2026-06-28 19:06:01
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen
Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter.
Will Mackin reads his story “Pig Lab,” from the July 6 & 13, 2026, issue of the magazine. Mackin, a U.S. Navy veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the author of “Bring Out the Dog,” which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize as the best début short-story collection of 2018.
2026-06-28 19:06:01
Every year, at the Nobel Prize banquet, in Stockholm, each laureate gives a brief, formal speech; typically, they thank the Swedish Academy and express some hope for the future of humanity. The 2025 Laureate in Literature, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, made no mention of humanity’s future. He gave his thanks, instead, to its past: to the artists of classical Greece; to the Italian Renaissance; to the city of Kyoto; to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, and Johann Sebastian Bach, “for the Divine.” He thanked his friends, many of whom were “no longer among the ranks of the living,” for their more personal influences on him. “I give thanks to my friend Jóska Pálnik, who told me, on the second stair of the water-slide pool in 1960, how babies are made, and under the grievous weight of this revelation, I wanted to die.”
The speech will not surprise anyone who has read Krasznahorkai’s novels. His themes are learned; his settings numerous and far-flung; his imagination apocalyptic, but very, very funny. His characters are mad men or visionaries—it can be hard to tell the difference—addled by their belief in a sacred perception of beauty, of transcendence, in a cruel and withholding world. Each novel has found its ideal English-language translator. Krasznahorkai’s earliest novels (“Satantango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War”) owe their bleak grandeur to the British Hungarian poet George Szirtes, while the novellas (“Chasing Homer,” “Spadework for a Palace,” “Herman”), compressed thrillers, gain their air of paranoia from the short-story writer John Batki. Most recently, the fluid and colloquial style of Ottilie Mulzet has animated “Seiobo There Below,” “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East,” “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” and “Herscht 07769.” They mark a shift in Krasznahorkai’s later writing, toward what he called an “explosive confession” that mimics how he speaks and defies tidy syntax.
In March, I interviewed Krasznahorkai at the Athens International Literature Festival. The night before, we had dinner at a restaurant below the Acropolis, then, the next morning, attended a reception in Krasznahorkai’s honor at City Hall, where he was greeted by the mayor, the mayor’s father (his copy of “Herscht 07769” in hand), a troop of bureaucrats, and, eventually, the mayor’s excitable puppy, Pericles. It reminded me of “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” in which the residents of a dilapidated Hungarian town await the return of their local aristocrat, a longed-for savior, whom they greet with awkward and exaggerated pomp. But where the Baron is timid and bumbling, Krasznahorkai is expansive, charming, and courtly. Throughout the weekend, we spoke about Kafka’s love affairs, Hungarian composers, the sound of the oud, Japanese temples, and cigar shops in New England. Before we walked onstage, he saw a white speck on my black pants and, turning to the man next to me—“Thomas, with your permission”—knelt to clean the hem.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Krasznahorkai’s answers, which were delivered in Hungarian, have been translated by Mulzet.
I was moved by your Nobel Prize banquet speech, especially by your mention of your older brother. You thanked him for always lifting you onto his shoulders when you were children, because he taught you “that there could be another way of looking at the world.” What did you see up there?
At first, nothing. My older brother got angry at me, because up there, on his shoulders, something frequently happened in my little trousers. It was not so pleasant for my brother. He would shake me in his anger, and then I couldn’t see too much of the world. Now that we’re both very old, I asked how awful it was for him. He said, “I still feel it.”
I did see from there that the world was moving around a lot. Ever since, I have tried to maintain this velocity in everything I do. This velocity determined how I composed music when I was younger, and later on, how I wrote my sentences. Perhaps, with this explanation, I have become a little serious.
Your sentences have great velocity. They are long, complex, patterned by interesting repetitions, and can sprawl across a whole novel, like in “Herscht 07769.” But they weren’t always like that. Your technique has changed: first and most dramatically, between “The Melancholy of Resistance” and “War and War,” in which each short chapter was structured by a single sentence, often limited to one event, setting, or character’s point of view; then again, between “War and War” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” which is divided into lengthier episodes, each formed by a single sentence that sweeps up many events and many points of view, and moves freely across time and space. How did your sense of velocity affect how you composed your sentences?
I think this can be attributed to how I am getting ever closer to the spoken language. When somebody wants to say something really important, let’s say a man wants to say to a woman, or woman wants to say to a man, “I’ve been in love with you for seventeen years, and I can’t bear it any longer, I have to tell you, because things can’t go on like this anymore,” comma, comma, comma—it is not possible to chop up an explosive confession like this, from living speech, into neat little sentences. This kind of problem has really determined my relationship to velocity.
For me, the correctly chosen velocity is what determines the character of a prose work. Of course, I don’t mean velocity in the physical sense of the word but in a strongly figurative sense, although it can also be connected to the physical concept of velocity. It is undeniable that in my first two or three books, I did not really feel this obligation to use the living language of these confession-like statements. For me, the situation became more serious, because I was ever less satisfied with the books I was publishing. Maybe it sounds funny, but I consider practically all of my books to have been failures, and if this sequence of failures had not occurred, I would have finished my career after my first book. There was no sequel to the Bible, was there?
Then, when I became middle-aged, while I was working on “Seiobo There Below,” I really wanted to try to say something important. I wanted to say something important about how I could not say anything important, because I was having a lot of problems with the idea of importance, and even with the idea of articulation. But I had no problems with this confessional speech. I would catch a thread from the things that were occurring in the background of my own life, it would suddenly burst into my brain, and I would set off from this thread. At first, the sentences were only in my head, and I would pace around and around whatever room I happened to be living in at that time, and then, suddenly, there were about fifteen or twenty pages, on the old A4-size paper, and I had corrected all the errors in the rhythms, melodies, and tempo, as if I were a fanatic dreamer like [Friedrich] Hölderlin or [Heinrich von] Kleist. During these times, it was not good to live with me, because I could never concentrate on anything else.
My goal was for the figures in my books, figures that did not yet exist—my goal was to write them into reality in such a way that they would remain there. For example, Prince Myshkin is, today, no longer the hero of one of Dostoyevsky’s novels. He is part and parcel of our reality. Dostoyevsky wrote him with such terrible strength that now Prince Myshkin is a part of reality as we perceive it. I, too, was aiming for something like this.
You said you were dissatisfied because everything you wrote was a failure. How did you come to that judgment? What did you feel you had not perfected?
