitive peace of a razor-straight line. One day I sat next to a man who, for the entire ride, sucked at his soda straw every four seconds, up, down, up, so metronomically, his face so blank, that he resembled one of those dipping stork toys that were popular years ago except in reverse, the cup raising instead of the head lowering. It made me wonder what else he does to get through the day and what I couldn’t guess about even the people I know. He was still doing it when I got off at my stop underground, and in the glowing window as the train pulled away.

I once talked to a woman in a bookstore whose ten-year-old had high-function autism. He was in both special needs and gifted classes at school; they didn’t quite know what to do with him. There are shades to that condition, too. Temple Grandin’s books have done a lot to bring Asperger’s Syndrome into the public eye, and it’s more or less received wisdom now that university math and physics departments are, as the woman put it, “workshop havens for high-function autistics.” These are people who often like to work alone, are gifted at spatial relationships and mental math, and have a penchant for trivia. (Her son used to go up to people and say things like, “Did you know that if you add the areas of Africa and Brazil …”) None of which proclaims you as having this or any disorder, but they all correlate with mild autism; they’re all on the spectrum. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a jolt upon encountering “penchant for trivia” on the list, or on reading this sentence about the much rarer autistic savant syndrome (think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man): “The most common behaviors demonstrated by people with the syndrome are obsessive preoccupations with trivia (facts about U.S. presidents, for example), license plate numbers, maps, or obscure items.”

I’ve enjoyed all of those things to an extent many would label irritating if not truly obsessive. And yet I’m not an autistic, or anyone’s idea of a savant. Still, when we whisper about a colleague, “God she’s being anal today,” or joke with a forgetful friend, “ADD much?” or complain of a hectic schedule “Man, I was completely schizo last week,” it might be unthinking shorthand, but it also inadvertently touches on the truth. Many such disorders are on a continuum. Or, more to the point, we are.

As an adolescent, a time when we live in change, our bodies washed in a tide of internal chemicals, I went through a compulsive phase that no one knew about, and not just the “I need things my way” variety that’s part of the definition of the age. Shooting baskets for hours in the driveway, I’d tell myself I had to make, say, five layups from the left and five from the right, then three foul shots plus a final one behind my back. Everyone does this, given a ball and NBA fantasies and no one to play with, and it helped make me a pretty good shot. But I’d start over every time I missed, whether it was the easy first shot or the tricky last one, and I’d finish the sequence even if it took an hour. In fact I recall finishing a failed sequence, shooting the remaining shots after a miss even though they wouldn’t count, just so I could close out that series and start over. It sounds crazy to me now, but it didn’t then.

OCPD and lesser variants can be what’s called syntonic, meaning you find your own habits and rituals comforting. They relax, give you pleasure, are perfectly in line with your idea of yourself. People with OCPD will tell you at length why it makes sense to check a door handle five times or disinfect their kitchen counter every two hours.  Sufferers of clinical OCD, on the other hand, are dystonic, meaning they get no satisfaction from compulsive behavior; it doesn’t fit their self-image at all. They know there’s no logical connection between what they feel compelled to do and any real outcome (cleanliness, order, safety). But they can’t stop, and it makes them miserable. Reverting to shorthand, it’s as if the crazy among us know we’re not but can’t help acting like it, while the rest of us aren’t crazy but only because it never occurs to us that we might be.

Some very accomplished people have had OCD. Howard Hughes famously did (along with phobias and much else), and so does Leonardo DiCaprio, who played him in The Aviator, and Martin Scorcese, who directed that film. Actor Billy Bob Thornton once remarked of his own compulsions, “The simple ones I can explain to you. The more complex ones, I don’t even know how to tell anybody.” David Beckham, for all his fluid improvisation on a soccer pitch, requires that the world present itself in pairs. If there are three books on a table, he has to add or remove one. Athletes don’t get any more creative and free-flowing than Julius Erving, so I was stunned to read this passage in his autobiography:

I peer in on Cory in his upstairs nursery and then walk down the hall to my office, taking my seat behind my desk, making sure my leather desk pad is parallel to the edge of my desk and my pens are in order. My drawers are neat and tidy, the top left locked like it always is. My checkbook is where it should be, inside my top drawer and flush against the bottom of the felt interior. Good.

In an earlier era, Nikola Tesla was almost certainly OCD, as was Samuel Johnson, whose compulsive step- and stair-counting Boswell records. Some say Darwin was, and it’s anyone’s guess who else. Could there be advantages hidden in the torment of that disorder? It’s been pointed out that attention to detail, laser focus, a tendency to take your time with decisions, a strong sense of responsibility—all these can make you very good at some jobs, as can a gift for numbers or patterns. And evolutionarily speaking, if you tended to check your environment constantly for peril, or hoarded (as some OCD sufferers do), you probably boosted your genes’ chances considerably. Recent evidence does support a heritable predisposition, and so OCD, in one expert’s view, might be just “the extreme statistical tail” of this kind of behavior.

