Hi everyone, my name is Baird Harper.
I'm gonna read from my book Red Light
Run in just a minute, but I wanted to say
thanks to Rachel Galvin and John
Wilkinson and also Jessi and Starsha and
May for arranging for this reading
series and making it happen. So thanks to
all of you guys. I know it's poor
form to compare quarantine to
prison, but I don't know, I think that our
capacity for apt analogy has been
strained, and so I'm letting it slide. But
I thought I was—to be honest my own—
when I was asked to do a reading for
this series my own brain went to
confinement, and so I'm gonna read from a
chapter of my book called "In Storage." The
the latter pages of this are essentially
a flashback from the main character's
point of view, and he's trying to get to
sleep on the final night of his of his
prison tenure, and in the morning he gets
released. But first he slips into a dream
in the past. Here goes.
He begins to wake,
swimming to the surface of this dream,
flavors of wine and lip gloss pooling in
his mouth, until finally he emerges into
the concrete bunk room that is still his
home. A convicted rapist
snores peacefully on the cot below. It is
the middle of the night before the day
on which he's scheduled for release.
There is no clock to tell him the time,
no window to carry the dawn light into
his cell. The new day, with each dream,
with each waking, refuses to arrive. The
future stalls. The breaths of the monster
in the lower cot count the seconds in
reverse. Time backpedals. The past sits on
its haunches in the predawn black of
his cell. He can hear its slow breathing,
its dark mouth consuming the future. The
day won't arrive and he can't envision
it. He doesn't know who will be there to
pick him up. His mother will be there, but
will his father? Will his wife? He closes
his eyes and swims into a darker place. Into the mouth of the beast.
Who will come and where will they take
him? Where is home now? He squeezes his
eyelids tighter, swims deeper into the
past, to a time when his father had no
place to live,
evicted from home and marriage.
"What do you think of my new digs?" he asked
Hartley as they pulled up alongside the
shipping container that was his father's
new home. The long steel box was set off
on its own away from the hundreds of other stacked containers
in the shipping yard along the concrete
shore of the canal. "Riverfront property,"
his father declared, pointing to the spot
on the freight container below the
words Lu Kang intermodal where someone
had spray-painted a picture of a naked
woman with bottle caps over her eyes.
"But of course your mother," he added, "isn't
to know that I'm living in storage." They
set out in search of what his father
called "bach-pad essentials," down a
street full of pawnshops Hartley knew
well. The main showroom of Mel's
Second Hand sold used housewares, greasy
tools, stolen electronics, but if you had
the courage to walk through the beaded
curtain, the back rooms offered more. They
browsed, finding a hot plate with a
corner where the white plastic had been
toasted like a marshmallow, a space
heater with screws missing, a power strip
a dog had gotten at, and a bronze desk
lamp with a green glass dome that his
father insisted was the exact same kind
they had at the University of Chicago
library. "These things are all damaged," he
announced, parking the space heater on
Mel's glass-top counter. "So I'll expect
a serious discount." Mel's eyes rolled. He
drew his good hand from one pocket and
scratched the gnarled stub where his left hand once had been. "Twenty bucks,"
his father said. "For everything. Twenty-five tops."
Mel dragged glazed eyes across the
things in Hartley's arms. Cobwebs and
dead bug parts clogged the empty socket
of the green lamp. "Forty-five." Hartley's father
laughed. "Come on, Mel, I haven't even
perused the backrooms yet. You don't want
to drive away a customer before he's
even finished shopping. I'm thinking of
buying my son a sword."
Mel cast a hateful look at Hartley.
"Fine," he said. "Twenty-five." The first room down the
back hallway had racks of cracked
leather jackets and polyester suits
people had died in. The second room
peddled lethal exotics, cases full of
Nazi bayonets and guns so small they
looked like weapons for toddlers. There
were throwing stars and tooth necklaces
here, a wall of battle-axes. Then, at the
end of the hall, a walk-in closet with
floor-to-ceiling shelves of skin
magazines heavy with the oil off
people's hands.