I am not a reader of my own books. I would never voluntarily reread any of them. But I had a friend, Béla Tarr, who made films using my work as a source of inspiration. We worked on these films together. I had to read my own texts aloud, to write a screenplay for Béla, which was very, very difficult for me, because I was very afraid that the same thing would happen, and it did happen, always—I would begin reading, and suddenly I would see a shocking error of rhythm, of melody, of content, a flaw in form, and well, I had inevitably made a mistake, but it’s not only a single mistake to me, it ruins the entire thing. It vexes me so much that I try to remedy this in the following book. My entire life is just such an attempt at recompense. I am not doing too well.
Although perhaps this perfectionism isn’t even perfectionism, because I otherwise like mistakes, apart from the ones that I made when working for Béla. For example, there is Japanese art. Those who appreciate Japanese art can never praise it enough for its perfectionism, and yet, Japanese art is not perfectionist, because it loves asymmetrical situations. When places are being set for dinner, or in a stone garden in a Buddhist monastery, there is no governing principle of central symmetry or proportional order. There is a love for the mistake. In Japanese ceramic arts, say, from the early Meiji Era, there is enormous value in an object that bears a decisive flaw, because it makes it more particular. And I am this way, too, with everything else, with the exception of my own books.
So, each novel has emerged from this obsession with perfecting your own prose. Your characters are also obsessives. They are men who seek sacred encounters with rare and beautiful objects: a manuscript, a garden, a whale skeleton, the music of Bach, the books in the New York Public Library, the Acropolis. Almost no one understands or sympathizes with these men. Often, they are destroyed. Some are mutilated. Some die once they realize that, as one character says, “The higher realm had disappeared from the human world.” What is the cost of being obsessed with beauty in the human world, a world of barbarism, where nothing is sacred?
Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.
In my own books, this began to be one of the most important themes for me. I placed this dilemma onto my characters, so that I could tell the story of how they were doing in this question, and how they ended up failing. There is a single personal characteristic to my books: I place my own failures onto this or that character appearing in my novels, so that he is the one to suffer, because I don’t want to suffer anymore.
Are we at an especially low point in our relationship to beauty and an especially high point in our suffering?
There were several ages in human history, and now I’m only speaking of European civilization. From the European cultural point of view there was, here in the Mediterranean, a pragmatic culture which regarded the divine presence as self-evident. To perform a sacrifice in front of a temple so as to influence a god or goddess was not seen as any kind of problem. This kind of relationship made the lives of people living in ancient times unproblematic in terms of the dichotomy between the transcendent and the space of reality. Then, in European culture, Christianity appeared, a religion which made an astonishing discovery, namely, that the primary cause for everything—humans, animals, nature, fertility, the inanimate world, the universe, the cosmos—could be concentrated into one single point. This made everyone calm down, and immediately step into a space where there was no longer any border between the divine and the human real. With regards to human nature, the main question became how this recognition could be distributed throughout a given society, whether in Europe or in the Near East.
Of course, it was never ideal, and it didn’t mean that, as in a fairy tale, everyone could step into some kind of unproblematic relationship with the divine whenever they wanted. God provided a surface for the instance of beauty. This surface was the outward appearance of something, its given form. It was, to express it in very general terms, an entity that could be designated. And then the Renaissance came along, which was also strongly pragmatic, and there were many more possibilities for a so-called educated person, stepping away slightly from the mystical or transcendent relation, to reach a purely human beauty, a beauty created by human means. After the Baroque is when the problems continuously begin to occur. A world divested not of God but of the divine, this was certainly problematic for humankind. You could enjoy it, because the world exists even without God, and we human beings are capable of building whatever we want. Because, well, where are we now?
We’re in a disenchanted technical civilization.
Yet this current technical civilization is astonishingly genial, even with all of its enormous problems, because it appears to be almost unlimited. And since the human being is dangerous, therefore the technical civilization that he has created is also dangerous. But the relation to this border has fundamentally changed. Ever since the Enlightenment, let’s say, the modern human being does not require this relation to the border. Michelangelo is a fridge magnet now. He is a photograph I take as I stand in front of a statue by him. But he is still good. Other things are still good. The “Mona Lisa” is good, that magnificent temple so close to where we’re sitting is good. Everything is good; the main thing is that I can’t experience it.
If we were to ask—how many people are on the planet now, maybe eight billion?—if we were to ask five billion tourists if they knew something about the Acropolis, I think everybody in this room would be very sad. The answer would be, Yes, I saw the Acropolis, it was very beautiful, but let’s say that the sun was shining a lot that day, and I hardly saw anything of the Acropolis, because I didn’t bring my sunglasses. We can call this deterioration, but we could also describe it as something else: that the demands of the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern person have changed. This person demands a life in which pleasure is granted the primary role. This is a very comfortable attitude for such a creature as man.
It can be imagined that this is not a negative process. The important thing is the beauty that Michelangelo created, or the beauty that was constructed by the genius or geniuses who made the Acropolis. But it is likely that there will be ever fewer of us who feel this way. Our relationship to the past has radically changed. A good half of it is misunderstood. Culture today, during this flowering of European populism, is nothing more than a kind of ridiculous right-wing or extreme-right-wing ideology of tradition, in which culture is noble, and makes me noble, and anyone unwilling to accept this becomes my enemy. A kind of emotional relation comes into being, but it is an absolutely negative emotional relation.
I’m very happy that I’m as old as I am, because I truly feel sorry for the ones who are young. I can lament a cultural age. Perhaps this isn’t even an age in that sense of the term, not in the sense that the Baroque or the Roman or the ancient Greek culture represented an age but, rather, the entire occurrence of human civilization to date represents one single epoch, and that is over. If it is really over, I’m very happy to lament over it.
Maybe you shouldn’t feel sorry for young people, because your fiction enacts a different relation to beauty and to history. The scenario you just described, of a man who visits the Acropolis on a hot, clear day but cannot see it because he has forgotten his sunglasses, is from “Seiobo Down Below.” In it, the man stumbles around, blinded by the sun, surrounded by insensible tourists. The joke, I think, is that the experience of the Acropolis has been so thoroughly commodified that it hardly matters whether the man sees it or not. Still, his failure to be in relation to beauty reminds us of its opposite: a culture that once experienced beauty as transcendent. Reading “Seiobo Down Below” made me feel very melancholy. But I also felt some suspicion, or perhaps just a hope, that a new relation to art could be possible.
That melancholy was discovered by the Romantics, and, in its coarser variation, was equivalent to despair. It was the Romantic era that brought us that expressive form, which I greatly suffer from. It is a very important signal indicating that we’re in a lot of trouble in terms of that relation to art which earlier had been self-evident: a relation through God, or through a divinity, or perhaps through the magnificence of human creation. This is truly an essential difference.
