Darrow tried to sleep in the backseat, but he was too petrified. His knee shook arrhythmically to the beat of his anxiety and the occasional road bump. All he could see of Josef was the back of his wide head, but from the mood of his straight neck he imagined him glowering at the road. Josef reminded Darrow of the not-that-smart thug in mob movies. He was exactly the kind of guy Darrow should be scared of, but since he had no respect for him whatsoever, he dismissed him as a nonbeing. The car might as well have been driving itself.

He wished Max were here. He had no one to bounce ideas off of, no ideas of his own to start with, and they were going to be in fucking Grundenwaldenwhatsitcalled in no time.

Christ.

Darrow began to sweat, steaming in his clothes like a microwave chicken in a bag. Usually, if he needed to work out an intractable problem and there was no one there to work it out with, Darrow talked to himself. But he imagined from the look of Josef that he would not take kindly to Darrow soliloquizing in his presence.

Darrow tried to think in his mind, to listen to the pitter patter of his internal monologue. When I get to the town I’ll say…fiddlesticks clarinets trombone swirl crescendo!—stop music stop music stop, when I get to the town I’ll walk up to the man in charge and say—image of man in charge clouding out all thought; he’s Santa Claus!—I’ll say, I’m Darrow Bezel eldest son of Dick Bezel and ancestor of the Schmuck, mucky duck fuckface. Fuck!

Darrow clenched his whole body — eyes, anus, fingers, knees — suppressing the desire to erupt in speech. The thing with speech was, you didn’t have the clutter of mental images and song fragments and dumdadum sounds and low-grade murmurs of “you are a worthless piece of shit” contending for your attention; you just had your own voice, loud and clear above the fray.

He held his breath. Darrow didn’t think he’d ever wanted to say something out loud this badly before. Sweat leaked off his eyebrow. What if he died from suppressing words? Can’t you die from suppressing urine? Or did it just make you infertile? Either way, fuck fuck fuck.

Josef cleared his throat. How Darrow longed to do the same.

He saw a sheep passing them on the road. Lonely, without a flock. That’s what Darrow would be if he got to Grundenwaldenberg and didn’t manage to fix the curse and heal his family, a lonely retarded sheep on the road to nowhere.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, and the sound of his voice soothed him beyond compare.

“Fuck,” he said again, to the same effect.

He peered up at Josef and found the man stiff as ever. Hallelujah! Maybe he was mostly deaf. Okay, okay, okay…

“My name is Darrow Bezel and I’m an alcoholic, huhmmph, and the eldest son of Dick Bezel and an ancestor of the Schmuck. I come to your town bearing the full weight of history on my shoulders. My great great grandfather, the Schmuck, dishonored your town and my name and brought a curse down upon my family’s heads, and I am here to beg, please, that you call off your curse; let us be.”

No.

“My name is Darrow Bezel and I’m an addict, and the firstborn son of Dick Bezel,” Darrow started again. If there was one thing Darrow was good at, it was soliloquy. But this was by definition an unwitnessable event. When Darrow had had occasion to be overheard, it hadn’t gone well—the observer always concluding at worst that he was a schizophrenic, at best that he was arbitrarily narcissistic and annoying. But Darrow didn’t care what Josef thought.

“Yes indeed I am Darrow Bezel, the heir apparent of Dick Bezel—” Darrow began again. At the third start, Josef actually turned around to the young, smelly man to see if his eyes were rolling back in his head—maybe this is what “speaking in tongues” was? Josef hoped so, for from what he’d heard the middle Bezel sibling say, Darrow completely one-hundred percent totally utterly misunderstood the nature of the Bezel curse. That simply wouldn’t do.

“It has befallen me, you see, to bear the weight of history, and now I come to meet my fate and take what comes and make it right with guts and butts not butts but as a mutt from nowhere, see, it is now my true duty—destiny rhymes better!—to bring together my family in the light of day not night and I will do it easily, merrily and freely. And no more blood will spill, except what has already been taken from my brother, and now he will pull through when all is well and light’s returned, and I will say, no, no, t’wasn’t I but all who parted the clouds of doom and brought back the fruit of the loom so that love could sprout and rekindle its flame in the absence of shame.”

         “You are mixing your metaphors, Mr. Bezel,” Josef declared.

Darrow scowled. He didn’t much care for constructive criticism.

“Why is it that you think your family has a curse?” Josef asked, cracking his knuckles on the steering wheel.

Darrow didn’t answer. Josef wouldn’t understand. They sat silently for a few minutes.

“And how is your brother recovering?” Josef added.

“What would you know about the curse?” Darrow asked.

“You just spoke of it. Never mind,” Josef said, turning his head so momentarily Darrow could see Josef’s black eye in the rearview mirror. “Maybe you have it backward and it is not you who is cursed; have you thought about this?”

Darrow’s knee went back to shaking. No, he hadn’t, because that was ludicrous. If he wasn’t cursed, who was? Darrow wasn’t on a mission to help solve world hunger, for Christ’s sake (though at a later date, he promised himself silently, he would be). He was trying to save his family. He resolved to give Josef the silent treatment and went back to looking at the increasingly rural landscape. Rows of what might have been wheat flashed past and he tried to focus on the center of each aisle. It was like monotonous visual Morse Code: wheat, ROW, wheat, ROW, wheat, ROW. As he was directly in front of each long line of wheat, Darrow couldn’t see how long it was—it was a blip, one specific piece of wheat, hiding the stretch that continued behind it, but as the van curved, Darrow could make out the whole length of the field, with its straight and perfect grid of fertility tended by machines and men.

Darrow supposed a lot of life was like that: when you looked at it too closely it seemed solitary, unique, but if you pulled away there was a whole system, calculated for its purpose.

Whatever that meant.