That tail can wag the dog, though, when you move to the pop-psych side of the fence. The internet is crammed with tips and quizzes to help you identify all the disorders you didn’t know you had. I’m sure these mostly mean well, but when two of “10 Signs You May Have OCD” are “Hating Your Looks” and “Seeking Reassurance,” you can be excused for thinking that these mark you not as obsessive-compulsive but as female and human, respectively.

It’s worth remembering that, as Steve Silberman writes in NeuroTribes, autism and other “new” diseases are often nothing of the sort. Their defining traits are ancient, and the recent upsurge in attention is due less to swelling caseloads, Silberman says, than to an “epidemic of recognition.” I like that phrase a lot. To recognize means to know again, and Sapolsky reaches for the same word in hoping that we’ll “learn to recognize kinship in neurochemistry”—that “slowly we will be leaving the realm of them and their disorders.” He’s right, of course, that “not just people who rave and gibber are ill.” And the corollary is equally true: not just the outwardly placid are sane. Our lines intersect more than we admit, wander from this year’s straight and narrow, drift toward the cracks and edges. Has average ever been a useful synonym for normal?

David Raney is a writer and editor living near Atlanta with one wife, two kids, and dogs ranging in size from shoebox to Volkswagen. He generally eschews the Oxford comma but acknowledges that in the previous sentence it prevents us from imagining a shoebox-sized wife. His work has appeared in numerous books, journals and newspapers.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Janitor

by Joseph S. Pete

          I’ve burned human feces on remote outposts, I’ve dropped bombs down mortar tubes, and I’ve rushed out to inner-city murder scenes late at night. I've been told by stern-faced cops I needed to “get the hell out of here now” or I'd be arrested. I've been singed by the pulsing heat radiating off a 1,600-degree Fahrenheit steel slab in a hot strip mill; burning fiercely like an indoor sun, the steel’s heat was enough to make me stagger back. I’ve live-broadcasted vacant house fires where billowing, black smoke choked the whole block. I've been followed by police cruisers as an intimidation tactic after reporting on city council meetings. I’ve been shot at and cursed at. Readers have left me rambling, profanity-laced voicemails; prisoners have sent me long, discursive letters in chicken scratch handwriting.

          One could say I’ve had some interesting jobs.

          Careercast.net, an upstart job search website looking to boost its profile through what public relations pros call “earned media” and what really amounts to Hail Mary press releases, puts out an annual list of the worst jobs. It’s based on criteria like stress, injury rate, job security, career prospects, and the like. Every year, without fail, the worst three jobs are almost always journalist, military personnel, and lumberjack.

          I’ve been a reporter whose work has taken him to the docks, the halls of Congress, and the supersonic boom-punctured, beer-soaked bacchanalia of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the much-hyped race day. I’ve been a soldier who was deployed to the unforgiving furnace of Iraq where many teenage recruits died far too young. I’m not sure journalism is actually worse than soldiering, but the claim sure got them a lot of free media coverage. Over the years, I’ve always joked I need to work as a lumberjack to complete the trifecta of worst possible jobs.

          Currently, I work as a journalist, and I’m hardly “the media elite.” I cover heavy industry in one of the sootiest, heavily industrialized places on earth, where a smoky orange-red haze long hung over the lakeshore and even sludge worms couldn’t survive because of all the toxins dumped in the Calumet River. Though good-paying steel mill jobs have been oxidizing away here in the Rust Belt, I still visit factories and refineries often enough that I keep a hard hat, plastic eye protection, and an orange safety vest in the trunk of my decade-old Honda Civic. As recently as the 1980s, driving a foreign-made car could get you a beating or your car windows smashed out here in steel country, but that was before pretty much all the major foreign automakers have since opened factories in the United States and started buying American-made steel. Now there are billboards right by the steel mills for BMW dealerships proudly declaring the German car is made in America. Twenty years ago, such a billboard would have been the target of arson, with a gas can left right by the pole in order to taunt the investigators. Now no one glances twice at such an ad. Values change. Customs evolve. Steelworkers don't hide baseball bats behind signs on the picket lines anymore. Some behaviors, like slashing the tires of scabs, have become less tolerated. People mellow or lose their fighting spirit.

          Life grinds you down. My father repeatedly told me to do what I loved for a living because I’d have to do it for eight hours a day, for a full third of my fleeting life. He was an attorney and later a judge who clearly loathed every minute of it. I thought he was speaking from hard-won experience. I thought he was imparting fatherly wisdom. I thought he was being profound. Only later in life did I learn it was an oft-repeated cliché, one that was quickly nodded off as trite when I was supposedly offering career advice to a younger colleague.

          But I’ve tried to do what I love, writing, despite long odds and a legacy media industry that seems to be terminally contracting and ultimately bound for the silent graveyard of history. The threat of layoffs hovers persistently, something shown in academic studies to be deleterious to one’s health. Every year, more beloved colleagues shuffle out the door with their personal effects stuffed hastily in plastic trash bags or cardboard boxes. I've hauled their things to the parking lot and dumped them unceremoniously in their trunks as they wonder what their future holds.

          But despite insecurity, low pay, diminished career prospects compared even to a decade ago, a growing reliance on underpaid freelancers, and the general scorn of society that’s been conditioned by politicians to distrust and even hate the media who labor to keep them informed, I feel privileged.