It’s possible that this is really the new state of the world, and that we are more or less at the beginning of it, as opposed to being at the end of the previous one. Perhaps it would be more fitting not to compel the younger generations to weep with us over what a fantastic poet Dante was, or what a fantastic, eccentric author Euripides was. They will have to put up with us as we lament that there will be no more Michelangelo, no more Bach, no more Dante, there will be no one to write works like this and that, and woe, woe, woe is us.
To me, this is unacceptable. The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever. When a human being loses his sense of identity, there will be a need for so-called national identity and similarly idiotic ideas. Traditionalism, or clinging to it, is already a political category. Let it remain so, or, better yet, let it not play any role in the political sphere whatsoever, if only because it can only lead to enormous problems.
When I was young, when I thought about the future, I naturally concluded that the world was unacceptable. The only possible solution was to rebel against it. There is a saying which I would like to slightly modify, or add my own interpretation to: The young person who does not rebel has no heart. And the old person who rebels is ridiculous. Although I do not consider the viewpoint that I am espousing ridiculous, it does mean that one has to rebel for the sake of the clarity of ideas. Somehow, we have to get back the definitions of what is what. We have to once again decide what evolution means, what is God, and so on.
If we do not look at these concepts anew and from a different perspective, then we don’t really have much of a chance, because wherever we end up we will simply be moving while standing in place, and only moving as much as the Earth moves with us. Velocity begins when we make even one tiny movement, because even with that one tiny movement, we have gained more velocity than the Earth, if we set off in the right direction. If we do, then we will be able to clarify these concepts once again. Perhaps this won’t be a very happy or peaceful period of time in human thought, because we might reach certain conclusions that won’t be helpful in trying to make our own reality more comprehensible. But let’s not tell young people, “If you are not with me in this, then you’re a lout.” Let’s wait a bit, let’s be patient.
Your Nobel Prize lecture, “Enough About Angels,” ends with a similar call to rebellion and the role that a new concept of angels might play in bringing it about. In the lecture, you say that you are not going to talk about the angels of old, the messengers from heaven that have been glorified by Michelangelo and Giotto, because now the heavens have been colonized by men like Elon Musk. You will speak only about new angels who walk among us, and who have no message to give and none to receive. They offer only an occasion for us to witness the world’s injustice, its cruelty, its mercilessness toward defenseless people. You imagine that the encounter with these new angels might one day spur some kind of rebellion, which you call a rebellion “in relation to the whole.” What is a rebellion in relation to the whole? How does it differ from a rebellion in relation to the part?
The angels of old were always bringing a message—they gave their angelic greeting to Mary—but the people of today no longer have any kind of need for these angels. This is why they perished, and that is why these new angels are still here among us, but in a completely different form and so with completely different purpose, although they look like us.
Any of you could bump into one of them, whether here in Athens or anywhere else. If someone stands in front of you, a man, woman, child, elderly, middle-aged, or in any form, if a person stands in front of you who, it seems, really wants to say something, but just stands there, and you think that this person might have bad intentions, or is crazy, or I don’t even know, this being is simply waiting for you to send him a message. This person needs the message now, and they await it from us, although I think that they will wait in vain.
It is clear what rebellion in relation to the part means. In an unbearable situation, it becomes impossible to further withstand a certain state of affairs. Here we are speaking of some concrete matter, a given oppression, layoffs in a factory, a bad pension system, and so on. However, rebellion that relates to the whole gives birth to despair. Human existence senses that something impedes it from subsisting. This is like when a person is in complete darkness, and they see nothing, and they are afraid, they tremble, and they flail around. You must imagine an enormous darkness, where a person is searching for some kind of light, because this person is simply attempting to rebel against the darkness by trying to remedy their own state of despair, and this is the rebellion of the person’s whole mind, namely, it is when a person can no longer withstand their own self, and considers not only human life in a given situation to be unacceptable but also the entire world, the entirety of human civilization, the human condition, and attempts to somehow box themselves out of it. I do not wish any of you to experience this. I do not wish it for you, or for myself. ♦
(Translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet.)
2026-06-28 19:06:01
Frozen yogurt comes in swirls, obviously, but it comes in waves, too, following the crests and crashes of the trend cycle, each fro-yo reflective of its era. The concept hit critical mass in the fitness-freak nineteen-eighties, but by the late two-thousands chains such as Pinkberry and Red Mango had inspired a craze for giant tubs of the stuff buried under sugary mountains of candy toppings. In the twenty-tens, fro-yo seemed briefly eclipsed, in New York, at least, by a mania for ice cream—your Ample Hills, your Morgenstern’s, your Caffè Panna. But now frozen yogurt is indisputably back. Have you seen the lines out the door? Even Van Leeuwen, a trailblazer of the fancy-ice-cream movement, has put it on tap. The style currently consuming New York is more elegant, more restrained than the fro-yos of yore; these are sophisticated yogurts, minimalist yet indulgent, a gastronomic version of old-money European vacations, or of our never-ending fascination with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—thin, tasteful, never trying too hard. Still, the one thing every fro-yo wave has in common is a sheen of virtue: frozen yogurt, with its not-too-sweetness and lactic tang and ambient implication of protein, can plausibly be branded as a health food, even if we all know it isn’t much of one.
This time around, the Upper East Side is the epicenter of the fro-yo explosion—draw from this whatever demographic inferences you will. Butterfield Market, the fancy-schmancy grocery store that’s recently been attracting crowds for its viral “dot cakes,” has been serving frozen yogurt for what feels like forever, but its version is not especially notable. Compared with the wonders of the grocery aisles, the topping options are fairly generic (sprinkles, chopped-up berries), and the yogurt is so mild that you’ll just have to take it on faith that it isn’t ice cream. Fro-yo heads will tell you, conspiratorially, that Butterfield Market is rumored to have the same supplier as Forty Carrots, the café tucked away on the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s which claims to have introduced frozen yogurt to New York City some fifty years ago. They do taste awfully similar, generically sweet and cold, rather than funky and tart, as I like my frozen yogurt.
You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis. At many of the ultra-trendy fro-yo spots I’ve visited lately, the sundaes seem more optimized for photography than for consumption. Many of these magnificent-looking concoctions fail the most fundamental test of a summery treat: do I want to eat every single bite, and maybe even go back for more? Mimi’s in Nolita, which, of all my stops, draws the longest and most youthful lines, is the apotheosis of the problem: pretty, and pricey, and utterly fine. Interview magazine recently built a portfolio around the actor Alia Shawkat tasting the city’s most viral frozen yogurts; of a Mimi’s specimen, she declared, correctly, that it was good but “not that good.” The line you’re waiting in at Mimi’s is, essentially, a line for content. At Madison Fare, by contrast, the toppings maximalism lands you somewhere genuinely delicious, and often surprising.
