I opened the only other book I’d brought, Sacred Centers: New Perspectives on North American Burial Mounds. Dr. Madera was right; after my second year in the program, I was accepted at a summer dig—the one she co-directed, at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, in Collinsville, Illinois. On the first day, Dr. Madera gave a copy of Sacred Centers to me and one to Golnaz. This was the book she’d worked on with her own professor-mentor, the book that had come out of her first dig. On the cover, a notated line drawing diagrammed the excavated interior of an archaeologically significant platform mound, the name or number of which I didn’t know. This book, I felt, was more than a book. It was a gate. When I went through it I would be on the way to who I was becoming.
On the second day of the Cahokia dig, I quit.
The day after that I called the graduate school director and dropped out of the program.
I didn’t answer classmates’ texts, I didn’t answer classmates’ emails.
I didn’t give the complete explanation to T.
I removed archaeology books from my nightstand and I unsubscribed from archaeology websites.
But a few months later, while packing for the flight to Prague, I’d been unable to stop myself from reaching for Sacred Centers. Into my bag it went. It was as if the book contained two tracks: one corroded, one clean; one shameful, one joyful. To read it was to ride both routes at once. I half-read the book to half-stop myself from seeing T. Bundles of bones buried with pottery shards and marine shells. Data on the Cahokian diet. Topographical maps of terrain through which I’d carried equipment. Hyper-specific fact-packed charts like the ones I’d intended to learn to make.
I imagined throwing the book across the room.
I threw the book across the room—it banged the wall and ruffle-fluttered to the floor. I was a baby.
I remembered: not far outside of Prague, my brother had told me, was a famous Black Death ossuary, a chapel in a church’s basement done up elaborately in dead people’s bones.
“Right up your creepy alley!” he’d said.
I opened the guidebook to find it. I thought about what T would say when I told her that the first thing I did when I got to Prague was leave it.
She’d say, You’re a stereotype.
I’d say, And you’re not.
I can commit!
You said no. You did.
I said no because you didn’t mean it, she’d say. And let’s speak from the I, not the you.
I’d say: I thought about it and I bought the ring and I proposed and I meant it.
Or I’d say: I may not have meant it then but I mean it now, I can mean it now.
She’d throw on her truth-face. Her truth-face was firm. It was and wasn’t patient.
I’d say, Say it.
She’d say something true about our relationship.
It’d be hard to hear. I’d pretend to think about it, and then I’d say something untrue.
She’d ask a question.
I’d say something untrue.
She’d continue to truth-face me, no longer needing to speak, and in the silence I’d think of the true things that I could’ve said instead, that I should’ve said, and I’d pick one, the biggest one, and I’d imagine myself saying it. Then I’d look at T and try to say it. I’d fail. There’d be a feeling in the way, a feeling spread across me like a sealant. It wasn’t anger or pride or fear or shame, but anger and pride and fear and shame were part of its compound. T would touch my arm. She’d say the true thing I’d tried to say. But instead of seeing her honesty and empathy, I’d see an actor—I’d see an actor playing Honest Empathetic Girlfriend—I’d see T’s skill and talent and training, the of-this-world authenticity that she flesh-and-blooded into every role—I’d see the times I’d seen her truth-face on the stage.
This was when I’d start to swerve away from myself.
The swerving, I knew, was unsafe.
T would say, Don’t leave.
I’d leave—I’d walk out of wherever we were, apartment or diner or park, bar or coffee shop, L platform, and I’d wait, waiting until my swerve away from myself had straightened out. I’d wait a little longer. I’d go back. She’d be where she’d been. She’d let me touch her arm like she’d touched mine. I’d say that who we’d been, just then, that wasn’t us.
She’d say, You think you can be anybody else?
11
Stanley Recalls a Time When He Thought He Could Be Anybody Else
When I walked into the theater for our first date, T was in the lobby reading the program, chuckling to herself. We exchanged a mock-formal handshake.
