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The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.

so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.

threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,

smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes

blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.

but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth. 

VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?

GUS: I’m sure I have.

VANESSA: I see.

GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.

VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!

GUS: That’s a new one.

VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?

GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.

VANESSA: I don’t.

GUS: I’m not a racist.

VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.

BLU: … i seen pictures, gemini, of oceans that are actually blue. waters so clear you can stand waist deep, look down and see your feet. not like any ocean i’ve ever been to. light reflects off the top of the water and you can see the sand on the ocean floor.

My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”

These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.

Daddy shook the box, kicked it, mumbled under his breath something that sounded like it had teeth. He came from around the house with a shovel and dragged it behind him, along with the box, to the woods. He would bury my dog, I thought.