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Once again, incredibly rough stuff--and very bad working practices, to post something like this! But I didn't want whoever does read this to think I've been unproductive.

Jienne took refuge in the warm scent of stagnant air, lying dormant for the days she had been away; undisturbed by the outside air that always destroyed this quiet equilibrium the piles of linen created. From her windows, she could see the murky blue of the skyline, which reminded her of the difference between the harsh blue of the country skies. Over the years, she had begun to appreciate the paler blue, which reached an almost golden quality on particularly smoggy days; in the days of her youth when she had listened to defiance and found meaningful poetry in everything, the blue sky over uninterrupted highways brought tears to her eyes. She had imagined, then, the creativity of routine that the daily drums might produce; like driving a car, she found that it was less interesting when done properly, and, several years after breaking out on her own, contracted a bad case of the Non-deviated, Sterile Atmosphere of Culture. It was cured, at length, by a feigned bought of physical illness—not difficult, in fact, since the lethargy of her disillusionment was heavy and noxious enough to induce symptoms of a far more dangerous disease to the visage of anyone—which allowed her to convalesce alone, at home, among the misfounded order of the passing regime of Culture. She closed her eyes and discovered that, inside the ten-minute breakfasting, two-minute, blank-minded meditations, and neatly regimented dietary plans, she liked herself. Specifically, she discovered that there is no such thing as mindless meditation.

So the patient was freed of the cancerous disease which inflicts Society. When her illness was up, she briefly considered staying out the year in the job she was working as a library aide, but the menace of the malaise was too persistent for her to do much more than hand in a letter of notice to her supervisor, a tall old lady whose face was ridged in soft, unchangeable lines carved by years inside the belly of the Beast. Her name was Mrs. Whiling. Jienne came in—and by this time, there was very little left of Jienne’s reason, which had been eaten away by her long-suppressed desire to live life visibly—and Mrs. Whiling looked at her for a moment, and took her letter. Jienne was relieved and surprised that there had not been more fuss and carrying-on, but Mrs. Whiling stopped her on her way out, because years before, she too had been a young woman and had harbored the generational desire that lives of in the lives of the descendents to make herself known, to live as liberatingly as order had promised to be in the early days of her youth. Mrs. Whiling had been, in the days of her youth, a Good Girl, and she had gone along with her reputation because she saw the desirability in being two-faced and in having a shell of irony against herself, and she had never been able to break away from her shell. She had tried, years ago, decades ago, in the water-damaged halls of the apartment where she had lived an ordered life in quiet sophisticated grey suits with a small lady-like watch and index cards of recipes, and one day she had looked at herself in the mirror and screamed—inwardly. That part of her sat down with a bump and now lived at the level of the knees of the current Mrs. Whiling; Mrs. Whiling, who had been, obliviously, though the childhoods of her son and her daughter (who grew up to fit perfectly into the shells they created for themselves after very little initial resistance on the behalf of the value of the treasure they were entailing) and the death of a husband and fifty years of work at the library, knew that living to Society and Culture were the easiest and the most practical and the best thing to do. So she stopped Jienne for a moment and felt just a moment’s pang in the reflection of herself that was passing before her; she wondered, in that instant, if she was dying, for her life was surely passing before her eyes. And then Jienne was freed from the pragmatic pull of the life that Mrs. Whiling had lived herself, since Jienne looked into Mrs. Whiling’s eyes and saw there the product of Society and Culture.
Jienne walked into the street and realized that the important thing is not how the story is told.
It was fairly easy for Jienne, in the Metropolis where she lived, to get a job. She looked around on the internet, did some poking, some phone calling, some looking up addresses in the yellow pages, and some walking, since her money was wearing thin and becoming your own person takes money, and then she was hired by an online journal, to whom she submitted Fiction and Satire whenever she wrote it. The relationship worked out well. For a great while, she was breathing out a sigh of happiness at her timely escape, but as long as she was sighing she was also on edge because the relief meant she was thinking about how great it was to get out of it all, and how horrible it would be to get back in it. The people in the Organization like Jienne’s writing, and she was paid enough for each story that she was all right, although she lived frugally. She got into a relationship with N____, who rode a motorbike and didn’t drink. N____ had been, many years ago, a crab fisherman in the Bering Strait, and for a while had lived on a houseboat, but when a new occupation had come around in the form of a motorbike, he had ridden his new form of transportation halfway across the country and stopped, penniless, in the Metropolis. It was there he had lived for the past two years, during which time he had gotten a job at a bakery. He had risen in position there, and, in between long cold rides on his motorbike, he worked with vats of bubbling, rising bread dough and massive trays of cakes sliding into the cavernous mouths of the red-hot ovens that lined the back wall of the back room and pervaded the air in the bakery with the scent of the things within. N____ came home with occasional burns, smelling like yeast and sugar. Fortunately for N____, his vast appetite for the things he baked—and bought, and bought home, and ate in the kitchen with Jienne—was matched by a fast metabolism and a lenient boss who sent him home now and again after a strenuous couple of days with a steaming paper bag on whose sides the insidious smell of the cakes it contained was marked permanently.