Madison Fare recently branched out to the Village, opening a dedicated yogurt shop on the same picturesque block of West Eighth Street as Culture, a standard-bearer for yogurt—they make theirs in-house, and it’s available both frozen and fresh. Culture’s toppings don’t hold a candle to Madison Fare’s, but Culture may have the best actual yogurt in the city: ultra-tangy, ultra-rich, in an ever-changing roster of flavors. The fruity selections are terrific—whenever they have blood orange on the menu, I’m awfully tempted—but, somewhat puritanically, I always find myself drawn to the plain. The only fro-yo shop that can compete with Culture for sheer yogurtful yogurtiness is Go Greek, in NoHo, where you can practically taste the probiotics doing the fandango, though the shop’s overt focus on macros and wellness robs the experience of a fair portion of its little-treat joy, and the notably health-conscious selection of toppings skews the flavor profile of a sundae disappointingly toward breakfast parfait. Compared with the fro-yo at Culture and Go Greek, the yogurt at Birdie’s, a cute little spot in the West Village, is so un-yogurtlike that there’s hardly any pleasure in the plain. I’d recommend ordering the coffee or peanut-butter yogurt, dousing it in Biscoff butter and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and telling yourself it’s Mister Softee.
One of my cherished summer rituals is to wander from my Brooklyn apartment over to Culture’s original location, in Park Slope, though lately I’ve been rerouting to Sofreh Café—the casual all-day offshoot of the chef Nasim Alikhani’s magnificent Persian restaurant Sofreh, near Barclays Center—which has installed a two-flavor soft-serve machine. One flavor rotates monthly. (On my most recent visit, it was sour cherry, Barbie-pink and fruity.) The other is always saffron-rosewater, which is sunshine-yellow, heady as a summer garden, and lusciously silken in texture. Sometimes it’s served with a gentle sprinkle of crushed pistachios, sometimes not. Either way, it might be my favorite of the dozens of frozen yogurts I’ve tried. There’s no line for now, but give it time. ♦
2026-06-28 19:06:01
In your story “Pig Lab,” a Special Forces troop is doing live-tissue training (which they refer to as “pig lab”)—a test in which they must assess and treat anesthetized pigs that have been wounded in ways that soldiers might be in combat. (This form of training was recently phased out.) You underwent similar training. What inspired you to build a story around L.T.T.?
The inspiration came out of the genuine affection that both my troop and our trainers felt toward the pigs. As a result, this training seemed like some kind of communion. Trying to save the injured pigs brought to mind the men we’d lost, and the likelihood of losing more. It was impossible to undergo any of it without feeling that no lives—human or pig—should be wasted.
The story is set in 2009. Some members of the troop have already been deployed, and seriously injured, in Afghanistan. Why would they be taking this training for a second time and returning to active duty?
There were never enough of us to go around, so multiple deployments were the norm. Soldiers who suffered combat injuries were sometimes rehabilitated and returned to the war. Deployments were cyclical and frequent. During our training phases, it seemed like we never had enough time to update ourselves on changes in rules of engagement, technology, weaponry, threats, friendly tactics, etc. Even if none of those things had changed, we needed to maintain proficiency in critical areas.
“Pig Lab” interweaves the training session with scenes from the narrator’s home life: his wife, Allison, has been having flashbacks to trauma she suffered as a child at the hands of her father. Why did you choose to juxtapose these two forms of trauma in one narrative?
It seemed less about trauma than about survival. I saw a link between how Allison, as a child, trained herself to survive her father’s abuse, and the training that the narrator and his boys undergo. I also thought a lot about cycles while writing this story. Allison is reliving abuse that she experienced decades earlier. Simultaneously, the narrator and his troop relive the war again and again. The narrator would like to break these cycles, but he doesn’t know how. I want to believe that his heart is in the right place.
Although you give a few details about Allison’s childhood, you don’t name or describe the trauma she experienced or is reliving in her flashbacks. Why did you decide to keep that unspoken?
I think the fear that Allison exhibits, her transformation while in the throes of a flashback, and the lengths that she goes to hide herself, all speak for the trauma. But then, my decision not to detail what Allison went through as a child reflects something that I do in real life. When I meet another veteran, I try not to talk about the war. I suppose that I’m more comfortable having it be this unspoken thing that we need to work around to establish some normalcy. And I think Allison is on a similar path.
The premise of the story—the pig lab—seems absurdist or surreal but is actually grounded in reality. Do you want readers to pick up on that sense of surreality, which inflects other elements of the story as well, or to see this as a straight depiction of real life?
The reality is that my memory of intense events becomes more surreal every day. The nuts and bolts are still there; however, they are turning into something Andy Warhol might have done with actual nuts and bolts.
You and I sometimes joke about the fact that your stories in the magazine, which revolve around the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, always involve animals, often goats. This time it’s pigs. Perhaps there’s a reason for that beyond your own interests? I think we civilians don’t always register the fact that combat takes place on land, amid settlements, homes, farms, and that battlefields are often exactly that—fields. Did being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan take you closer to rural and wild environments than you expected?
I had zero experience with barnyard animals prior to my deployments. Once I was downrange, however, they were omnipresent. Goats were by far the most numerous and strange of the lot. The way they stood on their hind legs and stuck their tongues out at us kind of summed up the whole misadventure. ♦
2026-06-28 19:06:01
I was not alive for Dylan going electric, but I was alive for the Diwali riddim. I can’t imagine that the sixties felt so monumental. In 2003, it seemed that every other song on the radio was built on the Jamaican producer Steven (Lenky) Marsden’s backing track, named after the Hindu festival of lights and instantly recognizable for its jubilant handclaps, surging, feinting bass line, and stuttering drums. In the hypercompetitive world of dancehall, a popular riddim is an invitation to brinkmanship, artists big and small jumping on the beat to see who can make the most iconic song. I saw the best minds of my generation lose it to Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go.”
Those handclaps were everywhere. Not quite applause, more like the sound of strangers finding unison. Wonder began releasing records in the mid-eighties as a teen-ager, and his sweet, angelic voice never left him. While most riddims remain unchanged from version to version, Marsden tweaked his backing track for the major artists who wanted to use it. For “No Letting Go,” originally released in 2002, he started with a whistling synth line, a patient build that’s always reminded me of Stevie Wonder’s “As,” keeping the percussion at bay as Wonder (no relation) crooned about his baby. “Got somebody, she is a beauty / Very special, really and truly / Take good care of me like it’s her duty / Want you right by my side night and day,” Wonder sings, as pieces of the rhythm track drop in. The handclaps arrive with the force of history, and as Wonder soars into the chorus it feels as though this is the only love song that has ever existed.
