Innehållsförteckning för 216 (Spring 2016) från The Paris Review

When they became outlaws they gave themselves new names. He chose Miles Braintree: the first part after Miles Davis, the second after Braintree, the T’s southernmost stop on the Red Line. She chose Odelia Zion: Zion for the Promised Land, and the baby-name book said Odelia means “praise God,” but mostly she just liked the sound of it. Hamlet’s Ophelia but not quite. Lives of the Saints tells of the murdered virgin Odelia, patron saint of the blind. Can be shortened to Delia, Ode, O. A martyr, a lyric, a letter. MILES HAD HAD HIS disagreements with SDS, split the organization before it crumbled and formed the Obscure Reference Collective with a handful of other radicals disgruntled by the direction the movement was taking. The bloodhounds were sniffing from day…

MILK SHAKE I am never lonely and never bored. Except when I bore myself, which is my definition of loneliness—to bore oneself. It makes a body lonesome, that. Today I am very bored and very lonely. I can think of nothing better to do than grind salt and pepper into my milk shake, which I have been doing since I was thirteen, which was so long ago the very word thirteen has an oldfashioned ring to it, one might as well say Ottoman Empire. Traditionally, thirteen is an unlucky number. Little did I know at thirteen that I was on the road, by a single action, to loneliness and boredom. My friend Vicki and I were sitting at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s, waiting for the milk shakes we had…

I wish my pussy could live in a different shape and get some goddamn respect. Should I thank you? Business is booming and I am not loved the way I want to be. I am an elastic winter: sympathy and shock, addictive decoration. In the sunlight my captors drink African hibiscus. They tell me I look regal bearing fruit. I am technically nothing human. I will never be a woman. Somewhere in my memory, I was held by a man who said I deserved it. Now I understand. No one worries about me because I am getting paid. I am here to show you who you are, to cradle your large skulls and remind you you are perfect. Mother America, unleash your sons. Everything beautiful, you own.…

THIS ONCE . . . or somebody’s going to get hurt. For my sake, however, keep pealing to a minimum. We’ll need the firewood you can pick up on the shore of that lake. Oh and by the way . . . Splurge. And get moving. SITTING AT THE TABLE In these situations I’m trying to figure out what is going on. So is he too. Purged for oversharing, he launched a partially deflated football into the stands. The crow went wild. We’ll ski the gorse on our ankles provided that makes anyone feel better. If not the cheapest scent availeth not. We are all captured, out of work, clinging to spruce dominions. It wasn’t always this way. Somewhere, ants were taking control of earth’s blistered pulse. Peanuts were jettisoned…

Since 1976, Robert Caro has devoted himself to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a landmark study of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. The fifth and final volume, now underway, will presumably cover the 1964 election, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the launch of the Great Society, the deepening of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the unrest in the cities and on college campuses, Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection, and his retirement and death— enough material, it would seem, for four additional volumes. If there is a question that annoys Caro more than “Do you like Lyndon Johnson?” it is “When will the next book be published?” This interview took place over the course of four sessions, which were conducted in his Manhattan office, near Columbus…

I wear a suicide belt I detonate And make my City of Light A coprophagic tomb. This is the End of Days. This is what we’ve been waiting for always. I walked over to the Hudson River, heading for Mars. Each poem of mine is a suicide belt. I say that to my girlfriend Life. Welcome to paradise, and good-bye. Stay away, stay home, don’t gather in numbers. Of course we want to assemble to demonstrate I wasn’t born to fear all this, But every one of you will receive a lei, And martyrs will receive a lei and a virgin. Oh yes it’s showtime and yes apocalypse. It’s bombed-to-bits applause-applause Gouging out the ice cream with a scoop To eat some soft, And then comes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Also known…