Some months after Jienne became newly liberated, she was walking home in the city dusk, past the playground by the school—she stopped a moment by the gate, gazing over the barren fields of abandoned dreams, and realized there were two young children playing there, twirling enthusiastically around the brightly-colored jungle-gym bars, pretending to be butterflies and princesses and space aliens—and past the library, past the big house on the corner which was home to a rambunctious, sprawling, utopian group who stayed up until the wee hours playing music until their respectable neighbors came banging on their doors in nightclothes. It was November; her coat collar was pulled up around her face, and the wind was numbing her nose. Her fingers were just warm enough to feel the bite of the handles of the plastic bags of groceries. Upon reaching home (which was an achievement realized after a prolonged fumble with clumsy fingers and the heavy felt coat pockets whose treasure, the house key, was yielded only reluctantly,) Jienne sat down at the kitchen counter for a moment to catch her breath.
The apartment was cozy after the wind of the outside, the close walls’ ambiance snug rather than claustrophobic for once. Jienne sat in silence undisturbed until her cell phone rang; from the tone, a rapid and complex series of electronic beeps aligned into the tune of “American Pie,” she could tell it was N____, and she hastily answered it.

“Hello?”

It was N____, of course, and they talked for just a moment. He said to forgive him, he’d be home in about an hour, and he loved her; she said okay and that she loved him too. The phone snapped shut and the line died. It was five o’clock. Jienne unpacked the vegetables—broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, scallions, and red peppers—and the chicken, chunks of ice sliding silently off the plastic wrapped against the soft pink meat on the counter. A can of oyster sauce followed. Jienne lamented briefly the deficit in their kitchen supplies that necessitated a finger-breaking trip to the grocery store for even the simplest recipe. At least there were frying pans, one of which Jienne placed carefully on a burner. Some time later, little browning pieces of chicken were muttering away in the pan, bathed in a puddle of oil. A pot full of Chinese noodles lurked behind the chicken like the stealthy killer in a murder mystery. It was nearly six when Jienne served the Chinese chicken up onto two of the five mismatched plates she owned, set them beside her two mismatched mugs—full of ginger ale—and lit two mismatched purple candles, one of which was a gift from a friend’s mother and one of which Jienne had found, half-burned and still tall, in the dumpster behind the church beside the grocery store. She sat down to wait for N____ with a New Yorker, and became entranced in a lengthy article extolling the virtues of the virtual world. inoculated from the world as she was, she would not have noticed that time was passing if her stomach had not begun protesting over the lengthy walk from the grocery store and the tantalizing smell of the Chinese chicken, which sat uneaten by the mugs of ginger ale; once, however, she became aware of the gradual darkening of the sky outside the window beside her which had turned the evening from dark grey to dark navy, and her first thought was of N____. She looked at the clock opposite the chair where she was sitting; it read A Quarter to Seven and No N_____.

