Search All Winners

Every thing I own save the poor Beasts is in a heap here in the center of this room and if I mean to keep it whole I must before I sleep cover all against the leaking, rake old tins & leavings outside the door, burn a camphor stick against vermin, set my few mouse traps along the walls. And hope for better Weather & Strength in the days coming. I have put out in the night the 2 boys I found here, they had taken up living in the empty house. Those were Troubles I could not borrow, as I am scarce likely to make my own living in this poor place and coming West I have seen idle men Everywhere abut in La Grande and Boise and Missoula and in the Papers woeful news of the falling price of Wheat & Cattle both. They were polite & forebearing, for which reason I am sorry.

“YOU COME WITH ME NOW,” Uma madam says one day, after breakfast. She has come prepared. A male guard comes forward and grabs my arm. 

“Where?” I say, wrenching free. He lets go. “Stop it! I need to talk to Gobind about the appeals.” 

“You walk or he will drag you,” says Uma madam in reply. 

Back in my cell, I gather my sleeping mat, my other salwar kameez, slip my feet into the rubber slippers, then look around for anything else that is mine. Nothing is.

Uma madam pulls my dupatta off my neck. When I grab at it, she clicks her tongue. “What use is modesty for you anymore?” she says. 

We walk down the corridor, the three of us, and a few women look up from inside their cells. The corridor is so dim they are no more than movement, shapes, smells, a belch. Perhaps sensing my fear, Uma madam finds it in her heart to explain. “You can’t have a dupatta in this place where you are going. Not allowed. What if you decide to hang yourself, what then? It has happened before.” After a pause, she says, “Nobody’s coming to see you, don’t worry about looking nice.” 

Uma madam unlocks a door at the far end of the corridor, which opens onto a staircase I have never seen. Though the day is dry and sunny, there is a puddle of water on the top step.
 
“Go down,” she says. 

When I don’t move, she insists, “Go! Don’t look so afraid, we don’t keep tigers down there.” 

I climb down, my slippers slapping the steps.

Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

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 I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.