My Thanksgiving time travel story for your enjoyment

Once in a while, I put one of my own stories on this blog. They seem to get as many readers when I do this as they do when I get it published somewhere. And even if I did get this one published, it'd be hard to get it timed exactly right to come out right on Thanksgiving, which seems like the best time to read this. 

So here goes, one of my own stories.

 

Herald

At first, it annoyed me that Elmer made me learn time soaping from her in person. Truth be told, it annoyed me at second, too. Couldn’t she have just given me the password to a secret wiki page or something? Why had she made me practice with the dispenser in her basement over and over for months? And why had she made me go all the way into Greenpoint for one particular kind of apple fritter she just had to have before bringing it all the way back to her place in Brooklyn to practice?

Now that I was actually holding one of the bones to a four-story high baby Yoda, though, I was glad she’d made me do all the training in person. Soaping wasn’t about science or technique as much as it was about psychology in practice. Not really something a wiki page could teach you. It was a kind of Jedi mind trick, an irony not lost on me based on the balloon I was trying to keep more or less tied to the Earth. I was so nervous, I couldn’t even feel the bone—what viewers at home would call a rope—in my hands, and I half feared I’d be carried off into the sky with the baby Yoda. I guess the name of the thing was actually Grogo. I don’t know. I don’t have Disney Plus.

“This is more of a workout than I thought,” one of the other volunteers said to me, huffing as she said it and pulling down more than was necessary. She was short, and the physics of it pretty much dictated that all the taller handlers would be shouldering the real weight. She should have faked effort until we got to Herald Square to deliver her message. That was her real purpose in being here. That was all of our real purpose in being here. How else would the competition to stand in the cold all morning for free be so fierce?

I forget what her story was, what kind of message she was hoping to send as a stowaway. We’d all exchanged our stories in the pre-dawn dark. Hers was probably something about love. That’s what more than half of us were here for. It’s what got me into soaping in the first place. When I first reached out to Elmer to teach me, I wanted to make Elaine forget the things I’d said to her at Thanksgiving a year ago.

“Port side, a little more slack!” Elmer ordered the volunteers, running up and down the columns. “And don’t forget to smile! You’re in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Enjoy yourselves a little.”

We all tried to smile, but we forgot her command almost as soon as she moved around to the other side of the balloon. Who could smile when we were all so close to the moment of truth? To work right, time soaping required absolute focus at the right moment, and we all feared that if we focused too much on anything else before we got to the end, we’d wear ourselves out prematurely.

Having run from one end of a column to the other and back again, Elmer eased up to the front and slowed to a walk.

            “I know it’s hard to relax,” she said, in a voice low enough only the first row of spectators in Bryant Park could hear. “But trust me, your message will go out a lot better if you’re calm. You’ve got this. Good luck, washers.”

            With that, our backs straightened and our flagging arms grew strong again. Elmer was a good pilot. Actually, her name wasn’t Elmer. It was Nancy, but I hadn’t known that until she’d introduced herself in the wee hours of the morning as the pilot to the other balloon handlers.

 

            She’d had me call her Elmer from the first time we met. She said it’s what all the time soaping mentors went by. I guess it came from something they used to do a million years ago called Ham radio. Back then, before the Internet and wiki pages and helpful how-to TikToks to show you how to do everything, there was no way to learn the hobby except to have someone who’d been doing it a while show you. There were guidebooks and stuff, I guess, but there was a lot of equipment involved, and it was pretty complicated, so the best way to learn was to sit with an actual human guide. These guides were called Elmers. She told me why, but I forget. I’ve called her Elmer since I first found her through Bubble, which is like Craigslist, but on the dark web and only meant for time soapers.

            Dark times led to the dark web for me. After two years with Elaine, I’d said one stupid sentence at her parents’ house, and that was the end of it. I wanted Elmer to help me undo it, or to at least make it seem undone to Elaine.

 

            “We’ll pull up right at the end,” Elmer Nancy said to me in an even lower voice. “While we’re waiting, the actors will run on and do their thing. That’s your moment.”

            It wasn’t as cold as we’d hoped. It’s a lot easier to hide the dispenser over your ear if you’re wearing a hat. For that reason, most of the volunteers had started out with them on in the morning, but I was sweating so bad I had to take mine off back at Columbus Circle. The few still doggedly keeping theirs on looked like they’d been cooked in one of those roasting bags for turkeys. Hiding it in my pocket wasn’t a bad second option, though. I could still pull it back out when I needed it.

            “Remember,” Elmer Nancy advised us one more time, “You aren’t trying to convince anyone, because there’s nothing to convince them of. The way it is in your head is the way it is.”

           

“The way it is in your head is the way it is” is a mantra she’d been drilling into me since the first time we’d met. When I knocked on the door to her brownstone, she’d opened it quickly, snatched the box of pastries from me, pulled me inside with a quick glance down each side of the street, and took me to the basement. She’d inhaled both fritters and waited until the last bite had fully travelled down her gullet, her eyes closed to savor every hint of flavor. At some point, she decided she was done, opened her eyes, and that’s the first thing she said to me. The way it is in your head is the way it is.

I was confused, because I was hoping to make it so the way it was in my head wasn’t the way it really was anymore. I wanted to change the past, undo what I’d said. She said that’s not how time soaping worked. Time travel was impossible—another frequent truism of the time soaping community—but if you could convince someone that something else had happened in the past, didn’t that come to the same thing? Anyway, she said what I was feeling was regret, but that regret wasn’t how to change the past. If you transmitted even a sliver of regret, the dispenser wouldn’t work. You had to believe that the way you wish things were or the way things had been was the way they really were. That was the only way to change the mind of the receiver, and in so doing, to change the past.

 

We passed 37^th, and I found that now I was pulling harder on the bone than was necessary, wearing myself out as much as the woman next to me had been doing. We all were. We were in the zone now where the crowds thinned out, because the television broadcast limited viewing near Herald Square and the big finale. We were all getting close to show time. Volunteers patted their pockets with a free hand to make sure their dispensers were still there. We’d all been given these white and black jackets that said The Mandalorian on them, and we’d tucked our devices into them.

It was an open secret that nearly all the balloon handlers were there to time soap. At first, the parade had tried to stop it, but then they almost couldn’t get anyone to participate, so they had to relax a little bit. You were allowed to soap as long as you kept it reasonable. Convince the person you’d been crushing on that he’d actually been in love with you their whole life? Fine. Get your bosses to unfire you for that outburst? No problem. Just keep it discreet. The main time soaper on top of Macy’s was for the big corporations that paid for it. Your ideas were allowed to hitch a ride, but only if it wasn’t something that would go messing with their profits. One year, a soaper tried to convince the whole world that Santa Claus didn’t exist. For thirty minutes, capitalism seemed doomed, until Santa came along at the end of the parade and the corporate soapers managed to undo the damage just in time. Considering how well you have to understand the subtleties of the human heart to make soaping work, it’s amazing how well the folks who work for evil corporations do at it. Because of scares like that in the past, you could only get into the parade now if you had someone who’d vouch for you. Elmer Nancy had gotten me in. She’d been a balloon pilot for years. Nobody questioned her.

