1.

Hannah Hahn was a legendary editor, though the reasons why were hard to pin down. She founded the literary journal Hot Stanza in 1989 out of her East Village studio. It ran for just four issues, two-plus years between each. Production values were practically nil. Yet it was precisely this state of near absence that added luster to Hot Stanza’s myth. The submission process was at once straightforward and verging on the mystical. You’d send a 20-page free-form rant to a P.O. box on Canal Street, and a week or a year later Hannah would send you a typewritten postcard, having pruned your meanderings to three enigmatic sentences, one of which you never wrote. She’d also give it a new title, usually a number. Then she would reject it anyway.

To get rejected by Hannah Hahn was an achievement in itself. Writers pinned the postcards above their desks. An air of mystery hung over the proceedings. Hannah never went to parties, didn’t own a phone. It was said she had a British accent, a harelip, a hearing aid, a lisp. A picture once circulated that some claimed showed Hannah emerging from a club called the Pyramid. In the photo, she looked like a cross between Betty Page and Charles de Gaulle, with a warm mouth captured mid-laugh. After a while this theory was discarded. Everyone expected her to be thinner, a hunger artist with Giacometti bones—a frame to match her pared-down aesthetic.

It was said she had secret scouts in cities all over the world, people from all walks of life who sent her found poetry, chance haikus, spontaneous word-spills that read like coded communiques from one spy to another.

The last piece to appear in Hot Stanza was a lyric extracted from a radio weather report, author unknown. It runs, in its entirety:

light rain touching parts of queens

2.

One of the handful of writers published in the pages of Hot Stanza (1989–1998) was Bethany Koo, briefly known as Anybeth Ook, drummer for Weird Menace. The band’s name came from an old pulp magazine that she found in a closet of the brownstone where she grew up, the literary residue of a former resident. She didn’t read the stories but the covers were all she needed.

The conceit behind her band was that its four members belonged to a cult that worshiped alien overlords, or that they were the alien overlords themselves—no one could keep the story straight. It’s been said about the Velvet Underground that although only a few hundred people bought their first LP, every one of them started a band; the joke about Weird Menace was that only 20 people ever heard them perform, but each one of them swore off music for life.

Now Bethany is a guidance counselor at Measures, a new private school built over landfill in Upper Manhattan. The overlapping ovoid buildings look spun out of sugar, special glass that goes white in sunlight. When rain hits the façade it sets off a bouquet of harmonics, like an ambient steel-drum band at the most exclusive chillout room on Ibiza. Inside are so-called learning pods that resemble crumpled balls of paper, as if the architects had knocked over a trashcan and said eureka. Sometimes when she’s talking to a student, listening to him drone on about lacrosse and string theory and some movie about 3-D printers gone haywire, she gazes out the oddly shaped windows and loses her mind a little. Is the Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose legit, or another bizarre fashion statement? 

Or something else. In that moment she knows: the world has ended, the sun has died, and the student before her is some alien life form in terrestrial sheath, draining her life-force by the second.

3.

Escaped animal Twitter handles: could they be your legacy? Online, Tina Koo impersonates the mature Persian lynx that hopped the fence of a Fort Lauderdale menagerie. “Lynx hungry, lynx eat poodle.” Stuff like that. Two days in and there are forty thousand followers. With the right weapons, she thinks, you could overthrow a third-world government. Think of all the office time wasted, all across the country. The profile pic isn’t of the lynx in question, just something Google spit up when she searched “lynx.” Maybe it’s not even a lynx. Perhaps just a very big housecat with fancy ears. You could argue that’s part of the charm, the play between reality and fiction. But that doesn’t explain forty thousand and climbing. Something is in the air, something desperate and a little depraved, held together by circuits and signals and stuffed up above in the cloud.

Fifty thousand, sixty.

