Love is why I refuse to do the laundry
or
If you love me, you should wear chinos.

It’s painting to avoid a conversation.

Like when you tell me the milk is sour, and then put it back
In the fridge, I might write an ode to grocery stores

Fluorescent promises of ten steaks for the price of one.

And in another book another wife has written
About her husband who refuses to take off
His madras shorts and replace the milk.

But she never uses the words husband, or shorts, or milk.
Hers is a page about anteaters, yet it’s clear
She and I suffer the same.

You really should go to the store.

Though Laurent is a retired engineer he is frequently traveling on weekends—“potential free-lance clients” he explains to me, though I have not asked. Phillipa is not fooled by this explanation, and when he is home she works to perturb him: He cannot open a container because his hands have lost their dexterity so she turns to me and snickers. She knows he has interest in something she is saying at the dinner table so she switches to the broken English he cannot understand. Laurent tells a story so she rolls her eyes and casts a long face. It seems that in a marriage too old to terminate discontent is aired in the form of these petty revenges.

Today is Phillipa’s birthday and Laurent has prepared hors d’oeuvres and purchased an expensive bottle of rosé champagne. They invite me to share this treat with them in their living room, a large rectangle with Guimard windows overlooking Place Jeanne D’Arc. Phillipa is smiling, waiving the bottle of champagne in the air while slowly removing the cork with her fingers. Laurent wheels around her, arms flailing, yelling his guidance over the sounds of giddy anticipation. The cork pops off like a gun shot and foam spills everywhere. We all laugh and drink up our first taste contentedly.

We talk coolly for some time, gnashing on morsels of bread and cheese and smoked salmon. Laurent gulps down his third glass of champagne despite Phillipa’s protestations. The more he drinks the more he speaks. Of their son and his service, of the troubles in Afghanistan, of the American election, of President Sarkozy and his new top-model wife. This leads him to the words “la vie moderne en France” and “aujourd’hui, la divorce est normale”—divorce is common today. He is focused solely on me, excited to give me explanations I can barely follow. He seems not to notice that his wife has stopped speaking altogether, that her eyes are starting to glisten with tears.

When it is time for them to leave for dinner Laurent is sprightly and flushed red from the champagne. He stands up, pounds the table with one fist and lets out a happy laugh; there is a kick in his step as he carries our empty glasses to the kitchen. Once he is out of earshot Phillipa speaks her first words for some time:

“Laurent n’etait pas là”—Laurent wasn’t here. I don’t know whether she is referring to tonight, a moment in the past, or their entire marriage. The remark has no context and it hangs in the atmosphere of the gray evening light like a dislodged entity. I have nothing to say, and I sense that my face betrays me. It knows only the force of the simplest of sentences, a reminder that they too can overflow with meaning.

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him.

Bonsoir, I say.

Would you like some food tonight?

Oui, le menu, s’il-te-plait.

The fish is good tonight. The chicken is also good.

Je prends le poisson.

You like beer, don’t you, mon ami. And then he laughs in a very Francophone way, which I do not pretend to understand.

But the barman and do I have an understanding, on a superficial level that is the equal of some friendships I know. He jokes at me in poor English, and I rigole back at him in le mauvais français. The Spaniards who descend on the courtyard for several cloudy days in my second week become the subject of both of our jabs: they speak neither French nor English nor anything in-between, and they smoke all day and drink Coca Light, and they tip badly, the barman tells me. Here as everywhere otherness is measured in degrees, even at the extreme margins of the scale, and my otherness is not as other as theirs. There is an old Frenchman, too, whose voice is like a whisper at full-shout, an unpleasant croaked-out thing. He sits for a week on the same barstool front of a little color television that plays French variety shows and basketball at night. When he shouts at the television or the barman I can picture his voice-box in my head: it is gnarled and poisoned and hanging by the slenderest thread to his esophagus. One day the Frenchman is gone, and I ask the barman if he has seen our friend, if he is alive or dead. The barman smiles a wicked smile, perches himself on a barstool, and peers down at me, arms wheeling theatrically.