I thought one more time about scrapping the mission Elmer Nancy had given me, of going back to the original plan of trying to soap Elaine into thinking I’d never said what I’d said. It was so stupid. Her parents had kept pushing wine on me, and I don’t usually drink, but I didn’t want to be rude. And then it took so long to get dinner out, I just kept getting drunker and drunker. Elaine’s mom, whom I just called Mrs. Wanjiru, said that she hoped I wouldn’t find her cooking too strange. She’d never seen a turkey until she was twenty-five, she said.

“I’m sure if you can cook a warthog, you can cook a turkey,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Wanjiru both laughed, but Elaine went cold, and she dropped my hand she’d been holding on the couch as we watched the parade. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was angry. I would have asked what I said that was wrong, but someone named Jordin Sparks came on to perform, and suddenly I realized that I’d always loved her music and I pulled out my phone to download all of her songs on Spotify.

Elaine barely spoke during dinner. I should have been concerned, but I was, for reasons I didn’t stop to consider, so excited to go book a trip on a Disney Cruise Line, I just couldn’t bring myself to think about it. It wasn’t until after dinner when I was taking Elaine home that I realized how badly I’m messed up. I didn’t catch everything she said, but as words like stupid and Americentric and insulting and racist burst out, each one popped a bubble of thought that had been floating in my mind, bubbles having to do with a movie I suddenly wanted to watch or Broadway show I suddenly wanted to see or how glad I was that Al Roker was still alive and how much I hoped he’d be back next year.

I tried to stammer out some kind of explanation. Wait, did I want to explain? Should I just apologize? But if I apologized, would that mean I thought I was totally wrong? Hadn’t her parents just made a joke about how easily I got sunburned, and wasn’t I just trying to make us all comfortable with each other by making it okay for us to tell jokes we wouldn’t say in public? I felt like maybe I was two-thirds wrong and one-third right, but that my two-thirds wrongness was mitigated by having been a hundred percent soused. But I couldn’t both apologize and explain at the same time. I had to pick one or the other, and it confused me so badly I chose neither, and I yelled at her instead, and we were done by the time I pulled into her driveway.

That’s why I’d volunteered. We’d all volunteered for some reason similar to that. I wanted to make her think I’d never said it. Was I going to punt that all away now because Elmer Nancy had filled my head full of talk about responsibility to society?

There were more delays as we got closer to the finale in front of Macy’s. Some acts performing in Herald Square hadn’t had to march the whole way—who was going to make Cher wave along the whole damn parade route?—and they had to be weaved into the rotation so they could perform in front of the cameras. It didn’t really seem right to me. Was this a parade or a lip-synch concert? If something couldn’t be marched along a parade route, did it belong in a parade? But there was big money paying to put those acts in, so the definition of a parade got stretched as long as the route along 6^th Avenue.

I was waiting for one of those acts to go on. That was going to be my moment. If I held to my course, that is. Elmer Nancy had seemed so convincing in her basement when she’d asked me to do it, I couldn’t tell her no. But now I was thinking back to Thanksgiving a year ago and reliving how lonely I’d been in the year since, and I didn’t care about the world. I wanted Elaine back.

 

“Time soaping isn’t time travel,” she’d said to me when she first pulled out a dispenser in her basement and started to show me the basics of it. “It was invented as sort of a side effect of the search for time travel, though.”

I tried to listen as I turned the dispenser over and around in my hands. It looked like the kind of headset we’d all had to start using for video meetings when the pandemic started, the kind with a pullout microphone, only the microphone was sort of a jagged ball and it was supposed to go to the back of your skull instead of in front of your mouth.

“Scientists and nations tried for a long time to discover time travel,” she said. “But they finally decided it was impossible. The universe protects causality, it turns out.”

I thought I could guess what “causality” meant, although it was a word I’d never used before. It didn’t help me to follow what she was saying, though.

“Early on, we realized that you couldn’t send, say, a whole person into the past or future. Their mass was too great. In order to travel in time, you’d have to somehow have negative mass, so you could go faster than the speed of light. Nothing we know of has a negative mass, of course, and a whole human being has a mass so large it couldn’t begin to get near that fast.”

I install heating and cooling systems for a living. I can read a schematic and I understand how electricity works. I can even do mental math pretty well, which has given me the false impression over the years that I’m smart in science and math. But this stuff was over my head. I thought hard of a question I could ask that would sound halfway smart, enough that she didn’t kick me out for being too stupid to learn.

“If you can’t send a whole person into the past, what about a message, like a radio message? Those go about the speed of light, don’t they?”

“We used to think there was some hope in that,” she told me. “But over time, we started to think about it. Let’s say you could send yourself a message in the future. So you start to send it, but as you’re about to send it, a message comes to you from the future telling you to destroy the machine. So you destroy it, but by doing so, you make it so the device never existed, meaning you couldn’t have gotten the message from the future in the first place. It makes no sense.”

            She brushed crumbs from her blouse. I didn’t know if she really understood physics or she was a crank. She seemed a little undignified for a physicist.

            “Aren’t you just describing what makes sci-fi stories about time travel confusing? Just because it’s confusing doesn’t mean it’s impossible, right? I mean, the soapers work, don’t they? If not, what am I doing here?”

“Oh, they work alright,” she said. “But those paradoxes aren’t just potential plot holes. They’re the reason we know time travel can’t work. Have you ever heard of Hawking’s cocktail party?”

I knew who Stephen Hawking was, and I thought of making a joke about how lively a party a guy in a wheelchair could have thrown, but then I realized that jokes like that were the whole reason I was looking to go into the past to fix my love life in the first place.

“Hawking threw a cocktail party in 2009. It had champagne and caviar and balloons and everything. But he didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. He figured that if anyone actually figured out time travel in the future, they’d be able to get the invitation and come back in time to attend. Since nobody attended, he figured that time travel was impossible.”

I stood there trying to understand how the timing of that worked.

“So if time travel is impossible, what am I doing here?”

“Time travel doesn’t work because the universe doesn’t violate the law of causality,” she said. She was standing in front of a wooden workbench under a long, hanging fluorescent tube light. Dust was falling on her, and she looked gray and indistinct.

“A city is burned because a cow kicked over a lamp. If the cow doesn’t kick over the lamp, the city doesn’t burn,” she said. “Everything causes something else. Time travel would alter the series of causes and events, and the universe just doesn’t like that, it would seem.”