A New Yorker born and bred, Tina had a kind of pre-midlife crisis, holing up in her mother’s new, cramped apartment for a while. Now she lives near Eucalyptus, California, where she surfs and tries to write screenplays. So far, nothing. Not nothing as in no bites, but nothing as in no screenplays. The funny thing about writing is that it’s hard. She thought surfing would inspire her, but it turns out all the surfing narratives have been done. It’s not a sport that lends itself to layered storylines. “Surfing’s over,” another surfer, someone named Bronx, tells her, while reading her latest inconclusive draft. It has major Act Two issues, and Act One is no cakewalk. It never gets to Act Three but Tina is leaning toward having a shark eat most of the cast.

Bronx has some constructive criticism. “Change it to hockey and make all the characters chicks.”

“What about the female characters?”

“Change them to dudes.”

“And then what?”

But Bronx is already dissolving into the sun-blasted sea, just a set of shoulders now, or maybe those are waterbirds at rest in the glare. Tina turns backs to her Twitter feed and types “Just got great edits.” Hashtag screenplay, hashtag lovemylife, hashtag killmenow. Would a lynx tweet this? Tina decides that her lynx would, and for some reason licks her lips.

4.

Before her untimely death, Clyde Virtue, née Fatkinson, lived a floor below Bethany and her daughter Tina, though Tina never knew her dramatically perfumed neighbor’s name; she assumed the “Clyde” on the letterbox was the last vestige of a late husband.

After graduating Vassar, Clyde moved to New York and through a series of frustrating jobs, before throwing herself to the gods of freelance reviewery. Fortunately, she wrote at breakneck speed, and with a high degree of style on books and opera and architecture alike, and picked up work with seeming ease. However, even those closest to her, upon reading her pieces, would profess confusion as to what she thought of the work in question, be it a Verdi opera or modernist office tower or revamped logo for a beloved brand of ketchup. She met with acclaim, and even attained notoriety; a piece in Spy was headlined, “What Is She Thinking?”

But Clyde quickly grew disillusioned with the racket, as she called it. Most disastrous, or amazing, depending on your stance, was when she tried her hand as a pop music critic, writing for a variety of periodicals. Here it was perfectly obvious what she thought. Even though Clyde did not listen to any contemporary music, if she could help it, she believed her ear to be infallible, for she knew the rudiments of music theory, and wrote forcibly about the dreck filling the airwaves. No band or movement was sacrosanct. She took pleasure in puncturing nostalgia acts and young Turks alike, indeed reserving particular venom for the Rod Stewart song “Young Turks.” (“He sings that young hearts should run rampant this evening, as though he had quite forgotten the song’s title.”) In her mind, the Beatles, a deeply flawed group at best, had clearly peaked with the soundtrack to Help!. She reserved special venom for recordings by female singers, with the exception of a rare, practically unattainable Emmylou Harris demo. Indeed, practically every song ever recorded, not to mention most of the ones left unknown to posterity, was as offensive as could be imagined, and more than one of Clyde Fatkinson’s reviews ended with some variation on the opinion that the consumer would do far better to seal up his ears with wax than to give the disc in question even a single spin. Some editors who were entertained by Clyde’s crankiness nevertheless feared for “his” sanity (they assumed the writer was a man), and figured his attitude was a result of him being more of a jazz or classical fan. But in truth she despised these forms even more. For Clyde Fatkinson, only the first Brahms piano trio and the early compositions of John Philip Sousa bore repeated listenings.

Against all odds she fell in love with the stage director Guy Virtue, whose musical flop Burton!, about the author of the seventeenth century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, she panned in the pages of a stapled-together whatnot called Hot Stanza. Virtue agreed with her assessment; curious to meet her, he suggested lunch at his club, and the two were engaged, as they liked to tell it, before dinner.

5.