Jienne’s insides were cold; she took out her cell phone again and called N____. His cell phone rang insistently for almost a minute until there was a click and his voice greeted her ears, warm and comforting as a draft of chicken noodle soup until she realized that it was the eager, upbeat strains of his answering machine: “Hi, you’ve reached N_____’s cell phone. I’m not available right now, so please leave a message.” She was barely able to force out her inquiry over the bubble of surprise that rose in her throat, a request for him to call her as soon as he could, and then she hung up. She waited half an hour; the chicken lying on its bed of noodles with its attendant vegetables grew dry and, when she tried to eat a bit, tasteless; she threw the chicken away. Its existence disgusted and scared her. She longed to simply go to sleep, and thought for a minute of going to bed, of piling on the covers and turning out the lights in the darkening night, but she realized that the tension would be too great; besides, she had to know what was happening, and becoming unconscious would not make her more aware, would not tell her where N____ was and why he had not returned home.

It was midnight when the shrill call of the doorbell reverberated around Jienne’s head. It took her sleep-befuddled mind a moment to realize what it was and how she should respond to it, but finally she stumbled out of the living room towards the door; her hand gripped the handle with terrifying clarity, and she opened the door to reveal two men in police uniforms. “Ms. Duchene?”

“Hello? What…” They stepped past the door she held open, and something must have been working in her brain subconsciously, because, through no effort of her own, she closed the door. She was numb now, and blinked a couple times, restoring herself to the cognitive world. She opened her mouth again to ask what was going on, but the shorter policeman was already explaining.

“We’ve found the remains of one N_____ Venegas on, and the only calls to his cell phone in the last month have been from you.”

“N____? What happened to him?”

The policemen shuffled their feet, as though whatever had happened was their personal fault.
“He’s in the morgue, ma’am; it appears that he was assaulted sometime around five thirty that evening, possibly by multiple people, in an alley off North Water Street. The cause of death has been identified as a handgun.”

The first emotion Jienne felt was anger. “And you just now got around to telling me? It’s been nearly seven hours! What have you been doing since then?” She felt a fresh wave of fury at their impotence. “And…and do you know who did it?”

The policemen looked down. “No, ma’am, I’m afraid we don’t.”


In Jienne’s mind, there was no question that she would move immediately, although her landlord, a nervous, plump, middle-aged man who seemed to have no idea as to how to handle the recently bereaved, was not so happy. Nevertheless, Jienne, in her newly numb state of mind, battled her way out with the backseat of her brother’s station wagon packed tight with the cardboard boxes in which she had packed all of her things, a job that took her barely two days, since in her haste to quit the city she worked from early in the morning until late at night, powered by grief and the desire to cut her losses; she ate up the rest of the food she had, and didn’t leave the house until her brother pulled into the driveway and stood in the doorway hesitantly watching her manic energy filling the rooms of the small apartment. They stopped by N____’s funeral, held in an old stone chapel on the edge of the city; neat planning had Jienne leaving the town the day her love was interred there forever. As they pulled out of the parking lot still filled with the rattle-bang cars of the friends N_____ had made during his time in the city, the strains of an ironically happy tune ran through Jienne’s mind, and she nearly broke down and cried. She thought about what wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t become her own person: she wouldn’t have met N____; maybe, even, the course of Fate would have been altered enough that, in not meeting N____, she would have preserved his life. Distracted for a moment, she considered that possibility and decided she couldn’t tell which would have been worse. In the end, she decided that the path of Fate is unalterable, so really it wasn’t her fault: she was just redeeming a preset path, which brought up the question: was she really her own person if all she did was fulfill fate?