“So the dispenser…”

“There is something, though, that confuses causes and events all the time. The human brain. If you can convince the human brain that the past was something other than it was, you can make someone see the whole chain of causation differently. For them, at least, the message got there before the event. Get enough people to change their perception, and the world, at least this world run by human brains, really does change.”

This sounded like an episode of something I’d seen.

“You mean like a brain worm? Something that inserts itself into your memory and makes you think it was there all along? Like Photoshop for somebody else’s brain?”

“That’s a little bit crude, but it’s not too far off, I guess. People’s memories aren’t really all that stable to begin with. They’re always looking to rewrite their past to what they wish had happened. They just need a little push. That’s what the time soapers are. The same way soap changes water molecules so they penetrate clothes better, the time soap dispenser sort of makes the brain a little more absorptive. Enough that you can send a thought to it and it will accept that thought as its own.”

I felt a little disappointed. I wanted to go back in time and unsay what I’d said. But here she was talking about some kind of hypnosis or something where I’d just convince Elaine I’d never said it. What would happen when some stimulus made her snap out of it and she realized she hated me again?

“Of course, to make it stick takes a lot of power. I’m talking 1.21 gigawatts kind of power here.”

I felt like that was a reference she expected me to get, but I had no idea what it meant.

“When the first bubble makers were being made, it was nations that paid for them. You can see why the CIA would be interested in technology that could make all our enemies think they’d already lost, or that they loved us after all. But all of our adversaries developed similar technology at about the same time, meaning they kept cancelling each other out. Every nation still has a dispenser or two, just to keep things equal, but they’re useless now, except for making sure nobody else takes over the world through suggestion.”

“So this dispenser I’m holding…”

“Is useless in itself. It’s far too weak to soap a brain on its own. It has to hitch a ride on something much more powerful. You need your signal to hide in a much stronger signal.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Well, the biggest soaper still in existence is at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” she said. The dust below the light shimmered like a halo around her head. I couldn’t tell what color her hair was.

“The parade? You mean Santa and Miracle on 34^th Street and Snoopy balloons?”

“That’s the one.”

“What the hell is a soaper doing there?”

“Nations can’t use soapers for defense purposes, but companies can. They just have to keep their purposes below the level of something another nation would care about enough to fight it.”

“So who is behind the Macy’s Parade soaper?” I asked.

“Oh, whoever has a shitty movie or television show nobody cares about but which they need people to care about. So they have a huge and powerful soaper sitting on the roof of Macy’s. When a balloon for some Nickelodeon show goes on the air, they hit the soaper and suddenly, children all over America who are watching the parade at Aunt Sally’s find they need to borrow their parents’ phones immediately to stream the show. A singer nobody has paid attention to in a decade suddenly has a resurgence. A musical about to open its run that nobody has bought tickets to suddenly sells out.”

“How does it work so well?” I asked. I was hungry and wishing I’d gotten a pastry for myself.

“Think about it. Everyone watching the parade is in some kind of awkward family setting. They’re at a house they’re anxious to leave. They’re hosting family members who annoy them. They’re meeting their future in-laws and they’re nervous. And it’s not even noon yet, so they’ve got hours left to go. And here’s this parade of floating balloons and vanilla announcers losing their absolute fucking minds with excitement over it. It’s all very disorienting. Leaves the mind very open to soaping, especially when the world’s most powerful commercial-grade soaper is beaming thoughts at you.”

 

We were making the turn onto 34^th Street now. Elmer Nancy was busy guiding us through the turn, which wasn’t easy. It would have been challenging for the Marine Corps, getting the left flank to wheel while the right flank held firm. I was near the front of the balloon, and I looked into the baby Yoda’s eyes. They were black and expressionless with no pupils, sort of blank the way an ancient Greek statue was. It was as if the baby Yoda didn’t want to influence anyone with its own emotions. It wasn’t going to tell me what to do. Within your own heart look you must.

We were in Herald Square now, within site of the front of Macy’s and the cameras and the performances. I could almost hear Al Roker, now back at the parade, frothing at the mouth and about to give himself a heart attack with excitement.

“Okay, we’re going to hold up here while they bring an act on in front of us,” Elmer Nancy said. Then, lower, she added, “Clear thoughts. Best wishes.” She was looking at me when she said it. I still couldn’t tell what color hair she had, and I swore her face looked different than it had before. I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the voice in my head asking me one last time for a favor. Remind me of why I did this, it said.

As we held Grogu in front of the performance area, a DeLorean pulled out in front of us. Its doors popped open, and out came an Einstein-looking older man in a white hazmat suit and a younger man with curly hair, tennis shoes, and a red sleeveless vest. Music came on, and they danced and lip-synched their way through a routine. I couldn’t really hear what the song was about, but I thought maybe it was something about science and time travel. Eight very attractive female dancers came on, shaking their way through what was probably the exposition to whatever musical they were brainwashing people into wanting to see.

Elmer Nancy had said it was a movie when she was a kid. A series of movies, actually. It had meant a lot to her, but she didn’t think I needed to watch them in order for me to help her. In fact, maybe it was better if I never watched Back to the Future. I’d have a clearer head that way.

A week before the parade, she’d told me what she wanted from me.

“I need you to send a message that time travel is possible. That if someone only works hard enough, they’ll be able to find a way to make it happen. I want you to say that this has been a dream since someone was a kid and first watched those movies.”
            “Who am I sending this message to?” I asked her.

“To me.”

 

I pulled out my dispenser and put it on my head. I would only get the chance to soap once. All the companies who paid Macy’s for a spot in the show had their own bubbles going out. You could sneak in a small message here or there, but if you tried to soap a second time, they’d catch you and squelch your message. I had to decide. Would I help out Elmer Nancy or would I wait until Back to the Future the Musical cleared off the stage and go send Eileen a message of love with all the other balloon holders?

Grogu’s eyes seemed to grow a shade darker, as if to emphasize that the answer wasn’t anywhere outside me. To send a message with my own brain that would implant in the brain of another, I had to be absolutely clear in my own mind. I looked at Elmer Nancy. She gave me a slight smile and blinked slowly. Not really a blink so much as a message of understanding. I know it’s hard, she said. I’d do it myself if I could soap my own mind. Wouldn’t the whole world be easier for all of us if we only could?

The song changed. You gotta get back in time, it said. Over and over, it said it. I looked into Grogu’s eyes and thought yes, you’ve got to get back in time. You can do that through time travel. Isn’t this a wonderful story and not in any way convoluted and isn’t this musical delightful and not at all a shameless cash grab aimed at Gen X and their sentimental money? This is brilliant, I thought, and I tried to mean it. This is brilliant, and everyone should aim to be an eccentric scientist in a hazmat suit with white Einstein hair who turns a car into a time machine. Ignore the plot holes. It makes sense. Do this with your life.

