brutal en pointe shots

Oh dear. I review a documentary about child dancers that…isn’t that good.

Toe shoes and bromides critiqued, here.

 ‎(But ugh if the review didn’t get editorially sandblasted into benignity.)

social anxiety and chocolate, plus farce

Uncanny Valley High Reading

New York Tumblrites: On two occasions this week, you can hear me read from Uncanny Valley High.

• Tuesday, March 20, 6pm: Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village 

AND! 

• Friday, March 23, 8pm: Uncanny Valley performance space in Long Island City. (This one in especial is very recommended, as it will be a double feature with the marvelous Mollycule Theory, who’ll be reading from her satirical serial, “Creighton Crossley: Lazy Intellectual Vampire Hunter.”) 

Come drink, eat, and listen to sympathetic and satirical tales of the paranormal!

We Like to Watch

I have a new piece up on 3 Quarks Daily. Kant, Laverne & Shirley, tricuspid valve repair, and more! — all noted in a single essay on friendship porn: “We Like to Watch: Friendship on TV.”

Of adolescent ankles and awkwardness

I’m still too much of a newb at PopMatters to be allowed to review Young Adult, which would have been an appropriate follow-up, but here’s my first review for them, of The Myth of the American Sleepover (upon the occasion of its DVD release).

It’s no Dazed and Confused, but at least (thank god!) it’s not American Graffiti.

Chapter 22

N.B. Which is just to say that I did not wimp out on the 22nd and final day of Januariad. Just that my at-home internet access went psycho, and work and etc. has made it impossible to post until now.

I know everyone was just champing at the bit for this latest installment.

————————————————————-

AP calc to AP physics. The same steps, north hall to west hall, every morning. That day, the smooth planes of a tanned face surfaced from the crowd of similars. He saw the manicured arc of each eyebrow, set in the immobile forehead of its perfectly neutral face. As all the others had, it floated before him for a moment, as familiar as the theater masks that hung, undusted, in the drama room. Then he saw only flames.

*

Locker trashed again. The padlock smashed, his clothes and shoes reeking of urine. 

They avoided his eyes. Price and Price grinned without looking at him. Lockers were sprung open and slammed shut. In the showers, someone had left a thin spray of water running. It echoed as it trickled to the drain.

Motherfucker. The words ran together. He hit the metal hard with his fist. He yelled until his voice didn’t feel or sound like his own.

Nothing. Only the trickle of water down the drain. They walked by him without looking, onto the court.

*

A football player, dumb and placid, held a liter bottle of Gatorade above his own head and patiently let the stream of liquid blue drip from his sodden head down his blank face and the back of his thick neck and broad shoulders.

The girl who drew horses in her spiral notebook was now sketching them, red and black, on the sun-faded whiteboard. 

Two blonde twins whom no one could tell apart were quietly, drowsily singing “Row Your Boat” in a round.

The doughy woman subbing for Mrs. Fowler was addressing Christmas cards at the squat-legged desk in the corner. 

Becks was reciting something soundlessly. Her lips moved dryly as she hunched against the window, watching the empty sky.

Boe watched the room from the very back. He was eating fun-size peanut butter cups, smiling faintly as he chewed.

“The smile gives him away, doesn’t it?”

Becks could see a reflection in the window pane. Will Lux was leaning on a desk behind her. She glanced over at Boe.

“He pretty much just uses his powers for stupid.” Then she caught herself: “You know what he’s doing?”

Will shrugged. “It’s kind of obvious.” 

Becks looked at him a moment. He was squinting into the outside light. The corners of his eyes creased; he seemed much older. 

She turned her face to the window again. “A murrain on thee,” she said, almost to herself.

“Pardon?”

Becks smiled to herself. “Must I endure this fellow’s insolence?”

Still no answer. 

“Sorry,” Becks said to his reflection. “I have a tendency to quote obscurely.”

She watched him watch her reflection in the window.

“Okay, Teiresias.” She finally turned to look at him. “Don’t blame the messenger, huh?”

He nodded.

Becks checked her watch. “Why are you here, in a tenth-grade social issues class? Aren’t you supposed to be at a basketball game?”

He said nothing.

“Away game? Valley versus Hills?”

“You an avid basketball fan?” He was teasing her a little. “I didn’t take you for one.” Or mocking her. She couldn’t tell which.

She shook her head. Trying not to remember him naked in the parking lot. “So what’s your message?”