Hartley's father liked to take his time
going through the back,—trying on the
biker jackets, digging through the
buckets full of belt buckles, testing the
balance on all the throwing knives in
all the glass cases—so Hartley made his
way directly to the last room, locating
again the one magazine called Sexpot,
which he knew had a series of naked
women riding horses through mountain
meadows. Back when Hartley first
discovered this issue, he imagined there
might actually be a ranch somewhere out
west where the models and their horses
hung out all day, washing their hair and
eating carrots, waiting for the most
ideal summer weather to go out and do
the next photo shoot. It was a place that
had entered his dreams
long ago, and he still entertained the
naïve fantasy that someday he'd try to
find it. But the pages with the horseback
women had been torn out, and all
that was left, besides the
phone sex ads, was a spread titled
"Damsels in Distress!" A blonde on a
hospital bed with blood running down
her chin and chest; a blonde in a pleated
skirt with a jump rope noosed around her
neck; a blonde in a hard hat and denim
cutoffs with a saw blade embedded in her
torso. He leafed through them, each page
tearing loose from the ruined binding,
until he came to the last picture, of a
woman trapped in an overturned car. She
looked less vaguely pornographic than the
others, more plausibly distressed, with
her dark hair and judicious green eyes, a sensible yellow blouse. The shirt
had been torn open in a revealing way,
but the overall effect—of her ribs
stabbing out her torso and the sickening
curve of her neck, of the broken auto
glass studding one side of her face, the
blood welling up across her cheek, the
embedded blue diamonds turning into rose
quartz, into dark wet rubies—
"Psst! Earth to Hartley." A finger flicked his
earlobe. He glanced back at his father.
"Ooh, nice," his father said. "What is she? A zombie or something? Excellent. Have you seen
the new movie about the zombie
apocalypse?" Hartley gathered the loose
pages of wrecked women and stowed them
on a shelf of water-damaged Playboys.
"Which movie?" His father shrugged. "It's our
future, I guess. But I haven't actually
seen it." Hartley felt it then, perhaps for
the first time in his life,
the silent advance of Fate taking a step
closer. Something was about to happen, he
thought. Good or bad. Something. He knew it.
As his father drove them away, down that
derelict city street, Hartley looked out
at the world, trying to see what was
coming to him.
Pawnshops and liquor stores, steel bars
on every window. What, he thought, am I not
seeing? Back at the shipping container,
his father has set the library lamp on
the minifridge beside his mattress and
said, "Well, I guess I'm nesting."
He pulled the brass chain and the steel
room filled with soft green light.
When all
of his new appliances had proven
themselves to him he got two beers from
the fridge and pulled a pair of
tattered beach chairs to the open end of
the container so they could watch the
orange evening sky fade just beyond the
shipping canal. "Just the men tonight.
Who needs anybody else." Hartley nipped at
his beer. The stale froth combined with a
rotten whiff
of the canal made his stomach shudder.
His father finished his first beer and
opened a new one. "But what do you suppose
she's doing tonight, without us?"
Hartley thought of the girls on the
erotic horse ranch.
Another night eating carrots, a pillow
fight, a kissing closet. But he was
already graduating from this fantasy, as
there were real girls in school with
bodies he might soon get to touch. The
old dreams were fading, real life showing
through at the edges. The horse ranch
wasn't the future anymore. The future was
a girl he'd meet on spring break of
sophomore year,
two singles hedging at the perimeter of
a blaring Florida dance floor, stealing away to share a tallboy on a seawall as
sand crabs scuttled beneath their
dangling feet, two midwesterners sharing
stories of having suffered the same long
winters, the same luckless summer
baseball. The future was a marriage six
years later, honeymooning in the islands,
room service every night, love on the
beach under a new moon. The future was a
shift from protected sex, to careful sex, to hopefully
procreative sex, to the anxious nightly
coupling of people losing faith that any
kind of sex could bring them what
they really wanted. Will we, her eyes
sometimes asked, ever have a child? The
future was a big house in the suburbs,
with Glennis strapped inside all day with
wine,
with gin, washing back the neighbor's pain
pills, asleep at the dinner table, wasted
at the company picnic, naked
in the boss's koi pond, minor
interventions, major interventions, drunk
behind the wheel, Are you sure you're
okay to drive?
"What did you just say?" his
father barked. Hartley looked out over
the shipping canal. The clouds glowed
above the distant skyscrapers like warm
coals. He felt far away from himself.