 

The actors cleared off the stage. Elmer Nancy directed us forward. The crowd cheered. We were on, and while sixty balloon holders sent their desperate messages as inconspicuously as they could, the announcers said something cheery. Then our time was up and we were headed off to go deflate the balloon by sitting on it until all the air was out.

Had it worked? After the balloon was folded and put away for next year, I couldn’t tell that Elmer Nancy was any different. All the people I’d marched with for the last few hours were texting the loved ones they’d just tried to soap. Some got immediate responses and some were still waiting, chiding themselves for not having believed enough.

Relieved at last of her piloting duties, Elmer Nancy strode over to me with such determination, I was afraid she was coming to yell at me for not having done my job right. Instead, she asked me to go eat at a place in Koreatown she knew was open.

 

I let her order for me. I didn’t know a damn thing about Korean food, and I wasn’t even sure I could locate Korea on a map. A year ago, I might have made a joke about Gangnam style or whether the restaurant served dog, but I didn’t make jokes like that anymore. I was going to shut up, eat what she told me, and wait for her to talk.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to ask someone to do this for me,” she said. She wasn’t half bad with chopsticks, and she was digging into a number of bowls filled with green or red plants I didn’t know.

“Why hasn’t it worked before?” I asked, wondering if our talking about it this way meant it also hadn’t worked this time.

“Oh, it’s worked, but each time, the same conglomerate that sponsors the Macy’s time soaper has gone back and erased the memory. So I have to fight back.”

“Why would they care what opinion you hold of a silly 80s movie?”

“Because that movie is what inspired me to first get interested in time travel. Which then led me to realize that it would never work, but time soaping might. Which then led me to invent the technology.”

“You mean you’re….”

“Nancy O, the inventor of the time soaper, the technology nobody admits exists but every powerful entity on Earth is using.”

And suddenly I saw her. The brilliant Korean-American scientist even I’d heard about. She was quoted on every documentary about anything involving science. But I, and probably most of the country, didn’t know what she was famous for or why everyone thought she was so brilliant.

“I never wanted to make the soaper for commercial or government purposes,” she said. “I originally thought of it as a tool for therapists. Something to help people out of their bad habits. If you think you’ve never smoked, it’s a lot easier to quit smoking. If you think you’re assertive enough to tell your boss he’s creeping you out with his sexual jokes, you’ll be assertive.”

I tried stabbing one of the green things enough to get the pointy end of the chopstick through it and use it as a skewer. It only worked enough to flatten it out. Elmer Nancy picked it up and put it on a little plate in front of me. I stared at it, not sure how to get it from the plate to my mouth. I wished she’d have just fed it to me.

“Of course, you can’t develop something like a soaper without the resources of a big institution. I started with my university research lab, hoping that’s all I would need, but before long, we needed help from the government, and then industry heard about it and got involved. We didn’t just need help with equipment and power, we needed test subjects to send and receive the ideas. We needed psychologists to figure out what kind of suggestion would work. It got away from me very quickly.”

I gave up on using the chopsticks like pincers and just picked up the green thing with my fingers and put it in my mouth. It was oily and spicier than I expected.

“There was a scary moment there where it seemed like governments were going to be able to use it for domination through hypnosis. We got lucky that it was possible to cancel out soap with more soap. But then companies came in to use it for advertising, which of course had been their intent all along. I resisted. I started to speak out in public, making it known to everyone that this technology existed and what it was being used for.”

A server piled meat on a grill. She didn’t look at me, but Elmer Nancy spoke to her in Korean, and the server handed the tongs to her and left.

“I suppose you can guess why not everyone knows about it even though I’ve made it known to the world?” she asked me.

I thought about it. Normally, I’d have failed to come up with the answer right away, written myself off as an idiot, then panicked and lost the thread completely. For some reason, though, this time I didn’t. I kept on track. What was the most likely reason? And soon, I had it.

“The companies that use the soaper erased it from everyone’s mind?” I said.

“Exactly. Of course, soaping isn’t an exact science. It’s kind of frothy, so to speak. They couldn’t completely wash away the memory of something that had so fully gotten into the public consciousness. And there are irresponsible uses of it that threaten its secrecy. A few years ago, they loaned a soaper to a rich man who wanted to be a politician. He started using it all over the place to make everyone think he hadn’t said things he’d clearly said before, or that he hadn’t done things he’d definitely done. It actually got him elected president. It would have worked even better, but he was so capricious about how he used it, the time soaping would start overlapping with other time soaping, and soon the people he was trying to influence just started running into each other. The companies eventually had to steal it back from him to get him to quit messing up their tool. So there is still some public knowledge of it they can’t erase, but it exists somewhere between rumor and conspiracy theory. Only people desperate enough to need it end up finding out the truth.”

People desperate enough to need it. People like me. I’d screwed things up with Elaine. Elaine, who I’d loved from the minute she met me at the door when I showed up to fix her thermostat. She’d been holding a six-pound dog in one hand and a spatula covered in cake batter in the other. She was wearing a purple tank top and white shorts in the middle of winter because her thermostat wouldn’t shut off and her apartment was eighty-eight degrees. When she said, “The damn thing won’t shut off, I’m sweating my tits off in here,” I’d thought that if I were around her, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling sad again. And here I’d been without her for a year and I’d been sad the whole time.

“I’ve been playing a game of cat and mouse with the big corporations,” Elmer Nancy told me. They half erase my mind to get me to quit trying to tell the public about their tool or to develop a rival to it, then I, who have just enough memory of being a part of it to know I need to reverse it, manage to get my memory back. I fight them for a while, then they manage to get the next soap savant to override my memory again.”

She seemed calm for someone whose brain was a battleground and knew it. She had the serenity of a baby Yoda balloon. The barbecued meat, which she’d handled herself, was half gone.

“If you already know who you are, more or less, what do you need people like me to remind you of it for?”

“Because I want to design something so good, it breaks the corporate soapers altogether. Something that people can use to improve their lives, not just something companies can use to sell crap to us. To do that, I need to believe I can with all my heart. I need to believe I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. I need a story about having seen a story about time travel when I was a kid and making up my mind that was what I was going to do.”

“But you know I put it there. How can you still think it’s real?”

“It honestly doesn’t matter if you know it’s made up. If the memory is there, it’s real. People who’ve been through trauma keep living the same thing over and over even after they know it’s gone. The dispenser does the same thing, but in a more useful way.”

I was still hungry, but I was out of water and didn’t see the waitress anywhere to ask for more. Without water, I was afraid to keep eating.

“Each time, I come back a little better,” she said. “A little smarter about how it all works. That much soaping, that much openness to suggestion in the brain—it doesn’t make you softer. It makes you stronger. And here’s what I think I realize this time, now that you’ve helped me break free again. Causation. It isn’t what you think it is. You aren’t miserable because of what you said. You’re miserable because of what you didn’t say afterwards. There’s no soap in the universe that can take back the worst things we’ve done. To some extent, you can’t change causes, even in people’s minds. But you can change effects, and when you do that, it changes how people perceive the cause itself. The way to change the past isn’t in the past. It’s in the future, in how you react to what you did.”