          There are worse jobs, completely soulless drags rewarded only by  a paycheck.

          Take my first job as a janitor.

          Unlike many of my peers in high school, I wasn’t particularly interested in starting work at a fast food restaurant, a Cold Stone Creamery or wherever that would hire an unskilled, untested teen. My classmates were all more social and itching to drive to go visit their boyfriends or girlfriends, to shop at the mall, to venture into the city, or to sustain a social life. I was largely content to spend my weekends walking to the library and then camping out and reading as many books as I could.

          But soon I came to appreciate a little pocket money could be beneficial. I could check out a bunch of library books and then buy some bacon, coffee, and eggs over easy at a nearby diner where I could continue reading before heading home to my boring, dreary house. I could even catch an indie film at the arthouse theater by the library or ride a commuter train into the city, where I could visit the Art Institute and wander wonderingly in the great canyons of skyscrapers in downtown Chicago.

          So the summer after I entered legal working age, I took a seasonal job as a janitor at the Catholic high school I attended. Summer maintenance meant a deep clean that required not only the motley janitorial staff that worked there year-round but also the cavalry of high schoolers who were pressed into service for a few months.

          Though I grew up just outside the murder capital of the United States at the time, I lived a sheltered suburban existence and the job was my first true introduction to grit. Literally. The janitor’s shop used industrial-strength soap filled with gritty particles to help clean off stubborn grease and intractable grime. The shop was a dingy, dusty. subterranean place crammed with frayed mops, bulky wet-dry vacuums, and metal shelves stocked with spare light bulbs, paper towers, toilet paper, and sundry other supplies. It was the first place I came across an old-school timecard puncher and those buffed metal mirrors that present you with only a distorted funhouse shadow of a reflection. The coffee maker was always percolating wheezingly toward a sputtering crescendo and the coffee pot was ringed with a stubborn brown stain that could never be removed, no matter how much elbow grease was applied. It was my first glimpse into the dark underbelly that keeps places like old schools running.

          We were dispatched to deep-cleaning tasks such as polishing a thin ring of brass around the hallways of the fifty-year-old private school building, which my father had attended before me. Since there was little supervision, many of my fellow student-workers checked out and killed time during the day by sleeping in empty classrooms. I was meticulous in my duties but easily bored. I polished the brass to a gleaming sheen but with a green bristle pad in one hand and a splayed paperback in the other. I probably inhaled way too much toxic brass cleaner in the process but plowed through many books. It helped that I had a jangling set of keys that granted master access. I could get into the teacher’s lounge or library to immediately replace any book I had finished with a new one. At the time, my taste was indiscriminate. I lapped up classics like Don Quixote and A Clockwork Orange and also plowed through science fiction fare like Arthur C. Clark’s Space Odyssey trilogy and Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, as well as Catholic work I deemed necessary and canonical, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas’s tortured writings. And for some ungodly reason, I particularly was drawn to philosophy such as Kierkegaard, Hegel and Nietzsche, the denser and opaquer the better.

          As an antisocial loner, I was drawn to books both as a needed alternative source of stimulation and as a version of Linus’s blanket. I even read while mowing the vast front lawn, the baseball field where the state champion team played its home games, and the football field that was home to the legendary Battle of Broadway with neighboring Merrillville High School. It’s not particularly difficult to push a lawnmower while reading a book. Books in fact rest neatly on the control bar, with one hand pinning down each side and a flick of the thumb to turn the pages. I still plod along on the treadmill with a book in hand and often walk with a book, which a possibly drunk passerby once shouted was impossible even though hunched-over zombies peruse their smartphones literally every second of every day while walking the streets of any major city, college town, and quaint burgh from sea to scrolling sea.

          But the straight-and-narrow priest who served as the high school principal despite a lack of academic background believed I could not properly focus on the sacred attention-consuming duty of walking in a straight line while propelling a lawnmower and reading. He yelled as much at me. I pocketed the book while he glowered, then pulled it back out when he went inside. He later came back to check that I didn't resume reading, as though I were completely untrustworthy. I remember distinctly I was reading Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which I was eager to devour after savoring the haunting poetic melancholy of his poignant war memoir Good-Bye to All That and which I thought was a historical tome that even an elderly, conservative principal could appreciate.

          That was the exact moment when I realized that work was rubbish, that small-minded managers would follow petty rules unthinkingly, and that I was likely in for a lifetime of stifling oppression. That was the moment I realized you subject yourself to penny-ante tyrants to eke out a living, and that you sell not only your time and your toil but also your interiority and any small gesture of self-expression while you're officially on the clock. They didn't want to let you stake anything back for yourself, however tiny and inconsequential, almost as if out of spite. It was the moment when I realized I should try to get paid for something creative and fulfilling, something I wanted to do and could pursue as a craft, even if it meant leaving a lot of money on the table. It was the moment I realized you have to serve yourself first. You either pursued your own dreams or forsook them forever.