"Nothing."
His father glared at him for a time, then
opened another beer. "I was asking you," he
said, "what your mom's doing tonight."
Hartley turned around and looked into
the dark cramped space of the shipping
container. Then the dream begins to fade.
Consciousness creeps closer. The beast in
the dark breathes to the cadence of a
sleeping rapist. The corrugated steel of
the freight unit wants to dissolve into
the flat concrete of a cell wall. He
shuts his eyes again, harder. Chasing
after the reverie. Anything to pass these final hours of captivity. "I think
Mom went out for Indian food again,"
Hartley explained. "Indian food."
His father forced breaths through his
nose. "Like I believe that.
Who eats Indian food?" "Yeah, she doesn't
even like it." The lights of half a dozen
planes hovered in a perfect dotted line
connecting down toward Midway. Hartley
was sure that they were both seeing this,
but turning to his father he realized
that the man's thoughts were somewhere
else. "If she doesn't like it," his father
said, "then why would she eat it?" Hartley
closed one eye and reached out, touching
each sparkling blip in the sky. "If she
doesn't even like it," his father repeated,
then what? Someone's making her eat it?"
"Mr. Gupta," said Hartley. The beer can stopped
short of his father's face. "Who's Mr.
Gupta?" Mr. Gupta was the man who taught
the entrepreneurs' course Hartley's
mother had begun taking on Wednesday
nights. "Entrepreneurs' course?" His father
stood up, patting his thighs like he was
going to rush off in the car
at that very moment. But this was the
night the car wouldn't start, the night
his father would eventually fall into a
deep drunk sleep in that lawn chair, the
night Hartley would walk two miles to a
gas station in the dark to call his
mother for a ride home. "Mis-ter Gup-ta."
His father shaped carefully the name of
the man who would, in time, become Hartley's
stepfather. "Entrepreneurs' course." Then
came a shift in the wind and Hartley
caught the full stench of the canal—the
rust and mushy tires, the toxic fish
skeletons, the reek of the cell toilet.
The green belt of lamplight stretched
out in front of them, unfurling all the
dim promises of a future they could
suddenly see quite well but do nothing
about. I see it now, Hartley thinks,
remembering the soft green glow of
university life, the charmed career, the
big house, the love of this or any life.
All of it suddenly dissolving in a rush
of fluorescent light and the hollering
of prison guards announcing a new day.
Thanks.
I want to start by saying how
happy I am to be a part of Writers in
Residence, and I want to thank Rachel
Galvin for her vision and wherewithal in
putting this series together, and to
Jessi Haley for making it all run
so smoothly. I'd also like to give a
shoutout to Baird Harper, my virtual
stagemate tonight, whose work I love. I'm
going to be reading a few pages from my
novel, The Readymade Thief. It's the
prologue, so it doesn't need any further
introduction, but I do want to introduce
the reading of it. One of the classes I
teach here at University of Chicago's
creative writing program is in research
and world building, and one of the things
I emphasize in the class is the
importance to many writers, myself
included, of an archive of images. Photos
and maps and schematics and
illustrations to use for inspiration and
to help in building our worlds, be they
realistic or imagined. So this reading is
a nod to my own image archive for The Readymade Thief. It was also inspired by
all the different backdrops in Zoom
I've been seeing lately. So here we go.
To make your way to the DePaul Aquarium and
Museum of Natural History, on Petty
Island in the middle of the Delaware
River, you can drive through New Jersey
and over the only bridge. But then you'll
be confronted by a CITGO guard and will
either have to social engineer your way
in (and good luck with that) or be forced
to turn around and go back.
Better to temporarily liberate a small
boat from one of the old piers on the
Philly side row the half mile across the
river. Once on the island, you'll want to
avoid the large shipping lot—busy with
dockworkers in the daytime and prowled at
night by a security cruiser—and instead
cut through the wetlands to the southern
end of the island. The aquarium stands
nearly solitary amid a village of
bulldoze foundations, one of two
preserved relics from an aborted 1960s
attempt to turn the island into some
sort of tourist attraction. The other is
the Blizzard, a rusting megalith of a
roller coaster that silhouettes the
night sky. The aquarium—a long, low-slung,
single story building—hunkers in its
shadow.