Down the hall from Clyde was a woman named Klein. We were neighborly, though for a long time I didn’t know whether Klein was her first or last name. Early on she'd invited Ashley and me over for tea—“high tea,” she called it, without irony, or perhaps with an irony so rarefied it eluded me. The talk was pleasant, though the tea was bad. Klein was well above six feet tall, diluted only slightly by her constant stoop. Afterward, Ashley and I estimated she could have been anywhere from five to 15 years older than us, her skin smooth but her soft hair a uniform gray and worn like a helmet, almost like a toupee. She was visibly Asian, like us; however, she never divulged any information that would shed light on her exact ethnicity or upbringing. What lay behind her stolid mononym? Alas, it was not ours to fathom. Klein’s place was the same size as ours, yet felt at once more spacious, since she lived alone, and claustrophobic, as she apparently never threw anything away. Everything was in its place: shoes in a shoe rack, hats neatly impaled on pegs, bills and papers stuffed in large boxes atop a long wooden desk. An assortment of keys hung from a series of cast iron hooks near the entrance, like some complicated musical instrument. Yet for all the

evident organization, her quarters exuded the sensation of things about to burst at the seams. Floor-to-ceiling cases were crammed completely with books and old periodicals as fat as books, complete runs of bricklike journals with one-word titles like Caesura and Embodiments. No vases or picture frames or totemic tchotchkes broke up the onslaught of spines. It was like looking at a painting titled Pure Literature. There was no breathing room. So tightly wedged together were the books that I was overcome with the frightening and delicious sense that if I were to attempt to pull free a volume, the whole shebang would topple. No survivors. I had a fleeting presentiment of Klein’s death by falling bookcase, her tall frame completely obscured, and undiscovered for weeks. The conversation eventually turned to time travel, flying saucers, continents lost to time and tide. Her tone remained jovial as she discussed these matters, considering arguments pro and con. Klein mentioned the neighbors in 1B, with the small children, and said that she would keep a casual eye on their growth, for a race of little people would foretell the apocalypse. She laughed as she said this. She spoke of alchemy, turning lead to gold. The alchemists yearned for immortal life, she said; what if one of them found it? He would still be alive today! Ashley asked, But then wouldn’t we know of his sustained existence? At which Klein smiled and wondered if maybe a condition of such an extraordinary gift was that you could not broadcast it, you must keep it to yourself, a creature of eternal anonymity. A month later, Klein invited us over again, to “chit chat about this and that,” and the tea was still bad. There was a plate of six Ritz crackers, with no cheese or other accompaniment. As though hypnotized, neither Ashley nor I partook of the snack, which might have been lying out on a plate for hours if not days before our arrival. We talked about the mixed-up weather the city had experienced, which got Klein started on the history of weather prediction and weather control, in particular the “seeding” of clouds to create rain, and before long she was talking about actual cataclysmic meteorological events—earthquakes, floods—recorded across the ancient mythologies. She never got a third chance to invite us over, but we returned the favor and had Klein to our place for strudel and coffee. She didn’t touch the latter but devoured the strudel, helping herself to seconds and in fact to thirds and technically fourths, fifths, and sixths, small irregular shapes that she carved with a strange precision. She seemed to swallow the pieces whole. She really did a job on that pastry. Ashley was amused, but I confess I was miffed about her single-handed decimation of the strudel. I had wanted some more for myself. It had set me back $7.49 plus tax at Zabar's strudel counter. So strongly did I associate Klein with what amounted to her wholesale annihilation of that blessed confection that any time I encountered her hence, the word “strudel” would flash in my mind, and though I don’t claim to be a synesthete in my day-to-day life, the flavor of that distant afternoon’s dessert would spring to my tongue. Relations cooled after that, though on one occasion, Ashley, on her own, ran into Klein on the sidewalk and treated her to an impromptu almond croissant and Pellegrino at a nearby upscale bakery. It was a Friday. Though only two or three years had passed since Strudelgate, Klein looked different, she said, now suddenly 20 or 25 years older than us, hair gone ghost white, eyes small and cloudy behind thick glasses. But the most shocking thing was how large she had grown; boundaries extended, her immense body was bulging beneath a large black sacklike dress. Around her neck was a curious purple scarf, thin and made of some tough material and tied in an elaborate fashion suggesting Quipu, the system of ancient Inca knot writing. Even before they sat down, Klein mentioned that it had been a good day, that her entire week of stress and toil was worth it, for she had made stunning progress on her paragraph. Her what? Ashley asked, and ever civil, Klein explained. The paragraph was something she had been working on for five years now, on and off, mostly on, devoting her lunch hours to its construction. Often the work involved erasing what she had written the day before. Her labors had become legendary among the cognoscenti, or so she intimated. Despite many offers, she refused to publish any portion of it until the entire thing was done. This heightened the anticipation among her literary friends. The work had taken its toll. Her body was in decline. Meals were frequently forgotten, or else in her single-minded pursuit of le mot juste, she would lose track of meals and eat breakfast twice, lunch from noon till four, and have an endless buffet for dinner. At one point, two years ago, the paragraph dwindled down to a single sentence, and a short one at that. (“A dark time,” she said, “a dark time, indeed.”) Then she discovered “the key,” as she called it, and the thing took on weight again. She bulked it out, bigger and better than before, Klein said. Ashley could tell she wanted her to ask to read it, and Ashley wanted to ask; but she didn't really want to read it. Ashley’s own job as a photographer’s assistant left her feeling exhausted at day’s end, and the only thing she wanted to do was curl up on the couch and watch bad TV until sleep overtook her. She hadn’t opened a book in years. We subscribed to a few magazines and got the Sunday Times but I had only seen her glance at the front page; she never waded in. When she told me about Klein’s paragraph, I exclaimed, “I want to read it!” Maybe it contained the secrets of the universe, the recipe for eternal life. But though I visited Klein’s apartment several times over the next few weeks, my knocks and notes went unanswered, and in early February the super told us that she had abruptly moved out back in December, leaving nothing behind.