At the time, a friend and I d.j.’d a party at a bar in Cambridge on Thursday nights. I handled the early hours, coaxing folks onto their feet, managing the evolution from curious head nods to proper dancing. We would trade off during the party’s peak, and then, late into the night, he would start playing dancehall. He would move through the other Diwali-riddim contenders, like Bounty Killer’s underdog anthem “Sufferer” or Danny English and Egg Nog’s jubilant “Party Time” or Sean Paul’s vaguely sinister, wee-hours jam “Get Busy.” Then, there would come a moment when I would dig through his crates and hand over “No Letting Go,” and we’d watch people, who’d been strangers a few drinks ago, stomping, clapping, exploring ways to jigsaw their bodies together.
The Diwali name and festive percussion gave the song a faintly South Asian vibe. The early-two-thousands were a time when the pop charts were filled with hits that eyeballed some kind of cross-cultural conversation: Missy Elliott’s tabla-sampling “Get Ur Freak On,” Nas and the Bravehearts’ Orientalist fantasy “Oochie Wally” (a personal favorite), the lite Bollywood-isms of Truth Hurts’ “Addictive.” As far as gimmicks go, it was nice that this one looked beyond our borders. I spent a lot of my twenties trying to make disparate sounds harmonize, song-length reprieves from geopolitics. Sometimes being a d.j. means trying to piece together a world you want to live in—at least until people get drunk enough to start harassing you with requests.
There are certain genres that seem inappropriate to play during cold weather. Dancehall sounds like a tease in the dead of winter. Yet “No Letting Go” was a song for all seasons. We played it in the fall, when Wonder’s line about growing apart—“They say good things must come to an end / But I’m optimistic about being your friend”—fit the season’s melancholy. We played it in the winter, where its stomps and claps sounded like people marching together, huddling for warmth. And then, come spring, it felt like we were conjuring the gross, sweaty months to come. The years blur together, yet I still feel like summer doesn’t start until I hear “No Letting Go” boom from a passing car.
My life is a lot more boring nowadays, and the mere idea of carrying crates of records makes my back ache. A few weeks ago, some neighbors on my block in Brooklyn got married. They filed the proper permits with the city, blocked off our street, and invited all of us neighbors to be a part of their wedding. Their guests were decked out in fine suits and funky dresses even though they would just be hanging out on the street for hours. Vows were exchanged on their stoop, and the couple leaned on the hood of a car to listen to the speeches. Trash cans were wheeled away so a d.j. could set up in their small front yard. We watched them party all afternoon from our steps across the street, basking in someone else’s love, before retreating indoors as the sun set. Later, I heard the opening synths of “No Letting Go” and ran back outside just in time for the claps. It had never sounded so good. I felt overjoyed for the happy couple—by now, the bride had sheared off the bottom of her wedding dress so it was easier to dance—and went back inside to get ready for bed. The night belonged to them now. ♦
2026-06-28 19:06:01
Late as I was, I figured I’d be walking right into an active scenario. Crazy Omar, maybe. Or Outnumbered and Outgunned. I thought I’d hear the thud of stun grenades and hillbilly shouts of “Allahu akbar! ” I expected to taste the bitter clouds of cordite drifting over the lawn and see the green muzzle flash of machine guns firing blanks on full auto. Above all, I assumed I’d find wounded pigs dying on the grass, and the boys elbow deep in their salvation.
Turned out, however, that I hadn’t missed much. The pig men were in the trailer, knocking out the pigs with anesthesia. The pigs, perhaps sensing the looming betrayal, or at least recognizing a serious departure from their bottle-fed, sunny upbringing, fought back. Hooves banged against the metal floor. Squeals cut through the cool air. Steam leaked through the trailer’s slats. Pig fear had the same sour reek as our fear.
I found the boys stooging in a patch of morning sun at the base of our compound’s tower.
Ted Waters, with his real leg crossed over his mechanical one, eyeballed my approach. “Nice of you to join us,” he said.
Bing Thomas spoke out of the corner of his new mouth. “Look who deshided to show up.”
I’d planned to arrive early, before the boys and before the pig men, just as I had for the previous pig labs I’d attended in preparation for my troop’s deployments. I liked to give myself time to prepare for the day’s events. The scenarios were nothing more than window dressing—meant to evoke the chaotic night raids that would be our mission downrange. It was the pigs that had me worried. A pig’s face might remind me of Bing’s old face. Or a pig’s leg lying off to the side, detached and jittering, could resemble Ted’s leg. I’d wanted to arrive early enough to think through these possibilities and allow other, half-forgotten things to bubble to the surface. But, just as I was about to leave the house, my wife, Allison, had screamed from the upstairs bedroom.
“Circumstances beyond my control,” I explained to the boys.
The trailer’s back gate swung open, and a pig man wearing a blacksmith’s apron emerged. He’d been blown up, I guessed, then put back together minus some pieces. I suspected this because a curious light shone from around his joints, as if some kind of spell held him together, specifically the type of spell that would break if anyone drew attention to it. He wore a red beard that looked like it had been carved out of wood, dipped in wax, and clicked into place. He approached us on a curve.
“Who’s done this before?” he asked.
I raised my hand.
Red Beard spoke in a low, electric monotone. “Someone besides him, then. Why are we here?”
Officially, we were there to learn—via live, unconscious, anesthetized, and wounded pigs—how to manage battlefield amputations, hemorrhaging, sucking chest wounds, skull fractures, and the like. Unofficially, however, this was a sacrifice—pigs instead of us.
An answer to Red Beard’s question came from behind me: “We’re here to fuck up some pigs.”
No one laughed.
“Who said that?” Red Beard asked.
It was the new guy. Untested as he was, his body was whole, and his mind was intact. As a result, his voice was confident, clear, and amplified by an empty-headed belief in his own good intentions.
New Guy tried to fix himself. “It was a stupid joke,” he said.
From the pig trailer came a bang, followed by a muffled squeal.
“These pigs are our brothers, not jokes,” Red Beard said.
“I’m sorry,” New Guy said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Red Beard nodded, and a flash of light escaped from a scar on his neck.
“Sorry’s not good enough. You can leave.”
Allison’s scream was not that of a full-grown woman, the kind I’d heard on so many night raids. There was no depth to it, no hint of recognition of the horror that had provoked it. It was, instead, the simple, guileless scream of a young girl, which meant that my wife was having a flashback.