Will watched her. She seemed perpetually fatigued, like her eyes were open only because it made no difference if she shut them. Right now, she was resting her head on her knees, her face turned toward him but her eyes not quite focused on him. Other than the purple below her eyes, it was a face devoid of color or ornamentation. She wasn’t ugly, he decided. Just strange.

“Okay,” she said, as the twins launched into the chorus of “Row Your Boat,” one voice lapping against the other’s. She glanced at the substitute, whose stack of red and green envelopes was growing. “Evidently, you’re a reluctant messenger.” She was feeling uncommonly bold.

The white board now bore a resemblance to the caves at Lascaux. Becks rolled her eyes away from it. “But I need to get out of here.” She tapped her head. “Too much noise.”

With that, she straightened her legs and slid down from the counter. She had nothing with her, and so she loped straight to the door without pausing. If he followed, it was because it seemed he had to. How had that happened?

*

A padlocked chain made it impossible for anything bigger than an underfed cat to slip between the double doors of the old gym. They creaked, predictably, when pushed. Becks peered into the space between the heavy doors. There was only dimness and echoes. 

Will waited behind her. She was like some kind of melancholy hound, he thought, nosing under a fence for what it sensed was on the other side.

“You know, there’s another way in,” he finally said. 

One hand still on the padlock, she turned, sighed. “You could’ve said.” 

Through the rusted sinks and scarred wooden benches of a windowless locker room, he led her to another heavy door, industrial and grey, that pushed open into the contained space of the gym. Daylight filtered through the narrow windows near the ceiling.

“I’ve never liked gyms,” Becks said. It was necessary to whisper. “They make me feel so exposed.” She folded her arms to her chest as they stared. “It’s just like…this complete void that they put walls and a ceiling around.”

Will looked at the bedraggled silhouettes of the basketball nets at either end of the empty floor. The bleacher were folded flat against one wall.

He trailed Becks as she began to walk the perimeter of the floor, her arms folded tight against herself, as if she were expecting an ambush from the shadows. When she stopped, at the far end from where they’d come in, she kicked at something with her foot. It made a hollow sound, so different from the sound of sprinting feet on the gym floors he knew. Then she crouched down. When he crouched down beside her, her fingers were resting on a simple metal handle, painted red to blend in with the red boundary line it was on. 

He waited for her to pull it. And when she didn’t, he reached his larger hand on top of hers and yanked. 

Chapter 21

Berta waited in the bleachers. Just visible through the morning gloom were the dead hills, blotched with dark shrubs that, from a distance, looked infectious. From the very last row, she could see the moving, shifting knots of teenagers, bunching and thinning as they circulated. These knots took on their own existence, swelling and fraying, absorbing any latecomers, shedding and forgetting their smallest components. 

A recorded metallic clangor split the air, and the various bunches and knots converged, swelling into one bulge that slowed at the double doors. She had seen bees, maybe ants, do something similar.

Minutes later, the new teacher let her in by that same door. “I’ll just be half an hour,” Berta told her. The new teacher nodded, eyes set — watchful, if not hopeful — before disappearing into one of the rooms that lined the halls.

It was quiet. There never seems to be a mid-point between chaos and desertion in a school’s hallways. They are like desert gulches, flooded in a flash and, just as suddenly, still and barren.

Berta walked the empty hallways, aware of murmurs from behind glazed doors along the way. The beige linoleum was over-shiny. Track lighting that ran the length of it was reflected as a mirage down the middle. At regular intervals, doorways separated the rows of green metal lockers, indistinguishable save for their tiny numbered plaques.

It must have been over a decade since she’d been in a high school. She couldn’t remember any time since her own graduation. She walked. There was a familiarity to these hallways that was uncomfortable. These over-shined floors, the rows of lockers repeated into the vanishing point. How many hallways, in how many high schools, were there, identical to this?

She stopped for a moment, hugging one side of the hall, suddenly too exposed in the open range between lines of facing lockers. The air felt close. Was there always that sense of accidentally exposing too much of yourself in these halls? The shooting gallery of these hallways that exploited any misstep. And she had never made any. By any measure, there had never been one at all. She’d been good at things. That was lucky. Long jump and high jump. Solving equations and calculating reactions and conjugating verbs. She’d gone to proms and had a boyfriend and tried a few things but not too much or too often. She’d never misstepped. Yet one had always to be painfully alert to the possibility. All those years in that funny but common space of not being able to exist unconsciously.  