Jienne moved farther across the country this time, making her way to the farthest North-West corner of the United States, nearly Canada. She was entirely unsure of what she would do from there; the soles of her feet itched constantly, pointing her further away from wherever she was whenever she stopped. In this state, therefore, Jienne came to Mrs. Robinson’s boardinghouse: a tall house on the edge of town that looked like it hadn’t had much outside business in the past few years, although from the plaque by the front door she could see that it had endured a hundred years on its bluff above the sea where the sky was nearly always an indeterminate grey and the sea provided most of the color and sound. The first time Jienne recognized the boardinghouse as home was the day when she came back to it—opening the door to the bedroom Mrs. Robinson had assigned to her, the smell of the room registered unconsciously as Home, and she felt as comforted as she had when, as a young girl, she had hidden herself away in the piles of linen in the upstairs closet of her childhood home—after a day in the town, sitting in the coffeehouse that she used as her base of operation because it had the free wireless that allowed her to send her work off to the website that still provided for her room and board in its paychecks, which arrived in her bank account on a monthly basis. Eventually, though, her reserves of money dwindling, Jienne was forced to take a job—at the coffeehouse, which seemed appropriate—to supplement her income.

Working at the coffeehouse was comforting insofar as it provided hours of physical labor that took her mind off everything except the best way to load dishes into the industrial-size dishwasher and the total on the bill of the next customer; on the other hand, she was surrounded daily by the smells N___ had brought home on a regular basis. Every now and then, they struck her with fresh potency, but she was relieved, two months into the job, to realize that the impact wasn’t as strong; she was able to go weeks without going out the back door, on break, to cry. Soon she became close to a young man who worked her shift (which was to say, nearly all the time; it was remarkable to her that she was able to keep up both of her jobs, although, working so many hours she rarely had time to reflect on the day’s events before she fell asleep in Mrs. Robinson’s boarding house, this fact rarely had time to sink in) and one evening in February, a week after Valentine’s day, he invited her to the ice cream parlor, which was just down the street from the coffeehouse. After work on that night, they got into similarly thick jackets designed for the cold of almost-Canada in winter and walked down the icy sidewalk, slowly and, at first, solemnly; but soon they were talking more and more about what had brought them to that moment in time. Over coconut ice cream they discussed fate and the intricacies of working at the coffeehouse; their exchanges over the affairs of their coworkers verged into the dubious realm of Gossip, but they were both grateful for the innocuous human contact: Ben, as he was called, was living in isolation with a couple of nocturnal roommates at the other end of town from where Jienne ate, quietly and demurely, dinner with Mrs. Robinson, night after night, which was a good deal, since Mrs. Robinson was a good cook, but not very interesting, since neither she or Mrs. Robinson was very apt at making small talk. The young woman at the counter—a high-school student fretting over lost study time for a Physics test the next day—was forced to turn them out onto the sidewalk (where she joined them for just a moment after a couple minutes before getting into her Volvo, the last one in the parking lot) at midnight. Jienne, in a moment of clarity, realized that she hadn’t thought about N____ all day and that it was too late for her to return to Mrs. Robinson’s house without disrupting the lady’s sleep. She inquired if coming to Ben’s apartment was a viable option; it was, and, although the night was spent in unbroken chastity, a romance was in the making, a romance that would tempt Jienne from the erstwhile side of Mrs. Robinson early in March under the duress of walking halfway across the admittedly small town to work and then to Ben’s house and, from there, back to Mrs. Robinson’s for a change of clothes and a shower.

Ben was five years younger than Jienne; in the subsequent fall, he would leave her and the coffeehouse and the only corner of the world he’d ever called home and go to Dartmouth. This was declared early on in the relationship—in fact, several weeks before he received a thick letter from New Hampshire inviting him to go there, he was telling Jienne that in exactly eight months and ten days he would leave her (forever, perhaps, but he didn’t say that.) Jienne, who was at that moment 24, decided to make the most of their time together. As the snow began melting in April, they trod around the issue; in fact, they largely ignored it. They were, their coworkers remarked, very well behaved at work; since many of their coworkers were female students at the local high school from which Ben had graduated the previous June, there was a certain amount of bite to their comments.