I ran upstairs and into the bedroom, where I found the bed empty, the covers flung aside.
I got on my hands and knees to look under the bed, which was supposed to be Allison’s safe place. This had been decided in therapy, which we’d signed up for after Allison had got pregnant, and her memories, which she’d suppressed for decades, had started to become a problem. The therapist was a round, soft woman who sat cross-legged on a fuzzy couch. Allison and I sat on a smooth couch opposite her. There was a glass coffee table between us, and under that was a cardboard box full of toys. A big clock hung on the wall, ticking softly.
The therapist said that Allison needed a place to go where she would feel protected. When Allison couldn’t think of a safe place on her own, the therapist suggested under the bed. I wanted to hug my wife and tell her that everything was going to be all right. I wanted to convince her of this with the kind of hug that was a safe space in and of itself, that would feel like the inverse of all those dark and musty spaces that the boys and I, while rooting out the enemy downrange, had torn big loud holes in. But, as the therapist explained to me, Allison needed to be in a place where no one would try to convince her of anything.
I didn’t find her under the bed. I didn’t find her in the bathroom, either. She wasn’t curled up under the toilet tank, where I’d discovered her once before. Nor was she lying fetal and naked in the cold and empty tub.
In the four months that Allison had been pregnant, I’d learned a few of the things that triggered her flashbacks: Her father’s birthday was one. Her mother’s birthday, just two days later, was another. The smell of spoiled milk (which, until age thirteen, she had thought was the smell of fresh milk); and the sight of the little girl from down the street, standing off to the side, away from the other kids at the bus stop, with her dirty face, uncombed hair, dingy stockings, and untied shoes.
Allison was thirty-one years old, tall with long auburn hair and a bright smile. In the throes of a flashback, however, she became a terrified child. Her heart hammered away, her eyes flickered, and her voice grew tiny and plaintive. The flashbacks often happened at dawn, as the world was coming into focus, or in the evening, when it was starting to dim. The moment a flashback began, Allison would hide. I did not turn on the lights to find her, and I did not call her name, because these were things that her father had done. Instead, I stood quietly and listened.
Explosions had all but ruined my hearing. As a result, there was no such thing as quiet. Sometimes crickets chirped in my head. Other times, a phantom string quartet warmed up. Standing in our bedroom that morning, I heard a pot of water rumbling to a boil.
Then, from the baby’s room, I heard a whimper and a thump.
Pigs were lined up on their backs on the grass, anesthetized, mouths wide open, tongues hanging out, eyes slammed shut. Armed pig men stood at either end of the line. Closest to the fence was a pig man with a rubber hand, who was gripping a hatchet with his flesh-and-blood hand. The pig man at the other end of the line wore an eye patch and carried an M4. These two stood ready to wound the pigs as soon as Red Beard was done saying goodbye.
Red Beard knelt alongside a pig, kissed the top of its head, and gave it a hug. Slowly, he rose to his feet and moved on to the next pig.
I walked over to where Red Beard was kneeling. Eye Patch rocked on the balls of his feet and hummed. Sunlight chimed off Rubber Hand’s hatchet blade. Red Beard’s palm rested on the pig’s chest, right above its heart. My shadow fell on him.
“What do you say we call this off?” I said.
The sun, directly behind me, gave my shadow a halo. Red Beard looked up at me. “How so?” he asked.
“You take the pigs back to the farm, and I take the boys back to the compound. If higher asks me how the training went, I’ll say it was great.”
“But your men haven’t done the training.”
“Yeah, they have. All of them did it, except the guy you sent home.”
“None of them raised their hands.”
“They don’t like raising their hands. It makes them feel stupid.”
“What about good order and discipline?”
The light that shone from Red Beard’s joints brightened.
“Were you like this before?” I asked.
I had been walking behind Ted Waters on that blue night, along the highway outside Marjah, in Afghanistan, when the bomb took his leg. The explosion had balled me up, shoved me aside, and pelted me with hot stones. Aside from a sharp ringing in my ears, however, I was fine. I’d knelt next to Ted as he lay on his back, conscious and bleeding on the pavement. “What happened?” he’d asked me as I fastened a tourniquet around his tattered thigh, then looked at my watch. It was twenty-three minutes after midnight, so I wrote “0023” in grease pencil on Ted’s forehead. “You’re going to be fine,” I’d said. But Ted had already begun to realize that he was not going to be fine. And every now and then since, whenever things were quiet and no one was paying attention, he thought back to a time when he was fine. Now it seemed as if Red Beard were remembering, too.
“You can’t choose the things you want to do versus those things you don’t,” Red Beard said.
“My wife is pregnant,” I told him.
“Congratulations,” Red Beard said. “I have a newborn son myself.”
After Ted Waters and Bing Thomas were wounded, I put them both on injured reserve, thinking that I was doing them a favor. They could retire early with full benefits, and they could have a go at becoming normal citizens. But they refused. They both wanted back in. I thought this was insane, so I made them an insane proposal. If they could get through Hell Week again, I’d sign waivers for the face and the leg. It wasn’t pretty, but they made it.
“We could save them both,” I said to Red Beard. “My kid and your kid. We could stop this nonsense right now and maybe they won’t have to go to war.”
“How so?”
“You take the pigs back to the farm, and I take the boys back to the compound. If higher asks me how the training went, I’ll say it was great.”
I thought of the big dry-erase board hanging in our ops shed, where all our names, specialties, and requirements were gridded out in black marker. A green check mark in a box meant that a particular block of refresher training, required prior to our next deployment—Marksmanship, Free Fall, Clandestine Entry—had been completed. An open box meant incomplete. Bing Thomas had drawn this grid by hand, following each warped line with a slightly more warped line until the grid practically curled under itself. Pig Lab was the last column on the grid. Its deformed and empty boxes appeared to have been crushed under a landslide of green checks.
“Then what?” Red Beard asked.
Of course I’d imagined a world where pigs were humans and we were pigs. Where pigs fought wars while wanting to save their fellow-pigs from death. Where pigs learned from humans how to save themselves.
In this upside-down world there’d be a pig like Ted Waters, who, one blue winter night on a concrete highway outside Marjah, had his leg blown off by a bomb disguised as a guardrail. And there’d be a pig like me, who’d knelt beside Ted and applied the tourniquet just as he’d been trained to do. Then, a month later, in Khost, a pig like Bing Thomas would have opened a booby-trapped door and had his face sheared off. And a pig like me would have picked Bing’s face up off the dirt, rinsed it in cold water from his canteen, and felt the skin flex in the palm of his hand.
