some names

(These names have all been changed.)

Sara, her mouth always half-open, barely able to walk, her head always flopping around like she was unsure how to keep it mounted on her body. Unable to really talk other than to say her sister's name over and over again: “Where Wanda?” Instead of being at the club, this girl almost certainly needed to be involved in some kind of developmental therapy program.

Wanda, the girl with the biggest brown eyes you'll ever see in your life. “What did you do today, Wanda?” I'd always asked. She'd think for a moment, then reply: “Pwayed.”

Taylor, the 6-year-old with a lisp who always ran with his hands held in a certain kind of way that made you think that he was almost definitely going to grow up to be homosexual. He loved singing a song about ants on a log. Playing Patty Cake was enough to send him into convulsions of ecstasy.

Jocelyn, one of my best buds at the Club. A little headstrong and stubborn. She had this way of hugging that consisted more of climbing all over your body like it was rock-climbing wall. When she smiled it looked like her teeth were all crowded together, like there wasn't enough room in her mouth for them all.

Alexis E., either Jocelyn's cousin, brother or foster sibling (it was always hard to tell family relations at the Club). “HI JUJEE!” he would always screech out whenever he saw me. Also a hanger-oner.

Brian A., one of my earliest buds at the Club. He was always crying over everything. I fetched a ladder to get his bouncy ball out of the nasty-ass vent. He wanted to be a tattoo artist when he grew up and was always drawing dragons and other crazy designs on the back of scrap paper. He was also completely obsessed with and addicted to playing computer games.

Alexis V., my earliest nemesis at the Club. Two suspensions later, he is pretty sweet. I think I just got off on the wrong foot early on with him just because of my own early nervousness and uncertainty about how to work with kids (needless to say, I've definitely learned a lot.) Our relationship thawed from him always mimicking what I said in a retarded-sounding voice and shouting “come here baby!” to us playing Speed and him helping me to make ice cream with the younger kids.

Adam, the 6-year-old who was taken away from his mom 'cause she was sexually abusing him. I learned this from his aunt after several incidents in which she had to be called because he kept unzipping his pants and rubbing himself on other kids. “Give me a kiss!” he was always saying to me, puckering his lips up. God, the whole situation was just so wrong in so many ways. Imagine how much therapy this kid is going to need later on.

Daniela, the sweetest angel girl. Scars on her face from the time she fell off her uncle's motorcycle. When she first showed up with the scabs I was speechless, thinking that someone (parent, schoolmate) had beat the shit out of her (which is usually the case when kids show up with injuries.) Always gave tours to the new kids and parents visiting the Club. She's gonna grow up to be something, just you wait and see.

Matthew, one of the autistic kids. Always shouted “Boo!” at me. He liked asking me, “Julie, Knock Knock,” and then responding to my “Who's there?” by saying things like “Do You Know Where Tinky Town Is?” Something about the way he spoke just demands capital letters.

Colin, one of the Club's biggest characters. Another one of the autistic kids (probably Asperger's.) When he's sweet, he is very, very sweet (except for his unfortunate boob-grabbing stage), but when he gets into one of his tempers, he is just wretched. This is the kid who screamed at me “You're the meanest staff EVER!” before throwing a chair at me. A wonderfully creative mind though—so imaginative. One of the best ways to get him to go to meeting was to tell him that he needed to go on an undercover mission for the Autobots (I know more Transformers lingo than I ever thought I would need). He's probably going to grow up to be an artist or author, or video game designer (maybe all three.)

Jonah, yet another one of the autistic kids. Definitely, definitely Aspergers. They were my homeboys, I guess. Glasses with a Pillsbury doughboy-like face. Man, this kid was difficult to deal with. A biter and a hitter. All he ever wanted to do was play on the computer or talk about Pokemon. Very smart though. He liked to run over to me making squeaking noises and give me a big hug.

Benito and Miguel, brothers: Benito so fat with his mouth permanently half open. Always showing up with their identical new shoes and haircuts, buzzcuts with star designs.

Alex and Francisco, brothers. Bullies, yet capable of being so sweet and creative. During my spiel about not picking flowers in people's yards while walking to the park, he raised his hand and said that he would like to add something, and told the other kids that they shouldn't pick flowers in the park because they were planted there by the federal government. Francisco had a shy, soft-spoken way of slightly dragging his feet behind everyone and absolutely loved soccer.

