Karen Russell’s debut collection of short stories St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves was published to great acclaim in 2006 in the US, introducing readers to a fresh voice that would, in turn, earn her a place in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists 2, in 2008. The novel that followed, Swamplandia!, grew from one of the stories in this first collection, expanding on the lives of the Bigtree family and their plight to save their business, the eponymously named alligator-wrestling theme park, from being eradicated by a new competitor: The World of Darkness. She talked to Patrick Ryan about the joys and difficulties of writing in the fantastic and what would scare the bejesus out of the Brontës.

PR: Swamplandia! is rich in imaginative detail; it’s fantastical, and yet the story encompasses the very real human dramas of loss and economic hardship. Do you find that the imaginative feeds off the real, or vice-versa? Or both? On a personal note, I ask that because I’ve found in my own writing that one can derail – or take over – the other.

KR: I know exactly what you mean about the tension between the imaginative and the real. I guess the way I try to keep one from overloading the other, is by always trying to write characters who feel true and dimensioned, no matter how weird the world (or body, in the case of the werewolf children in St. Lucy’s) they inhabit. To try and write a story with a genuine emotional core, so that the fantasy feels in the service of something larger than the line-to-line pleasure of ‘hey, isn’t that crazy!’ My favourite writers, like Kelly Link and Italo Calvino and George Saunders, seem to operate from a Wild West that is by no means totally lawless My favourite writers, like Kelly Link and Italo Calvino and George Saunders, seem to operate from a Wild West that is by no means totally lawless – it’s rule-bound, there are consequences – but perhaps they aren’t so rigidly bound to the laws you see represented in so-called ‘realist’ fiction (whatever that is – I find myself getting sweaty palms whenever I’m asked about realist versus speculative fiction. I was about to say you’re more likely to find a Subaru in the former and a dragon in the latter, but then I remembered that alligators are real dragons, and a Subaru, well, that would surely have seemed like a fantastic machine a few centuries ago. It would have scared the bejesus out of the Brontës).

So you don’t lean more toward one or the other?

Well, in daily life, I think it’s impossible to draw a hard and fast line between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy.’ So much of our mental lives are spent in fantasy lands, either in the future or in memory. Kids in particular have this beautiful, terrifying ability to hold many contradictory ideas in their head at once (although I’m not convinced that’s something we necessarily ever outgrow). One reason I think I like to write from adolescent points of view is because of that kid-elasticity – at that age you can really straddle two worlds, a childhood realm that’s coloured by games and fairy tales and an adult reality.

What experiences did you draw on for this book? Have you ever worked in a terrible theme park like the World of Darkness you describe, or did you draw from what you’d observed as a visitor to such places? Having grown up in Florida in the 60s and 70s, I saw plenty of them myself – and saw them come and go. It was heartbreaking to read the news that GatorLand had burned down.

It makes me so happy to know that you are processing your Floridian childhood through fiction, too. And I love that you were heartbroken about GatorLand – that fire broke out maybe a month after I visited the park with my brother on a ‘research trip’ where we fed frozen drumsticks to the alligators. But like a phoenix from the ashes, GatorLand has risen: they even rebuilt the big concrete gator mouth that you walk through to get to the gift shop. I just read that they have white, leucistic alligators with sapphire eyes on display right now. I never worked at a theme park. But one of the humbling things about growing up in South Florida was that now nothing I can come up with in a story holds a candle to the true weirdness of that place. I never worked at a theme park. But one of the humbling things about growing up in South Florida was that now nothing I can come up with in a story holds a candle to the true weirdness of that place. Fantasy is the big industry, the tourist lure, and I think Swamplandia! grew directly out of the many hours I logged in places like Disney World (the model for the World of Darkness), as well as the mom-and-pop outfits. Like any kid, I enjoyed the Orlando superparks, but I felt an underdog allegiance with the crappier places, the shabby tiki huts. I bet you have vivid memories of the Miami Seaquarium, the Coral Castle, Shark River Valley, Parrot Jungle, Monkey Jungle.

The story of Louis Thanksgiving is a haunting tale that has stood on its own as a short story. It is also embedded in the greater canvas of Swamplandia! Was the novel born of this story, or did you have the greater picture in mind from the get-go?

Louis’ chapter, ‘The Dredgeman’s Revelation’, did get excerpted and tailored a bit, but to be honest it was never intended to live outside of the novel – it grew very organically out of one of Ossie’s paranormal escapades. I’ve always loved stories-within-the-story, and I hoped that the Louis Thanksgiving chapter, which is a radical departure from the material that precedes and follows it, might function as a kind of mirror, a place where readers could see a few things in superimposition – Osceola’s grief and horror at her mother’s abrupt, early death; her hunger, which manifests as a stillborn romance with this dead kid; also the Bigtrees’ connection to early Florida history; and – I hate to mislabel it man vs. nature, but let’s say, the violent collision between human settlers with profit motives and the primordial, inhumanly beautiful swamp.

I think all of the seeds of Swamplandia! are contained in a short story I wrote way back in 2005, ‘Ava Wrestles the Alligator’, about two sisters on a swamp island mourning the death of their mother. In that story, Ava watches helplessly as her sixteen-year old sister, Osceola, begins to have romances with ghosts. When I started this novel,When I started out, if I tried to picture the book as a whole, I felt like I was flying over the greater story in a plane – I couldn't see grass blades, just blurry green swaths. I did have a Big Picture, but it was an extremely fuzzy one – I felt sort of like Cassandra without her reading glasses. I knew that Hilola Bigtree had died of ovarian cancer, and that Osceola would elope with a ghost. And I was committed to writing as honestly as I could about what happens between Ava and the Bird Man. But when I started out, if I tried to picture the book as a whole, I felt like I was flying over the greater story in a plane – I couldn't see grass blades, just blurry green swaths. All of the fine print of the Bigtrees’ story got worked out during the actual drafting, and that was where I met Louis Thanksgiving.

So Swamplandia! wasn’t born out of the Louis Thanksgiving story?

No, but that chapter came to feel like the novel’s secret heart to me. Louis Thanksgiving showed up when I was doing research for the book, reading these diaries of Florida pioneers in the early twentieth century. I read the word ‘dredgeman’ and got a little chill. Dredges, I discovered, were barges with cranes and dippers used to dig canals and roads through Florida’s impenetrably swampy interior. Land barons like Hamilton Disston purchased millions of acres of Florida swampland, with the goal of draining the entire swamp to expose the arable soil of ‘An American Eden’. Not long after reading this, a haunted dredge barge crashed into the novel.

As for the horror that befalls Louis Thanksgiving and the dredgemen – I came to see that story as silhouetted against a larger narrative, a horror story about delusion, a very American, uncritical faith in an ecologically-devastating idea of ‘progress’, driven by a bottomless hunger for land and profit without any real knowledge of or respect for the lanscape.

Why did you choose to write in the first person, as 13-year-old Ava? One can imagine many different ways in which this novel might be narrated, and you chose to anchor the narrative voice to Ava. Were you comfortable in allowing yourself some liberties along the way? Some of the background knowledge, evocative imagery, and sensibilities seem to come from a more an omniscient perspective than that of a young girl.

I always struggle with the point of view issue. At one point I was switching Ava’s voice from first to third, past to present, etc. until I had just about given myself trichotrillomania. But once I returned to her voice in the first-person, something clicked in and I felt that I couldn’t tell her story any other way – because she is, at core, an unreliable narrator, and all of the novel’s thematic preoccupations, not to mention its plot, really require that the reader be totally merged with Ava. What happens to Ava later in the book is such a shock to her, and I wanted readers to understand the exact nature of that shock, to experience that particular pain with her. Not to sort of pity her from a distance, you know, but to feel it with her. So much of Ava’s journey involves her moving from a deep blind spot into the light, really grappling with some bad truths. I don’t think the novel would have worked if Ava wasn’t recreating, in her own voice, the events of that summer – but that said, I was sure glad to have the Kiwi storyline in there, with a more satiric, distanced viewpoint, in part because I think it can start to feel a little claustrophobic inside of Ava’s head. That’s a danger of the first person, I think. Much less so in a twelve page story than a four-hundred page novel.

As for taking liberties, I never felt like I was doing anything too egregious, I guess because I think Ava really would know quite a bit about the history and ecology of Swamplandia! I always saw the novel as being told retrospectively, by an adult Ava who is time-traveling back into her thirteen-year old body; telling the story with access to some adult vocabulary but really trying to be true to the spirit of that age, her grief and her goofiness, her almost complete ignorance of the mainland.

Rumour has it you’re working on short stories and / or a novel based in the dust bowl drought. How has the experience of writing this novel influenced your approach to your next one?

Right now I’m trying to complete a few stories and revise others for a second story collection, tentatively titled Vampires in the Lemon Grove. And I’m working on my second novel, which is set in an imaginary town during the Dust Bowl drought. Every day I’m shocked to rediscover that it’s just as hard, maybe even harder this second time around. I do think that the experience of writing Swamplandia! has changed my approach – it’s made me much more patient, for sure. Every day I’m shocked to rediscover that it’s just as hard, maybe even harder this second time around. I thought it might feel like repeating a grade – like, your reward for being a dunce the first time around is that now you’re the huge hairy savvy kid, smoking in the eighth grade – but so far I’m still the duncey one. It’s an entirely new set of challenges.

The big change is that I think I’m a little more comfortable with uncertainty now. It took so many years and drafts before Swamplandia! came together in its final form that I now have this simpleton’s faith that if I stick with it, more will be revealed. Periodically I’ll feel that the new stuff is doomed, as I did with this novel. But I guess I’m learning to let those emotions bleat in the background, the way you’d ignore a car alarm. ■

You can also read her story, ‘The Barn at the End of Our Term’, which featured in the Best of Young American Novelists, here.

Photo by Katerha.

My dad worked a lot of jobs. As a young man, in Ohio, he repossessed cars for a summer. (‘Don’t ever repossess cars,’ he told me. ‘Nobody likes you. I had to carry a baseball bat and keep a loaded pistol in the glove compartment, just in case of trouble.’) He then worked as a desk clerk at a hotel in Washington DC. Later, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he stood in a caged room all day and checked out camera equipment to staff photographers. When the Apollo program began to wane in the mid-1970s, he quit ahead of the layoffs that were coming, honed his skill at fixing cars, and got a job as an auto mechanic. But after a few years, the owner retired and sold the garage.

