We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

  Well, then it’s okay, you said.

  Okay, I said.

  Okay, you said again.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Sunday, October 18, 3 a.m.

  Dear Little Jo,

  I was just reading some old letters here at 3 a.m. in my room. You asked if Mark has the Kurlansky genes. He doesn’t. He’s about Sylvan’s height only narrower. Angular. He has my mom’s pale skin and brown eyes. Girls go crazy for Mark because of his soulful expression. Or that’s how he explained it to me, back when he started getting all these texts from girls and I wanted to know why.

  In Afghanistan once Mark watched a man die of a snakebite. He told Sylvan how they tried to make him lie still. Stay calm. But the guy kept jumping around in a panic. Sylvan didn’t know what kind of snake it was. He said a viper maybe.

  I mean Mark never talks to me about Afghanistan. He will tell this stuff to Sylvan when Sylvan goes to the Texas Border, the bar where Mark works as manager. Then Sylvan will tell me when we’re on a roof without Uncle Vik.

  Mark used to be a vegetarian. A vegetarian in a houseful of animal killers, is how he put it. I learned to cook by watching Mark, because he started cooking back when he was thirteen or fourteen. He got stacks of vegetarian cookbooks out of the library to find new stuff to try. Mark introduced our household to the concept of seasonings. Fresh oregano in the veggie lasagna. Cumin and coriander in the Marrakech stew.

  I loved the way Mark would unthinkingly wipe his hands on his T-shirt the whole time he cooked. Fingers flicking front and back along his ribs before he opened the fridge or turned the page in the cookbook.

  Adam, he said, let’s not be the type of people who think about cleaning up the whole time we’re making a mess.

  It’s actually the cobra, not the viper, with the deadliest venom in Afghanistan. A neurotoxin. I looked it up: It would have been either an Oxus cobra or an Indian cobra. The US military had to buy vials of cobra antivenin from Iran. The problem is your heart, Sylvan explained to me. The faster your heart is beating the faster the venom gets to it.

  What woke me up tonight wasn’t a nightmare for a change. It was missing Mark. I woke up feeling sick with missing him.

  I mean he didn’t die over there or anything. He returned intact, is how they describe it. The screws in his hip, the way he limps, is nothing compared with most vets discharged for medical reasons. Of course I missed him the whole time he was over there. But I don’t know. Somehow I miss him more since he got back. It’s like five years ago when Mark was deployed, I promised myself that when he returned everything would be just like when we were kids. Hikes and wrestling and pancakes and target practice and joking around all the time. I wasn’t aware that I even made such a ridiculous promise to myself, let alone that I believed it.

  Now that he’s back it’s obvious. It’s so obvious you would think I’d just get over it. Instead missing Mark sometimes wakes me up at night like a hole punched in my skin and all my insides escaping.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Monday, October 19, 5 p.m.

  Dear Kurl,

  You weren’t at school today, which of course meant there was no letter from you in Ms. Khang’s box, either. Maybe you were doing a roof, but it was raining this morning, so it seems unlikely. I’m a little worried you might be sick or something, because of what happened on Saturday.

  I went down to Cherry Valley Saturday morning to make another, more serious bicycle recovery attempt, but the water level had risen and Nelly had sunk even deeper under the rotting leaves and silt at the creek bottom. Even if I’d had the courage to strip down and plunge in, I doubt I’d be strong enough to lift the bike out.

  From that discouraging venture I joined Bron at an SAT information session at the community center, which was about as entertaining as it sounds, and then we ate pho and watched American Sniper at the Riverview. My objective was simply to stay away from the house while it filled up with Decent Fellows, since their regular rehearsal space wasn’t available.

  We got home around 9 p.m., and Lyle mentioned that you had dropped by, Kurl. You were on a run, you’d told him, and had found yourself nearby. He said you hung around to listen to a couple of songs but wouldn’t even sit down. He said you seemed keyed up: “Twitchy, or spooked or something.”

  He asked you if you’d be into smoking a bowl, and when you said no thanks, he packed the bong anyhow and smoked a bit himself, just in case you changed your mind, which eventually, he said, you did.