“I am dead,” he says, rasping and gasping. “Too many cigarettes, too many women, get me a beer.” Then he breaks out in giggles. “A big beer, I said, and cook me an omelet.” The Spaniards look on, smiling and baffled. I clutch at my neck and waggle my tongue out of my mouth like I’m choking. “Je suis mort,” I say. “Au secours. Police. Hôpital. Pompiers. Omelette.” I lay my head on the table. “Je suis mort.” We are both laughing now, he comes over and slaps me hard on the back, I pretend to choke and die again, and we laugh some more. Five minutes later, the barman brings me a fresh beer. “Nothing in Africa you get for free,” he tells me. “Except this time.”

— Nick Hoy and the Editors of Leland

You can also find the complete issue as a PDF on our archives page by clicking the “Archive” tab above. Happy reading!

This is the community that I’ve imagined around myself. We’re the unemployable: the unpragmatic, the clueless, the vain dreamers. We don’t know what we want to do, but it’s not that. We’re headstrong, and we’re proud, and, in many ways, we’re dumb.

I talked to approximately one recruiter at the most recent career fair. It was sheer coincidence that I took her to be the best-looking girl there. In the middle of our conversation, she took out a fun-size piece of Laffy Taffy and began chewing it in front of me. She read me the joke off of the wrapper.

“What’s an owl’s favorite kind of math?”

I shrugged.

“Owlgebra,” she said.

I laughed, and she laughed, then drooled (apparently the taffy had caused saliva to build up in her mouth), but I pretended I didn’t see it. I continued to laugh, and the longer I did, the emptier I felt.

I was too disheartened to hit on her. As I walked away, I thought to myself: I have no marketable skills. Then I thought: that’s a lie. I like money. I want to be happy. I have dreams, but I probably lack the confidence and the talent to carry them into action. I enjoy taking orders, and I’m a real champ at wasting time.

Later that week, a friend and I were camped out with a bottle of Carlo Rossi in the center of an empty Lake Lag. I was blabbing on about myself as usual, and she was half-listening and looking up at the stars. I was listening to myself, and thinking that I wasn’t a true dreamer. I was just vain. Real dreaming is hard work, and it’s got a lot less to do with the dreamer than the dream.

There was a long silence between the two of us. Then my friend spoke up.

She said, “People have been telling me to follow my dreams since I was a little kid. It always seemed intuitive, but now I wonder if the problem is that dreams are like the KGB in Martin Cruz Smith’s ‘Gorky Park.’”

I looked at her and we smiled.

“They don’t always take you where you want to go, do they?”

Download “Editorial Statement” as a PDF.

This worries me: the distance.  This shred of a war story is what I cling to; this one story that I haven’t gotten from the media, but that has come to me in the old way, way of mouth, which seems more natural.  And I don’t think I’m unique in this situation.  As each new storyteller emerges, one step further from the experience, fiction seeps into the tale.  It seems that more weight is placed on the how – on the telling of it – than on the what – the fact that these things actually took place.  But as the story is distanced from the source, the facts recede: the how has little with which to work.  The result is a shoddy story, with some boy’s reality being used as the punch-line.  It disturbs me that pure fiction can sometimes touch me more than such true war stories.  Of course, I gaped at my friend’s story, but even as I gaped, I felt the self-conscious judgment: this is rehearsed, it’s not sincere.

What I want to know is why it can seem so easy to be sincere about what never happened, and yet so difficult to be sincere about what really did happen, what’s happening every day, somewhere in the world – about what matters?  Does fiction hold the world’s stories to a standard that they will never be able to match?  Are words and experience like schoolboys and schoolgirls, always running in different directions, and when they meet are they awkward and shy?  Do they demand two different types of sincerity?  Is it possible to have any idea what it feels like to lose an arm and an eye for your country without lying in the sand, bleeding and alone?

I hope that it is possible to have some idea, that each time we meet another person we don’t simply nod our heads in respect to that which we do not know.  Words can seem at times like trinkets – playthings, but when one gets to turning a phrase for turning a phrase’s sake, it could be worthwhile to recall the tremendous power of the words that we use every day.  They have the power – and the burden – of expressing what we would otherwise be left to experience alone.

— Bob Borek & the editors of Leland

Download “Editorial Statement” as a PDF