People in the street referred to her as al-tarsha, the deaf woman, and, among the Arabs in the marketplace, everyone and everything in her household was known in elation to the tarsha: the deaf woman’s father, the deaf woman’s home, her maid, her bicycle, her car, her husband. The motorcycle with which she had won an exhibition race on the Corniche in the early forties and which was later sold to a neighbor continued to be known as the tarsha’s mutusikl. When I was old enough to walk alone on the streets of Ibrahimieh, I discovered that I too was known as the tarsha’s son.

At five to nine that evening everyone moved into the smaller living room and crowded around the radio to listen to the news. Someone placed the small kerosene lamp on top of the radio.

The Egyptian news bulletin in French announced a decisive victory over the enemy. England, France, and Israel had been thoroughly defeated by the intrepid forces under the command of Colonel Nasser. The crushing march to Haifa and Tel Aviv was already under way, and by midnight of December 31, 1956, the combined Arab armies would celebrate their victory on the shores of Galilee.

“Claptrap!” muttered Uncle Isaac.

I was hit on my very first day at VC. I was slapped in arithmetic for not multiplying 6 times 8 correctly and got five strikes with a ruler in Arabic class for misreading five words in a five-word sentence. Everyone had laughed. Then I was punished for not finishing my rice and not knowing how to peel a fresh date with a knife and fork. I was made to stand next to the table while everyone else continued eating in the large dining hall. I wanted to take my grandfather’s Pelikan pen and thrust it into the forehead of Miss Sharif, my Arabic teacher, who sat at the head of the table.

“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”

She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.

The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”

She learned plenty her first semester at the Institute for Vertical Transport. She learned about the animals in the Roman coliseums hoisted to their cheering deaths on rope-tackle elevators powered by slaves, learned about Villayer’s “flying chair,” a simple pulley, shift and lead counterweight concoction described in a love letter from Napoleon I to his wife, the Archduchess Marie Louise. About steam, and the first steam elevators. She read about Elisha Graves Otis, the cities he enabled through his glorious invention, and the holy war between the newly deputized elevator inspectors and the elevator companies’ maintenance contractors. The rise of safety regulation, safety device innovations, the search for a national standard. She was learning about Empiricism but didn’t know it yet.

The man enters the car on the first floor and declares, “Department of Elevator Inspectors.” He flips open the badge, that gold nova, to the agitated wives, who suddenly see their afternoon assignation get complicated. “Everybody out.” He is authority… Look at that gray fedora slashing across his brow, brim bent downward to hide his eyes, casting shadows just where shadows need to be, the sophisticated craftsmanship of his solemn pinstripe suit, cut in a Continental, the skin of his authority. Look at that. He is an elevator inspector down from the capitol to kick their hamlet into shape, taking charge, checking for rust.

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

“I’m sorry about that,” Curtis said. “I think my parents really like you, though.”

Beneath the pines they stopped to kiss, listening to the thunk of the basketball. Curtis’s face was soft—he had no beard at all—and when he kissed her, Mary often thought of things that seemed arbitrary: the gray undersides of spring rain clouds, a cat licking its paws, sheet music with notations penciled in the margins. This time she thought of a raisin, squashed on the steps of her grandmother’s porch by the weight of a tiny tennis shoe. At just that moment it began to snow.

“Well, here comes the winter,” Mary said. “You know, you should probably tell them not to like me too much.”

Mary in labor, dreaming of crows: she is on her knees, vomiting into the snow and corn stubble, and when she looks up she sees them—their glistening beaks and dark eyes on her, on the terrible thing she’s done. Her car idles on the side of the road behind her. At the clinic they told her she should not drive. A baby, she thinks; I am twenty-two and it was a baby.

“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”

And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”

He had come home to write his book, but it wasn’t going to be a book about Bombay. There were no mangoes in his poems, and no beggars, no cows or Hindu gods. What he wanted to write about was a moment of quiet. Sometimes, sitting along in his room, there would be a few seconds, a silent pocket without the crow or the hammering or wheels on the macadam outside. Those were the moments he felt most himself; at the same time, he felt that he was paying for that peace very dearly—that life, his life, was rolling away outside.

In Health class I’ve heard that you saw movies and even put condoms on bananas. The way I learned about sex was by looking up one word after another in the dictionary. It was time-consuming. I started simply, with “sperm,” properly “spermatozoon,” which led me to “spermatic cord” and “testis.” I could pretty much picture those, although the “scrotum” turned out to be much, much uglier than its definition suggested.

“He has something of mine,” the man said.

With that, she turned to look at him. “Who are you?” she finally demanded. “Sergio called me to come pick him up, not you.”

“You don’t know me?” His voice pitched higher, edging toward frustration, maybe anger. “You don’t know who I am?”

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t.”

“He’s got my heart,” the man said, melodramatically holding his hands across his chest, but he sneered a bit when he said it. “He’s got a lot of things I want back.”

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

I’m lucky: I spent only a year in jail in Avenal, for forgery, paychecks I faked a long time ago. The police were searching for something to charge me with when I got caught in Las Vegas, and all they came up with were those bad checks. I was in Las Vegas, heading east, as far away as I could get from the gas station that I helped rob with this guy I used to know, Kyle, the only white boy on Gold Street. To this day, I don’t know what happened to Kyle.

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

After she counted the money, the woman folded up the bills and reached deep into the black T-shirt to hide the bills in her bra, and then she walked back out to the car. “You rub that crema on you every night, you hear me?” she ordered, and put her hands on Emilio again, as if to feel once more whatever she might have felt before. “Someone put the evil eye on you,” she told him as her hands traveled up the back of his neck and into the fringes of hair on the back of his head, rubbing him as a lover might, looking away from him in concentration, eyes closed. “You have to believe in it for it to go away.”

Copyright © 2006 by Manuel Muñoz. By permission of Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved.  The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permission is prohibited.

“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.

Chekhov was nine years old when War and Peace was published. He admired Tolstoy tremendously and longed to meet him; at the same time, the prospect of this meeting filled him with such alarm that he once ran out of a bathhouse in Moscow when he learned that Tolstoy was also there. Chekhov did not want to meet Tolstoy in the bath, but this apparently was his inescapable destiny. When at last he worked up the nerve to go to Yasnaya Polyana, Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.

Today, Russians remember Empress Anna primarily for her love of jesters, dwarfs, and Germans, all of whom enter into her biography at an early point. In 1710, when Anna was seventeen, her uncle Peter the Great arranged her marriage to Duke Friedrich Wilhelm, the German ruler of the small duchy of Courland: a strategic alliance, intended to bolster Russia’s support of Courland against its big neighbors, Prussia and Poland. At the wedding banquet, the tsar cut open two pies with his dagger. A splendidly dressed dwarf jumped out of each pie and together they danced a minuet on the table. The next day, Peter treated his guests to a second wedding: that of his favorite dwarf, attended by forty-two other dwarfs from all corners of the empire. Some foreign guests saw a certain symmetry in the double wedding, one between two miniature people, the other between two pawns in the great game of European politics.