She said her line but I didn’t hear it. I only saw her.
There was laughter and applause. She was a favorite.
Her character had come from the scene of an accident that would turn out to have been on purpose. Her dress was rumpled, her scarf was stained.
“You don’t say,” she said.
She took her spot at the table in the radio booth. She glanced at her script. She put on lipstick. Other actors were talking.
One actor, playing the producer, slapped down a letter, a complaint from a listener who called T’s character’s character unlikable and unrealistic.
T gestured indifferently at the audience, started to say her line, and saw me in my seat.
She paused. A stricken, painful, shaken pause.
The audience tipped into it. Everyone was with her.
This wasn’t how she’d been playing this moment but I saw that this was how she’d have to play it from then on. The actor playing the producer sat, surprised.
T remembered who she was supposed to be.
T remembered who the who she was being was trying to be.
She said her line: “You try being somebody nobody expects to be complex.”
I was getting up.
I was bumping legs, I was stepping on shoes.
I was outside.
The cabbie was standing at his cab, smoking.
“Your bag,” he said.
I’d left it in the backseat.
I was in the backseat, smoking.
“Airport,” I said.
The cabbie pulled up to the curb at a hospital.
He opened the door for me.
99
Stanley Is Treated
I was in wide light on a gurney in the ER and I was in wide light on a bed in a room.
My eye was bandaged shut.
In a bed beside me lounged a teenager. Half of his head had been shaved and stitched. He ate sausages out of a bag and watched the TV on the wall.
He watched Czech game shows; he watched Czech news.
He said something to himself every now and again.
I steeped in meds.
On the news appeared an insert of an image of my uncle’s face. The image wasn’t recent. Then a shot of his apartment building, with squad cars at the curb. Then footage of an interview with my uncle from what looked like ten years ago. He was angry.
I slept and I woke up and I slept.
What was happening was that parts of myself were going away. They were going away gradually. I didn’t know the names of these parts, or what their dimensions were, or where and how they fit with other parts, but as soon as they were gone, it was as if they’d never been around to begin with. They didn’t appear to be necessary.
For example, part of me wanted to be with T, to find T, to see T, to talk to T. Then that part of me went away. I thought that I would want that part of myself back, but I didn’t, and then I thought that I would at least want to want it back, but I didn’t. And yet I was still myself.
Between these parts was whatever was me, I concluded.
I felt variations of this feeling for a while.
Then I felt terror—cold and crushing—piling up, piling under—and I passed out.
Then I came back to another part of myself going away.
Then it repeated.
An old nurse said, “There is a visitor to see you.”
I said that I wasn’t seeing visitors.
The teenager in the bed next to mine read a book. He didn’t look at me.
He read a different book.
“You will not be able to see out of your eye for likely forever,” said a young doctor.
“I waited too long,” I said.
“Correct,” said the old nurse.
I signed papers, I received prescriptions.
“No flights for one week,” said the old nurse.
I stepped into the hall, where there was no one I recognized, and then into the street, where there was no one I recognized.
I took a cab to a pharmacy and then to the train station.
“Poland,” I said. “Polska.”
The agent gave me a ticket for Kraków.
I pushed it back. “Warszawa.”
100
Stanley Arrives in Warsaw
On the train my bag was stolen.
I took a cab to Old Town Market Square. The space was small and still, boxed in by shoved-together buildings. There was the feeling of a silenced folktale. At the center of the Square stood a statue of a naked mermaid, pushing out of a wave, gripping a sword and shield.
I walked until I found a hotel, where I reserved a room for a week. At the computer in the lobby I paid to change my return flight from going out of Prague to going out of Warsaw. I made a new email account—I told my brother and my father that I’d be back, but I didn’t tell them where I was.
I plucked a tourist pamphlet out of a stand.
I went to a castle, I went to a palace, I went to a monument. I went to a restaurant and I went to a bar. I spoke the lines of Polish that I knew. I expected to see flashes of my family in the local men and women—Busia and Dziadzia’s glares and frowns, my father’s walk, my mother’s voice. I expected to come to an understanding, or to touch a meaning, or to otherwise discover that I had the ability to make something out of being there.
I bought a bag and a set of clothes.
I didn’t buy smokes.
I went on a walking tour, one that began in Old Town Market Square. The guide said that only two of the buildings that surrounded the Square were originals. The rest were reconstructions of originals that had been systematically annihilated.
“The history of this city is the history of Poland,” she said. “And Poland’s history is the history of Europe. And Europe’s history is the history of the West.”
“Americans, are you listening?” she said.
The tour ended in a bar, with one free beer.
I drank a Lezajsk and ate lard spread.
The tour guide asked me where I was from.
“I have worked in Chicago,” she said. “When I would meet Polish Americans, they would ask me where I was from. I would tell them. They would say, ‘I would like to go to Warsaw.’ And I would say, ‘Do not go to Warsaw. Go to Kraków.’”
“I did not guess that you were American,” she said.
I asked her why was that.
“I will not tell.”