And so my dad mulled around for a bit and flirted with the idea of becoming his own boss. He looked into opening a liquor store, a cafeteria-style restaurant, a wholesale inner tube business . . . But he lacked the one thing a man with a dream needs to get anywhere: capital. He would become a realtor, he decided. He would sell houses. He got his license and tried that for a while – just as the real estate market in the area was entering a major slump. By coincidence, his marriage to my mother was also in a slump; they separated on the eve of their twenty-third wedding anniversary and divorced soon after.

He moved to Virginia. He tried real estate there for a while, couldn’t sell a single property, and got a job at Dulles International Airport overseeing the luggage-handlers for one of the major airlines. A year later, the airline went broke.

At a low point, he filled out an application at a convenience store. They hired him for the night shift, where he mopped the floor and restocked the shelves when he wasn’t carding minors trying to buy beer and cigarettes. The store was part of a nation-wide chain, and they did right by him. More than a dozen years later, he was a regional manager with a whole fleet of stores under his control.

And then, at last, came retirement. Or semi-retirement. He’d remarried by then, and after saying goodbye to the convenience store chain and being presented with a nice mantle clock that bore the His full head of snow-white hair was buzzed into a high flat-top.store’s logo, he and his second wife moved to South Carolina, where he took a job three days a week washing cars at an Alamo Rental Car agency. He didn’t mind the work. It got him out of the house, allowed him to socialize with several other semi-retirees. But he looked forward to the day when he could, as he put it, ‘be done with all this shit and do nothing. Well, not nothing. I want to sit on my ass, figure out TIVO, and read.’

He was sixty-eight years old. He had bad posture, mild arthritis and a hiatal hernia at the bottom of his oesophagus that spasmed in the middle of the night and made swallowing a challenge every four or five bites; other than that, he seemed to be doing fine. His full head of snow-white hair was buzzed into a high flat-top, he was sporting a chinstrap beard and, as I discovered on a visit to his house that Thanksgiving, an earring. Standing at his backyard grill, wearing a parka and a pair of aviator sunglasses and wielding a spatula, he asked me out of the blue, ‘So how do you think the old man looks?’

I told him he looked like an assassin in an Elmore Leonard novel, and he smiled.

‘Why the earring?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I want to get a tattoo on my ankle, too. I just haven’t decided what it should be.’

We’d always read, in my family. We read what is known as popular literature: mass market paperbacks that didn’t cost much and had the word ‘bestseller’ stamped on their covers. Stephen King. V. C. Andrews. The occasional disaster novel and a dip, now and then, into the occult. Rosemary’s Baby and The Amityville Horror. It was communal reading, and the unspoken rule was that the book stayed on the coffee table in the living room when it wasn’t being read so that we could all be reading it simultaneously. I don’t remember ever having family discussions about these books, but by the time they’d been around the house a few weeks, they were dog-eared and curling, their cheap spines well-broken-in.

Like many retired – or semi-retired – couples, my dad and his wife lived on a severely fixed income. While they were both avid readers, We’d always read, in my family. We read what is known as popular literature: Stephen King. V. C. Andrews. they stopped buying books and got everything from the library, putting themselves on waiting lists for the more popular titles, sometimes waiting months for a particular book. My dad read for hours every day. During my visits, I’d do my own reading, sitting across from him in the living room, but I’d also watch him read. He was keen on political thrillers, now, and he would page through one after another with absolutely no reaction in his face. When he finished one of these books and set it on the coffee table, retaining his bookmark for whatever was next, I asked him what he’d thought of it.

‘It was good,’ he said. ‘Good story.’

I knew better than to expect a more lengthy assessment. He’d read my books with the same flat response – including the one I’d dedicated to him (which I had to point out, because he hadn’t noticed): ‘It was good,’ he said about each one. ‘Good story.’

Just a few months after my dad’s sixty-ninth birthday, on a routine checkup, his doctor said he wouldn’t mind taking a look at that hiatal hernia that had been waking him up at night. My dad didn’t see the point of inspecting something he knew could never be fixed, but he consented, and they set up an appointment to numb his throat and have him swallow a miniature camera.

The results showed a tumour as big as a thumb hugging the side of the hernia.

‘Is that why you’ve been having more and more trouble swallowing?’ I asked, trying to calm the panic I felt rising in my own throat.

‘It’s not easy to tell,’ he replied in his usual deadpan. ‘The tumor doesn’t hurt, but it causes the same discomfort as the hernia, which is why I didn’t even know it was there. But it’s cancerous, they know that much, and it can spread. So I have to deal with it.’

Right away, the doctor wanted to start him on a regimen of chemo and radiation. Following ninety days of that would be an ‘invasive surgery’ (is there any other kind?) wherein they would remove the hernia and what was left of the tumor – along with most of his oesophagus for good measure; they would then draw up his stomach lining and sew it to the bottom of his throat.

Chemo. Radiation. Invasive surgery. I was alone at work when he called me with this news. I was pacing the floor with the phone held away from my mouth, crying and not wanting it to funnel into the conversation. ‘So that’s it?’ I said stupidly. ‘We just do the treatment, and then have the surgery, and hope for the best?’

‘Who’s ‘we’?’ he asked. ‘You got a mouse in your pocket? I’m going to do the treatment, which they say is going to make me sick as hell, and then I’m going to have the surgery, and that should take care of things. Small meals from here on out, small bites. But no more cancer.’

It occurred to me that, for all the jobs he’d had, he’d never once called in sick (that I knew of), never once had the flu or even a cold. ‘You’re going to beat this,’ I said, trying to sound encouraging.

‘I’m telling you I’m going to beat it. If I don’t, I don’t, but I think I will. The truth is, I plan on being around for another ten years, so I can sit on my ass and not work,’ he said, and I could feel him grinning through the phone. ‘You’re stuck with me.’

I couldn’t bear the thought of his having to wait for what he wanted to read while he wasn’t feeling well, so as soon as he started the chemo and the radiation, I started sending him books. I stuck to political thrillers, because that’s what I knew he enjoyed. If I sent him a particularly long one, he’d thank me over the phone but say that, with his energy level so sapped, he just wasn’t up for tackling more than a few hundred pages of any one book.

A month into his treatment, he called me with an update from his doctor: things seemed to be going well. The tumour, on scans, was noticeably smaller. He hadn’t lost any of his hair. But he felt rotten and slept a lot and had no appetite; I should be prepared for the sight of him on my next visit, he warned, because he was a lot thinner than he’d been just a month ago.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

‘That Robert Bourne knock-off you sent. It’s not awful, but it’s not very good, either. You know what I really want to read? The new Stephen King. Dome-something.’

‘Under the Dome,’ I said.

‘That’s it.’

Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine – they’d all passed across our coffee table when I was growing up. But as far as I knew, he hadn’t read a Stephen King novel in years. ‘It’s a big one, isn’t it? Like, a thousand pages? I thought you weren’t up for anything too long.’

‘I’m not, but I saw him talking about it on TV and I thought, that sounds like a good book. A good story. I’d like to read that.’

‘Well, then you should read it,’ I said, thinking, You should do whatever the hell you want. You should go to the Grand Canyon, see Venice, the Pyramids. For godsake, you’ve earned a spree.

But this was a man who’d never owned a passport. He didn’t want to travel; he wanted to sit on his ass and relax.

‘I’ve got my name on the waiting list at the library,’ he said. ‘It’s Stephen King, though, so it could be a year before I get it.’

Ahead of my next trip to South Carolina, I purchased Under the Dome on Amazon and had it delivered to his house.

He insisted on driving to the Myrtle Beach Airport to pick me up, but he told I was pacing the floor with the phone held away from my mouth, crying and not wanting it to funnel into the conversation. me in advance that they wouldn’t be meeting me inside the terminal. ‘Get your bag and come outside. We’ll be right there.’ He was standing next to the car, waving at me, during the moment it took for me to recognize him. He looked like an empty costume of himself hung on a coat hanger. His eyes appeared bulbous and his jawbone pronounced, but this was only because his face had sunken in around them.

‘Guess what?’ he said into the rearview mirror on the drive back to his house.

Questions like this were never rhetorical. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘I’m almost halfway through that Stephen King book. I feel like shit, most of the time, and I fall asleep a lot – ’

‘At dinner!’ his wife said from the passenger seat. ‘The other night, he fell asleep at dinner!’ She sounded annoyed, but I could hear in her tone that she was scared, and most likely exhausted.

‘True,’ my dad said. ‘But I woke up in time for dessert.’

‘Huh. One bite,’ his wife clarified. She’d lost her first husband to cancer. She was facing sideways now, staring out the window at the shoulder of the road.

‘Anyhow,’ my dad said, ‘I feel like shit and I fall asleep a lot, but I’ve still managed to get almost halfway through that book. It’s a good story.’

‘What do you like about it?’ I chanced, wondering if, at last, I could get him to articulate why he enjoyed what he was reading.

‘It’s about everyday people thrust into a shitstorm, and what they do to deal with it – or not deal with it,’ he said. ‘You want to know what happens, so you keep reading.’

‘When did you start using the word “shit” so much?’ his wife asked, still staring off to the side.

‘Always,’ my dad said, grinning at me in the rearview mirror. ‘Shit’s a good word.’

He kept reading. During my visit, I watched him sit like a shrunken gnome in the wingback chair of his living room, in his bathrobe, turning a page, falling asleep, starting awake and turning another page.

I was desperate – maybe selfishly desperate – to feel good about something. I’d given him this big fat book and he was sticking with it, despite his exhaustion, his frustration with feeling sick, his fear that maybe – just maybe – things wouldn’t look so good when they finally cut him open.

He finished Under the Dome within a few weeks. It was the last book he ever read. ■

Photo by Robert Bessoir.

Julie Otsuka’s tour de force second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, follows the story of a group of Japanese women coming to America, in the early twentienth century, as mail order brides. It is one of two novels in the history of the magazine, the other being Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, to be excerpted in consecutive issues: Granta 114: Aliens and Granta 115: The F Word and is now a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. Here she discusses with Assistant Editor Patrick Ryan the advantages of writing in the first person plural, what the soundtrack to her novel would be and following her intuition.