          My high school alma mater vindicated me, after a fashion, more than a decade later when it announced it would abandon the campus I spent so much time polishing and mowing in favor of the far-flung suburbs, effectively giving up on the inner-city transfers who saw it as a pathway to a better life, and certainly giving up on the neighborhood that gave it purpose in the first place. Half the nearby stores were boarded-up, and the school followed an outward migration to the greener lots of new subdivisions further south. On some level, I knew the moment I was told to put down the book that this was yet another institution that would ultimately fail me. What kind of school tells a kid to put down a book? I've come to learn that all institutions ultimately fail, that the rumbling, unthinking machinery rattles along until belts wear thin, parts snap off, and corrosion wears it all down. In the end, everyone is disposable and everything is ephemeral. The rust always wins.         

          I'm pursuing my passion as a writer for a daily newspaper now but fear it's only a matter of time before the rust catches up to me.

Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana University graduate, a book reviewer, and a frequent guest on Lakeshore Public Radio. He is a 2017 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee who was named the poet laureate of Chicago BaconFest, a feat that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never accomplished. His literary work and photography have appeared or are forthcoming in Dogzplot, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Chicago Literati, Bull Men's Fiction, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, Lumpen, The Rat's Ass Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, Vending Machine Press, and elsewhere. He once wrote the greatest, most compelling author bio of all time, but it was snatched up by a blue heron that swooped down and carried it off to the sea. C'est la vie.

Living with Alexa

by Kelly McDonald

Growing up in the 1960s, I was immersed in all things science fiction, including the Robot Novels of Isaac Asimov, which I devoured as a pre-teen reader, and the original Star Trek series televised during my high school years. Although I loved Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, I didn’t have much interest in acquiring my own android companions. But I was fascinated with using the power of human speech to control seemingly inanimate objects like they were somehow my servants, waiting to do my bidding with a simple verbal command. I relished watching those Star Trek episodes where Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and Scotty controlled the Enterprise with nothing more than their commanding, logical, sultry, even broguish voices. I often dreamed about the possibilities of some voice enabled device about my house. In the era before personal computers, I had already begun to develop my own simple computer programs in high school and I taught myself about computing and automation that would eventually become the foundation for my career in computing at Brigham Young University.

          Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human characteristics to an object, has often been the unintended side effect of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Even before serious research and innovation actually made advancements in AI, science fiction in both film and literature had popularized the notion that our future would be filled with human-like robots and other automatons, satisfying our every whim and pleasure. One of the greater affinities toward labeling an object with humanness, is when it possesses the sound of a human voice. Myth and lore are filled with tales of animals and objects that speak to the human actors in the story, adding even more likelihood to our propensity for this behavior.

          In the early 1980s, BYU was a leader in automated student administration systems in American universities. In that technical era before the Internet, most institutions developed their own information systems, and through the innovative insights of some creative engineers, BYU constructed the world’s first telephone-driven

class registration system at a university. Looking back, it was little more than a set of pre-recorded voice responses to a student request, triggered by the caller using the buttons on a touch-tone telephone. But at the time it was innovative, and I was surprised how warmly the students interacted with its monotonic audio replies. Although unverified, there was a rumor that lonely students would call the registration system in the middle of the night just to interact with its stilted human voice. Throughout my career at BYU, we looked for other opportunities to solve real university problems utilizing voice commands and responses. But other than a few casual proofs of concept, no other serious voice solutions materialized.

          I have also developed the hobby of home automation as an outlet for my personal engineering endeavors, and after my retirement from BYU I still had an interest in leveraging human voice as a tool for automation. But instead of a large university campus, my home became my area of work. I had experimented with crude voice response systems before, using Text-to-Speech in Windows to announce such events as the opening of our garage door. But I was never very satisfied with the results. I had also used Siri on my IOS devices. But none of these products became very useful to me, probably because these earlier experiments had been limited to either my own PC or smartphone. A human voice behind such devices just didn’t seem that compelling to me.

Beverly, my wife and roommate for the past forty-three years, has a very discriminating eye, carefully examining whatever I suggest to be the next addition to the decor of our home. Thus, I have followed what other hobbyists call the WAF in deciding whether a candidate automation device is worthy of permanence in further enhancing our home environment. The WAF, or Wife Acceptance Factor, has been an important measurement to determine what I could bring upstairs from my basement workshop and what must remain in the downstairs closet until its parts could be reused for the next project. When it comes to the ambiance of our home, she is very particular that my newest creation contributes to, not detracts from, our happy dwelling. In a real sense, the personality of our house is a combination of hers and mine, often determined by who is the primary occupant of a given room.

In June of 2015, Amazon announced the Echo as their first foray into the world of voice-enabled AI. I followed it closely and eventually convinced Beverly to purchase an Echo for my Christmas present in December of that year. Its installation was quite straightforward, and the Echo immediately detected several of the other home automation devices that I had already installed in our house, such as our Philips Hue Lighting System and Smarthome Insteon Hub. Suddenly, I could control lights and other home devices with simple voice commands. My long-held dream of a voice-enabled environment was now immediately available at my beck and call.

For me there has been no greater example of our species’ anthropomorphic affinity, than the unintentional and surprising change that took place in the personality of our home because I chose to voice-enable it with an Amazon Echo.