With that, she tucked into the meal and didn’t speak again until she’d cleaned up everything on the table. I was hungry after marching all morning, but I looked around helplessly for someone to ask for water while she finished it all. When the last morsel was gone, she stood up and dropped what looked like a poker chip on the table. I picked it up and looked at it. It had an engraving of bubbles on one side and Buddha on the other.

“Here you go. Congratulations, you’re an Elmer now. Use it wisely, and pass on what you’ve learned.”

After she had gone, I realized she’d left me to pay the bill.

 

On the train back to Queens, I signed up for a free trial subscription to Disney Plus. Even if you knew you were being manipulated, even if you were part of the manipulation, literally pulling the strings the whole time, the trick could still work on you. I started to watch the first episode of the Mandalorian.

When I came out of the station by home, I turned off the show. I wanted to do something about the future that would change not the past, but the effect the past was having on me. I pulled up a text box for Elaine. My phone still remembered the last angry thing she’d sent to me a year ago.

I thought of explaining myself, of telling her that of course I hadn’t meant it like that and how could she think that I could, after I’d learned so much because of her I could even tell when she was speaking Kikuyu and when she was speaking Swahili. I could have tried to explain it, but explanations don’t change the future or the past. I could only think of one thing powerful enough to do that. So I wrote Elaine nothing is right without you and nothing ever will be and I’m so sorry and I sent it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

           

           

Literary tourism: "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe (O. Henry Anthology 2025)

I joked a couple of posts ago about how doing a compare and contrast was a lazy way to make it seem like I was really engaging with a story while not actually working all that hard. It's partly true and partly just a self-effacing joke. There is still some thought involved, but the built-in structure of comparing two stories does tend to make it easier to decide what you're going to write about. There's nothing really wrong about comparing one short story to another as a way of teasing out what's interesting about the one you're looking at. But darned if I'm not here two stories later in the 2025 O.Henry Anthology and the first thought that comes to me after reading "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe is that I should compare it to "Sickled" by Jane Kalu, which appeared earlier in this same anthology.

They're both set in Nigeria, and both have teenage girls with serious illnesses. Both sick girls even have the same name--Ije. One family is a middle-class Igbo family with two daughters living in Lagos. The other is an Igbo family with two daughters that has recently fallen out of middle class status. In "Sickled," the older sister of the sick girl is the first-person narrator, while in "Miracle," the mother is the first-person narrator. 

One thing I like about the O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. "The Best Short Stories," compared to Best American Short Stories, the other main literary fiction best-of short story anthology to come out every year, is that the editors are willing to pick stories that play off of one another like this. BASS is more likely to pick one Nigerian story and, having checked a box off of its list in order to achieve a goal of a diverse menu of stories, move on to some other part of the world. O.Henry is willing to put stories in an anthology that invite comparisons, that take on more meaning when juxtaposed with the other story. 

Until this year, this thematic gathering was sometimes a lot easier to see, because O.Henry didn't follow BASS in ordering its stories in alphabetical order of the author's surname. From what I can tell, that's new to O.Henry this year. Instead, O.Henry would group stories based on their interplay with one another. In 2019, they put five coming-of-age stories back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I wish they had done that here with these two stories, which I'm pretty sure were both picked partly because of how well they complement one another. 

A different direction

In spite of how neatly they'd provide a compare-and-contrast project for me, one that would allow me to wrap up the anthology and move on to whatever comes next, I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to use this story as cause to muse for a moment on the act of reading a short story set in a place like Nigeria as a Western reader with no deep knowledge of the country.

Unigwe was born and raised in Nigeria but lives in the United States. While Nigeria is full of English speakers, typically, when we read a story by a Nigerian set in Nigeria, that writer often has had a chance to leave Nigeria for a significant part of their formative years. For example:

• Chinua Achebe: born in Nigeria, traveled for work to London occasionally before making it big with Things Fall Apart. Lived most of the last twenty-three years of his life in the United States.

• Wole Soyinka: Educated in both Nigeria and England.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Moved to the U.S. at nineteen to study.

• Ben Okri: Spent early childhood in London

• Teju Cole: Born in the U.S., raised in Lagos, moved back to U.S. at seventeen for college. 

That means the experience someone like me is getting is mediated by someone with significant Western understanding. Of course that's a good thing. Great writers like these, with a foot in both worlds, are able to translate their understanding of one world into the other in such a way that someone like me can more easily digest the information. But that ease of digestion comes with a cost. It's like eating at a Nigerian restaurant in the U.S. that alters favorites for American diners. It's close, but not quite the real thing. Maybe I wouldn't like the real thing, and if I'm being honest, yeah, I'd probably prefer a meal I will like if I'm only going to eat once or a few times. But if it were really going to matter that I understood Nigeria on a deeper level, then I really need to go eat the real thing. Even if I hate it. Even if it gives me terrible diarrhea. 

American military forces have been in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. There's an enormous apparatus there for Americans stationed in the country, one that allows them to live in Korea without feeling too lost most of the time. You can go have Korean "experiences," but they're curated by locals who know how to make the experience enjoyable and safe. Some Americans go away from their time in Korea thinking they really understand something about Korea, but they don't. They can't speak a lick of Korean. They've never eaten anything but bulgogi and kalbi. 

I don't know Korea like a Korean would, but because I speak passable Korean, I had a different experience when I've been there from what most Americans would. I at least have been in conversations with locals in their own language, seen bad, good, and indifferent behavior from people who didn't care that I was watching. I've eaten food that made me sick and food that isn't in any restaurant in the States. I've karaoked 70s Korean tunes and followed Korean news for domestic, rather than foreign, consumption. 

None of this makes me a Korea scholar, but it does mean I understand what farcical bullshit the "Korean experience" experience is. It's the same thing for people who think they're becoming cosmopolitan by checking off countries on a travel list, thinking that because they've been to the twelve places it's safe for tourists to go, they're worldly now. They're actually worse than people who've never traveled, because now they'll substitute their bullshit experience for just being humble enough to admit they don't know anything. The two-star general with a Korean driver who interprets for him and takes him everywhere is quite likely more mistaken in his understanding of Korea than the dude from his hometown who can't locate Korea on a map. 

Reading stories like this is the literary equivalent of a three-day trip somewhere

Look, I'm not in any way ripping on "Miracle" here. It's a fine story. It leaves the reader in the same place of moral ambiguity as the readers of the real-life news event that inspired the story. Yeah, you know that paying an unfortunate person for the kidney is immoral, but also, it's kind of understandable, and when the person doesn't end up fulfilling their end of the bargain, maybe you even feel like they've committed about one-eighth of a sin. It would be good grist for "Literary Court," if I didn't think I'd played that out already. 