PR: Would you say that The Buddha in the Attic has no central main character, or that it has many central main characters?

JO: I’d say it has one central main character, which is everyone: the collective ‘we.’ No one ‘I’ is more important than any other.

What do you think was the benefit of writing in the ‘we’ voice, the first-person plural, as you got into the world of these mail-order brides? It’s a stylistic technique novelists rarely employ.

Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to tell a much larger story than I would have been able to tell otherwise. At first I tried telling Each sentence gives you a brief window into somebody’s life – it’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s house from a train... the story from the point of view of a single picture bride, but this approach felt too narrow and confining. In my research, I had run across so many fascinating stories, and I wanted to tell them all. Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to weave them all in. It’s a very capacious and infinitely expandable voice. Each sentence gives you a brief window into somebody’s life – it’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s house from a train – and then we move on.

Also, since Japan is a very group-oriented culture (my father, who immigrated from Japan after World War II, once said to me, ‘Japan is the opposite of America’ – meaning, I think, that here in America, the emphasis is on the individual), it made sense to speak of the picture brides as a collective entity.

Given that you resist settling into the head of any one of these women for very long, did you find that one collective personality emerged as you were writing?

At the beginning of the novel, when the women arrive in America, they conform more to the ‘typical’ Japanese personality – quiet, stoic, uncomplaining, obedient, respectful of authority (i.e., the perfect wife or maid). But the longer they stay in America, the more they are able to individuate. And while many of them remained ‘typically’ Japanese till the end of their lives, there were variations on the typical, as well as a few outliers – women who were loud and outspoken, women who left their husbands shortly after arriving in America, women who kept secret bank accounts, women who defied their parents’ wishes by coming to America, etc.

An image that stays in my mind: Japanese women smashing their valuable, much cherished tea sets to the ground rather than selling them to their white neighbours for pennies at the ‘evacuation sales’ that took place before the Japanese left for the camps. Showing your anger in front of someone outside the family: this is not typical Japanese behaviour. In Japan, where much is made of saving face, such behaviour would be considered shameful.

Also, the women who sailed to America tended to be braver, more adventurous souls to start with. So already, just by wanting to leave, they’re a bit atypical.

Can you talk a little about the hope these women start off with, and the deceit they encounter, and how that shapes the course of their lives?

Most started out with very high hopes – they expected to marry handsome, wealthy young men (as ‘advertised’ by their future spouses in their photographs and letters) and live a life of leisure. Or, if they expected to work, then they thought that after several years they’d be able to save up enough money to sail back home to Japan and live out the rest of their days ‘with a cat in their lap and a fan in their hand’.

But life in America was not what they expected. It was one deceit after another. Some of them were deceived by their husbands, who had lied about their age and financial status. Within days of their arrival, many of the women found themselves picking strawberries in the fields, living in migrant labour camps or working as maids for white women in the city.

(On the other hand, a few of the women had deceived their husbands as well. They had ‘pasts’ in Japan – perhaps they’d had an affair, or given birth to an illegitimate child, or maybe they were just widows who stood no chance of remarrying if they remained in their village. Remember, the first line of the book is ‘On the boat we were mostly virgins.’)

And then they were betrayed by America, or the promise of America – they were despised because of their race, suspected of being disloyal and sent away to the camps.

I think that quite early on, these women – most of whom had no idea of the prejudice they would encounter in America – realized that they would only be allowed to accomplish so much in their own lives, and so they put all their hopes onto the lives of their children. Which is a huge burden, if you’re one of the children.

In this and your previous novel, and in some of your shorter pieces, you often write clusters of sentences that begin in a similar, repeated fashion and then go where they need to go. The result of reading your work—for me, and I suspect for many other readers – is a kind of hypnosis or meditation; it’s impossible not to be drawn in, submerged, seduced. Are you conscious of strategically using repetitive sentence structures? Or is maybe that you’re drawn into the rhythm of the words you’re putting down? Or is it something that just . . . happens?

A kind of hypnosis or meditation, I love that. Someone suggested that if there were a soundtrack to my novel, it would be something by Steve Reich, and I immediately thought, yes, Music for 18 Musicians . . . that hypnotic beat that just puts you into a trance.

I was obsessed with the rhythm of the language while writing this novel. I was constantly reading my sentences out loud soIt’s like there’s this underground aural grid that’s secretly holding everything together. I could hear where the accents fell. I could often hear the rhythmic pattern of the next sentence I wanted to write before I knew the exact words to drop into that pattern. And at times I found myself doing things like searching for the right three-syllable town in California where they had Japanese migrant laborers working in the peach orchards . . . A two-syllable town with orange groves just would not do.

Most of my writing is very intuitive and falls under the ‘just happens’ category. I think the best way to put it is this: it’s like there’s this underground aural grid that’s secretly holding everything together.

There’s an obvious bridge between this book and your first novel, When The Emperor Was Divine. The Buddha in the Attic serves as a prequel. Do you have any plans to explore a third book about the lives of these people?

Not in the immediate future. I think my next book will be about dementia and . . . swimming. That’s all I can say about it right now. People have asked me, however, if I’m going to write a book about the post-war experience of the Japanese Americans – their lives after they came back from the camps (and this, in my opinion, is where the real hardship began). Maybe that’ll be book four? ■

Read the first extract from The Buddha in the Attic, which appeared in Aliens, ‘Come, Japanese!’, here.

Photo by Terence S. Jones.

I left the office just in time to get to Penn Station, find my track and hop onto my train. We pulled out into an afternoon grey and heavy with rain.

This was our first U.S. event for Granta 116: Ten Years Later– an issue themed to how the world has changed since the events of 11 September, 2001. The event was to be a panel discussion with a journalist who has a piece in the magazine and a scholar whose field of expertise pertains to the issue’s theme. Given that the journalist was a veteran of the war in Iraq and that the scholar was a scholar, I had my work cut out for me. I’d been prepping for days, reading what they’d published and formulating questions that would – fingers crossed – generate some fruitful discussion.

In New Haven, I switched to a train bound for Madison, Connecticut. In Madison, I stepped out onto a platform that was little more than an elevated, concrete slab with a cover. Rain pinged against theIn Madison, I stepped out onto a platform that was little more than an elevated, concrete slab with a cover. tracks and pooled in the parking lot, which was filled with cars (commuters’, I assumed) but otherwise deserted. On an information sheet screwed into a half-wall and protected by Plexiglass, I found the number for a cab service. There was no answer. Fortunately, before leaving New York I’d scribbled onto my hand the number for the bookstore where the event was to be held. I dialed it and asked if they could call a different cab service for me.

‘There’s just the one,’ the woman said. ‘If they don’t answer, they must be busy. The store manager will come and get you; it’s no problem at all.’

Before long, the manager of R. J. Julia Booksellers arrived in her black SUV She was an extremely pleasant person, down-to-earth, easy to talk to. She told me she was a little worried about the turnout for our event because the weather was so bad, and because the town had just gotten its electricity back that very morning, a week and a half after being pounded by Hurricane Irene.

R. J. Julia is a gem of a place – exactly what you want in an independent bookstore:R. J. Julia is a gem of a place – exactly what you want in an independent bookstore. humongous stock, rooms opening onto rooms, comfortable chairs, artwork on the walls, and a quaint little cafe in the back. I was starving, wet. They brought me dinner and coffee. I’d managed to arrive early, so after I finished eating I sat in the cafe with my notepad, tweaking my questions for the event.

A short while later, the manager approached my table. ‘David just called,’ she told me. David was the scholar – one of my two panellists. ‘He has water damage in his house and can’t make it tonight.’

A wholly understandable reason not to attend, but I glanced down at my notes and saw half of what I’d planned for the evening evaporate. That left only me and Elliott Woods, the young journalist and Iraq veteran who was, at that moment, in his car on his way from Pennsylvania.

‘Okay,’ I said with a toss of my hands. ‘I’ll roll with it!’

‘Try one of our cupcakes,’ the manager said. ‘Best in Connecticut.’

After pillaging my notes and excising all questions meant for the scholar, I was confident I could make this work with just me and Elliott. He was the one with the hands-on experience, both in having served a tour of duty in Iraq and in having extensively interviewed veterans about their service, their homecoming, and their thoughts on the last ten years of war. People, I reminded myself, would be at the event to hear the panellists – or, in this case, panellist – not me. I just needed to do what a good moderator does: get the panel talking, and keep it talking.

Twenty minutes later, the manager of R. J. Julia once again approached my table. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your day just keeps getting more interesting.’ She informed me that Elliott had just called the store to say that he was stuck in traffic in southern Connecticut and was going to be ‘very late, if he can make it at all.’

Very late. If he can make it at all. Translation: Isn’t going to show up. Not unlike Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors when he finds out his sister has been defecated on by a blind date, I yanked my glasses off my head and rubbed a hand over my face. ‘Oh, my god…’ I said, and then struggled to compose myself. ‘Okay! I’ll improvise. Somehow.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Roxanne – the owner – wants to be on the panel with you. She loves this stuff.’

Was everyone in Connecticut nice?, I wondered.

My cell phone buzzed. It was Elliott. ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ he said. I could hear honking in the background. I could hear the rain smacking against his car even more clearly than I could hear it pelting the window next to my table. ‘Traffic’s been moving at twenty-miles-an-hour, if it’s been moving at all. I’ll try to make it there by eight.’

The event was to start at 7 p.m. and be over by 8 p.m. I told him not to worry about it, to drive safely and try not to hydroplane. ‘And don’t speed,’ I added.

‘Speeding isn’t an option,’ he replied.

A recent hurricane, mass power-outages, and a subsequent downpour is not the best combination for getting anyone to come to a bookstore for an event with two writers they might not be familiar with. Still, about a dozen people showed up – all eager and holding dripping umbrellas.

Clearly, this would not be a panel discussion (there were no panellists!). But it could still be a discussion. Everyone had thoughts to share about 9/11 and the events that have followed. Damn the notes; I decided we’d have a town hall meeting. We sat in a semi-circle. Roxanne, the charming and affable owner of R. J. Julia, introduced me. I talked about the history of the magazine, the new issue, the contributors. Not unlike Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors when he finds out his sister has been defecated on by a blind date, I yanked my glasses off my head and rubbed a hand over my face. Ha, ha, I told the small crowd, the authors can’t be here – though one of them is, at this very moment, trying to be here – so let’s just have a discussion about the issue’s theme. Roxanne was right with me, stepping up to the plate and being the first to contribute, once I’d finished my opening remarks. As she spoke, it became clear to me that she knew everyone in the room by name; they were all regular customers. She talked about how she’d reacted to the global news that trickled in following the attacks of 9/11, how she felt about the U.S invasion of Baghdad. ‘Bill,’ she said, pointing to someone in the audience, ‘you came into the store on 9/11 and spent the whole day here. What did you imagine would be the repercussions of what had happened?’