6.

Dr. Emma Chew, Hannah Hahn’s stepmother, was a revered psychoanalyst in her day. Once, when Hannah was young, she asked her what she did at work. “Sometimes people tell stories and they leave out the feelings,” Dr. Chew informed her. “My job is to show them where the feelings are.”

The good doctor hasn’t practiced in years. I got to know her by sheer chance. One cold March morning, I was walking the short stretch of 83rd Street from Amsterdam to Broadway, where I would swing up to 86th to catch the subway downtown. “Excuse me, young lady,” a voice said. I turned to see an old woman, lost in a down coat so big it looked like a comforter. She smiled warmly, advancing her walker one slow square at a time along the icy pavement. The sunlight reflected off the parked cars stabbed my eyes. Where was she bound on this harsh day? 

“Do you want to hear a joke?”

As something of an amateur folklorist—I majored in oral history at Brown—I said, “Bring it on.” Her face brightened. “There’s a newly married couple,” she said sweetly, breath making shapes in the air, “and they get along beautifully, except they always argue about how to fix breakfast. The husband works all day and thinks the wife should be the one making the meal. The wife knows herself to be incompetent in the kitchen, and besides, the husband’s job is as a chef in one of the city’s better dining establishments. Oh, the other thing I should mention is that the couple is quite religious, are you religious?”

I shook my head no.

“The husband—he is really a gorgeous man, very nice looking, very virile, says to his wife one morning, ‘I cook all day, the least you can do is bring me a cup of coffee.’ The wife—she is also an attractive specimen—puts her foot down. She says, ‘Darling, if you are truly pious, you will make the coffee. The Bible says it’s the man’s job.’ ‘That’s ridiculous,’ replies her husband. ‘I’ve read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and back, and I’ve never seen any commandment to that effect.’ The wife, she smiles and pulls their trusty old Bible from the shelf above the toaster. She flips through the different books, Romans, Corinthians. Then she stops, ‘See,’ she says. ‘He brews.’”

The old lady, who I would come to know as Dr. Emma Chew, M.D., Ph.D., burst into laughter as we walked to the corner. “Do you get it?” she asked.

I told her I did.

7.