I asked her for her email.
She wrote it on the back of her tour company card. “I am older than you,” she said.
I went to the Warsaw Uprising Museum, and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the Polish History Museum, and the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art.
I went to the National Museum of Archaeology.
I peeled the bandage off of my eye. I turned to a mirror: my eye was pink and glazed. It looked like it was being regrown.
I tried to find an eye patch but couldn’t. Nobody stared.
I went to a bookstore and I went to a park.
If the locals smiled, it seemed to be because they were sharing jokes about how little they smiled.
What the tour guide had written was unreadable.
One night I sat outside at a restaurant in the Square. The waiter, a man my age, recognized me from the night before, and brought me a vodka. There weren’t many people out, in the Square itself and at the restaurants, but when they passed each other, they stopped to talk. It was the weekend. Lights and voices were low. My flight back was a day away: I would see Chicago from the window of a plane. I would walk through O’Hare to the Blue Line, and ride the Blue Line to the Lawrence bus, and ride the Lawrence bus to my apartment. I would turn on my phone to texts and voice mails.
Or I would skip my flight and find work in Warsaw. I would move into an apartment, work as many jobs as I could for as long as I was allowed, learn the language, and make something, I didn’t know what, out of being there.
I ordered another vodka.
&n
bsp; The waiter brought two and shot one with me.
“Na zdrowie,” we said.
He pointed behind me and said something I didn’t understand.
At the end of the Square, a horse-drawn carriage clunked up to a gathering of other horse-drawn carriages, the drivers on break.
The waiter smiled and went inside.
As I watched the men, I noticed that I’d started to see out of my bad eye, a little.
Shapes and shadows. Outlines, movement.
I didn’t want to count on this. I focused on the men. One would speak, and the others would shake their heads. They all took a turn, their gestures brief and certain. Then they settled into a solid quiet. I waited for them to start over, but they didn’t. They were done.
List of Scenes
1. Stanley Arrives in Prague
2. Stanley Thinks About It
3. Stanley Knows What It Was
4. Stanley Tries to Feel the Space at the Center of Himself That Isn’t Him
5. Stanley Hears Footsteps, Which, for Reasons That Aren’t Clear to Him, Remind Him of His Father
6. Stanley Reflects on His Decision to Accept His Uncle Lech’s Proposal to “Apartment-Sit” for Three Days in Prague
7. Stanley Reflects on the Sort of Man He Was
8. Stanley Hears More Footsteps, Then Doors
9. Stanley Continues to Reflect on the Sort of Man He Was
10. Stanley Decides to Day-Trip from Prague to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora
11. Stanley Recalls a Time When He Thought He Could Be Anybody Else
12. Stanley Day-Trips to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora
13. Stanley Recalls the Last Time He Talked to Manny
14. Stanley Naps
15. Stanley Remembers the Dream
16. Stanley Wakes Up as Manny Arrives
17. Stanley Recounts His Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party
18. Stanley Recalls the Artist with the Drawings on His Face
19. Stanley Recalls the Artist with the Laugh
20. Stanley Recalls the Artist Who Pretended to Be Homeless
21. Stanley Recalls the Artist Who Pretended to Be Asleep, Comatose, or Dead
22. Stanley Recalls the Artist with the Easel
23. Stanley Reflects on Uncle Lech’s Art
24. Stanley Receives an Envelope
25. Stanley Recalls His Conversation with His Brother at His Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party
26. Stanley Remembers the Final Family Dinner with Busia
27. Stanley Continues to Recount Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party
28. Stanley Recalls the First Year of Aunt Abbey’s Marriage to Uncle Lech
29. Stanley Recounts Uncle Lech’s Proposal at His Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party
30. Stanley Recalls the Flight to Prague
31. Stanley Accompanies Manny to a Restaurant
32. Stanley Watches Manny Answer His Own Question
33. Stanley Remembers Another Instance of Manny’s Laugh
34. Stanley Eats a Meal and Takes a Lengthy Constitutional with Manny
35. Stanley Reluctantly Observes the First Figure, Which, for Reasons That Aren’t Clear to Him, Reminds Him of Barton
36. Stanley and Manny Enter the Apartment Building
37. Stanley Reluctantly Observes the Second Figure, Which, for Reasons That Aren’t Clear to Him, Reminds Him of Torrentelli
38. Stanley Enters the Apartment
39. Stanley Remembers His Mother’s Migraines
40. Stanley Remembers a Time When He Tried to Think Less
41. Stanley Remembers Another Time When He Tried to Think Less
42. Stanley Almost Has a Realization
43. Stanley Has a Realization
44. Stanley Imagines How T Persuaded Manny to Stay with Him
45. Stanley Almost Has Another Realization
46. Stanley Has Another Realization
47. Stanley Imagines T at the Café
48. Stanley Controls Himself
49. Stanley Remembers the Last Time Manny Lied to Him
50. Stanley Remembers Other Uncomfortable Assessments of His Character