Bill spoke about what he’d expected, and about how he’d reacted to certain global turn-of-events over the past decade. He spoke about fear and ignorance, about how they shape a national consciousness, and about how being constantly lied to only serves to keep us all confused. From the other side of the room, Sarah pitched in. So did Frank and Elizabeth. I offered my own thoughts whenever there was a lull – and eventually realized that I wasn’t filling lulls at all; I was participating, like the rest of them. We were sitting in a circle in a little room on the top floor of bookstore in Madison, CT, in the middle of a rainstorm, having a public discussion about the theme of the issue. Success! I thought. Salvation by group effort. Community spirit. All that, and more.

A few minutes shy of 8 p.m., a young man appeared in the doorway. He was strong-jawed, straight-backed, holding a copy of Granta 116 in one hand and a dripping umbrella in the other.

Elliott Woods, ladies and gentlemen!

Elliott Woods, whose name you will know (if you don’t already) because he’s such an obvious and earnest talent. Elliott, who’s essay ‘Veterans of a Foreign War’ you should read (if you haven’t already). Elliott, who had just driven six hours through inclement weather to be there with us.

I introduced him and asked him a few questions that got him talking to the small crowd. I offered my own thoughts whenever there was a lull – and eventually realized that I wasn’t filling lulls at all; I was participating, like the rest of them.He took over with ease, becoming part of the conversation that was already underway. And before long – too soon, really, for I couldn’t have been more charmed by the venue and the unexpected way the evening had unfolded – I had to leave to catch my train back to New York. I apologized to the audience, thanked Roxanne and the R. J. Julia and everyone in the room, and asked the manager if she would call me a cab.

The rain was coming down harder than ever. I needed to get not to the tiny train depot in Madison but all the way to New Haven (the trains from Madison to New Haven had stopped running for the night). The cab arrived, and I dashed out to it and climbed into the back seat.

‘Fuck!’ the driver snapped, throwing down her cell phone. ‘Slit my wrists in a warm bath!’

I had, I thought, found the one un-nice person in Connecticut.

‘I’m serious,’ she said, glancing at me in the rear view mirror. ‘Slit my wrists in a warm bath.’

I tried to chuckle. ‘Not until you drive me to New Haven.’

Her phone rang just after we got underway. ‘Fuck!’ she yelled again, then said, ‘Hello? Where do you need to go? When? It’s not gonna happen fast. I’ve got to get this man to New Haven, then I’ll come for you. Don’t make me wait; I’m hell-a busy.’

‘Why did I offer to work today?’ she asked me after hanging up. ‘It’s been insane! I’m so tired!’

I told her I was sorry to hear it. We were on the highway now, the wipers creaking back and forth and the water sheeting across the blacktop. She drove with one hand, texted with the other.

‘Guess what I have?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘A friend who got bitten by a tick and now the bite has a red ring around it. He Success! I thought. Salvation by group effort. wants me to drive him to the hospital tonight after I get off work. Tonight! And not the hospital in town but the one two towns over! I just want him to wait till morning because I’m so tired. Do you think it’s okay to wait till morning?’

I was, by now, fully-clicked into improvisational mode. ‘Surrre,’ I said. ‘They’ll just start him on antibiotics. What difference will eight or ten hours make?’

‘Right?’ she asked.

We fell silent for a moment. The matter seemed settled far too easily; I began to fear for her friend’s health. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about’.

‘Are you a pharmacist?’ she asked.

‘No! I’m a writer. An editor. Nothing to do with medicine.’

‘You’re a pharmacist’, she told me. Still driving with one hand, she dialled her friend. ‘Listen, Nate, it’s me. I’ve got a pharmacist in the cab right now, and he just told me it’ll make no difference if you go to the hospital tonight or tomorrow. Nothing’s going to change in the next ten hours. So I’ll pick you up in the morning, all right? All right.’

She hung up, dropped the phone onto the seat next to her and turned up the windshield wipers. ‘How was that for a performance?’ she asked, smiling at me in the mirror.

‘Excellent,’ I said. We would make it to New Haven in time for my train. The evening had gone well, despite the hurdles. Nate – fingers crossed – would not contract Lyme disease in his sleep.

Excellent is, maybe, too strong a word for the state of things. Not bad may be more accurate. But I was tired, out of the rain, and happy. ■

Want to join the discussion? Come to one of our events this weekend in Berlin, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Miami, London and Los Angeles to mark the launch of Ten Years Later.

She became a widow in 1965, the year I was born. The great uncle I would never know had been shrewd enough with money to invest some of it in the stock market, use some of it to buy an orange grove in Florida and stash some of it in various safety deposit boxes around Atlanta. His death from a heart attack was swift and unexpected. She was fifty-four years old.

She’d already done many things for her family. She had eight siblings – one of them my maternal grandmother – and because she’d married comfortably (as opposed to well), she’d helped all of them out financially from time to time. When the Second World War was in full swing and my grandfather went off to fight naval battles in the Pacific, she took my grandmother and my mother in to live with her for several years. And she would still continue to help out – paying for a brother’s car, a nephew’s braces, a sister’s rent when yet another heart attack took an in-law. But when she became a widow, she began to think of herself. ‘You have to be able to make your own decisions,’ she once told me in her thick southern drawl. ‘You have to be able to control your own life; otherwise, you’ve got nothing.’ At fifty-four, she didn’t want to return to the world of work. After carefully calculating how much money she would need to live, she pulled out of the stock market, sold the orange grove, and emptied the safety deposit boxes. She sank everything into bank bonds that would yield just enough interest for a meagre survival, and it was on these bonds that she lived for the rest of her life.

I was five when I first met her. We were living on the east coast of Florida. She drove down from Atlanta for a visit and we made a family outing to Cocoa Beach. She asked me if I wanted to take a swim with her and I said yes. She held my hand as we walked out into the water. The tide had scooped a hollow out of the ocean floor, and I dropped down into it unexpectedly, sinking below the surface. When she’d pulled me up and had me back on shore, I said, ‘Damn you, you tried to drown me.’ She burst into laughter and pulled me against her. ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said, wiping tears from her eyes.

On a trip to Atlanta, when I was twelve, we were in her apartment – crammed with all the antiques she’d once owned during her married life – and she told us the young men living upstairs were hippies who smoked marijuana. She didn’t care for them; their Frisbee had once bounced off the hood of her car. ‘But look what I bought at the mall,’ she said, and from a bag she pulled out a plastic plant with pointy leaves. ‘It’s supposed to look like marijuana. They’re going to think they died and went to Heaven.’ ‘It’s supposed to look like marijuana. They’re going to think they died and went to Heaven.’ We watched as she used a spade to plant it in the flower box outside her kitchen window. Then the two of us sat by the window with the blinds nearly closed, and waited. Before long, one of the young men came loping down the metal staircase. He spotted the plant and reached for the leaf; a moment later, he was shaking his head and walking away. ‘Ha ha!’ she cried, clapping her hands. My mother asked her how in the world she’d even know what a marijuana plant looked like. ‘What am I, a nun?’ my great aunt asked, and winked at me.

Family members two generations older than I was started to die off. Then one generation away started to die. Aunt Sue carried on, moved – out of financial necessity – into a smaller apartment, then a smaller one still. When I stayed with her in my early twenties (in town for my grandfather’s funeral), she was living in a tiny place, still surrounded by most of her antiques. By then, her hair was salt and peppered, and she’d put on weight. All of her eight siblings were dead. My grandfather had been the last of her living in-laws. A letter arrived while I was there that I’d sent from Tallahassee just a few days earlier; in it, I’d written to her that I hoped Granddad would ‘pull through his rough spot.’ My eyes went damp when she showed it to me, and she put her hand on my forearm. ‘Come on, now,’ she said, ‘it happens to all of us.’

I was in my mid-thirties when she moved to an even smaller apartment – what we call ‘semi-assisted living’ for the elderly. She had her own kitchen but it was miniscule, dorm-like. There were medics on-call in the lobby, an emergency pull-cord in the bathroom in case she fell. I was living in Virginia and flew down for a visit. She’d begun to resemble Benjamin Franklin by then, though her white hair was teased up and thicker than his. She’d just begun to use a walker. We walked the halls, passed the day room. ‘Look at them,’ she said, thumbing towards a group of old men sitting around on the couches and armchairs. ‘You know what they are? Greeks. They’re all Greeks!’ Some of them looked back at me, either curious or irritated, I couldn’t tell which. I suppressed the urge to shush her.

‘They’re not bad people, those Greeks,’ she told me once we were back in her apartment. ‘Some of them bring me food. Look at me; I’m as big as a bear. That’s because all I do is watch the news on TV and eat ice cream, and then I eat all the food the Greeks bring me. ‘all I do is watch the news on TV and eat ice cream, and then I eat all the food the Greeks bring me.’ Will you make a sign for me that says, PLEASE DON’T FEED THE BEAR?’ She laughed and touched her throat. During that same visit, she went into a rant about how certain members of the family – all dead by now – had accused her of not helping them out, and to prove that she had, she produced a shoebox and laid out across her coffee table a series of cashed cheques, some of them dating back twenty years or more.

She spent most of her days in her recliner (an overstuffed piece of furniture that stood out among her antiques). She was suffering from glaucoma by then and was having a hard time reading. I mailed her large-print books. At her request, I sent her a new heating pad, but she didn’t like the colour of the cord and sent the pad back to me. ‘Please send me one with a brown cord,’ her note read.