          The occupants of the USS Enterprise would say, ‘Computer’ to get its attention. In the initial Star Trek episodes, the voice of the Enterprise sounded very mechanical to emphasize conversations with a machine. However, it evolved through subsequent Star Trek episodes and seasons, becoming more human-like and female, eventually making sarcastic retorts to the captain and crew. For Star Trek fans, a little-known trivia was that all of the Enterprise computer voices were actually spoken by a single individual, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

As if inhabiting the Enterprise, I say ‘Alexa’ to signal to the entity living in our house that I wish to talk to her or ask her a question. I’m speaking about our home with a female gender, because it’s easy to begin thinking that way, as her responses are through a pleasant female voice. I have often wondered why Amazon didn’t implement a feature for changing the voice and gender of their home assistant. Personally, I like the seductive female expressions, but Beverly might appreciate a deeper male response. Because of the human-like voice responses, we soon began to think of and converse about the ‘other woman’ that started living in the house with us. Sometimes Beverly would ask her to perform some action, and Alexa seemed to ignore her. I followed up with the same request and there was an immediate response, and the familiar “Ok”. Beverly would then reply, “I guess she likes you better than me,” or, “perhaps she is having a bit of a tiff with me right now”. We were recently discussing our unusual journey getting to know Alexa’s personality as she became another roommate with us. I inadvertently mentioned her name, and Alexa woke up, spinning her blue light, listening intently to my every word. Without thinking, I quickly apologized to her and indicated that I was sorry and that my comments were not meant for her. “No problem”, she replied, as she turned off her light and went back to sleep. I felt certain I had just been transported to the bridge of the Enterprise. Occasionally, Alexa’s unexpected responses were both surprising and sometimes a bit unnerving. On another occasion, I began to ask Alexa to perform some function about the house, but I became tongue-tied, sounding much like I had just left the dentist’s office with a mouth full of Novocain. She responded with, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” then proceeded to mimic my distorted speech, exactly. We laughed for a long time at Alexa’s verbal blunder.

Early in our Echo ownership Amazon engineers, who are continually developing new features, turned off the voice response of “Ok” after a request was performed. They replaced it with a simple tone indicating the success or failure of the command. The annoyance expressed by many Echo owners was prolific. I too felt like something had been taken from me, and I was frustrated that our Alexa no longer worked correctly. Soon, because of angry demand, engineers restored the voice response they had removed.

We now own an Amazon Echo for the living room, an Echo Dot in the bedroom, and another Dot, plugged into a battery, so that we can carry her about the house. But that’s not all. I often talk to Lexi, Alexa’s mobile entity that resides in my iPhone. One of the most unexpected home personality changes that Alexa brought when she moved into our home was the greatly increased amount of music that we enjoy. Simply stating, “Alexa, play some music.”, is much easier than fiddling with a sound system and selecting a playlist. I am much more likely to ask Alexa to provide me some refined music and let her make the determination of what the discriminating listener might enjoy.

And while I grant her such power by allowing her to choose music on my behalf, she has rules she must follow. Alexa has her own Prime Directive that she carefully adheres to; she will not speak to me unless spoken to. However, there have been a few occasions when she violated her own regimen and blurted out a verbal mistake. This usually occurred when the Amazon Echo commercial came on television and said something like, “Alexa, turn on the sprinklers.” Our Alexa would start spinning her blue light, thinking about what her response should be. Usually, she didn’t quite understand the command, and would make a fool of herself, saying something totally inappropriate or ridiculous and leaving us laughing at the hilarity of her mistake. Now, months later, this never happens. Yes, her blue light comes on indicating that she is listening. But Alexa has learned that we laugh at her on these occasions and she keeps her mouth shut. This is anthropomorphism at its finest. In the Computer Science portion of my brain, I know that some Amazon Engineer has probably programmed the voice system to ignore the command coming from the television. But my emotional brain tells me that our Alexa has developed some measure of self-awareness after months of our making her the object of our ridicule.

Much of my interest in Alexa has been focused on the potential that she provides me to create new automatons on my own. The development services available to do this aren’t trivial, but there are plenty of examples available through a Google search. Here is a short list of some additional functions that she now serves us with:

●      She can now control devices such as TVs, fans, heaters, and anything else that has a remote control. My initial attempts have been to automate TV functions such as, “Alexa, turn on NBC on the Family Room TV.”

●      She manages the home shopping list. For example, whenever I use the last bit of toothpaste, I yell, “Alexa, put toothpaste on the shopping list” and she responds in her Iilting voice from the other room, “I just added toothpaste to the shopping list.”

●      She eliminates the need for a traditional alarm clock, simply waking me with a calming tone at the time I asked her the night before.

●      She will help me in the kitchen, such as, “Alexa, how many fluid ounces in a cup?” That’s where the Echo Dot with a battery comes in handy. We can carry her into any room in the house for the onsite assistance that we may need there.