  “Did it help?” I asked.

  “Of course it helped, Jojo,” he said. “It always helps.”

  My father is something of an evangelist when it comes to this particular drug (which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, he and the other Decent Fellows all refer to as green). He adores the fact that it’s being legalized in a number of states and can’t stand how long it’s taking in Minnesota.

  Of course, by the time you retrieve this letter from Ms. Khang’s box, you’ll be back at school, meaning you’ll have recovered from whatever was, or still is, ailing you—but I have to admit it’s unsettling not knowing, as I write this, whether you’re okay. Will I hear from you tomorrow, or the next day, or the next? This is one of those occasions when a simple phone call would be infinitely more reassuring.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  Tuesday, October 20

  Dear Little Jo,

  Just a quick note to say sorry if I had you worried there. I probably shouldn’t have gone for that run on Saturday in the first place. I had a sore back and the run made it worse. So much worse that I stayed in bed Sunday and yesterday. It’s fine now though.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  Wednesday, October 21

  Dear Kurl,

  Three letters from you in the box this morning! And one of them appears as long as a novella! If the disadvantage to a letter-writing relationship is an occasional period of suspense, then the upside is this joyful abundance when it commences again. I’m taking these missives home to read at my leisure, Kurl. As for yesterday’s short note, I’m so sorry to hear that your back was bothering you. Yet another reason to reduce your time hunched over on rooftops, regardless of your uncle’s opinions on the matter.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  Saturday, October 24, 9:45 p.m.

  Dear Kurl,

  Saturday night, schnitzel night! You arrived at our house tonight laden with shopping bags, embarrassed, apologizing for not asking ahead of time, saying you’d planned to cook at home but your uncle Viktor wasn’t feeling well, and your mom had decided to go visit your aunt Agata at the nursing home. I asked you whether it’d be okay if there were extra people for dinner. Bron, you probably expected—she is a fairly good bet for dinner on weekends—but Rich, the Decent Fellows’ guitarist, and his wife, Trudie, were over tonight, too.

  Bron and I helped you unload the groceries and find the right skillet. Rich, Trudie, and Lyle sat in the living room, chanting, “Wienerschnitzel, Wienerschnitzel, Wienerschnitzel,” which I can only assume was some jingle from the 1980s. They’d all hit the green pretty hard by that point.

  You’d brought some tools from home, including a knife sharpener. You took our biggest knife from the drawer and dragged it through the metal discs. I had just read your letter about how you learned to cook from your brother Mark, so I watched you with new fascination and respect for your skills.

  “Technically,” you told Bron and me, “it’s not called Wiener schnitzel unless it’s made with veal and comes from this officially designated area of Germany.”

  “You mean Austria,” Bron said. “Wien is Vienna.”

  “Nope, I mean Germany,” you said. You unwrapped a stack of pork chops and peeled the top one off, slapped it onto the cutting board, sliced it horizontally in half, and opened it like a greeting card. “It’s a tourist thing in Vienna now, but the dish didn’t come from there. They think it was imported from Italy, originally.”


  “Wait. Did you research this meal?” Bron asked.

  “He researches everything,” I said. “Ask him about salamanders.”

  Bron loved this. She latched right on to it: “Tell me about salamanders, Kurl. I’m dying to hear about salamanders!”

  You’d produced a small, spiked metal hammer from your grocery bag and started pounding the pork chop to make it even thinner. The noise brought Shayna into the kitchen. “It’s dead, man, it’s already dead,” she shouted, and grabbed your forearm and pretended she was trying to wrestle a weapon from your hand. You relinquished the hammer, and she took a turn with it. “Look, I’m beating your meat,” she joked.

  I was worried I’d embarrassed you with that comment about the salamanders. I hadn’t meant to bring up a subject from your letters like that. It completely violates the principle of freely writing about whatever topic you’re thinking about, doesn’t it, if the recipient of the letter is going to turn around and hold up the topic for social mockery? The whole time the meal was cooking, I was racking my brain for a way to apologize.