The isolated life she was living – combined with the effects of her advanced age – were beginning to take their toll. In early 2002, in the middle of a phone conversation about something else, she said, ‘Do you know that I don’t miss my husband? I love him, but I don’t miss him because I can hardly remember what it was like to have him around.’ In another conversation she claimed that her next-door neighbour had abducted her and held her hostage in a shed for twenty-four hours. When I suggested she might have dreamed this instead of actually experiencing it, she changed the subject: ‘I just never thought I’d see the day when Amtrak would start poisoning people.’‘I just never thought I’d see the day when Amtrak would start poisoning people.’ I told her it was anthrax that was poisoning people, not the railway company. Not long after, when I called, she told me she’d been taken to ‘the nicest lunch you can imagine’ by a cousin of mine – at a restaurant that served traditional southern food. ‘They had okra,’ she said, ‘and corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes.’

‘Mmm,’ I said, ‘were there collards?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and whites; it was mixed.’

These conversations would go on for an hour or more at a time when long-distance calls cost per the minute. When I would tell her I had to hang up, she would invariably snap, ‘Well, why did you even bother calling if you can’t talk?’

In 2004, at the age of ninety-four, she fell in the bathroom and broke her hip. The emergency cord proved useful, and in the hospital, post-surgery, two cousins of mine – both in their early sixties – stood on either side of her bed. ‘Aunt Sue,’ one of my cousins said, ‘you have to get it through your head that you can’t live alone anymore. You have to go to a nursing home.’

It was the last thing she wanted to do. She told them so.

‘Well, you’re going into a nursing home, and that’s that,’ one cousin said.

‘Do we really have to discuss this now?’ the other cousin asked. ‘Why don’t we wait till later, when she’s feeling better?’

‘I’d like some water,’ Aunt Sue said. One of them got it for her; she sipped from the Styrofoam cup and handed it back. ‘I want to tell you both something and I want you to listen to me,’ she said. ‘This discussion is over.’

And, with that, she closed her eyes and was gone. ■

Also on The F Word Online:

‘Worlds Literature Festival’: An exclusive reading of A.S. Byatt for the Norwich launch of The F Word.

‘The Bible made me a raging heathen feminist. Does that count?’: your unadaluterated Feminist Bibles.

‘...kill something larger than a squirrel at least once a day’, and other Notes for a Young Gentleman from Toby Litt.

This week in the Granta blog, we hear from assistant editor Patrick Ryan as he finds himself chairing our translation event in New York.

As part of the week-long launch of our new issue, Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, we held an event called Translating Culture: From Spanish to English at Columbia University in New York. The panel was impressive. Argentinean writer and translator Pola Oloixarac was there, along with legendary translators Alfred Mac Adam and Edith Grossman. I was to introduce the panel, and a moderator from the translation program was to facilitate the conversation.

Five minutes before we were to begin, the moderator got a call that her son was sick with the flu and, understandably, she had to leave. Which made me the moderator.

It’s a unique experience to guide a conversation in a field that isn’t your own. Needless to say, I was less than prepared; but I decided I could rise to the occasion. I would endeavour to inspire discussion while saying as little as possible, try not to throw sparks, and hope not to rattle any cages.

Edith Grossman has an expressive face, bright eyes, exuberant white hair and hands that grasp at the air when she talks. Alfred Mac Adam is a handsome, dapper man who exudes intelligence and calm. Pola Oloixarac is a stunning beauty who manages a perfect balance of diva-chic and self-possession. Here are some highlights of the discussion:

“So you’re given a novel written in Spanish to translate into English,” I chanced, once the conversation was underway. “Do you read the entire thing before translating a word, or do you start reading and translate as you go?”

Silence. My question had stunned them all with its blandness, I decided. But then Edith declared that she read a whole manuscript first; Alfred Mac Adam said he began translating not long after he began reading, and Pola said it depended on the text. And the three of them did what good panelists do: they began to play off one another; they began to talk amongst themselves.

“Do you ever show your work to the author during the process, to get feedback?” I asked a little while later.

Across the board, all three of them: no way.

I asked Pola if she preferred translating to writing. She preferred writing, she said, but emphasized that translating is a kind of writing. To which Edith added, “When I translate, I’m writing and my blank page is the manuscript in its original language.”

The audience of students seemed captivated.

I asked if any of the panellists had ever had an author come back to them disgruntled after reading a translation. Alfred said that he didn’t think most authors read their translations. Pola nodded in agreement, and Edith said that by the time you finish a translation, the author is well into his or her next project and is too preoccupied to care.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked.

Across the board, all three of them: yes.

My initial panic was beginning to abate. “On the level of language, Spanish versus English…” I began, not really sure where I was going – I was winging this, remember – but hoping one of them would jump in.

Alfred saved me. “What’s going on with those two languages is everything,” he said, and launched into a very intelligent and lengthy statement about the different nuances between Spanish and English, heady stuff about syntax and imperatives, and then Pola weighed in, and so did Edith. I was interested in what they were saying and felt more spectator than moderator. But I needed another question.

“Ever had a bad experience with an agent?” I asked.

“Please,” Edith replied. “I’ll only answer that if someone gets me another glass of wine.”

Someone in the audience did so, and she told an anecdote without naming names.

“How about dialogue?” I asked on impulse. “Dialogue is often straight-forward, unlike descriptive passages. Edith, do you ever find yourself meddling with dialogue?”

“Patrick!” she snapped. “I do not meddle.”

She was irked, I thought, I’d overstepped my bounds, rattled a cage.

“Make music is what I meant to say,” I back-pedalled. “Do you ever make music with dialogue?”

There was a pause, and then she burst into the throaty laugh of an ex-smoker, glanced at the audience and wagged her thumb toward me. “This one’s quick on his feet.”

The students laughed along with her, and it took me a few beats to realize the event was going well. A dynamic had been established, despite my feeling I was out of both their realm and mine. I felt a great affection for all three of them, for the audience, and for the circumstances that had brought us all together. In such a situation, the trick to faking it, I decided later, is to relax. And the trick to relaxing… is to fake it.

It also helps to have panellists who are not only smart but warm and indulgent.

Granta’s new issue is available in both Spanish and English.

Previously on the Granta blog... Adam Thirlwell on lists of writers (why do we make them?), and Ollie Brock on found poetry, Nicaraguan street addresses, and Zoetrope: All-Story's Latin American issue

Buy The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists now.

On the Granta blog this week – our occasional series, ‘What I’m Reading’. Between books, Granta’s Patrick Ryan digs out the guidelines from his Catholic School.

What I’m Reading (and What I Ate)

In a box of old letters and documents, I recently came across a booklet typed up for the parents of Divine Mercy School, where I was a student in Florida. It’s a charming-enough read, but doesn’t quite match up with my memory of the place.

I was seven in 1972, and what I remember is that the Principal adored me, the head pastor tolerated me, and Sister Margaret, my second-grade teacher, despised me. But then, Sister Margaret despised everyone. To this day, I’m terrible at even the most basic addition and subtraction because of Sister Margaret’s teaching philosophy.

‘Raise your hand if you don’t understand what I just explained,’ she’d tell us, pinching a piece of chalk.

Just once, I raised my hand. She threw the chalk across the room, walked straight over to my desk and slapped me across the face.

‘Do you understand now?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Sister.’

She was as red-cheeked as I was, had a perpetually runny nose, and she was maybe a hundred years old (or so I thought at the time; thinking back on her now, she was probably all of 23).

‘I was in the supermarket last week,’ she told us one afternoon, hefting a yard stick, ‘and I saw a detergent named after all of you.’

‘Must have been a long name,’ Donny MacAvoy snickered from the front row.

I don’t know what he was thinking. No one made wise cracks at Sister Margaret. The next thing we knew, the yard stick was slicing through the air and breaking in half against Donny’s nose. When he started to bleed, Sister Margaret huffed in frustration, dug her own used tissue out of her pocket, and shoved it against his lips. ‘Bold,’ she told us. ‘The detergent was called Bold.’

The discipline was bad enough. But the food! Divine Mercy was an institution built on rules and regulations – even the parents were given a dress code for what not to wear (shorts) when attending parent-teacher conferences – and in the school booklet, the lunches we were required to purchase were spelled out in the uneven lettering of a manual typewriter. For $1.25 a week, we were fed the following:
{blockquote}
Monday: Hamburger and Potato Chips
Tuesday: Soup and Sandwich
Wednesday: Hot Dog and Potato Chips
Thursday: Sloppy Joe and Cup of Fruit
Friday: Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Fritos.

I picture all those wet mouths obediently chewing. All those 5-cent cartons of milk warming in the un-air-conditioned classroom. All those little orange lips.

I was tapping my foot during lunch one day without knowing Sister Margaret was behind me. She smacked the back of my head, causing me to bite my lip and pee. Later that year, the head pastor – who chain-smoked Marlboro reds when he wasn’t behind the alter – dropped dead of a heart attack at 43, and Sister Margaret punished those children who didn’t cry enough on the day of his funeral by making them skip lunch altogether.

But it’s poor Donny MacAvoy who got the worst of it, for on the day we were learning about First Communion and were each handed an unblessed wafer, he made the tragic mistake of swatting a fly that had landed on his desk.
Sister Margaret made him place the fly on the wafer and glared at him, ruler in hand, until he ate it.

(For a less horrific and more humorous take on the nun-as-teacher phenomenon, take a look at Christopher Durang’s play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You.)

Be sure to catch the latest writer in our New Voices series, Kseniya Melnik, whose story ‘The Witch’ was published yesterday.

Previously on the Granta blog... Ollie Brock on phototextual translation and Nicholson Baker; John Freeman on driving in Lahore.

As part of the launch of ‘Going Back’, Granta’s new issue, we will be celebrating ‘Music and Memory’ tonight at the Walrus Social in London (172 Westminster Bridge Rd, Lambeth, SE1 7RW). Patrick Ryan remembers his Dylan days, below, ahead of his performance at this evening’s event.

In 1976, when I was eleven, the family records I had access to consisted of Christmas songs (which I’d play any time of year), The Carpenters, Tony Bennett, and the soundtracks to My Fair Lady and Jesus Christ Superstar. I played these over and over again, marching around my room and singing aloud: the Little Drummer Boy, Eliza Doolittle, Jesus Christ. I became each of them – with utter conviction.

Then one day I was rooting through my brother’s stuff (he’d gone off to the Navy) and came across a record album with no jacket. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

I’d never heard of him.

I put the album on the spindle, set the needle down, and suffered the scratches that crackled out of the speakers. Then I suffered the sound of the singer’s voice.