There's nothing wrong with the story. In fact, it's the story's total okayness that makes it a good candidate to be the one where I finally stop and more fully consider the notion of including stories like this in an anthology meant for Western readers. (Also, it's the last story in the anthology, and now this post can serve as a wrap-up, because I was thinking to talk about the same thing in a wrap-up anyway.) 

I can guarantee that some of those Western readers of this book know even less about Nigeria than I do, and they're going to use the occasional story that a Western anthology uses to "round out" its collection to fake knowledge, either to others or to themselves. They'll feel like they've done something to become citizens of the world, the same way some travelers congratulate themselves on making themselves better people for having gone to Budapest. It doesn't. Without serious work to understand other parts of the world, traveling just upgrades you from ignorant to ignorant and privileged enough to travel. 

Let's say you are a securities trader. You try to fulfill your democratic duty by following the news, going deeper now and again by reading a longer story on the weekends. You've traveled a bit for work, say to Dubai and London. Most of your time and cognitive energy is spent on your job, but you do the best you can outside of that to improve your mind. You only can read one work of fiction a year, and since this is a highly regarded anthology, you make that your choice. Now these two stories are most of what you know about Nigeria. That, and a few stories you've heard from a woman at work who's from there. How does any of this affect you when you hear the White House, say, threatening military action against Nigeria for persecuting Christians?  

I'm not sure. I like to think that maybe it at least makes you think that Nigeria is a complicated place, and a simple take like "Nigeria persecutes Christians" is probably not quite getting to the heart of it. After all, aren't the parents in "Sickled" super, over-the-top Christians? And is anyone persecuting them? Aren't they doing a good job of ruining their own lives? That's possible, but maybe the well-meaning-but-busy futures trader takes away from it that Nigeria is a dangerous place, full of violence, because that's certainly a take one could have from "Miracle in Lagos Traffic." An alien reading this story might draw that conclusion. Mightn't a reader like this have an intuition where it seems plausible that Nigeria is persecuting Christians, or at least that it is inept enough to allow large-scale persecution. The government in "Miracle" doesn't exactly seem active in preventing crime. And the government in "Sickled" is a military dictatorship, although it's from decades ago. Come to think of it, our reader wonders, maybe those Christians in the story from decades ago are facing hardship now? He'll never know, because now he has to get back to work.

Not sure what the conclusion is

So what would I recommend, not putting stories like these in an anthology? Probably not. I mean, it's still a good story, and it shouldn't get ruled out because it might make someone smug and dumb instead of just dumb. But I do think part of the goal of making these anthologies "well-rounded"--one of the most unfortunate clichés in English, but okay, let's use it--is to give people at least some kind of cursory look into the minds of people from very different backgrounds. Maybe it's not so much to "teach a little about Nigeria" as it is to just experience Nigeria as a setting in a story in which the main point is to live through the psyche of a character in that setting. But some learning about Nigeria does happen. I Googled what a harmattan was while reading the story. I'll never remember that in a month, but maybe it gave me one trillionth of the feeling of living in Lagos for a second. It made me look up the news article about the senator who tried to buy a kidney for his daughter. A window into a few tableaux isn't deep knowledge, but it is knowledge of a sort. I'm not sure I can answer the question of whether something is better than nothing or whether a little learning is a dangerous thing.  

Reading stories like these, unless you happen to have done pretty thorough research or have a lot of experience with the culture coming into it, requires discipline. It also requires humility to prevent your self from making wide generalizations based on a narrow window into a fictional-but-based-on-at-least-some-truth world. Most humans aren't that disciplines, though. They take one fact they know and extrapolate wildly from it. They say Emily Dickinson's poems aren't worth reading because they heard somewhere she lived alone and was weird. They write off North Korea as a credible threat because Kim Jong Un has a funny haircut. So there's a bit of a risk to stories like these, curated by writers who know us so well, they don't let us get lost and terrified in a foreign land. 

O.Henry does something else that BASS doesn't ordinarily do: it included a few stories in translation. If I had to use some kind of fictional narrative to introduce someone to South Korea, I think I'd be more likely to use a novel in translation or even a soap opera with subtitles rather than a story written originally in English by a Korean-American. There is something quite different that happens when you experience art in which a culture is representing itself to itself than with art where a skillful guide represents a culture, knowing it's intended mainly for someone outside that culture. 

Ideally, we'd all have time for both kinds of stories, both those from inside the culture and those created specifically for export. I don't want to rule out the exports. I've certainly written more than my share of those stories myself, based on the hope that I had done enough work to present at least some truth from a different culture back to my own native one. My only point is that it seems to me that most Western readers get more of the literature meant for export, and that when you're consuming this, you have to have an extra level of vigilance to prevent thinking it gives you more knowledge than it does. 

 

The shortest analysis I've ever written: "Strange Fruit" by Yah Yah Schofield

"Strange Fruit" by Yah Yah Scholfield takes the Billie Holliday song by the same name and runs with it. It extends the song's metaphor of a lynched black body, hanging from a tree in the American South, as a kind of fruit the tree has produced. In the story, an entire community of agricultural workers of color works to harvest the "fruit." A very short story, its development of the metaphor ends quickly, and in the end, it produces a brief, albeit jarring, patchwork of images. 

A merciful compare and contrast post so I can slack off: "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. The Best Short Stories, is no different. I need to catch my breath. How wonderful, then, that I can do a compare and contrast post about "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih. It's the kind of post where it looks like I'm trying, but really the analysis kind of writes itself.

What am I comparing "The Three Niles" to?

I'll be comparing and contrasting it with "The Suitcase" by Meron Hadero, which was in the 2016 Best American Short Stories, the year before I started blogging all the way through it. Meron's story came to mind while reading "The Three Niles" because both were about children of immigrants to the U.S. from the Horn of Africa, and both involved trips made by those children back to the homeland of their parents. 

What's similar about them?

Both stories have children who go to the countries their parents came from, Sudan for "The Three Niles" and Ethiopia for "The Suitcase." Although I hate it when people treat all things African like they're the same and like Africa is one big country with a shared culture and heritage, in the case of Sudan and Ethiopia, there really is a lot that's shared between the two. They're both part of the Horn of Africa, which tends to have a lot of commonalities between countries. They even have their own regional quasi-UN, called IGAD. (Don't quibble about that characterization. It's close enough.) Both Ethiopia and Sudan are immensely proud of the Nile River and their country's share in the history of that cradle of civilization. This pride in the river isn't in "The Suitcase" the way it shows up in "The Three Niles," but it is a commonality between the two countries. Right now, Ethiopia is involved in Sudan's civil war, and Sudan is involved in Ethiopia's. The countries share a porous border.