It’s 1995. I am in Seoul, where I’ve gone to lay low for a spell, hoping to escape all sorts of craziness internal and ex-. I had to get out of Manhattan; then I had to get out of Queens. Korea seemed like the logical place. But things are only getting more complicated and dangerous. I’m in a bad way, options closing fast. In the mornings I run around a grim strip of park by the Han River. I take a shower while listening to the Armed Forces Korea Network.

No one can say my name here, Miriam, so I make up names. I tell people to call me whatever they want to call me.

I try to think of poems. Really scour that brain. What I get are stray lines that look like insane scraps of code. Rain, heavy at times. I fold them into squares and put them in my suit pockets, for later disbursement in the secret nooks of Seoul. There is no way to get back to me. I have hundreds of hidden readers, I tell myself. This is the means of publication.

For a while I carried around a notebook with the addresses of little magazines where I could send my verses. I mean really little: New Fungus, interFlux, Tongue Quarterly. They were like mayflies, living for one issue, then disappearing for good. In the margin next to each title, I wrote down the date of submission and whether I ever heard back. I never heard back.

Breakfast is a sweet bun bought the night before from the bakery down the block. Then I go into work downtown, a 40-minute bus ride through sluggish traffic. Everyone has dust masks on. The air is particularly bad now. For the past few months, a grand old building from the ’20s has been bashed and blasted, a relic of Japan’s colonial past. I used to walk by that immensity, past policemen with machine guns who looked at me like I was a spy. I wasn’t then, but I might be now. It will be years before the building is gone completely.

On this morning my satchel is heavier than usual. It contains a small spiral bound memo pad; a larger adhesive bound pad, half depleted, that I took from the office; a two-month-old issue of Details that my brother has sent me from the States; an orange; my Walkman holding a cassette of the Pet Shop Boys’ Behaviour; a Signet Classics paperback of Moby-Dick, marked at Chapter XVI with a clean white feather I found in Apkujong; and a thin hardcover book in a plastic jacket, Seven Women: Case Studies, by Dr. Emma Chew, whom of course I haven’t met yet. I checked Seven Women out of the USIS library using my aunt’s friend’s card. I’ve only skimmed the first chapter, about an actress who starred in a string of B-movies (horror, science fiction, even a couple of Westerns) before her rejection of acting as a “falseness upon a falseness”—the second falseness being life itself. Dr. Chew had a clear, elegant style, and she thought up amusing pseudonyms for her patients, in this case “Suzanne O’Woe.” Is it just coincidence (the good doctor wondered) that so many of Suzanne’s roles involve a character bearing some wound from before the movie proper has begun—a dancer with a broken foot, an assassin missing two fingers, an archer with one eye?

But this morning I’m in no mood for the doctor’s spirited assessments. The book is dead weight. The strap I’m hanging from digs into my palm. The day ahead fills me with horror. The tasks; the filing; the attempts to use the fax; the mystery of what to eat for lunch. My position in this country is uncertain. There is a good chance I’ve done everything wrong. At every stop I scan the boarding passengers for anything suspicious. I know the bus is a safe place to be, out in the open, but today it feels like a trap.

A polite voice asks me something. The speaker is a woman sitting next to the window. She’s a little older than me, attractive and demure, wearing a soft green loden coat and white leather gloves. No dust mask. Her makeup is perfect, like she could step out onto a stage at the next stop. The pressures of the morning, the paranoia, all fall away. She smiles, and I realize she’s finished asking her question. Her words make their way through my head for several moments, until the translation is complete, the meaning clear. Would I like her to hold my bag on her lap? Somehow this is even kinder than offering to give up her seat. I thank her, give a slight bow, and shake my head. I say in Korean, I’m fine, and for the rest of the ride at least, I am. When she leaves I give her the folded piece of paper from my pocket and say mysteriously, Open it later. I don’t remember what it says, just know that I’ll remember this bus ride for the rest of my life. It’s the last poem I ever write. ♦