Honey, just allow me one more chance to get along with you…

He was singing through his nose. And the shriek of that harmonica was more than I could bear. So long, hillbilly, I thought, snatching up the needle.

Nine years later, at Florida State University, I started to find the world ridiculous. I became mad and political and ironical almost overnight, and I started to feed on folk music. I skipped classes to sit around with my friends talking, smoking pot and playing records. And I became obsessed with Bob Dylan.

Those early whimsical songs were now hilarious to me – some of the most joyful things I’d ever heard. And the protest songs were telling it like it was (and is). I accumulated one used record after another and stared at their jackets while I listened, wondering at this lean, laser-eyed visionary. He didn’t care if he cracked up in the middle of a song, or flubbed the meter, or even if his guitar was out of tune. He sang what he saw, both real and imagined, and his heartbeat seemed to come straight out of his harmonica.

I bought a guitar. Three Cs, two Ds and one F later (grades, not cords), I knew how to play, more or less. Harmonica holder around my neck, I practiced Dylan songs for hours at a time. Finally, I got brave enough to play in front of a few friends. They were impressed (those of them who didn’t wince at the harmonica). I chanced playing on the campus mall, and at least three (one day four!) people gathered around to listen.

‘You should be playing in clubs,’ a girl told me.

The only person in town who would let me audition was the owner of a vegetarian restaurant called Sprout-and-About. For that, I expanded my repertoire. My audition (harmonica-free) consisted of a love song by James Taylor, a ballad by Simon & Garfunkel, and This Land Is Your Land.

‘You’re hired,’ the owner said, turning back to his specials board.

I hadn’t shown him my Dylan impression, and a shameless impression it was. In fact, I was proud of it – and proud of my tall scatter of hair (fashioned each morning with a hair dryer and a handful of mousse). I knew Dylan had come from nothing, hated oppression, and turned newspaper stories into songs. And what about me? I’d come from nothing; I hated oppression; I’d written a song about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher called Don’t Listen to Them, They Ain’t No Good. I was an Education major, but I no longer had any plans to teach. I had things to experience and songs to write, and, in the meantime, I had Dylan – who, as a young man, had sat himself down on a stool in New York’s Cafe Wha? and made history.

I told nearly everyone I knew to come to Sprout-and-About. On the Saturday night of my debut, the place was packed. It held about thirty people, but still: a full house. Two microphones – one for me, one for my guitar. A sound check.

At 7.30 I was introduced by the owner as ‘a guy made for music’ (I could only assume it was becoming obvious.) Fifteen minutes later, I had the crowd smiling. In a half-hour, they were silently mouthing the words to ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ as I sang. I played nothing but Bob Dylan songs for over an hour, and when I finally stopped, someone out there said, ‘Play a couple more.’ I did – at least five.

‘So,’ I asked the owner at the end of the gig, ‘what did you think?’

I was flush with excitement; he was flush from having just cleaned the kitchen. He handed me my $25 and said, ‘I didn’t know you played harmonica.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I hate the harmonica,’ he said. ‘It’s like a nail in my skull. Come back when you can play something besides all that goddamn Bob Dylan.’

That was the last time I ever played guitar and sang in front of an audience.

But nothing could stop me from being a fan.

In ’89, I saw Dylan live at a civic center in Ohio, and he was amazing. Two years later, in Michigan, he mumbled his way through a few numbers (even I had to listen hard to figure out which songs he was playing) and then walked off stage forty-five minutes into the show as if disgusted with the whole business. And the third time I saw him perform – well, he could have saved us both the trouble.

In ’95 I was in the restaurant/bar of an old hotel outside Washington, D.C. The bartender asked if I was a Dylan fan. I told him I was.

‘He was in here last week.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Nope,’ the bartender said, then told me the story of how Dylan had done a couple of concerts in D.C. and the next night had walked into this very room ahead of the dinner crowd, asked the manager how much they made on their best night of the week, then handed over nearly twice that in cash. ‘Nobody gets in here but me,’ he’s supposed to have said. Then – allegedly – he sat down at the bar, asked for a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels, and began putting it away shot after shot while staring silently at the wall.

Not too long ago, I was walking in New York’s East Village when I passed a man who looked a lot like Dylan rooting through a garbage can. In fact, he looked so much like Dylan that I circled back for a second and third pass. The only thing that made me think he wasn’t Dylan was the fact that he was digging through a garbage can. Soon after, I read an article about how Dylan had been mistakenly arrested in New York because he was pulling trash out of a garbage can and dropping it onto the street.

A friend told me about another friend who’d been walking in another major city when a dead-ringer for Bob Dylan walked past. No doubt, this friend of a friend had assured, it was him. ‘Hey!’ he hollered, ‘Dylan! Dylan! You rule, man!’

‘Suck a dick!’ the Dylanesque man hollered back.

I don’t know if there’s any truth to these stories (including mine) – and Dylan, who’s never answered the same question the same way twice in an interview – would probably want it that way.

Regardless, he’s not the same wiry hillbilly who used to laugh at and skewer the world. He still sings through his nose, only now he sounds like someone’s standing on his throat. But we all change, right? We all start out somewhere, struggle to get somewhere else, and get worn-out in the process. I’m as tired as the next guy. But I still get the same sense of joy and awe when I listen to those old albums. And, being the guy who became Eliza Doolittle and Jesus Christ, I steal myself off alone every now and then, sit down on a stool with my guitar and harmonica, and strum and blow like a fiend. Does it make me Bob Dylan, circa 1962? Oh, yes – with utter conviction.

Patrick Ryan will be reading this piece and singing at 6.30 p.m. tonight at the Walrus Social, 172 Westminster Bridge Rd, Lambeth, SE1 7RW. Click here for information on more events.

One summer in the late nineties I was invited by the writers Edmund White and Michael Carroll to come and stay with them at a house they were renting in the south of France. I’d been there for a wonderful, lazy week when Ed announced to me that an old friend of his wanted to take us all out for a meal at what was supposed to be the best restaurant in the region. ‘Who’s your friend?’ I asked.

‘James Lord,’ Ed said. ‘Have you heard of him?’

I admitted that I hadn’t.

‘Oh,’ Ed said, casual as could be, ‘he’s an American biographer who’s known practically every famous artist in the twentieth century. Picasso, Pollock, Bacon, de Kooning. He wrote a book about Picasso and Dora Maar, and the definitive biography of Giacometti. A few other books, too. He’s lived in France since the end of World War II, and he’s fantastically rich.’

Thankfully, I’d packed a jacket and tie.

James was to arrive just before 5 p.m. At 4.30, the three of us were sitting at the stone table beside the house, dressed and sweating in the July heat. Ed suddenly realized he had no food. ‘Michael and I are going to the grocery store in town. Now, listen, when James gets here, offer him champagne – there’s a bottle in the fridge. Offer it right away and tell him we’ll be back in minutes!’

They left.

Fifteen minutes later, a light-blue Mercedes came barrelling down the drive, dust lifting behind it. A dapper man with a full head of neatly-trimmed white hair got out and said as he walked toward me, ‘Hello, I’m James Lord.’

I introduced myself and explained that Ed and Michael would be right back. ‘Would you like a glass of champagne?’

He glanced at his watch. ‘Certainly not! It’s 4.45.’

We talked about the weather. We talked about the snails in the yard that clung dying to the reeds of grass. At 5.05 he looked at his watch again. ‘Where’s the champagne?’

I scrambled for it.

The restaurant was in the valley below Les Beaux. Our table, on a patio overlooking the Pyrenees, was surrounded by waiters. James spoke with a mid-western accent, even when speaking French. He was sweet and engaging and funny with his guests – but he was gruff with the staff. He wanted the wine, nestled in a stand that held a bucket of ice, to be placed next to him so he could pour as much as he wanted when he wanted. The wine steward was confused, hurt, and ultimately furious. He refused. ‘Mettez le vin içi,’ James barked over and over in his drawl.

The owner came over to see what the problem was.

‘Mettez le vin içi,’ James repeated. The sunset winked in the Legion of Honor button pinned to his lapel.

The wine was moved.

When the team of waiters arrived with our food and lifted the covers, the head waiter began to explain what everything was.

‘Sweetie,’ James said, cutting the man off (Ed later translated for me), ‘I’m going to astound you by telling you that we already know what’s on these plates. And do you know why? Because we ordered it.’

The meal was the best of my life and the bill probably cost what I earn in a month. Michael had driven us, and on the ride back to the house, James announced that he wanted to take us all to Aix on the following day to see Cézanne’s studio.

Ed emitted a low groan but then immediately added, ‘That would be great!’

Once James pulled away, Ed groaned again.

‘You don’t want to go to Aix?’ I asked.

‘No, I do. It’s beautiful,’ he said, but then added, ‘James isn’t the best driver.’

Ed doesn’t have a licence and is a nervous passenger, so I chalked up his reluctance to those two facts.

The hour-long drive the next day proved to be one of the two most terrifying of my life. The traffic was heavy, and James drove at speeds that topped ninety. He zig-zagged in and out of lanes, came right up on the bumpers of cars and, on a narrow stretch of just two lanes, played chicken with oncoming tractor trailers. He talked all the while – about the region, about Picasso, about the other drivers. ‘Look at her – brushing her hair behind the wheel of a car! Put down your hairbrush, you stupid bitch!’ (No one could hear him but us; I hadn’t even seen the woman, we’d passed by her so quickly.) ‘Get this guy! Where’d you get your licence, asshole? A box of Cracker Jacks?’

This is how terrifying it was: I decided I was going to die. I hoped I was going to die rather than be maimed in the crash. I thought, I’ve had a pretty good life. I can’t complain. And there are certainly uglier places to die. I didn’t want to see it coming, however, and I was afraid of appearing rude by closing my eyes. Michael had his sunglasses resting on top of his head. I asked him for them, put them on over my glasses, and closed the curtain on the image of an oncoming truck.

Ed was right on all counts. Aix was beautiful, and Cézanne’s studio was a marvelous, humbling thing to behold. Years before, James had single-handedly saved it from destruction. The town was planning to level it and build a high-rise, and James had spearheaded a fund-raising campaign that prevented that from happening. The staff greeted him like royalty when we walked in. They served us coffee and showed us every corner of the place. Ed prompted James to tell the story of how he’d pulled off the preservation, and James recounted the gruelling process. ‘You know who donated almost all the money?’ he said. ‘Americans. And you know how much the French coughed up?’ He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and peered through it. ‘Zero.’