Entry to the unguarded aquarium is
straightforward. Although the front gate
and the doors are chained shut, climbing
the stone wall on the eastern side is
not hard, and there's a loading dock
around back whose steel door has been
pried open at the bottom. Once inside
you're free to shine your flashlight at
will, letting it trail over the rows of
empty tanks, some with bone-whitened
coral and ersatz reef displays still
intact. You can climb down into the
alligator pit and crawl into old burrows
or over rocks coated in a patina of
dried algae. A row of life-sized plastic
shark models still hangs above the
entrance lobby, fins and tails cracked
but otherwise complete. The fossils are
gone from the Paleozoic Room, but one
display remains intact: a Cambrian ocean
diorama of faded plastic models—orange
trilobites, green nautiluses, sea slugs,
kelp, and anemones, a frozen, surreal
arena of underwater plants and
feverishly imagined bugs. It is in this
room that Lee has spent hours, losing
herself in the diorama every time she
visits the derelict aquarium. She
imagines that this must be what scuba
diving feels like: isolated in an alien
seascape. Tomi, the other member of the
Philadelphia Urbex Society (membership:
two), is not with her tonight, because
tonight she needs to be away from Tomi
and his endless talk, his name-dropping
arcane art movements—Fluxus and Lettrism, Pataphysics
and Situationist Psychogeography—his
insatiable craving for her attention.
Urban exploration is not the safest of
recreations, especially not for a single
female, especially a female a slight and—as Tomi once (but only once) put it—as
elfin as Lee, but she feels safer here
than at other sites. The sheer remoteness
makes the aquarium uninhabitable by
squatters, as testified by the dearth of
graffiti or other vandalism. She supposes
that one of the Petty Island guards
could potentially come by, but it is
unlikely: the aquarium is not part of
CITGO property, and by nature security
guards are incurious and lazy. Now she
sits in an old wooden office chair she's
commandeered from behind the cashier's
desk, staring past the pregnancy test
stick in her hand at the little plastic
seascape, the broken fronds and wilted
arthropods, all now faded and cracked, and
thinks about the tiny thing growing
inside her. Lee knows who the father is,
but she has no intention of telling him.
The thing inhabits some subterranean
cave of her body, floating in amniotic
silence, just waiting to emerge and wreak
havoc on Lee's life. All her hopes and
plans—a life made by her own choices,
even a chance at college—snuffed before
that life can take in its first breath.
Unless she snuffs the thing inside her
first. That is the real question hovering
before her right now, occupying space in
the diorama tank, somewhere between the
Wiwaxia and the Hallucigenia. The thing
is thirty-three days old—she knows the exact moment
of its conception—and so she doesn't
have long to decide what to do or the
decision will be made for her. Lee
stares into the glass tank a while longer,
stares without seeing, until a single
object begins to come into focus behind
the field of molded prehistoric kelp:
a rolled strip of paper, what can only be
described as a tiny scroll, tied with the
lock of what looks like human hair and
propped up in the green plastic
tentacles of the Cambrian anemone. Breaking
one of the two cardinal rules of the
Urbex Society—Take Nothing, Leave
Nothing—Lee reaches in through the back
of the tank and plucks out the scroll.
The hair, black and long, snaps when she
pulls on it, and the paper unfurls in her
fingers. Lee flattens it with her palms
onto the glass top of the tank and
stares at it for several seconds, trying
to comprehend its intent. Because she
understands immediately upon seeing the
photograph that it has been left for her.
Which means the station master has found
her. She's seen the photograph before,
hanging above the desk in his room, and
Lee studies the woman in it closely
now. The photo is very old; the brittle
paper crumbles a bit in her hands. She
brings it to the bathroom, holds it up
beside her head as she stands in front
of the cracked mirror, and shines her
flashlight. It is like looking back in
time to another version of herself, a
visage that has changed only slightly as
it echoed through the decades. She and the
woman in the photo look nearly identical.
Lee turns it over. Penciled along a top
corner in a fluid European script is
"A.T. Juli 1911." Below that is the
now-familiar cryptogram, still unsolved
after nearly a century. And below the
cryptogram is a short note in the crabbed
handwriting of the Station Master: Return
what you have taken.