  And then during dinner, Bron had to go and bring up the subject again. “Kurl, I’m begging you,” she said. “Please tell us one fun fact about amphibians.”

  You didn’t seem particularly offended by it, though. You simply grinned, chewed your mouthful of schnitzel, swallowed, and said, “The word amphibian comes from Greek. What it means, or used to mean, is living a double life.”

  Bron put down her fork and stared at you. “Adam Kurlansky, that is the most profound thing I’ve heard all day.”

  You shrugged. “It’s just facts.”

  I know you dislike it when I scrutinize you too much, Kurl. But at the risk of being called a nosy little bugger again, can I simply state that you’re a good deal more handsome than I suspect you quite realize? You have a broad, Slavic face and a wide, smooth brow. Deep-set eyes. Small ears lying flat to your head. All of these in themselves could be considered neutral-to-positive attributes. There’s a pleasing angularity to your cheekbone and jaw that contrasts with the softness of your mouth.

  “A generous mouth,” they say in novels. However, at school very few people would describe your mouth as “generous,” because you keep it in a straight line. Similarly, your brow is locked into a slight crease. Eyelids slightly lowered. Jaw slightly clenched. I’ve observed these tiny efforts on your part to hold your face still because I’ve been laboring for months now to decode your expressionless expression, Kurl. It falls midway between I-don’t-care and don’t-mess-with-me. The moment you become distracted, it all changes, though. When you were cooking your schnitzel, for example—your face was completely different than I’ve ever seen it at school. And I saw the change again when we sat down to eat and everyone was exclaiming over the food.

  “This is incredible, Adam,” Trudie said. She held up a forkful of schnitzel to show the layers between the breading. “What all’s in it?”

  You said lemon peel, sardines, capers, and dill. Half the secret, you told us, was keeping the other dishes (in this case, the salad with sweet vinaigrette, the noodles in cream sauce) gentle in flavor so they don’t distract from the schnitzel. We all spent a minute or so quietly savoring the food, which really was amazing.

  And your face, Kurl, as we discussed the food! You can’t possibly be unaware of how hard we were all working, the whole evening, to see this change come over your face. Not just Shayna and Bron and me—even Lyle makes more jokes when you’re around, trots out all his most reliably crowd-pleasing stories for you. We’re all bending over backward to get you to crack a smile, because when you smile it feels like the sun coming out.

  You will point out, of course, that everyone does this. Everyone wears a different face at school. And you’ll point out that the extent to which I have trouble switching faces explains much about how I get treated at school. You’ll be right on both counts. But somehow with you the change is more extreme, like two different people. I wonder, Kurl, when you look in the mirror, do you ever get to see the unguarded face? Because I wish you could. It’s a wonder to behold.

  “Will you come with us to Paisley Park? Please?” Bron asked you at the table. Paisley Park After Dark—the thrice-yearly dance party advertised only twenty-four hours before the doors open and only to Prince’s most devout acolytes, a.k.a. his Facebook followers.

  “Don’t come if you have to work early tomorrow,” Lyle warned. “It’ll be a late night.”

  “We’re taking the day off, sort of,” you said. You told us that your uncle had been paid today for a couple of roofs, so he wouldn’t be in any shape to work tomorrow.

  “It’s a done deal, then,” Trudie said. “You’re coming with us tonight.”

  I’ve got to stop writing and get dressed for Paisley Park now. You’re downstairs watching TV with Rich, Trudie, and Lyle while Shayna and Bron are choosing what to wear.

  I just realized something. When you first arrived at our house and said you weren’t cooking at home because your uncle wasn’t feeling well, I guess what you must have meant was he wasn’t feeling sober. Have I got that right? If so, I’m really glad that tonight you had us to cook for, instead.

  Yours truly,

  Jo

  Sunday, October 25, 6 a.m.

  Dear Little Jo,

  You came downstairs last, so you didn’t see the reaction the girls got. Bron in bare shoulders and shiny gold overalls and glitter in her curls. Shayna in that little skirt and all that eye makeup. I mean your sister looked like a completely different person. I guess I’m used to seeing her in sweatpants and baggy T-shirts. She comes into the living room and goes, Hey, does anyone here know a guy named Axel?