She was tall and at ease and direct, playful but grounded. Her voice radiated ability—a power and a range that the moment didn’t require—all of which she kept in check with practiced self-control. It was like being in the presence of an off-duty superhero.
I missed the first thing she said, an explanation of a coincidence, a personal connection to what she’d seen in the program.
“That shouldn’t be surprising!” she said. “But it is.”
I shook my head in a way that I hoped was worldly.
We walked to our seats. The way she moved, spoke, and grinned gave me the feeling that I should already know who she was, that if I could stop looking at how she looked at me long enough to think about it, I’d remember that I’d met her or had wanted to meet her, that we shared a friend of a friend, that we’d grown up on opposite sides of the same hometown.
None of this had come through in her profile picture, where all she’d been was beautiful.
The play was a murder mystery comedy. The seating was “immersive”—chairs had been arranged all over the set, and the audience was encouraged to change places, to catch the show from a range of angles. The actors moved through us, forcing us to switch positions. When T and I were separated, I didn’t watch the play; I watched T watching. Her grin was gone. She seemed to have shifted into the insulated center of a daydream. I couldn’t tell if she was completely absorbed in the play, and feeling it, or completely removed, and missing it.
Afterwards we went for tacos and beers at Big Star. We sat on the jam-packed patio, facing Damen Avenue, where the weekend mob of hipsters and bros and tourists and homeless men and women walked and biked and begged. T tied her hair back. She said that for her, the play’s staging (mainly the immersive seating) invited an intellectual response, while the play’s tone (mainly the actors’ performances) invited an emotional response. What she appreciated, though, was how these responses were aesthetically complementary. The acknowledgment of formal artifice (how the actors made no attempt to pretend that the audience wasn’t right there, sharing the stage with them) somehow increased the visceral pleasure of narrative immersion, of tumbling into the world of the characters. “That’s not an easy thing to keep together,” said T. “Everybody’s got to be all-in all the time, the actors, the crew, the audience.” I said that I’d seen a Hypocrites play a year or so ago, with my aunt, where they’d done a similar kind of seating—with fewer seats and more standing around—but because the play was a tragedy, not a comedy, my awareness of my fellow audience members intensified my discomfort. “I didn’t like that feeling,” I said. “But that feeling was part of the point.”
The Big Star menu didn’t include dessert.
“Tequila?” said T.
T talked about a semester she’d spent in Bali, and I talked about a world arts festival I’d attended on the South Side, again with my aunt, and we debated what it meant about a culture when its artistic traditions didn’t require practitioners to slot “theater,” “storytelling,” “music,” and “dance” into discrete categories, when what was expected was an interactive blend of many mediums.
T spoke out of performance studies and I spoke out of cultural anthropology.
We stopped at one tequila—we both had work early.
I walked her to the Damen Blue Line. She was taking the train; I was taking the bus.
“I didn’t ask th
e get-to-know-you questions,” I said. “I didn’t even ask where you work.”
She bopped me on the arm. “Next time.”
I gave her a sincere hug.
“You don’t need much to make you happy,” she said, happily.
Over text we played a game of avoiding asking the get-to-know-you questions.
A week later we met at the Field Museum, where Dr. Madera had contributed to the Ancient Americas exhibit. We continued our conversation about art and history and representation, wandering from hall to hall, letting what we saw in the cases and read on the displays lead us to new subjects.
On the steps outside, she said, “We just gave each other a guided tour.”
“We’re professionals,” I said.
We sat. Summer camp kids in bright T-shirts swarmed the steps, shouting and squealing, running and shoving. The street was lined with idling buses. Blinding wedges of sunlight erased the surfaces of skyscrapers.
T put her hand on mine.
“Do it,” she said.
I kissed her.