Both "the boy" in "The Three Niles" and Saba, the protagonist of "The Suitcase," struggle with language. Saba isn't great at Amharic, the language of her relatives, and "the boy" is pretty bad at Sudanese Arabic. In both stories, the returnees from America are feasted and celebrated by relatives while in the homeland, but neither knows how to repay their hospitality or even to carry on much of a conversation with them. 

Both stories contain their primary image or symbol in the title.

Both protagonists feel, in different ways, that they "don't belong here." Saba thinks this explicitly, while it is simply implicit in the boy's every thought, word, and attitude. But here's about where the similarities end.

Obvious differences

Saba is twenty; the boy is thirteen. Saba wants to fit in and become more Ethiopian during her month trip to Addis Ababa; the boy just wants his three-day stint in Sudan, on the outskirts of Khartoum, to end as soon as possible. Saba, who actually did live in Ethiopia when she was very young, wants to connect with Ethiopia to be more fully herself; the boy, who has never been to Sudan before, wants to deny his Sudanese heritage, because he feels that it has nothing to do with his true self. He doesn't even want to be called by his name in Sudanese Arabic. In short, Saba is there of her own accord and wants to be there, while the boy is going purely out of what flagging sense of loyalty he has to his father. 

Photo by Humera Afrid. The boy is kind of a sacrificial lamb in this story, giving up part of himself for his father. But he doesn't give more than he has to.

Less obvious differences

While it's very easy to see not just the outward differences in age and sex between the boy and Saba but also the huge gap in dispositions toward their ancestral home, it might be harder to see the difference in how the major symbols in both stories are working. In "The Suitcase," the major symbol, according to my highly advanced ability in literary analysis, is the suitcase. Saba has brought it with her and now needs to pack to go back home to America. She has actually brought two suitcases with her, one with her clothes and the other with gifts from her family in America to all of her family in Ethiopia. Now that she is headed back, the family in Ethiopia wants to fill that second suitcase with gifts of their own for Saba to take back. They have too many gifts, though, and they are arguing about what to take out. The choice is given to Saba, who, pressed for time to make it to her return flight, decides to dump out her other suitcase, the one with all her clothes, in order to make room for all of the gifts. 

It's such a neat and apt symbol, one that serves as a metaphor for Saba's own process of identity shaping. In order to let in what Ethiopia has to give her, she literally has to empty out her own identity, in the form of the clothes she loves so much. She has brought something to them, and she leaves it there with her family. When she goes back again, it will still be there. None of her identity is lost, but it is reapportioned. The family shares not only gifts, but their core selves with one another, and so bits of who everyone is are shared across continents. I am often mystified when people talk about being moved by literary fiction stories, but this story did move me. It's about as happy a story as one of these anthologies will ever give you.

With "The Three Niles," I have to admit that the symbolism tricked me. The boy resists everything he sees while in Sudan with his father, from the Arabic language to prayers to lamb meat to even remembering who the relatives introduced to him are. At one point, the boy "hated every single person in that courtyard for what they made him do, what they reminded him of." What they remind him of is his cultural inheritance, the one the boy thinks belongs to his father but not to him. That's why when the boy once heard someone in America call his father the N word over the boy's head, he convinced "himself that word, that agony, was his father's lot and not his." This was true because of "how unlike his father he was." 

But I thought, near the end of the story, that Sudan was going to sneak into the boy in spite of himself. The boy has noted how "effortless" the "transition" from talking to killing the lamb to talking again happened, and for a moment, I thought that a similar effortless transition was going to happen to the boy, one where at least something of Sudan would get into him unawares. That moment comes on the last day in Sudan, when the Sudan-based family is taking the father and son out for a river cruise. The father is pointing out the sights of Khartoum, and he indicates to the boy the point where the White Nile and Blue Nile come together to form one river:

The boy looked to a spot where he saw, or thought he saw, a shifting band in the river where the two currents, one murky, one milky, met and intertwined. But there was no crash, no violence. No spectacle to suggest different currents fighting for dominance. The river ahead was complacent, the merging silent and unremarkable. Easy to overlook, were it not for his father’s finger showing the way.

"Aha! This is it," I thought. The boy's American self and his Sudanese self are coming together, and will form one whole, and it will happen so effortlessly, he won't even notice! But just as earlier, when the boy seemed to be sharing a moment of mutual understanding with his father, but it was interrupted, so this unnoticed mingling of two worlds is also interrupted. The family on the boat begins to sing a song in praise of wearing traditional clothing instead of Western clothing. The boy wants to "step into the center of all that dancing and singing, to silence it." He and his father almost share another moment of mutual understanding when neither can eat the sandwiches the family offers them, but then a storm comes up, the boat tosses, and the grandfather is pitched off into the river. 

When it becomes apparent that the grandfather had drowned in the Nile, the boy's main concern is for how long it will take to find him, because he still wants to get on his flight to go home. (God, I love this ending.) He is literally standing between his father and the rest of the family at the end. There is no fusion of identities, only a steadfast refusal to allow himself to be transported back into his other life, the one that might have happened if his father hadn't immigrated. 

Should we blame the boy?

For much of the story, I'd guess most readers would be fairly sympathetic to the boy. He's apparently gay and vegetarian, doesn't speak Arabic, and doesn't believe in Islam. He was so happy when his father couldn't afford to keep sending him to a private, Muslim school in America, he felt liberated, and now here he is in the heart of all that he got away from. Although we might feel the boy is wrong to deny all of his heritage, we can certainly understand it. It's not an unusual attitude for a child of immigrants raised in the U.S. to want to live like the people he knows live. 

Still, the myopia of the boy at the end is pretty startling. He's has a few moments while in Sudan of almost kind of connecting with his father. Shouldn't that have made him able to understand, even a little, how his father must feel losing his own? 

Maybe it can't be helped. Maybe for the boy to be himself, to avoid the death that comes from giving up one's own identity, he has to keep his Sudan self at a distance. He can't allow himself to become blended from two distinct flows into one, because "His" Nile--the "White" Nile, tied to his white existence through his mother--can't join the other. 

Two different experiences of geographic origins as sources of identity

In "The Suitcase," Saba is presented with a seemingly impossible choice. During her entire trip to Ethiopia, her family has gone out their way to try to make her feel welcome and loved, but she feels she hasn't measured up. Now, she is being asked to choose which tokens of their love should make it back to America. It's a real Kobiyashi Maru scenario. But much like Captain Kirk, Saba doesn't believe in a no-win situation, and she comes up with a solution where identity doesn't involve hard choices. 

The same elements are there for the taking in "The Three Niles." We have three generations of men brought together at the convergence of the three rivers. The story could have allowed for an "effortless" blending of generations and rivers and identities. It would have been as satisfying as "The Suitcase." But for the boy, there is no way to cheat the Kobiyashi Maru of identity. For the boy, his identity is so completely at odds with the boy he would have been in a life where he grew up in Sudan, that the attempt to bring together the old with the new can only result in the stormy death of the old. 