51. Stanley Remembers an Uncomfortable but Accurate Assessment of His Character
52. Stanley Recalls How T Planned His Surprise Birthday Party
53. Stanley Hears Artists in the Hallway
54. Stanley Recounts an Easter at Uncle Lech and Aunt Abbey’s
55. Stanley Hears Artists in the Hallway, Again
56. Stanley Remembers a Christmas Eve at Uncle Lech and Aunt Abbey’s
57. Stanley Tells Manny the Truth
58. Stanley, Remembering How the Made-Up Woman Made Up to Resemble the Made-Up Man “Left” Her Purse in the Apartment, Recalls a Night with Torrentelli
59. Stanley, Remembering the Shoe That Manny Left on the Bed, Recalls When Barton Lived with Him
60. Stanley Stops to Think
61. Stanley, Remembering Manny’s Questions About Uncle Lech, Recalls Leaving His Aunt’s Birthday Party Last July
62. Stanley Continues
63. Stanley Resists Several Thoughts
64. Stanley Falls Down the Stairs
65. Stanley Encounters Two More Artists
66. Stanley Has Three Realizations
67. Stanley Deceives Himself
68. Stanley Deceives Himself About His Strategy
69. Stanley Justifies a Shift in His Strategy
70. Stanley Critiques His Strategy
71. Stanley Is “Followed”
72. Stanley Is Embarrassed
73. Stanley Encounters Uncle Lech, the Made-Up Woman, and the Police
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
74. Stanley Corrects His Observation
75. Stanley, in Jail, with Himself—
76. —Stanley, Looking for “Himself,” Remembers the Dig—
77. —in Jail—
78. —“Himself”—
79. —Shadows in the Corridor—
80. —the Dig—
81. —Stanley with Himself—
82. —the Dig—
83. —an Artist—
84. —the Dig—the Site of the Dig—
85. —What Is Known About the Man Who’d Been Buried Without His Head—
86. —What Is Not—
87. —Dig—
88. —Ears Covered, Eyes Closed—an Artist—
89. —the End of the Dig—
90. —Stanley’s Brother—
91. —Stanley’s Mom
92. Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark
93. Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Considers to What Degree His Having Been Wrong About Reading Faces Has Affected His Relationships with Family, Friends, and T
94. Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Considers to What Degree His Decision to Knowingly but Unwillingly Agree to Involvement in a Personalized Performance Art Project in a Foreign Country Has Changed His Self-Conception
95. Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Considers Whether or Not His Decision to Knowingly but Unwillingly Agree to Involvement in a Personalized Performance Art Project in a Foreign Country Has Accelerated Changes in His Self-Conception That He Would Have Come to Anyway, on His Own, Alone
96.�
�� Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Tries to Remember When He’s Felt This Way Before
97. Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Remembers the Time in High School After Class in the Parking Lot When He Was Walking Around Looking for Torrentelli or Barton or Torrentelli’s Car, and at the End of the Lot He Found Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly Up in Torrentelli’s Face, Calling Him a Fag and a Freak, and Stanley Approached, and They Called Stanley a Fag and a Freak and a Fuckup, and Stanley Called Them Fascists, and as They Moved Step-by-Step into the Fight That None of Them Had It in Them at That Time in Their Lives to Avoid, Part of Stanley Realized That Through These Exchanges Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly Were Co-creating a Woefully Reductive Misconception of Stanley, a Misconception That Stanley Perhaps Encouraged (or at the Very Least Failed to Discourage) Through How He Acted (Misanthropic Anger, Existential Apathy, Pessimism, Privilege) and What He Wore (Trench Coats, Explicit T-Shirts That Teachers Made Him Turn Inside Out, Baggy Jeans, Dog Collars, Black Lipstick, Red Contact Lenses), and Although This Was True, at the Same Time, Stanley and Torrentelli Were Co-creating Woefully Reductive Misconceptions of Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly, Misconceptions That Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly Without a Doubt Encouraged Through How They Acted (Antagonistic Anger, Academic Apathy, Pessimism, Privilege) and What They Wore (Designer Casual, Designer Sportswear), and This Realization of His Accountability in a System of Two-Way Misrepresentation Was What Stanley Struggled with but Didn’t Mention During His Three-Day Hospital Stay and Three-Week School Suspension When He Argued with His Dad, Mom, and Brother About Who He Was and Wasn’t, with His Dad Saying That If It Walks Like a Freak and Talks Like a Freak It’s a Freak, with His Mom Saying That Yes, She Agreed That He Knew Who He Was, It Was Just That He Had to Figure Out How to Be Himself About It, and with His Brother Saying That Although It Might Not Seem Possible Now, Before He Knew It He Wouldn’t Be Able to Equate the Way He Dressed and Acted with Who He Was, Even If He Wanted to, Ever Again
98. Stanley Is Released
99. Stanley Is Treated
100. Stanley Arrives in Warsaw
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Jenna Johnson and Sara Birmingham for your vision, generosity, and belief, and for everything you’ve done to grow this work. I’m deeply grateful.
The Made-Up Man Page 21