I could go on and on. The main thing is the names, all of them, so many of them. Araceli and Roman. Samantha and Florencia. Orlando and Salvador. Noe C., with his big smile. Bethlehem and Fatinah from Ethiopia. “I need my Julie!” Fatinah would always say, running over to give me a hug. Nate and Nubia from Somalia. Brisa from Guatemala, who left her plastic bag full of her wet towels and clothes at the park that I walked all the way back to fetch. Henry C. from Guatemala, so charming and yet so troubled, capable of calling someone a motherfucker and socking them, then laughing it up and hugging his skinny little arms around my waist minutes later. He disappeared; I wonder where he went. Chubby Juan, chubby Jesus and his skinny, spiky-haired eternally trouble-making younger brother Ziggy. (“ZIGGY!” is the most common shout you'll hear echoing off the Club hallways). James and Tristen, twins, always drinking out of the toilet. Aldo, Oscar and Leti, triplets. Alma with the unpronounceable last name, only 6-years-old and her face framed by dark hair, it was already clear she was going to grow up into a real beauty. Jacqui, all business-like, sharing her food (mostly spicy Cheetos) with the staff. Citlali, so pretty and such a quiet, well-behaved kid, who loved looking up the names of faeries on the Internet. Rigoberto, so good-natured and easy going, with this weird layer of dried skin circling all around his lips, I don't know if they were mega chapped or what. Pablo and Marta, who could barely speak English. Marcus, Alicia and A.J., siblings always traveling in a clique together, so polite yet withdrawn. That's the case with so many of the middle-schoolers; their social cliques just become their entire world, and everything else (school, family, the future) just falls by the wayside.

So many kids, most of them related to each other somehow. I never, ever thought I would remember the names and faces and individual personalities of 400+ children. I've been reading a lot of Borges, Piglia and Cortazar short stories lately, which have appropriately mirrored that labyrinthic feeling. There's a lot of stuff in there about circles without centers, doubles, mirrors, mysterious deaths, tigers roaming without explanation through houses, ghosts without faces. It all feels strangely and compelling appropriate as I get ready to leave for England on Monday with Corey. I want to bring Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Mrs. Dalloway along with me to reread; somewhere along the way I want to find the time to read Nabokov's Pale Fire and Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. I want to continue exploring labyrinths in fiction, I guess.

I really like this quote from Borges' short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Terius": "The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to some one of them... Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men."

Will I ever decipher the labyrinth of the time I spent with these kids?

Aira's ghosties

Little kids used to scare me. Though maybe "intimidate" is a better word. Kids are so emotional, you know? These little events upset us so much and remain deeply ingrained in our memories and psyches as moments of momentous injustice that we never, ever forget. I remember crying as a 5-year-old when a girl wouldn't share her potato chips with me (we're friends now on a social networking site, another testament to the weirdness that is the Internet). I guess I really, really wanted those potato chips (it was also the first day of kindergarten, so I was probably already pretty emotionally drained). There are so many moments at my job when I'm dealing with a kid who is just incredibly upset by something that seems so trivial to an adult (someone cutting ahead of you in a line is a big one).

The kids themselves in this novel aren't as scary as the situation they're in. Childhood was an important theme in Aira's How I Became a Nun (perhaps more important than I realized when I first read it) and plays a similarly prominent role in the most recent of his works that I've read,Ghosts. Ghosts is my favorite of the three Aira novles I've read, maybe because it's the one written in the most realistic tone. The focus of the novel is on a Chilean immigrant family living in an apartment building under construction. The father is the night watchmen. A lot of references are made to his heavy drinking, but all in all, this feels like a happy family. The children run up and down the stairs, play in the empty swimming pool, but an uneasy, ominous feeling hangs over everything.

And then there are the ghosts. Aira's treatment of the ghosts is what makes this novella worth reading. It's an understatement to say that I've never read anything quite like it before. They first appear sitting on the sharp metallic edge of the giant satellite dish, "on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the mdday sun; no one saw them, of course." Here is the first full descriptive passages of the titular ghosts, from page 12:

The naked men shouted louder and louder as if competing with each other. They were dirty like builders, and had the same kind of bodies: rather stocky, solid, with small feet, and rough hands. Their toes were spread widely, like wild men's toes. They were behaving like badly brought-up children. But they were adults. A builder who happenned to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to a length of two yards, and then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls... The two ghosts laughed more loudly and frenetically than ever.

Yeah.

It feels significant that the rich folks that are being given a tour of their future apartment can't see the ghosts, but the workers can. Aira never explains where the ghosts come from, how the workers first saw them, or how long it took for them to get used to naked men floating around the air and through walls. In a way, this is probably the best way to handle the ghosts. It's like an extreme version of Kafka or Garcia Marquez, where we come to accept the fantastical elements of a story because they're written in such a matter-of-fact, realistic way. In the end, we accept the ghosts because the characters accept them in such an unquestioning, logical fashion. For instance, the next passage in which the ghosts appear (after the member-pulling) concerns the father's innovative wine-cooling system: "It consisted of resolutely approaching a ghost and inserting a bottle into his thorax, where it remained, supernaturally balanced. When he went back for it, say two hours later, it was cold." (29) How practical!