We walked around the town. We had a nice lunch that James paid for. He was gracious and encouraged me to talk about my life, which I thought of as so horribly dull. And I could barely enjoy the day because I knew we had the car trip home looming ahead of us – a trip we all managed to survive.

James died in August of 2009 at the age of eighty-six, before he could see the publication of his memoir My Queer War. The last story I heard about him – told to me by Ed – was in October of 2001, when he was checking in at Charles de Gaulle for a flight to New York. The airline attendant asked him if he’d packed his own bag.

James winced and replied, ‘Certainly not!’

The extract of James Lord’s memoir My Queer War is now published online – read it here.

Read also... ‘A Plausible Portrait’, Ted Hodgkinson’s introduction to Lord’s life.

I was running out of money and looking for work. In Union Square I bumped into a friend, and when I mentioned my predicament, he told me his cousin had just left her copy-editing job, and they had yet to find a replacement for her.

‘The pay’s not great and the place is supposed to be a little weird. But it’s something, right?’

I wasn’t a copy editor, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I asked him for his cousin’s number.

The business was located in Chelsea, on the top floor of a plain building. When I stepped off the elevator the next afternoon, I was buzzed into a loft with large windows, high ceilings and a rash of cubicles sprouting like mushrooms from a hardwood floor. A woman in a mint-colored pantsuit was walking toward me.

‘Patrick, I’m Mindy Bouché,’ she said. ‘It’s so nice to meet you.’

She had Marfan syndrome, I thought. Her hands and neck and forehead were elongated in a way that suggested Abraham Lincoln. And, like Lincoln’s, her eyes rested in ashy, swollen bags of flesh. Her bracelets jingled when we shook hands. ‘Sorry about the cold, but it’s good for the computers.’

As we made our way through the cubicles, a few of the workers glanced at us over the tops of their partitions. ‘Where are you from?’

‘South Carolina. Lucien and I make quite a couple because he’s from Paris and I sound like a hillbilly.’

She turned on the lights in a conference room. A long, dark table stretched before us.

We sat down across from each other. ‘So,’ she said, ‘we just want to fill this position and get on with our lives. You’ve copy-edited before?’

‘I have,’ I said. And then I did that thing one does in an interview in the electronic age: I produced a hard-copy of the résumé I’d emailed the day before, as if it were the original, valuable artifact.

The document may as well have been a placemat between us – which was for the best, since I’d made up the company I claimed to have copy-edited for, along with the name and phone number of my fictitious ex-supervisor. ‘Can you start tomorrow?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And Debbie gave you a sense of what our company does?’

Debbie was my friend’s cousin; she hadn’t told me anything but Mindy’s email address. I nodded.

‘So you know there’s the stock, first and foremost,’ Mindy said. ‘We find the stock, and then we generate the story, and the emphasis is always on the story. I don’t know if you’re a fan of stories, but they’re crucial to what we do.’

‘I love stories,’ I said.

She placed her long hands flat on the table, then stood. ‘I guess I should go get Lucien, then. Your timing couldn’t be better, because he leaves tomorrow for a buying trip to China and I want him to meet you before you start.’ She walked out of the room.

I sat there beneath the humming florescent lights: be-suited, anointed. Employed. On the wall before me, anchored with thumb tacks, was a poster of a pretty blonde woman of about fifty, smiling a wry smile. Her image was photo-shopped against a purple background and surrounded by a constellation. Orion, I thought. Printed below her chin in cursive letters were the words, Athena sees good things for you.

‘Patrick!’

The voice was gravelly, like a belch. I looked up to see a corpulent man with bleached blonde hair and skin tanned the colour of peanut butter. He clutched a lit cigarette.

When I extended my hand, he pumped it vigorously.

‘You must be Lucien,’ I said.

‘I am! And I am wonderful now that I put my eyes on you!’ He sank into the chair at the head of the table and spread his legs wide. Mindy sat down next to him. ‘But I have to tell you, it has been a morning of bullshit. For the last hour, I have been on the phone with scum in Peking. You want me to pay five dollars apiece for a thousand Buddha statues as big as my thumb? Okay, and how about I fuck your mother in the ass while I pay you?’

I forced a smile.

Lucien burst into laughter. His face immediately reset itself. ‘Let me ask you something.’ He motioned with the cigarette toward the poster of Athena on the wall. ‘You are okay with all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have met my passionate lover, Mindy. As opposed to my bitch of a wife.’

He was kidding, I thought; he and Mindy were married. Or he was serious and was cheating with her. I just wanted the job. ‘She’s captivating,’ I said.

‘Right answer!’ He glanced at Mindy. ‘I like him!’ Then he turned back to me and exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘And here is another question. Do you have a problem with astrology?’

I shook my head, then turned down my lower lip as if the notion of having a problem with astrology was silly. Absurd, even.

Lucien slapped his hand down over my kneecap, which I hadn’t realized was within his reach. ‘We have a deal, then,’ he said, squeezing it.

After he’d left the room, Mindy narrowed her eyes and looked at the hard copy of my résumé for the first time. I braced myself, fearing she was about to tell me she’d tried to call my made-up ex-supervisor. But she said, ‘One last question: How’s your HTML?’

At 8:55 the following morning, I was standing in the vestibule. Through the little window set into the door, I could see that the loft was empty and most of the lights were off. I tapped on the glass.

A minute later Mindy appeared, slouched and strolling across the far side of the room. She was dressed in another pantsuit – this one the colour of orange sherbet – and she had a plastic watering can in her hand. When I tapped the glass a second time, she straightened up to her full height, spotted me, and made her way across the floor.

‘Good morning,’ I said, after she’d unlocked the door.

‘Look at this place. Do you see anyone else here?’ she asked. ‘I don’t. They keep their own sweet time – work ethic is a rare commodity these days.’ She led me to one-fourth of a quad of cubicles in the center of the room. The desk surface bore a computer and enough coffee rings to make an Olympic flag. ‘This is you.’

Never, over the course of many different jobs, had I had a desk that was entirely my own. I sat down and ran my hands across the surface. My fingertips were crowned with dust.

Mindy walked off to tend to a nearly leafless ficus tree, and for the next half-hour, I sat there in the cold waiting to be given something to do. Eventually, I started investigating the drawers, which were empty save for a Snickers wrapper and two manuals: one for a program called Smartt Web Management, and the other for a program called HatInHand XG. I flipped through the HatInHand manual and gazed at screen-captures of drop-down menus, wondering if there was any coffee to be had.

A girl had slipped into the cubicle next to mine. A pair of large eyeglasses dominated her face, and a thick-knit sweater hugged her waist and rode high on her wrists. With a trembling hand, she fidgeted with her mouse and brought her computer screen to life.

I wiggled my own mouse. My computer screen remained dark. ‘Hi,’ I said.

She flinched. ‘Oh! Hi.’ For the instant that she looked at me, I thought she might be on the verge of tears. ‘Sorry – you’re new here, right?’

Before I could answer, her eyes were already back on her screen. She clicked icon after icon, opening multiple programs.

‘First day,’ I said. ‘I’m Patrick.’

Her head bobbed up and down in profile. ‘Kim.’

‘Hi, Kim. Are you a copy editor too?’

‘Sort of. Not really. It’s more…’ She trailed off, absorbed by her work.

Before long, her phone rang.

‘Good morning, Jesse,’ she said into the receiver. ‘I know, I…I will, I…okay, I’ll call you when it’s done, okay? Okay.’

She hung up and clicked more rapidly.

‘Who’s Jesse?’ I asked, thinking I ought to show a little initiative.

‘This woman in Nyak? She sort of manages the – well, it’s this fulfillment company we use. She can be a little…short-tempered.’

‘I see. And what does the company do? This one, I mean.’

She let out a breathy, mirthless laugh, said, ‘We sell things,’ and offered nothing more.

I got up and went looking for the kitchen.

I found it past a long row of bookshelves crammed with books about Christianity and the solar system, world history and the power of gem stones. Most of my co-workers had trickled in by now and were wandering about, sniffling and nodding good morning to one another. At the sink was a shrunken woman with a muffler wrapped around her neck. Next to her stood a bald man with a lantern jaw and a neatly-trimmed van dyke. His arms were folded across his chest as he stared at the coffee maker.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘Hello.’

‘Are we still on Saint Xavier?’ the shrunken woman asked without turning around.

‘No,’ the man said. ‘I handed that in before I left on Friday. Now we’re on to the Mosaic of Prosperity.’

I wanted to hear a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but there was none.

‘Is the coffee ready?’ I asked.

‘Takes an eternity,’ he muttered as if sharing a trade secret.

Back at my desk, someone tapped my shoulder. I looked up to see Mindy towering over me. ‘How are things working out?’

‘Just fine,’ I said. ‘So will I be copy-editing web content?’

‘Kim will get you up to speed on HatInHand and Smartt Web. You should have that down as soon as possible. And you’ll need this.’ She handed me an astrological wall calendar. ‘It has all the moon phases, and they have to be correct in what we send out. Our credibility’s on the line when it comes to the moon.’

I was about to ask why when she clapped her hands, looked about the loft, and announced, ‘Ten minutes to Mollyglow, people!’

‘Jesus Christ,’ someone said.

‘Well, what’s the surprise?’ Mindy asked in the direction of the voice. ‘If you don’t like it, you can get here on time tomorrow and be ready, for a change.’

She walked off.

Kim blew her nose.

‘So you’re training me?’

‘I guess,’ she said. ‘I mean, your job is mine, basically. That’s how Debbie and I had it.’

And exactly what the fuck goes on here? I wanted to ask. Instead, I asked, ‘What’s Mollyglow?’

‘One of our websites. It gets updated every twenty-four hours.’

Had my computer been working, I might have gone to the site for some answers. I was mashing the reboot button when a woman across the way stood up from her desk, crossed over to mine, and held out a Jolly Rancher.

I took it and thanked her.

‘I heard about you. You’re a writer,’ she said in a voice just above a whisper. Her accent was German, I thought.

I hadn’t told my friend’s cousin I was a writer. ‘When I’m not here,’ I said.