Now I was on my back in the grass that grew dark and thick all around the tall, concrete tower. My jaw was slack, my eyes were slammed shut, and my tongue hung out, touching the ground. I tasted dirt and chlorophyll. The black sun shone through my tightly closed eyelids, and I could feel myself gently rising and falling as if I were lying in a rowboat on the ocean. A deep incision ran from the base of my throat to my navel. My sternum was fractured, my rib cage pried open. Cool shadows of puffy clouds floated across my exposed heart, which the pigs took turns touching with their snouts.
With their snouts, the pigs would feel each beat of my heart the way a human would feel a silver dollar that had been flipped in the air then caught in an open palm, flipped and caught, coming up heads or tails, whichever side had been called when the coin was at its apogee. The pigs would know, from my heart’s predictability, that the spark of life is durable. And they would learn that, no matter how bad a situation appears, it could always be worse. I didn’t understand their language, but I knew what the pigs were saying to one another, because it was the same stuff that the boys and the pig men say to one another.
New Pig, who had apparently been allowed back into the group after Red Pig had calmed down and accepted his apology for joking about their human brothers, touched my naked heart with his cold, wet snout, tickling me and making me snicker.
“This one is a rascal,” New Pig said, of me.
“You know it,” Red Pig said. “He opens doors with his hands.”
“Also plays fetch,” Eye-Patch Pig said.
“I never heard of a human that could fetch,” New Pig said.
“You should come out to the farm sometime,” Red Pig said.
Mention of the farm brought to mind a make-believe oasis of sunshine, warm fields of thick, green grass, fat red apples hanging from a tree, oats mixed with brown sugar in the trough, and a cool, clear stream winding through the center of it all.
“Look,” Red Pig said, nodding toward me on the grass, my white heart thudding slowly in my open chest. “That’s a strong, steady heartbeat. He can keep going like that for a while.”
The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I shivered. I thought of Allison lying in the cold and empty bathtub. As I lifted her out of the tub, she’d pleaded with me to stop touching her.
“Everybody had a turn?” Red Pig asked. No one answered.
“O.K.,” Red Pig said. “Anybody not had a turn, raise your hand.”
The pigs just looked at him.
I sat cross-legged on the shag carpet next to the blue toybox. Its wooden lid rattled.
“No,” Allison said, from inside. She sounded small and far away.
“It’s O.K.,” I said. “It’s me.”
Allison had scooped all the toys out of the box and tossed them on the floor. New toys, like the spaceship and the motorcycle, were piled on old toys, like the cowboy I’d had as a kid.
Once upon a time, this cowboy had bent at the knees, elbows, shoulders, and hips. I’d taken him everywhere with me. Then one summer day, at the neighborhood pool, where I was taking swimming lessons, bullies had pulled my cowboy apart and left all his pieces in a glass ashtray. When I found him, I was inconsolable. I cried non-stop for the cowboy, but also for myself, and for my mother, my father, my brother, my sister. Death would not spare us, either.
My father used a powerful glue to reassemble the cowboy, which twenty-five years later still smelled like orange peels. The cowboy wore the brown vest that I’d cut for him out of felt. The shape of his face was unchanged, but its features, drawn in black ink on soft plastic, had faded away.
“It’s Monday, September 8, 2009. We’re in our house on Rockrose Lane. You’re safe here,” I told Allison through the toybox lid.
“No-o-o-o,” she moaned.
Allison wasn’t big by any stretch. Even pregnant, she maintained her lithe shape from her swimming days. And she’d always been flexible, but she still shouldn’t have fit in the toybox. In the throes of a flashback, however, she underwent some kind of transformation that allowed her to occupy otherwise impossible spaces. I’d seen something like this performed on a TV show called “That’s Incredible,” where a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound yogi had folded himself into a plexiglass cube half the size of the toybox. You could see the yogi through the transparent walls of the cube, his serene face surrounded by limbs like so many spare parts. Allison was similarly contorted whenever I found her mid-flashback. Unlike the yogi, however, she was unable to escape whatever predicament she’d got herself into. When she’d jammed herself under the toilet tank, for example, I’d had to drain the tank, remove it, and pull the bowl out of the floor to free her.
“We love our house,” I whispered through the side of the toybox. “It’s white with black shutters. You painted the front door red. You planted flowers in the beds.”
“No,” she said.
“I’m thirty-two years old and you’re thirty-one. My hair’s falling out. We’re in the baby’s room on the second floor. We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet. We don’t know if we want to know. The baby’s room is yellow, the same color it was when we bought the house. We don’t know what color to paint it yet.”
Allison’s hand shot out from under the lid of the toybox and grabbed me by the collar.
“Quiet,” she pleaded. “He’ll find us.”
Allison didn’t know whether her father was dead or alive, let alone where he might be. I’d tried to find out, secretly. I’d given the spooks at the compound—the same men and women who, at the time, were spending all day and night searching the dark web for Osama bin Laden—Allison’s father’s name. I’d told them what Allison had told me—that her father had driven a van that smelled like buttermilk, that as a young man he’d aspired to join the San Francisco Ballet, and that, later in life, he’d impersonated a dentist in Milwaukee. No detail, no matter how incomplete or far-fetched, was irrelevant to their search. The spooks had plugged all this information into the algorithm—the same system that had delivered us Mohammed Atef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and al-Zarqawi—and it had come up with a brother, working in a muffler shop in Palo Alto.
“He won’t find you,” I said.
She pulled her hand back inside the toybox and its lid clapped shut.
Rubber Hand with his hatchet, and Eye Patch with his M4, had done their work. The hatchet had fallen with the soft sound of dirt filling a hole. The M4 had discharged what looked like powerful gusts of wind. The pig men had crossed paths at the midpoint in the line of pigs, where each, in turn, deferred to the other as if he were opening a door for a lady, before continuing on to the other end. We weren’t supposed to watch.
“Y’all line up on a pig,” Red Beard said.
A dozen pigs lay face up on the grass, hurt, doped, and smiling. I chose one with a freckled belly. A first-aid kit and a bottle of water lay on the grass beside him.
Red Beard held up a first-aid kit. “Same stuff we carry in the field, minus the fentanyl lollipop, which is a controlled substance.”
“Which is the tits,” Eye Patch said.
Red Beard continued. “When I say ‘Go,’ approach your wounded and do an assessment. Pat and swipe. Don’t try to put any outside stuff back inside. Leave that for the surgeons at the CASH. Your job is to prepare your brother for the journey. Project calm. Look him in the eye and tell him it’s going to be O.K. Tell him he’s going to make it. Raise your hand if you have questions.”
No one raised his hand.
“Go.”
My pig was heavier than I’d expected. His practically nonexistent neck bent in a very human way. Otherwise, I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. I raised my hand.