She was an actor: I watched her rehearsals. I was a graduate student: she read my research. We met each other’s friends and we ate at each other’s favorite restaurants and we attended each other’s social gatherings, and although we didn’t directly ask where we were from and what we did for work, the answers jumped up on their own. T was from a far north suburb, I was from a far south suburb; our parents had separated; she was a volunteer grant-writer for an arts education nonprofit, and a server at a brewpub, and a hostess-in-training at an upscale Mexican restaurant, and the coordinator of a theater summer camp for gifted grade schoolers.
I worked construction for subcontractors and I went to class.
“You’re smart,” she said. “You know to keep it simple.”
Keep it simple, I said to myself.
The first night that I spent at T’s place on purpose, I brought a change of clothes. In the morning, while she watched from bed, I stepped into a pair of sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt. They were stretched and faded, worn and frayed. She hubba-hubbaed. I flexed. She sat up, out of the sheets, naked, and raised her hand like we were in a classroom. She couldn’t stop it: wherever she was, whatever she did, she supercharged her personal space with an aura of casual celebrity. This was the source of what I’d felt when we met, the feeling that I ought to know her. More than once a week, a stranger would go out of his or her way to ask her if she’d ever been told that she looked like a certain actor, comedian, musician, model, athlete. I’d seen it happen on the street and at parties, in grocery stores and at museums, on the L and at red lights. In bed, with her hand raised, she looked like she was in the intro to a music video, like her world was about to go fantastical with song and light. She waved her hand harder. I called on her. She asked if I’d ever been told that I looked like a character from a high school football movie. “The Quarterback,” I said. “No, the Center,” she said, dropping her voice to imitate a doofy jock, “the Quarterback’s Dumb Best Friend.” I looked at the mirror nailed to the back of her door: she was right. That week I stopped shaving and I skipped the haircut. She touched my sprouting cheek. “Supercop on the Case,” she said. I returned to shaving. As my hair got longer, but not long, she compared me to other types, in the voices of those types—“Supercop on the Case, in a Comedy,” “Frustrated FBI Agent,” “Ethically Conflicted Hit Man”—but when I wore the shirts and slacks and jeans she gave me, and the sweaters her abuela gave me, and the shoes her pops gave me, and the most rugged cologne that the man at the Nordstrom’s could find, she started to say that I looked like myself.
“Tell me what that means.”
She thought about it. “You look like you feel like yourself.”
I said that everything was tight.
She tapped my butt. “That’s because it fits.”
12
Stanley Day-Trips to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora
A train took me to Kutná Hora in two hours, rattling around green mountains and rivers. Alone in the car, I read about the layers of Cahokian burial mounds that’d been stuffed with the whole skeletons of important Cahokians. The main thing we know about important Cahokians, Dr. Madera liked to say, was that they were important. The train whumped and shuddered like a school bus. I closed the book. I began to feel, with my body, that I was in a foreign country, in the realm of customs and rules I didn’t know but was subject to, and that it was important to admit to this, to be attentive to my ignorance. At the station I stepped off and followed a handful of fellow tourists from other cars into the road.
A sign read FIFTEEN MINUTE WALK THIS WAY.
In a scattered group we passed a shut-down factory, a row of saggy homes, a garage, a bar, a garage-like bar. Smoking locals stared from open doors, their disinterest fierce.
Two men at the front of our group, annoyed, traded camera lenses.
Three women shared a bag of apple slices.
A boy in a soccer jersey snapped practice pictures of his grandpa.
The church appeared at the top of a tombstone-cluttered hill, the hump of earth like some giant’s sunken severed head, the slanted stones the ruins of her crown. This was where an abbot brought a jar of dirt he’d collected from the hill where Christ was killed, I’d read, where he spread it, where the rich outbid one another to be buried. A breeze flickered by, stinking of spilled chemicals. The grandpa pretended he’d farted. The boy, wanting to believe him, laughed.
We entered the church. We bought tickets at the gift-shoppy front desk. We headed down the steps and were there.