Releasing versus freeing: "Rosaura at Dawn" by Daniel Saldaña París (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole. (I just learned the term "mereological" this week, and I could have used it there to sound really smart, but I feel like it'll be obvious I just learned it and was anxious to show off.) I do, however, have some theories about the parts themselves, and maybe these will be useful to readers as they seek their own ideas for making sense of the whole.

Two physical landscape and one personal, bodily landscape

A lot of what's going on during the few pages of "Rosaura at Dawn" involves comparisons and contrasts. One very clear set of comparison/contrast going on is between the physical border between Tijuana, Mexico, and the United States on the one hand and the body of the unnamed female narrator on the other. The opening lines describe the border: "The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards." There are two subsequent invitations to compare the narrator's body to this landscape, one explicit and one implicit. The first is when the narrator describes the scar on her leg from an undisclosed accident as resembling the frontier line, seen from above. (The "bird's eye" that the translator uses is a clever wink to the frequent appearance of birds in the story.) The second is when she refers to the scar on her leg, now fading, as "zigzagging," the same word she used to describe the border fence. 

This juxtaposition of the landscape of the border with the bodily landscape of the narrator likely means that the same feeling the border gives her, one of unfulfilled dreams, is how she feels in her own skin after her undisclosed accident in which her mother died. A body can be a prison, and our scars can serve to remind us of all that's gone wrong.

But then there is another comparison, one between the border and the aviary that Severiano has created for the exotic birds and reptiles the police bring to him after busting illegal exotic animal dealers. In some ways, the aviary performs the same function as the border fence: it keeps some things in and some things out. But instead of being "tall and threatening...the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad," it is, in the narrator's one-word assessment, "awesome." It is constructed "from metal tubes, like the ones used in market stands, and completely covered in chicken wire." Unlike the border, which was built by companies for profit using standard construction materials, this was built by salvaged parts out of love. Chicken wire is much less threatening than barbed wire. The aviary, like the border, is there to restrict entrances and exits, but it shows there can be more reasons for building something like this than fear or (as Severiano's brief time in "the can" reminds us) punishment. Walls and fences can also be a means of providing sanctuary.

There are prisons and border fences, but also bird sanctuaries. Which kind of building will the narrator's body, with its zigzagging scar, end up being? That is the question of the narrative. (Okay, that's sort of a GUT for the story, isn't it?)

The two openings

When I went back to re-read the story, I tried to find the original Spanish version. I succeeded, but only partly. I did find the original online, but only the first few paragraphs. That leaves me to rely on the translation for most of the story. In the little that is available for free online, I did realize that there is a version with a different opening paragraph. The translated version in the O.Henry Anthology goes: 

The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards. It stands tall and threatening, rusting in the sunlight, the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad. People peer through it, projecting hopes and a new version of themselves beyond the ICE patrols. There is no escape from this place.

The other version, with my own translation below, goes:

The enormous fence, crowned with barbed wire, winds among the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, cuts a capricious zigzag and, out beyond where it can be seen, ends several meters into the ocean. But the waves that break upon one side are the same that break upon the other, and the clouds cross the line routinely, in both directions, without passports or visas. 

I'm not saying the translator made the first version up. I'm sure there's a different Spanish version out there somewhere. Authors change their vision all the time, including after something has been published, so I guess that between the version online and the publication in O.Henry, the author changed his mind.

The version one goes with has an effect on how one views the resolution for the narrator. Are the barriers of her body a sanctuary or a prison? If we read version one, perhaps the narrator views her scars and her body as a confinement to escape from, but her dreams of escape have been disappointed. Her journey is in learning not to escape, but to find a better kind of confinement, one that provides protection rather than restriction. But if one takes reading number two, then there almost never was a confinement. In nature, nothing respects borders. The narrator needs to learn from nature not, as in the first reading, how to find the right kind of enclosure, but how to ignore enclosures altogether. Version one emphasizes the eventual returning of Rosaura, while version two emphasizes the freedom of her flight.

Chickens

I count four references to chickens in the story. The first is when the narrator sees Severiano in Tijuana. She assumes he is waiting for a pollero, a colloquial Spanish term for a guide to take him across the border into the United States. (Coyote is an older term for the same thing.) A pollero is literally a farmer or poultry owner who takes care of chickens. In this figure of speech, all the people the guide takes over the border are chickens that he is herding. The narrator assumes Severiano is a chicken looking to escape from his cage. She is wrong, of course, just as she is mistaken a moment later when she sees Severiano take the cockatoo Rosaura out of a bag to release her. She thinks at first that it is a chicken he has released. But it isn't a chicken, and as he will point out, he hasn't really released her. The bird is going to fly back to the aviary.

The third mention is the chicken wire that protects the aviary, which is a much less threatening and muscular type of barrier than the barbed wire that protects the border. The final mention is the raw chicken that the narrator feeds the hawk in the aviary. If the people moving around the border are chickens, then the narrator is reminded that sometimes they will end up getting caught and killed as prey for the stronger birds. 

I'm not sure what to make of all this chicken imagery. Obviously, birds are ubiquitous quasi-characters in the story, and chickens, which can kind of fly but not very well, are a good symbol of humanity, which shares some of the natural and animalistic traits of birds but not all of them. Birds might be able to fly over borders easily enough, but not chickens. So humans will have to modify their notions of freedom.

The comparison between chickens and humans is apt.

Releasing vs freedom

The narrator mistakes Severiano's letting the bird go for freeing it, when it fact, Severiano is merely letting it roam for a while before it comes back. There is a secret ritual he performs in order to get her to come back, one he teaches to the narrator, but it involves an incantation she will not even share with the reader. 

When Severiano is gone to take care of old business, the narrator releases Rosaura, the cockatoo. She does it in one of the seediest parts of the city and awaits Rosaura's return back at the farm where the aviary is. When the narrator sees Rosaura returning at dawn (roll credits!), she is deeply moved by it. She'd seen this return before, but "it had never felt so personal, as though the birds were celebrating me too, rejoicing that something inside me had also returned." 

As if this was the last thing Severiano needed to teach her, we find out immediately after this that he has left the farm to her. 

Freedom means the ability to roam wherever and not come back. Releasing means being free for a time an then to return. Whichever opening one uses, what the narrator learns is that there is a relationship between true security and true freedom. Without true security--which for the narrator, means a space so safe not even Jesus or Buddha can come into it--one cannot be well enough to venture out. Without returning to that place, our journeys will eventually wear us down. 

I think the theme of "Rosaura at Dawn" is similar to that of Robert Frost's Poem "Birches." While the transcendence of soaring into heaven is dramatic and liberating, it's the homecoming after the transcendence that is the point of the whole thing:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.