With the clangor of the bell, like a spell had been broken, the sound of chairs were scraping the linoleum, there was movement, there was speech again. They filled the halls all at once, and Berta found herself pressed against a wall, her arms folded. And they moved so smoothly, like creatures in a dream. She had to force herself to watch their faces, their unvarying expressions, uncomplicated and unbroken.

There was something her grandmother had liked to say, and she thought of it now. God is in the details. She could never make sense of it as a child; it had seemed like an unfinished thought. But now, looking into these faces devoid of the kind of detail that makes each face its own, she saw how empty they were. There was no life in them. It was almost as if they’d been un-made.

Chapter 20

“Must I endure this fellow’s insolence? A murrain on thee! Get thee hence! Begone… Avaunt! and never cross my threshold more.”

Becks recited from Oedipus Rex. They were back in the stairwell. 

Boe poked pimentos out of olives with a toothpick. “What’s a murrain?” 

Chloe placed a stuffed baby heirloom tomato in her mouth.

“And then he also says to him, a bit lower down:Vile slanderer, thou blurtest forth these taunts…And think’st forsooth as seer to go scot free.” Becks recalled this to them as if she were remembering the details of a police report. “Oh, and also: No one loves the messenger who brings bad news. That’s Antigone. 276 to 277.” She had consumed the suite of Theban plays while her mother was catering a bridal shower the night before. It was okay to read in the van between setting up and clearing.

“So Will Lux is a messenger of doom?” Boe had tired of the olives and was on to a container of smoke-cured pigs in phyllo dough blankets. “So what? Who isn’t?”

Becks looked at him from where she was hunched.

“I mean,” he said, spraying pig and blanket crumbs, “I could tell you a million doom-laden things if I wanted to.”

“And all before breakfast,” Chloe said. 

He looked at her blankly. “You could, too,” he said.

Chloe looked down at her baby heirlooms. 

“Anyway,” Becks said. Her stomach gurgled. She realized she had been confusing eating the catering food last night with right now.

“I sort of think he’s okay,” Chloe said. She said it very quietly.

Becks snorted. “That’s because you had earplugs in the entire time he was in the art room yesterday.”

Boe chortled. “Does he have bad smells, Chloe?” He had come to terms with the artificial blueberry scent of his own voice.

The girl’s face was growing flushed. Pink blotched her hairline and rose in her cheeks.

“C’mon, Chloe. What’s his big smell?”

Chloe shook her head from the depths of her embarrassment.

“Dead bunny,” Becks said. She was feeling spiteful.

Boe laughed in asthmatic fits. Chloe buried her face in her hands.

Becks gave Boe a look. “But you’ve seen him, right?” 

“Yeah.” Boe snapped the lid on the empty pigs in blankets container. “And so has Chloe.”

“And you don’t think it’s weird?”

“What?”

“That he looks like us.”

They both looked at her. Strictly speaking, what made them different from the smooth faced, dream-swimming rest of the student body was not something they talked about. It was just one of those unspoken little crosses they had in common.

“I mean, that he doesn’t look like everyone else.”

Laughter and footsteps from the floors above funneled down the stairwell.

“Do you think he’s maybe like us?” Chloe was looking at her lap again.

Boe snorted. His hair was looking more atomic lately. “What’s his party trick? Self-styling hair? Infinite rebounds?”

“I don’t know,” Becks said. She was looking toward the old gym.

Chapter 19

Will Lux drifted near the art room three times. He slowed and glanced in and held off again, during three different free periods, before finally walking in. It smelled of paints and glazes and charcoal. Maybe a residue of weed. Very faint. It was dimmer than the other rooms.

Both girls were there. The strange one daubed black paint on an already-black canvas. She did it with the rote motions of a fence painter. The other girl, the small one with bright hair, painted her canvas with bulging color. They stood next to each other, but didn’t speak.

He watched the slick accumulation of brush strokes on the black canvas for a while. He couldn’t tell if she was high or making a statement. The visible layers of black on the butcher paper were slightly unnerving.

“So…you’ll warn me if I get too close to the event horizon?”

Becks’ hand stopped in its downward stroke. She was aware of him beside her, but she didn’t look at him.

“…or not.” He wished that she would speak, or look at him. Her self-contained stare only made what he’d seen feel more terrible. All he could do was watch.

“So you’re not a big talker.”

She neither confirmed nor denied this.

“Okay.” He knew that people were looking at him, wondering why Will Lux was in the art room. “I just wanted to say thank-you.”

She had begun the up-and-down motion of her brushstrokes again.

“Thank you for untaping me last week.”