The space was stone-chambered and shadowy, lit like a low-budget set. Bones lined the ceiling’s vaulted contours. Bones ran the walls in bristling banners. Bones stood as sculptures, throne-sized, assembled into chalices and holy crosses and a coat of arms. Although these arrangements of skulls and ribs and pelvises and vertebrae and femurs and humeri were unintended by the body, they had the look of a series of solved puzzles. The centerpiece was a chandelier. It hung in a cake-like tapering heap. It was precisely like and unlike a chandelier, its levels ornate, various, each design yet another clever use of the body’s very smallest bones. Pillars fenced it in. On the pillars sat painted wooden cherubs, and on their fat laps, skulls.
PLEASE RESPECT THIS SACRED PLACE, warned the signs.
An excited young man reviewed the pictures he’d taken with his phone, and a middle-aged woman shook her head at the artist’s wall-mounted signature-in-fingerbones, and an attractive woman, my age, argued with her attractive companion, a man twice my age, in a language I couldn’t identify. These reactions I understood. Whatever blend they were of awe and revulsion and humor and fear, they were the product of considering the how and the why of the existence of this site, the how and the why explained in the church’s free pamphlet, the basement’s many placards, and my guidebook: the thousands of fifteenth-century plague victims mass-buried in the churchyard’s sacred soil; the lone sixteenth-century monk, half-blind, half-mad, who’d exhumed and rearranged the victims’ bones into shrine-like pyramids; and the ninetenth-century nobleman who’d commissioned a professional artist to continue the monk’s work, to make what was left of the dead into an offering to themselves.
I saw the others seeing some or all of this. I saw myself seeing them seeing this. I admit: it was satisfying.
I felt grateful to my brother.
On my way out I stumbled on the stairs, not enough to make me fall but enough to make me turkey-flap my arms. Someone I didn’t see tittered.
I walked to the tracks alone. A middle-aged man sat on a bench under the station’s awning, reading a newspaper. It was the made-up man from the airport.
He now wore sparkly earrings. His makeup had been reapplied. When I passed him, he smelled like prom.
The attractive couple who’d been going at it in the ossuary arrived, still ticked at each other. They lit the last two cigarettes in their pack. The man tossed the pack onto the rails, acting like he d
idn’t know that this would infuriate the woman. She blew a fuck-you of smoke into his face. He smiled.
The made-up man rose. He paced the platform, fake-reading, and came to a gradual stop in a position from which he could be sure that I’d see the front page. It featured a black-and-white photo of me and him at the airport, the moment when I took the key. The transaction looked criminal: my scowl nervous, his smile derisive.
I stayed where I was. He stayed where he was.
When the train could be heard down the track, grinding and hissing, he lowered the newspaper, “saw” me, and pretended to be startled. Then concerned. Then concerned about me seeing his concern.
He approached me like I might hurt myself.
I put the attractive couple between us, boarded, and picked an empty car.
We pulled away from the station. I watched the door’s dirty window.
At the next stop a grim dad and his two grim daughters shuffled in and sat across from me. They unwrapped ham sandwiches and ate.
One of the girls stared at me, mustard on her teeth.
By early afternoon the train had returned to Prague. I walked from the station to the apartment, stopping at a corner store for pop, beer, and snacks. The clerk noted but did not acknowledge my entrance. I appreciated this: it reminded me that I was in a city. Club music played. The things I wanted weren’t where I thought they’d be and looked nothing like I expected them to look. Bags of chips by jars of fish, cases of cola on crates of bleach. I imagined telling this to T. She liked to retell my stories to her friends, stories she wasn’t in or hadn’t witnessed. She’d perform them with theatrical intensity, enriching and estranging the facts with voices and gestures, with wry philosophical asides. Her friends, also actors, would cheer with delight. One of them would buy me a drink I didn’t want. T would punctuate her performance with happy glances in my direction, glances that were part of the performance. I’d stay silent. All of this fuss over one of my stories was to some extent an honor, I felt that, but the way it center-staged me without my participation made me uneasy, and the way T took liberties with the source material—me, and my way of telling my stories—set us up for disagreement.
The Made-Up Man Page 3