Red Beard knelt next to me, and light shone from his knees. “Whatcha got?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Talk to him.”
The pig looked at me out of one eye.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “Where’s it hurt?”
The pig blew a pink snot bubble out of one nostril. Red Beard pointed at it.
“What’s that tell you?” he asked.
“Collapsed lung?” I guessed.
“Right on,” Red Beard said. “Now what?”
Inside the first-aid kit was a prepackaged needle that could be used to create a vent in the case of a collapsed lung. I peeled open this package, removed the needle, and held it between my teeth. I felt for the pig’s ribs with my fingertips. Into a soft spot between two ribs, I drove the needle home. There was a pop. The pig sighed and relaxed.
Red Beard nudged me aside. He put his ear to the pig’s chest and listened for a heartbeat. He pried open the pig’s eyelids and stared into his giant pupils.
“He’s gone,” he said.
The pig men huddled by the tower. Eye Patch toed the grass and Rubber Hand hummed “Dixie” while Red Beard wrote in a little green notebook with a stubby red pencil.
It was the same notebook-pencil combination that I used on missions downrange. I wrote call signs, frequencies, rendezvous coördinates, Zulu times, and Julian dates in that notebook’s blue-lined pages. Just strings of numbers, mostly, that would otherwise be shoved out of short-term memory by more numbers. But, when I looked back through those notebooks, the way the numbers slanted or grew large or turned shaky across the page told me all I needed to know about the night on which they’d been written, and therefore served as a kind of memory.
Red Beard waved me over. He pointed the eraser of his pencil at my dead pig, lying in an oval of flat grass.
“Minus this one, your troop don’t make the cut,” he told me.
“You get that guy who saved two pigs?” Eye Patch asked.
New Guy, in his exuberance, had patched a sucking chest wound on one pig then clamped another pig’s severed artery.
“I got him,” Red Beard said.
“We could round up?” Rubber Hand suggested.
“This ain’t tiddlywinks,” Red Beard said.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” I said.
None of them acted like they’d heard me.
“We could redo the first thing,” Rubber Hand said.
“Then we’ll run out of pigs for the last thing,” Red Beard said.
“If I leave now, I can get to the farm and back before you’re done with the next thing,” Eye Patch said.
“This can-do attitude?” I interrupted. “This make-it-happen-at-all-costs? It’s unnatural. We gotta stop.”
“You take one-sixty-five down to sixty-eight?” Rubber Hand asked Eye Patch.
“This time of day,” Eye Patch said.
“Leave the trailer here, and put, like, six pigs in the cab,” Red Beard said.
“I’d knock ’em out first,” Rubber Hand said.
Just then my pig jumped to its feet and shook the wet blades of grass off its back.
“There you go,” Red Beard said.
The sun was on its way up, and birds were chirping in the bare branches of the oak tree outside the window. Allison was still in the toybox, curled up, I imagined, with her knees at her chin and her elbows at her ankles. I talked to her the way the therapist had recommended—slowly and steadily, with a focus on our immediate surroundings and the current situation, in hopes that this intonation of our state of affairs would end her flashback and return her to the present day. I had just started talking about the future.
“I want our lives to calm down,” I said. “I want us to sit on the porch, watch the sun set over the canal, let our kids play in the yard, and . . .”
Boom! Allison’s foot broke through one side of the toybox. Her bare and scraped-up leg hung out from mid-thigh.
Crack!
She elbowed out the front panel of the toybox, then rolled out of the wreckage and onto her hands and knees. Her hair was matted and her eyes were wild.
“There are snakes in the back yard,” she said.
“What kind of snakes?” I asked. I’d never seen one.
“Cottonmouths. They come up from the canal and sun themselves on the grass. You need to get rid of them.”
“As soon as I come home from work,” I said.
“No. Do it now,” she said.
The final scenario was Burning Down the House. Eye Patch carried the last pig up the stairs of the tower all the way to the roof, where he laid it down on the gritty, sunbaked surface. Then he looked over the edge and down at Red Beard, who was looking up at him from a gas valve the size of a ship’s wheel.
“That does it!” Eye Patch said.
Red Beard made a mark in his notebook.
“Come on down!” he said.
Before we’d commandeered it for our purposes, this tower had been a training aid for the fire department. As such, it had been a placeholder for all homes in the area that might one day catch fire. So it was also a proxy for the two-story Colonial, on the banks of the muddy canal, where Allison and I lived. And it stood in for the house three doors down, identical to ours in every way save its crooked shutters and dead shrubs, where the dishevelled little girl from the bus stop lived.
Ted Waters sat on the grass near the fence. He’d undone the rubber bands that held his mechanical leg in place and set it aside. He was scratching the dirt where his shin would have been, watching the situation develop. As Eye Patch descended the stairs of the tower, whistling a carefree, shuffling tune, Ted stood up and hopped over to me.
“Do something!” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“You got a big yard. Take these pigs in. Let ’em grow old.”
Earlier that morning, while I was standing in the back yard with a shovel, cottonmouths had come up from the canal. They’d slithered uphill through the grass toward the house. They’d lunged at me with their fangs out. I’d lowered the shovel and, one by one, chopped off eight heads. I’d left the heads in the grass as a warning to the rest.
“My wife doesn’t want any critters in the back yard,” I said.
“Stand clear!” Red Beard hollered.
New Guy stood facing the tower with his sleeves rolled up, hands on his hips, and chest out. He shouted at us over his shoulder, “Who’s with me?”
Red Beard turned the valve on a six-inch gas line. This fat line fed a series of narrower pipes in the tower, which ran along the corners of every floor, wall, and ceiling, and were perforated to spray gas into the rooms. With the valve wide open this system made a noise like a hovering spaceship.
Bing Thomas ran over to me and nudged Ted Waters aside. The expression on Bing’s face alternated between satanic and serene. His crooked nose honked like a kazoo.
“I ain’t running into no burning building,” he said.
“Fear is an illusion!” New Guy announced.
The igniter was wired to a red button inside a little black box mounted to a wooden post. Red Beard opened the door to this box and pushed the button. The fuse clicked softly. The spark sounded like a stick breaking in half. Then—whoomp!—flames jumped from the tower’s open windows and stood straight up against the light-blue sky.
Heat from the fire warmed my face. It toasted my chest through my shirt. It sucked a draft out of the swamp which smelled like rotten eggs. Pig screams were no different from our screams.
Bing Thomas ran into the tower with one eye shut. Ted Waters reattached his leg on the fly. New Guy didn’t budge, so the boys and I parted around him and came together on the other side. ♦