“It’s fine.” Still wasn’t looking at him.

She had come to seem strangely familiar to him, as if he knew her from another time or place. People you’ve come upon in a dream seem subtly marked afterward, as if your having seen them without their possibly knowing has made them vulnerable. For weeks now, after having seen the drawn face of this spider-limbed girl beside his own, he felt how he’d held it inside himself. Stalking the halls, closing off his head in the workout room, returning to it in a classroom while his eyes appeared fixed on the differential equations on the white board. It seemed to have gained its own existence inside his head.

“And…so…I’m fine.” Would he just keep up the patter until she looked at him? “The hair will grow back. Thanks for asking, though.”

She had tuned him out. The brush moved steadily and she stared vacantly at the black.

“Are you okay?” He ventured a hand on her shoulder, just the tips of his fingers.

Now she turned her head, shrugging him off.

And as she watched, he was suddenly turning himself in half, his hands grasping his ankles, his face smashed into his knees. In this contorted position, he began to hobble slowly away.

“Boe.” Becks hissed at the three-footer, who was smiling at them from the table where he sat carving a set of figurines. “Knock it off, Boe.” She threatened his figurines with the back of her hand, and he hastily gave in. 

Near a wall of student self-portraits, Will Lux had righted himself. He examined each of his limbs like a man who has found himself in the act of mugging himself. Identical silhouette studies in orange, fuchsia, and cyan framed him.

“You’d have been better off slipping a thank-you note in my locker.” Becks had dropped the paintbrush and was standing next to him.

“What was that?” He gestured to his legs, lifted his arms. “What the hell?”

“I think you’re probably better off going back to the basketball court, Will Lux.”

“You think I don’t want to?”

She was tall enough that she could look him level in the eye, but there was always something unfocused about her gaze.  

“Then why are you here?”

He could see the same white face, eyes dead. The tiled floor behind her.

“Yeah, I dunno. They have you read Oedipus junior year. Look how bad the messenger gets treated.”

He shrugged past the wall of monotone portraits and loped out of the door.

Chapter 18

The new teacher was watching her tenth graders. Crooked rows and columns of desks filled the stowage of the classroom. Most everyone was always faced with the back of someone else’s head. They were used to it. 

You could hear the industrial clock tick. The first 12 minutes of Block 6 were for SSR. Each tick was weighted with the uneasiness of involuntary silence, the hallways heavy with the suspended animation of every classroom.

Their smooth faces were turned down, looking at, or pretending to look at, the pages of open books. But they fidgeted like swimmers forced under water for too long. They shifted heavily in their seats. The room filled with the unacknowledged circuit of their sideways glances. In the closeness of the artificially induced silence, every movement and every sound was over-freighted. She remembered sitting in high school classrooms waiting for her name to be called, the tension of how a single monosyllabled response would surely be weighed and evaluated by every other person in the room.

But there was something worse in the blankness of these faces, in the barely discernible blink of their eyes. She could feel the same blankness on her own face, how somehow the smallest movements of its musculature didn’t correspond to her intentions, until the intentions were slowly let go and forgotten.

“These are cases that have gotten buried,” Berta had said. “They’re not resolved, and nobody’s doing anything about them anymore.”

A girl in the back row watched the heavy seconds of the clock. Throats cleared and settled back into uncomfortable silence. 

“People call it Ops, or they just pretend it doesn’t exist.” “Ops, like OPS. So, there’s an Office of Solid Waste, an Office of Toxic Substances. Etcetera.” She remembered how Berta pronounced every syllable of the word. “They call us OPS. Office of Phantom Substances. Like what we’re investigating doesn’t actually exist. It’s in our paranoid little heads.” Berta’s glance at her seemed very brave just then. “Or, as I prefer to think, it’s made to look like it doesn’t exist.”

The new teacher’s gaze fell on the small copper head of a girl whose mobile face was always registering some intensity or other. Her eyes were wide at something in the book she held at a distance from herself.

There were those few faces in her classroom that somehow still furrowed and creased in correspondence with their voices and emotions. The odd girl, Becks, who’d memorized all of Finnegans Wake when the new teacher gave her the book overnight. You could see exhaustion in her face. 

And people avoided them. Of course they would. But there seemed to be something else that the over-sensitive apparatus of the others sensed.

The recording of a bell sounded, and she saw Chloe’s face tighten. The classroom filled with sounds of books being shut and put away, zipped back into backpacks and set under desks.

“I’ve re-opened the case,” Berta had said. “Not that anyone knows yet.”