The sense of impending doom (or "climate of malevolence") (67) that hangs like a cloud over the children throughout the novel comes not so much from the ghosts (who come off more like a "flying puppet show" than a genuine menance or threat), but from how dangerous it is to have the children roaming around unsupervised in a roofless building with exposed electrical wiring. During a standard trip to the supermarket, the mother is described as "that anomaly, not nearly as rare as is often supposed: a mother immune to the terrifying fantasy of losing her children in a crowd." (23) Is this attitude is an effect of becoming numb to the presence of the ghosts? Needless to say, we're being set up: by the novel's end, one of these kids is done for.

In David Lodge's essay "The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?" from his book The Practice of Writing (I've been on a huge David Lodge kick lately and have several of his lit theory books lying around the house for Corey to trip over and curse), he writes about how fabulation in works such as The Satanic Verses "aims to entertain us with the humorous extravagance and inventiveness of its story while offering this as a kind of metaphor... for the extreme contrasts and conflicts of modern experience." (7) This could be applied very aptly to Aira, especially since humor plays such an important role in his fiction. My favorite character in Ghosts is Abel Reyes, the night watchman's nephew, who embarks upon a Kafkaesque grocery shopping quest to buy lunch for the workmen. I love how he obstinately refuses to use a shopping basket and with arms full of bread and meat picks up the Coca Cola bottles with the index finger and thumb of each hand, "which was all he had free." (20) I'm tempted to type up the entire passage that describes him: he is described as looking eleven years old despite being fifteen, "thin, ugly, awkward." Much is made of his long gross hair that makes him look like a girl: "Being young, foreign and therefore naive, he didn't realize that the Argentineans with long hair belonged to the lowest social stratum, and were precisely those who had condemned themselves to never escape from it... In Chile, [with hair that long] he would have been interviewed on television, or, more likely, thrown into prison." (18) It's funny, but "thrown into prison" catches us off guard slightly, as we ponder how true this might be.

Even though Abdul Reyes sadly disappears from the pages of Ghosts following his shopping expedition, I think his appearence sets up the subplot of Patri, the teenage daughter, whose musings and interactions with the ghosts comes to dominate the second half of the book. The other characters are consistently reminding Patri that she is reaching a "marriageable" age and worrying aloud about her lack of a social life, neither of which seem to interest her much. When her choice of men are people like Abdul Reyes, it's unsurprising that Patri's interest is piqued by the "virility" of the ghosts, who invite her to a party. The results of said party are not spoiler-friendly, and I leave it up to you, dear reader, to discover for yourself. I will say that Patri's interactions with the ghosts definitely represents a sort of crossing-over journey for her, from childhood to womanhood.

That's why I feel like childhood is one of the more important themes of the book. The children are made to seem just as freaky and otherwordly as the ghosts in this novel: "compared to an adult, they were always tiny. They were human in every way, but on another scale. And that alone could render them unrecognizable, or give the impression that they had been produced by the baffling distortions of a dream." (51) For Patri, the ghosts also appear to her "as the opposite of obscenity, as a kind of innocence." (54) I won't attempt to unpack the long interlude about Australian aborigenes and Polynesian interactions with sleep, dreams and rite of passage that takes up a good 10-15 pages in the middle of the book, but anyway, it all feels connected in an important, obscure way (while simultaneously feeling quite random and disorienting).

So what are we left with in the end? Are the ghosts an appropriate metaphor for the impossibility of coping with the modern experience? Are the ghosts spirits of laborers or immigrants who died working on the building, or in one of Argentina's military regimes? The last sentence of the novel is "Man and ghost stared at each other," (139) and apart from Patri, it could be the first time that any of the characters really "sees" the ghosts (and, more significantly, the ghosts see the living). There are quite a number of scenes concerned with "seeing" throughout the novel, such as when the characters turn off the lights during the New Year's Eve party in order to see the stars, or on the next to last sentence of the book, when one of the ghosts hands over a pair of glasses.

Lodge writes that one of the prominent marks of contemporary writing is a pronounced concern with communication, as opposed to self-expression (as with the romantic writers) or with innovation and creation of symbols (as with the modernists). Maybe this concern with communication is the result of genuine communication becoming an illusion; maybe it's the result of the saturation of communications: internet, phones, twitter, blogging, Skype, faxes, e-mail... on and on and on. We live in a hyper-communicative age. I like to think that, like anything, this is a power that can be used for good just as easily as it can be used for evil. For better or worse, it's the world we live in.

We'll just have to see, I guess.