When the city goes quiet

one of two things is happening:

a disaster, engrossing, seeping from one

neighborhood to the next (as a fire spreads

from North beach, eventually people walking

to work downtown will silence)

or the sun is out

inexplicably out,

and the wind is warm.

Today the streets were shushed

absorbing the heat of an

unexpected kindness.

The sound was just of engines,

left to run, because no one

remembered to tell them

to take the day off.

The worst kind of sound is the one you don’t hear till it’s gone
with a lurch, you’re left murmuring
what was that?
was I bothered?
did I love it?
who made it?
where was it coming from?

Probably your upstairs neighbors were vacuuming while you bathed
no big deal
it was just the trash cans rolling along the snow-torn streets
the mailman huffing loudly in the yard, mad your name is not yet on the box
it’s the thundering of some distant stranger’s joy
just a little something,                                                                                                               the fan in a kitchen competing with smoke
it’s just your heart beating in your toes for a split second
or a laugh you used to make, a real one like a                                                                    toddler blowing out birthday candles—spittled and clumsy—                     
that’s what it was, probably, and now it’s gone

You can’t remember what it sounded like coming out your throat
only that without it
you’re alone
in a dark room
a new room
though everything looks the same
and the quiet surprises you
too late

I ate the dog
in my mind,
now I’ll never come back
from the place
where that was possible.

Justified, it just sits there,
redundant like being,
when it’s really any something.

I couldn’t soak the books
or the pottery;
there’s nothing hidden.
Blankets,
pillows,
lingerie;
clothing I can’t eat.

What if I was locked here,
barricaded in this room?

I’d jump clearly,
never mind the trees and cigarettes butts,
but what if
no,
I couldn’t,
what then?

Eat the dog then,
You see,

clearly,

there’s cold water in the bathtub-

you’d last a long time.

I want to say
love’s enough, and empathy
because I am her, in part,
foolishly gnawing
at the bottom of the couch,
sniffing weeds over and over expectantly,
looking at me for answers, into me
where the whole world begins
and ends.

But there’s some kind of morality in it;
evolutionarily I’m winning,

so in my mind I ate the dog.

I just asked my lawyer friend, “Can I sue the GOP for damages?”

I moved to Boston 5 days ago so my fiancé could start his new post-doctoral position in a stem-cell lab at Harvard. He’s a neuroscientist, with the grand goal of using stem cells to create human neurons in a petri dish in order to cure psychiatric disease. Basically he could be a hero one day, if everything works out.

This move was huge for us, not just because it’s an important step for his career, and now suddenly my father gets to say his future son in law works at Harvard (every Jewish father’s dream), but mainly because I really, really didn’t want to go.

We were living in San Francisco, my career as an on-camera news host was beginning to take off, and it seemed to me that moving to Boston for my man was going to stall my future in its tracks, make my dead feminist heroes roll over in their graves, and be unimaginably cold and dreary.

We fought for a year and a half.

“Do you love me enough to support my life path?” he would ask me.

“Do you love me enough to support mine?” I’d respond.

It was a game of chicken, steeped in gender politics and childhood dreams and resentment.

We’d been together ten years already and suddenly the future of our lives seemed forked. Someone was going to have to give in. And because he is curing fucking brain diseases and I’m a writer who can basically work from anywhere, I lost. “You’ll find something there,” he said. But I didn’t want to just find something, to just make it work, I wanted to do something great! But I also value our partnership and his dreams and our love, so I agreed to come to Boston – to at least give it a shot.

In my mind, Boston had become a hellhole, full of sleet and wind and frat boys spilling beer, devoid of opportunity for writers or actors or news hosts.  You can imagine what the road trip here was like, with me grinding my teeth through the southwest, feeling that I’d given in on my principles, that I would no longer be the star of my own life, that I’d lost control of my narrative, that this was now about him and his dreams.

But if you know anything about Boston, you already know the next part. It’s great here. Culture and opportunity abound. Everyone is friendly and smart, and the food is great, and the beer is cheap. I’m shocked!

I’m not too delusional to admit it: I was wrong. Boston was a stand-in for my fear that I will never follow through with my dreams, that I’ll let the naïve and ambitious little girl I once was down. That I’ll settle. And that had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with my own shit.

He can see in my eyes that I love it here. And so far, he’s refrained from saying “I told you so,” because he is so goddamned relieved that I came with him, that I didn’t blow up our life out of fear, that we’re still in this together. We signed a lease. We found the Car Talk garage to fix our Honda. Life here is pretty grand.

Until NIH funding for science got cut by the sequester.

The whole time we were planning this move, the one thing we took for granted was Harvard has money for research. The government values cutting-edge research. He has done everything right along every step of the path toward becoming a scientist—studied for years, gotten his pHD at the one of the best neuroscience programs in America, published multiple papers in big journals. He’s got a vision for the future of his investigation—and it’s tenable! And exciting!

But it requires millions of dollars. And on March 1, when the GOP failed to agree to minor tax hikes for the rich and allowed a series of senseless cuts to go into effect, that money basically vanished.

Maybe it’ll come back. Maybe the sequestration will be overturned. Maybe NIH will get funding again, at least back to the level of the Clinton White House.

But maybe not. And maybe all my hemming and hawing that the love of my life was asking me to loosen my control on my future will pale in comparison to the government, in one thoughtless and avoidable swoop, taking away all his agency.

Don’t worry, my friends say, it’s out of your control.

Don’t worry my love, I tell him, it’s out of your control.

But I am worried. And I’m looking for someone to blame.

My only idea is to run for office on a “pro-science, anti-GOP, pro-tax, anti-bullshit” platform. Maybe I’ll Kickstarter my campaign. Since Obama admitted he did a few drugs once and he still got elected, I think my vetting will go OK. But where do I begin?