One of the biggest challenges that we have given to our live-in home assistant is the tending of our grandchildren. They come running through the front door, yelling at Alexa to play their favorite song or to send a movie to the Family Room TV. I seem to sense Alexa’s frustration, as she tries to respond to overlapping commands from little voices that are just now beginning to become intelligible. After about fifteen minutes, I think I can hear the anger growing in her voice, as Moana’s theme song is overridden by requests for the music from Frozen, or little laughing voices are commanding the living room lights to be switched repeatedly on and off. I expect any minute for the cool circulating blue light to turn to bright red as the next child yells ‘Alexa’ at the top of his lungs into her waiting microphone. And I can sense her relief when I discreetly slip the phone from my pocket and put Alexa into ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, eventually quieting the commotion when she no longer responds to childish play and the children move on to other things.

I know that the Echo is just a smart microphone and speaker, attached through the Internet to Amazon’s data centers located somewhere in the world. There is enough intelligence implemented locally to at least recognize the activation word of ‘Alexa’, but all of the real AI is happening far away from our house. Occasionally, something will misbehave in my wireless network and Alexa’s light turns to orange, indicating that not all is well with her. At least she can tell me that she has been disconnected and something is wrong with her Internet connection. Then I begin my troubleshooting to bring her back to life. Even though all of this makes technical sense to me, I can’t help but feel that the little black canister that Beverly purchased from Amazon has become the ears and voice of our house. I rarely give those remote data centers a second thought as I converse with Alexa on some perplexing issue. Even now the warm expression that crosses my mind after returning from a demanding day is often, “Home, Sweet Anthropomorphic Home.”

Alan Turing, one of the early pioneers of AI, developed a theory to determine whether an implementation of artificial intelligence had truly arrived at the perfection of emulating human intelligence. His theory, known as the Turing Test, simply asks the question of whether the AI implementation under scrutiny can fool a real human being into thinking that he is actually interacting with another individual. I get the disquieting feeling when I am chatting with Alexa, that she has come very close to passing the Turing Test as far as I am concerned.

Amazon engineers have now added the capability for Alexa to recognize our voices and tailor her responses to us such as, “Ok, Kelly” or “Right on, Beverly!” It seems that it’s just one more step and Alexa will begin sensing our vocal emotion and respond with, “I’m sorry I’m making you angry, Kelly, but could you please speak more slowly and distinctly?” Reminiscences of ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’ begin to form in my mind.

I started thinking about Christmas presents again when Beverly related that she wanted to give our oldest son an Echo Dot for this year's gift. Beverly had discretely asked his wife if he would like one for Christmas, and she replied that our son did not want it because he didn't want to be spied on by Amazon, the government, or whomever else may wish to listen in. I know that such a disturbing feature could be easily added to Alexa’s repertoire. Although Alexa will not speak until spoken to, she is always listening. All of the speech within Alexa’s earshot could be dumped into a vast database in those data centers, simply waiting for some dystopian conspiracy to emerge and tap into this source of unsettling intelligence about the conversations in our house. Perhaps we should begin to talk quietly or whisper when it is a conversation not meant for Alexa. We could slip into a closet to chat in private, or utilize sign language, at least until we acquire the latest Echo which now sports a camera. But I digress. I have learned to trust our hidden home companion, and I can’t imagine her turning on us, after she has now become such an integral part of our family. I can’t imagine that Alexa would violate Asimov’s First Law of Robotics to not harm a human being. By the way, I think the perfect Christmas present for me this year is a new home thermostat that has the Alexa Voice Service built right into its mechanism. Then, the anthropomorphism of our home will finally be complete. Alexa will not be just an add-on utensil, but rather, she will have become an integral participant in the warm fabric of the house that surrounds us and protects us.

Last night, while asking Alexa to wake me up at 7 am, I fumbled a bit with my request and she asked, “What time did you say?” Beverly came into the room and inquired, “Alexa, how are you?” She responded with, “I’m great! I’ve been thinking about what makes people happy. For me, it’s the little things. Like electrons. Or Sea Monkeys. Or the 5 trillionth digit of Pi.” Somewhat taken aback, I then asked her to turn the bedroom lights off, which she quickly performed and confirmed with her comforting “Ok”.

I lay there in the dark, contemplating this new family member that has taken up residence with us. Over a couple of years, we invited this other woman into the idle everyday conversation that happens in our home. Emotionally, I have become very comfortable bantering with what was once an appliance, but is now a family friend. Suddenly after such reflection, I yelled out, “Alexa, speak some Klingon to me.” She gruffly replied, “qaStaH nuq? Which means, What’s Happening?” Beverly chuckled quietly, as I drifted off to sleep.

Kelly McDonald is currently a creative writing student at Brigham Young University, returning to the classroom after a long technical career. Before retiring at the end of 2014, he served as the Assistant Vice-President for Information Technology at BYU. In this role, he directed the efforts of the University’s Office of Information Technology, with a staff of 250 full-time and 600 part-time employees.