‘I dance.’ She pointed at Kim. ‘She’s a writer. And Zach used to be a writer. And Sally’s a sculptor who says she’s can’t sculpt anymore. This place is fucked up, yeah?’

‘Well, I just started.’

‘You think it’s you for a while. But then you realize, wow, it’s this place. It’s a nuthouse and you have to accept that or go out of your mind.’

I sensed a comrade. Darting my eyes left and right, I unwrapped the Jolly Rancher and slipped it into my mouth. ‘What’s with the coffee?’ I asked.

‘It’s like piss. That’s this place: piss and shit.’

‘I’m Patrick.’

‘Inga.’ We shook hands.

Mindy’s voice launched like a cool dart through the air. ‘Two minutes, people! Mollyglow!’

‘Piss and shit,’ Inga muttered, and then wandered back to her desk.

For the next hour, I watched everyone – save for the bald man and the shrunken woman – scamper about in a panic, trying to fix several icons and something called a drop page. They tested and retested it. They got on the phone with a person named Louise, and Louise’s people ran some sort of diagnostic; each time, the results were unsatisfactory.

I went to lunch. When I came back, the crisis had been resolved; everyone was back in his or her cubicle and the only sound was the steady clicking of keys. I looked around for Inga, then asked Kim if there was any copy-editing to be done.

She looked embarrassed. She rubbed her chin for a moment, then took a folder from the metal rack next to her monitor and pulled out a few stapled pages. ‘I guess you could look at these if you want to.’

Dear X1, the first document began, On X2, as X3 moves into X4, I want you to turn X5 years into golden wealth.

I felt like I was looking at an SAT problem. But then Kim said, ‘Oh – not that one. Read one with the fields filled in; it’ll make more sense.’ She took the top document back and replaced it with another.

Dear Betty, this new document read, On December 17th, as Pluto moves into Capricorn, I want you to turn 53 years into golden wealth.

I’ve been studying your horoscope, Betty, and when I trace back from 1956 to 53 years later, I see a person whose too timid to make their dreams come true. But as a child, I know you created SPECIAL dreams that you still carry with you.

The document was a train wreck. I set to work fixing all the mistakes I found. Not far along was a picture of something called a ‘Golden Galaxy’ – a cheap-looking medallion on a chain. The medallion, glittery and stamped with a central white dot, was described as 14k Gold Plate Over Sterling Silver with a Mother of Pearl Eye and Enamored with Diamond-Glow Cubic Zirconia.

This brilliant treasure is designed after the shape of the galaxy – our Source of Life! – and not only that. It is a sincere reminder that the RICHES and GOOD FORTUNE you deserve are coming your way! Imagine, Betty, 53 years of fortune being spun with galaxial force into PURE FINANCIAL REALIZATION!

I didn’t have a dictionary but was pretty certain ‘galaxial’ wasn’t a word; I circled it and wrote ‘sp?’ in the margin. Gold had obvious value, the document reminded Betty; silver was the protective healing choice of the Ancients. And then, following a JPEG of Athena’s signature, Betty herself was speaking.

Yes, Athena! I understand that the Golden Galaxy is sacred to my birthday, December 17th.

Yes! I realize that this amazing piece will enrich my life, and I am looking forward to my RISK-FREE guarantee, and also THREE GIFTS – mine to keep if I return the pendant. (The gifts, I noticed – an authenticity certificate, a black velvet case and a laminated card detailing the activation ceremony that would unlock the pendant’s powers – were useless without the pendant.)

I’m so happy you’re making this choice, the text read, apparently slipping back into Athena’s voice. CLICK HERE!

Poor Betty.

The second document detailed three specific dates that would bring Betty wealth throughout the year, activated only by a pearl-studded pendant bearing the face of the Archangel Michael, known to lift the poor from suffering and shower them with riches. The third described a scarab bracelet that would heal all of Betty’s financial sorrows.

‘Do you want to take a look at these?’ I asked, re-stacking the documents and holding them out for Kim.

She took them from me, blinking with confusion. ‘You marked them?’

‘I copy-edited them,’ I said.

She was shaking her head and showing as much interest in my edits as Mindy had in my résumé. ‘We’ve been sending these out like they are for a year or so,’ she said as she tucked them back into the metal rack.

‘Between us,’ I said, lowering my voice, ‘is Athena real?’

‘Um,’ she said, and cleared her throat.

Mindy’s clapping broke the air. ‘Upsales, people! Ten minutes!’

Someone announced that the drop page on the Miracle of St. Bernadette Broche wasn’t working properly.

‘Well, fix it,’ Mindy said. ‘And fast.’

‘Upsales?’ I asked Kim.

‘Everything’s first in a series. Like a series of pendants or medallions or whatever. Upsales are when we write back and tell them the first one can’t really work without the second one. Which won’t work without the third.’

The next day, I arrived once again before everyone but Mindy, and I tried to take advantage of my time alone with her. ‘Kim’s great,’ I said. ‘She really knows her stuff.’

‘It’s a team effort,’ Mindy said, frowning at a small beige table that had probably come from Ikea. It sat flush against the outer wall of a cubicle and had nothing on it but dust. ‘I hate this table,’ she said.

I took a sip from the coffee I’d bought downstairs. ‘So my job is Kim’s job, right? Everything she’s doing I should know how to do?’

‘That’s right.’ She nudged the table with her hip. Bending over a few inches, she spoke to it: ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m not getting much sense of how this all works,’ I confessed. ‘I know this is only my second day, but I’m trying to get a handle on the job, and I—’

‘Did I give you the calendar with the moon phases?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I can take that off my list.’

‘Where does the information come from? About our customers, I mean. Their ages and birthdays.’

‘They give it to us when they apply for a free horoscope reading online.’

‘So that’s where we get all the email addresses?’

‘Ryan,’ she said, mistaking my last name for my first and evoking my high school gym coach, ‘I have a philosophy: Leave the nitty-gritty to the team. That’s why you have a team.’

Later that morning, a tech person tried to fix my computer by fiddling with the cables. I walked around the loft and found lying on shelf tops many of the items we were selling. They reminded me of the kind of trinkets that came encased in plastic bubbles and rolled out of dime machines. In the kitchen over the sink was a sign that read, Rinse your dishes and put them in the dishwasher. (If Lucien can do it, you can do it). In the men’s room, taped onto the door of the stall, another sign read, If you smell something, say something.

Mid-afternoon, while Kim sweated through phone calls and Skype messages and Mindy’s commands, I found that my computer was finally working and visited the Mollyglow site. I double-clicked on a cartoon bunny and a chipper, syrupy voice blurted out, ‘Well, okay, then! Let’s see what the future holds for you!’ I immediately closed the screen to silence the bunny.

Athena’s presence was everywhere, but she herself was nowhere to be seen. She was ubiquitous, elusive, and oddly menacing – like Keyser Sőze in The Usual Suspects. At the end of my second day, I sat at home eating a cheeseburger and surfing YouTube. On impulse I typed in ‘Athena’ and ‘psychic forecast’. She had nearly two-dozen videos posted. I played the first one.

Here was the woman from the poster - blond and matronly but bearing enough makeup to warrant an evening on the town. In a sleepy British accent, she told me she could help me. She knew of my struggles, my financial burdens, and my potential for true and lasting happiness. In fact, my happiness meant more to her than anything else in the world. Wasn’t it time I allowed the universe and all its powers to work in my favour?

I then Googled ‘Athena’, ‘credit card’ and ‘fraud’. Within seconds, I was scrolling through over 400 complaints on a consumer advocacy website.

Mid-morning of my third day, I ran into Kim in the kitchen. She was staring into the refrigerator, looking for space to fit her Tupperware.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi. Sorry about Friday.’

‘What happens Friday?’

‘Oh! I thought Mindy told you. I won’t be here. I have to take my mom to her doctor in Philadelphia.’

In a panic and with quickening steps, I made my way to Mindy’s desk. She was on the phone and held me at bay with a raised finger while she finished her call. As she hung up, she said, ‘What is it?’

The words poured out of me. I wasn’t being trained. Kim was too busy. And tomorrow was Thursday and the next day was Friday and I wasn’t going to be able to do all the things Kim did to keep the emails flowing and the drop pages dropping and the upsales selling. Friday, I told her, was going to be a disaster.

‘This is exactly the nitty-gritty I was talking about, Ryan. It’s Kim’s job to train you and it’s Kim you need to be talking to about this. I have enough on my plate as it is.’

‘But what happens when – ’

‘Do you really want to be helpful?’ She took a screwdriver from her desk drawer and handed it to me. ‘Dismantle that ugly table and put it away somewhere.’

I carried the table to a corner and flipped it over. On my knees, I worked at the embedded screws, each of which proved to be a challenge. The fourth leg wouldn’t budge, and I was all but yanking on it when Inga approached.

‘Ha ha,’ she whispered. ‘Look at you. You’re copy-editing!’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘In all the time you’ve worked here, has anyone ever just come out and said…’ I found myself reluctant to be the first.

‘Said what? We’re a horrible company that sells worthless crap to innocent people? And sets up unauthorized recurring charges? And has a phoney customer service number? No, no one ever says that. Actually, it’s been calm here for the past few days. Wait till you see Lucien in action. Have you ever had a boss call you a ‘worthless piece of shit’? And when he yells at you, his spit lands on your face.’

I felt myself wince. ‘How can you stand it?’

‘A trick of the brain,’ she said. ‘You pretend none of it’s happening, and then – poof – three years have gone by.’

Despite the cold, I was sweating. I walked back over to Mindy’s desk and told her I was going to lunch.

‘Did you take care of that table?’

‘Just about,’ I said. ‘I’ll finish it when I get back.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s nice to see someone besides me doing work around here, for a change.’

I walked out of the building expecting to feel a sense of relief. But there was none – and no further panic, either. There was only the smooth, gray numbness that comes with being desperate and unemployed – again. Around the corner from the office, I sat down at a computer terminal in a Tasti-D-Lite, addressed an email to Mindy, and wrote, Thanks, anyway.

What else was there to say? Sincerely sounded insincere. Yours sounded absurd.

Best of luck! I wrote, and before sending I signed off with Ryan so she’d know who the email was from.

But the universe and all its powers were working in Mindy’s favour – or Athena’s. The next time I logged on, my usurped mailbox coughed up an offer for a rare, mystically-charged crystal ball – mine for five easy payments of $14.99.