ADMISSION My mother was glamorous in a way I knew I never would be. Velvet belt buckle. Mascara lash. Miniature crimson lipstick living in the pocket of a purse. Her bow mouth was forever being twinned to a tissue. I never would wear that black windowpane see-through blouse, mother-of-pearl buttons tracing the path of her spine. Every woman was her rival. You could say seriousness made me impossible, exactly the same way beauty made her. I understand men. Some like to have one woman in their arms while a second one stands on a half shell, both continuously shifting between being and being seen. Even as a child, I understood there were erotic fishhooks that one couldn’t see. I learned to use a camera to see what I could be.…

Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, in 1954, and emigrated with his parents to the United States as a child. The family settled in northern New Jersey, where his father, Lucien, found work in a Teflon factory and his mother, Denise, worked in a high school cafeteria. Sante was educated in Manhattan, attending Regis High School and then Columbia University, which he left without a degree. After stints as a critic—for Interview, Wigwag, New York, and Spy, among other places— he won a Whiting Award and published his first book, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991). This was followed by Evidence (1992), a volume of crime-scene photographs; The Factory of Facts (1998), a memoir; Kill All Your Darlings (2007), a collection of essays and occasional…

He gets back in the car, resting a plastic tray of nachos on his jeans. I smell the salt, the corn, the nacho cheese, its under-smell of plastic, the way his hair smells when he hasn’t washed it in a few days, gasoline. For a second I forget I’m driving a car and I think I’m on an airplane, leaning back as it rises, and then I see the plane I’ve been following while taking everything in through my nostrils because I’m tired from not sleeping. His penis comes alive for me as a possibility in his pants, like a phone that might ring at any second. I consider it as something I would have to reach down through that compartment of nacho cheese to reach—I’m conflating again—sinking into vats…

The Germans were arguing about directions. Lennart understood some German—he’d studied it at school— but he was having a hard time following what they were saying. Beside him on the seat, a dozen bird decoys in a clear plastic bag stared up at him. He sipped his coffee, listened for words he knew. They hadn’t left the hotel parking lot yet. He’d met the Germans in the bar the night before, Saturday. The bar was crowded, and Lennart had found himself sharing a booth with the Germans. They were biologists and were already very drunk by the time Lennart sat down. He couldn’t remember the name of the university where they worked, but he remembered that it was near a lake and that they’d come to Denmark to research birds.…

Once upon a time. Twice on her parents’ bed. She freaked out when she found the human stain Dried rough in the rough shape of the male brain. Cautious ever after, after that she said She liked it when I shot her in the head. She blew my brains out. Bang bang, I was dead, Unarousable there in the first-floor master. Sometimes, on long drives, she’d gun me. Faster, faster I tongued the olive pressed between her thighs. Floaters, she swore, as bright as rescue flares Would dive across the dark behind her eyes. I pearl dove and never once came up for air There in her aunt’s houseboat on Lake Champlain. The wetter she got the harder I smelled the rain.…

We are all sitting around the fire pit, talking about how not to get raped. We have advice, opinions, instructions because we are the adults and Gertrude is the kid, and we’ve been to college, so we think we know what we are talking about. She lets us talk at her all night, ruining her graduation present because she’s an exceptional kid, an obedient kid. She’s not an eye roller. She doesn’t text while people are trying to talk to her. She’s not the kind of kid you’ll overhear calling somebody a cunt or her mother a bitch. Whatever is not in her vocab. She’s super adjusted and polite and so “she deserves everything she gets,” her parents say all the damn time. And this kid gets a lot. Always…

ALEX ABRAMOVICH lives and works in New York City. MITZI ANGEL is the publisher of Faber & Faber. She received the 2010 French-American Foundation Prize for her translation of 03, by Jean-Christophe Valtat. JOHN ASHBERY’s most recent book of poems is Breezeway. A two-volume set of his collected translations from the French was published in 2014. CHRIS BACHELDER is the author of the novels Abbott Awaits, U.S.!, and Bear v. Shark. MARY JOBANG is the author of seven collections of poems and a translation of Dante’s Inferno. Her most recent book is The Last Two Seconds. JENSEN BEACH is the author of two collections of stories, most recently Swallowed by the Cold. TUL’SI “TUESDAY ” BHAMBRY is the winner of the 2015 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. ERICA EHRENBERG was…