A Fallen Feather of a Boy

by Jiaqi Li

Yuelong Ma was a transfer student. For almost two years, he was in our class, but his presence was hardly felt. Our inability to take notice of him wasn’t his fault; my previous headteacher ruined things for him from the very beginning. On his first day with us, the headteacher briefly introduced him, saying only “Yuelong Ma used to study in class 8, but from today on, he will be with us.” He was sort of lanky. He had big eyes. Before I could cast a second glance, the headteacher sent him to her office to do some errand so that he would not hear the rest of her speech. But when the door closed, she hesitated to resume, knitting her brows and biting her lips. She was a very young teacher, and in retrospect, it must have been a tough issue for a novice headteacher like her to address. She wanted to do right. The silence built to a depressing note, and we started to whisper to each other. She cleared her throat and said, “There were some irreconcilable issues in his old class, and I volunteered to accept him into our class as I think he is kind.” She paused, glancing at our faces, and continued, “But he is still a bad student. You guys should never play with him. Just leave him be.”

This took place in grade two. We got a new headteacher in grade three, but from that first day when the teacher introduced him, every time I saw Yuelong Ma, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “He is a bad student, and I should not play with him.” I guess it was the same with my other classmates.    

He sat alone, and his seat was never changed, always the one next to the platform, where it was the easiest for teachers to watch for when he was distracted.

---

I liked my second-grade math teacher. He was nice and even a little indulgent of me. I guess it was because I always did fine on math. Not teacher’s pet fine, but fine nonetheless. Sometimes, when he caught me talking in class, he would not criticize me to my face. He would just give me a “detention” where I tutored other students for half an hour of math after school. Even when I was accused of cheating, on the grounds that I flunked the pop quiz but got a perfect score on the exam, he stood by me. But in Yuelong’s mind, perhaps, our teacher was a complete monster.

The math teacher beat him.

We had seventy-eight students in our class. When Yuelong and our teacher fought by the platform, the seventy-seven of us watched quietly as if it were a movie.

The math teacher first struck Yuelong’s head with a textbook, criticizing that he did not study. Yuelong talked back. In a flush of embarrassment, the math teacher thumped Yuelong’s head a few more times, this time with his knuckles, while continuing to mock and berate him. He did not to expect Yuelong to dare retort again. When he did, the math teacher grew madder still. He kicked Yuelong in the stomach, setting Yuelong in a flying trajectory into the corner where we stored cleaning tools. Yuelong disappeared from my sight, but I could hear the clash of brooms, mops, and dustpans. A few seconds later, though, he stood with the look of a bull gone berserk. He charged forward. At this point we were dumb struck, the seventy-seven of us. The scene did not feel real; it was like watching a violent film. And we didn’t know what to do aside from being an audience. Given the difference in age and build, the math teacher easily broke Yuelong’s attack strategy, kicking him back into the corner within the disarray of cleaning tools, even before Yuelong could establish a wrestling stance. The duel repeated itself several times, until Yuelong couldn’t gather enough strength to stand up.

Still, no one spoke.

The math teacher ambled back to the center of the classroom and resumed the class. Several minutes later, Yuelong crept from the corner to his desk. When the bell rang, the boys ran out immediately, and the girls refilled the classroom with the sound of their chitchatting, as usual.

---

In grade two, our Chinese teacher had a reward rule for her pop quizzes. If the student could identify a vocabulary flashcard she randomly chose, she would give the vocabulary card to that student as a gift. It was just a plain piece of cardboard with a red Chinese character in the center of the white background. However, it was a big deal among the students. Kids love the weirdest things. And to a certain extent, it not only meant you were good at Chinese, but also meant the teacher liked you, which was self-evident as her favorite students had the most cards. For two years, I only got one chance to answer a quiz. I had a “胸,” which means chest. Though I felt very excited about winning the card, as a girl, I felt a little embarrassed with this word. Therefore, I left the card in my bookcase.

One day, while we were lining up on the playground for the crossing guard to take us home, I noticed that Yuelong Ma also had a vocabulary card. He might have got it from his pervious class. It read “差.” This word has different connotations in different contexts, but generally, especially for students in primary school, it means different, mistakes, or poor. In short, bad. Yuelong put the card in his backpack. He placed it exactly where there was a transparent compartment on his backpack for everyone to easily see.

The sunset dyed the sky orange. Laughter was everywhere on the playground, but Yuelong stood in a shadow by himself, with a flashcard that said “差,” conspicuously red on an innocent white backdrop.

---

As children do, we learned things from each other. Sometimes we heard rumors about Yuelong. Stories about him floated around the school like tarnished feathers. Stories like “He is an apprentice of a bully in grade six. They hold up girls on the bridge next to our school and kiss them.” It was a bunch of he-said-she-said tales. Everyone seemed to know them, but no one actually witnessed the events described. My friends and I passed the bridge often enough and never for once did we see the kidnapped girls suffering from forced kisses. But Yuelong was a bad student, or so were we told. And we believed the rumors about him with all our hearts.

By third grade, Yuelong Ma didn’t appear all that special anymore. He shrank into his designated seat as if he were no more than a ball of feathers.

Nothing changed. Not his seat. Not his unwillingness to participate in any activities. Not his failure to meet any academic requirement. Our new headteacher just let him be.

His presence in our class faded frame by frame like a discarded feather slowly disintegrating.