  Dead silence. The adults all shoot each other these tense little glances.

  Shayna put her fists on her hips and goes, Oh come on. You all know him, don’t you? So who is he?

  I mean she’s not talking to me of course. I only recognized the guy’s name because of that postcard you told me about, the one she showed you and Bron at school that time.

  Rich and Trudie are both looking at Lyle. Waiting for him to decide what to say. He’s pretty red in the face. He stares down at his jacket clutched in his hands like Shayna is the sun, too bright to look at straight on.

  Finally Trudie goes, I don’t think your dad really wants to talk about Axel, honey.

  And Rich goes, You’re freaking us out a little bit, here, Shay—how much you look like your mom in that outfit.

  Rich! Trudie whispers at him.

  Right then you came downstairs, last of everyone. A woolen suit and a bow tie. I asked you what you’d been doing that whole time.

  Writing, you said, and you handed me a letter right in front of everybody.

  I admit I was embarrassed by it. I shoved the envelope in my pocket pretty fast. How are you going to dance in that costume? I said, and Shayna said, Oh my God, yes, tell him he can’t wear that.

  So we all spent some time bugging you about it: Jojo, you’re overdoing it again. Back in the 1920s or whenever your clothes were sewn, we’re pretty sure they didn’t have dance clubs. Maybe we should go find a speakeasy or a jazz hall. Et cetera.

  We parked in overflow and walked forever in that freezing wind and waited forever in that line. I started having second thoughts. I mean I’m not one for crowds and standing around. Or concerts in general. I never stay up late either. It was only just after 11 p.m. and I was already tired. Shayna had said she heard Prince plays till sunup sometimes. So I’m standing there in the line thinking sunup isn’t until eight this time of year. There’s no way I’ll make it.

  I tell you all that I’m not feeling that great, and maybe I’ll see if I can catch a train. That’s when Bron starts making her speech. I don’t understand how she does it. It’s like a superpower. She starts off only talking to us, our little group. Then she realizes other people are listening, so she turns and raises her voice and makes the whole crowd her audience.

  This is our chocol
ate factory right here, she says. We’ve each got a golden ticket in our pocket. This here is our Disneyland. Our Neverland, our Nirvana. We are the chosen ones. Prince is our religion, and Paisley Park is our Mecca. And if Prince is our religion and Paisley Park is our Mecca, then this right here is our pilgrimage, people! Tonight we are lowly pilgrims!

  We are the young of this earth, she’s saying. This, right here, is our revolution! I mean it’s not even making sense after a while. But even the security guys at the door are grinning and nodding along to what she’s saying: This is our time, and this is our music, and we gonna dance, muthafuckas!

  Don’t go, you said, but I was already staying. I mean who could go after a speech like that? And it was as if Prince heard Bron’s speech too. Maybe he did. It’s possible, if there are as many cameras in that place as Rich said. Anyway the doors finally opened and the line went fast.

  What Prince did is he thought up a magical place and wrote a song about it. Before you and the girls came downstairs Lyle played us the song called “Paisley Park.” When Prince was rich and famous enough he built the song into an actual place. I guess Elvis did that first with Graceland, but I don’t know if he hosted dance parties there.

  Now that I’m thinking about it, Prince sort of reminds me of you, Jo. I don’t know. Obviously it’s not the stilettos and spandex or his little wire glasses. But there’s something. How he created himself maybe. How he invented a world to live inside.

  There was this one moment toward the end (which luckily was 4 a.m., not 8 a.m.) when he was doing one of those endless guitar solos. Just tearing it up all across the front of the platform. I mean you could tell he had completely lost track of his band and even what song he was playing.

  We were standing right in front of him, and Bron was screaming how much she loved him. Shayna yanked my arm out of its socket, saying, Oh my God, look at him, just look at him. Prince went down on one knee in front of us like he was telling us a story with his guitar.