This morning, Esther Saint-Juste did nothing between the time she woke up and the time she got out of bed. There is nothing she’ll be able to tell her husband when he calls just before lunch. The telephone may already have rung, it may have rung more than once, and she may have heard it ring. She can’t say for certain. If she were criticized for staying in bed so late, she would explain that she had a “rough night”—a phrase that makes Antoine Saint-Juste uncomfortable each time Esther uses it to excuse her air of distraction. He gets these telephone calls out of the way as punctually as he can. Last night, for the first time in months, she slept for several hours straight. She woke to the blinding…

Until the mideighties,” Luc Sante says, “I was pretty unaware that what was going on all around me was specific and special, but I was fed by its vibration . . . New York City kind of ended for me at the same time that my youth did.” The following magazine covers, collages, and flyers are documents of that lost youth, with annotations by Sante. We are grateful to him for letting us reproduce them here. —The Editors Cover design for unpublished book, 1980. “Dave Carluccio” was my longstanding alter ego. He’d first shown up in a story I wrote in the midseventies, his name combining those of two elementary-school classmates, but eventually took on a life of his own. He wrote letters to the editor, took out fraudulent subscriptions,…

NEVER SLEEP ON A GRUDGE “Were you raised in a barn?” she said. “Were you raised under a sink?” I answered. “Your mother hated you for good reasons,” she retorted. “Your mother was a stupid, belligerent cow,” is what I said back, “and you’d have been luckier if she had hated you.” That got her going: “I hate your big weird feet,” she yelled. “I think yours are elegant and adorable,” I hissed, which was more than she could stand. If she were a different woman, she’d have punched me then. If I were a different man, I’d have recommended, yet one more time, that she go on antidepressants, but I’d learned my lesson. Instead she went to the kitchen and whipped up some cookie batter. I went into the…

I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest on Rhode Island. No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm wrestling champion in Portland, Maine. False. I caught the largest boa constrictor in Southern Brazil. In my dreams. I built the largest house out of matchsticks in all the United States. Wow! I caught a wolf by its tail. Yumee. I married the Princess of Monaco. Can you believe it? I fell off of Mount Everest. Ouch! I walked back up again. It was tiring. Snore. I set a record for sitting in my chair and snoring longer than anybody. Awake! I set a record for swimming from one end of my bath to…

The Baroness was a charming creature. The Baron had taken her from a family of high principles and had no reason to mistrust her, despite the fact that the tooth of time had already gnawed into him quite deeply . . . And yet a disquieting element of grace and charm lay dormant within her, which could easily complicate the practical application of the Baron’s imponderabilia (since the Baron was a bit of a stickler). One day, after a period of conjugal life graced with the quiet bliss of marital duty, the Baroness came running to her husband and threw her arms around his neck. “I think I ought to tell you this. Henryk has fallen in love with me . . . Yesterday he declared himself to me, so…

MY AFTER - DINNER DRINK is a bowl of stars, not the sunset’s wussy Pink Lady hours ago, before a solitary dinner— leftover meat loaf and veg, Jell-O, and decaf— I wash up from, then doze through episodes of endangered plotlines and the News at Ten, then finally lurch to the cabinet, pour myself a rum, and walk out with my laptop into eternity— for me, the view from an avocadocolored polycarbonate po-mo armchair on the terrace in my oddly rounded apartment complex, a semicircle of dark balconies, the building’s fountain nattering on, the neighbors asleep, the palms content, planes blinking overhead on their way to Miami or Hell, whichever is closest. Better than any telescope, my Night Sky app situates me in an immensity that, like my heart, shifts…

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