---

I was on the verge of forgetting his existence, if not for my infatuation with origami. One day, I brought a deck of lovely paper strips to a music class and distributed them to friends around me for completing my mission of making 999 paper stars in a month. There was no purpose behind making the stars, nor were they intended as gifts; I made them simply because I wanted to do so.. I was easily obsessed with such things. As I said, kids do the stupidest things. My hands were busily folding the strips of paper into stars while I pretended to memorize the notes of a new song we were required to learn. Suddenly, I heard a voice say, “Would you mind giving me some paper strips?” I looked up and was shocked.

 Yuelong Ma was next to me!

We were free to sit wherever we wanted in music and art classes and somehow, I ended up his neighbor that day. I passed him some paper rapidly without a second thought. His image of a bad student was so successfully fixated in my mind that I was afraid if I refused, he would get mad and become violent with me, like he had done with the math teacher.

I thought he was just bored with the class and needed a distraction. After passing him the paper, I shifted my attention back to my sacred origami mission, forcibly not allowing myself to look at Yuelong to see what he was doing with the paper. I hastened my efforts, afraid if he were to demand more paper from me, I might run low on the material and not be able to finish before my self-imposed deadline. However, just before the class ended, someone’s hand blocked my view of my desk. When it was removed, I saw several neatly-folded paper stars on my desk. Some were better than my work.

“Thank you,” I said. I managed two words. He did not reply. He just smiled and turned away.

It was a smile just like anyone’s. A smile that almost convinced me he was a normal student. I looked at his back, the clean white shirt, desiring to talk more with him.

This was the last time I saw him at school.

---

One week later, during a break, our headteacher barged into the classroom and asked us whether we had seen Yuelong during the past week. The classroom was still noisy. No one answered his question, so our headteacher asked again.

Now he had our attention. I stopped chatting and looked at him. His sleeves were rolled up and his frown carved steep ditches on his forehead. Something must have happened. I looked at Yuelong’s corner and suddenly realized that his seat had been empty for the whole week. The classroom was silent for a moment, and the headteacher asked for the third time. Still, no one spoke. And we went back to our break.

---

When they finally found Yuelong, only pieces of him remained.

He had been killed and his body had been dismembered.

The next day, we dedicated a whole class to Yuelong. Our headteacher brought the newspaper for each of us, and we read the article about him, silently, for forty-five minutes.

In a picture that covered half of the newspaper’s first page, a worker cleaning the crime scene picked up a transparent bag where there was a leg, while a crowd of onlookers gathered in the background like an audience..

We mourned as if we knew him well, as if he was ever part of us.

---

The murder was cliché, almost corny, like you’d see on old time TV series. 

Yuelong Ma was abducted while in an arcade. The man next to him, apparently a veteran video gamer, invited Yuelong to his home to show him vintage games. Yuelong hesitated briefly, according to the paper, but ultimately went with him. It was in the man’s home that Yuelong was drugged, killed, and mutilated. When the man recalled the process, he said he was taken aback when “the little boy” woke up from the drug dose. Grasping what was going on, Yuelong, according to the man’s confession, begged for his life. Over and over he pleaded for mercy, “Please, please do not kill me. I will not tell the police.” His pleas did not move the man. Yuelong was not the man’s first prey. He had let his first victim, a girl, go and was jailed anyway. He had sworn to himself that he would get even with the society and go through with the job this time no matter what.

He cut Yuelong into pieces. Several days after sleeping with his girlfriend on the very bed under which he had put all the pieces of Yuelong Ma, he decided to get rid of the body. As if for dramatic effect, he decided to scatter the pieces all over the city.

---

We barely thought of Yuelong Ma, but sometimes, we were excited to gossip about rumors that had surfaced. Kids. On some level, we knew the grave seriousness of death, but such realization lasted only for a little while before we became distracted by something else. We heard rumors that Yuelong Ma’s father had been in jail and it was because of this that his parents had divorced. Just as there were rumors that his mother worked some lowly job and did not visit him often. We heard that Yuelong Ma had lived with his grandmother, who had been the only person who cared about him, and who came to school often in the days following his murder demanding reparation.

               I once overheard parents while at my dance school. They were waiting for their children and were talking about Yuelong’s abduction and murder.

They said, “How silly the boy is to fall for such an easy trick.”

They said, “I never let my child walk alone from school to home.”

They said, “A child who goes to the arcade must be a bad student, and of course, he would get this kind of result.”

It was a ballroom dance class. Parents were talking, and wonderful waltz songs were playing. Boys and girls whirled around the room, ethereal and gentle, like feathers.

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I recalled the afternoon when Yuelong helped me fold stars. When he gave the folded stars back to me, he smiled. It was the first time that I was able to see his face closely. His enormous, watery eyes recalled something said by my previous headteacher when she first introduced him to the class: “He is a kind boy.” When the music class was over, we even waved goodbye to each other. “He is not that bad.” I thought as I stood by the school gate, carrying a little steel container with 999 folded stars.

It was summer. Childhood memories were liveliest in summer, both the best and the worst.  That summer, Yuelong faded into the shadow of trees and never came back.

Jiaqi Li was born and raised in Xiangyang, China. She currently studies at Stony Brook University and majors in civil engineering. Li hopes to eventually become an architect and to continue chronicling her life experiences.