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The next afternoon in the library, I picked up Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Atom” and started to read. There were words I didn’t know, but I didn’t slow down. I just guessed the meaning and kept going, and I saw then that Ivan was right: it was exciting not to understand.
The atom was seduced by the army—by a military man. Tiny little star, buried in metal, the military man said, or seemed to say. I will unchain you, you will see the light of day. You are a Greek god, come lie on my fingernail. I will guard you in my jacket like a North American pill.
The atom heard the army, and came out, and was unleashed. It became rabid luminosity. It assassinated germs and impeded corollas, and in Hiroshima the birds dropped like charred pears from the sky. Finally, the poet beseeched the atom to go back into the ground. “Oh, chispa loca,” he said. “Oh crazy spark.” Bury yourself back in your blanket of minerals, return to blind rock, collaborate with agriculture, and in place of these mortal ashes of your mask take on the noble something of the other thing, abandon your rebellion for cereal and your unchained magnetism for peace between men, so that your luminous something won’t be a hell but rather happiness, hope, contribution to the earth.
The thing that struck me was how the poem was all about stars and hell. As I had this thought, I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing again, even though it was April—and then suddenly the wind changed and the snow started gusting upward, back into the sky. I had to tell these things to Ivan.
I realized, as I was writing to him, that my favorite parts of the poem were the beginning and the middle—the seduction of the atom. The end was also beautifully written, but I didn’t like it as much. I told Ivan it reminded me of the rhyme my grandfather used to recite when I had a stomachache: “To the mountains, to the stones, to the birds, to the wolves, let Selin’s stomachache go, let it go.”
Things just aren’t that easy in real life. You can’t just tell an ache: “Go back into the rock.” Moreover, I think “peace” is misleading. It can’t possibly be the same thing as cereal.
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When I woke up in the morning, I found Ivan’s reply.
Dear Sonya,
I was going to write to you that there is no snow in Berkeley, but in fact there is no snow here either, and everything else is in order, below my window the traffic light changes back and forth, like my heart. Now I have fifteen hours to decide where to spend the next four years—New Haven or California.
Your atom, I think it will never go back to peace, to cereal or rocks or anything like that. Once it has been seduced there is no way back, the way is always ahead, and it is so much harder after the passage from innocence. But it does not work to pretend to be innocent anymore. That seduced atom has energies that seduce people, and these rarely get lost.
From your message, I figured out what happened: the snow fell the wrong way (up), slowly, until it all disappeared. This is fine if the fresh grass does not hide back in the earth, and what comes is Hello Spring, not Goodbye Summer. Not that again.
Your Vanya
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The things kept accumulating—the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal. It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone. Whoever it was would jump out a window from boredom. And yet here I was, watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about. This discrepancy seemed to set up an unbridgeable gap between me and the rest of the world.
I went running and thought about whether Ivan was saying that I was the atom, the crazy spark—the one that now had the energies to seduce people. Was he calling me, or sending me away? On the one hand, he was saying it wouldn’t work to go back into the ground. On the other hand, when he talked about the way ahead being harder, that sounded like something I had to do by myself.
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The phone rang. It was the editor of the literary magazine. I had won first prize in the fiction contest. The editor said that nobody on the fiction board knew me or had heard anything about me, and they had debated whether I was a boy or a girl. “I thought you were a girl,” she said. “I mean a woman.” All the winning entries would be published in the spring issue of the magazine. My entry was longer than the stories they usually published, and they had talked about making cuts, but they couldn’t figure out what to cut, so they were just going to run the whole thing in an extra-small typeface. The editor, Helen, told me the date of the cocktail reception where the winners would read from their entries. I would get a fifty-dollar gift certificate from WordsWorth Books.
“Okay,” I said, writing down the date.
“Are you . . . excited at all?” she asked.
“Definitely,” I said. “I’m super-excited. Thank you.”
Dread clenched my stomach. I liked that I had won a contest and that they had thought I was a boy, and I was glad about the fifty dollars. But I didn’t want my story to be published, or to read from it. I didn’t want anyone to think I thought it was good.
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I took my only pair of dress shoes to the shoe repair shop. They had come apart at the toe. The heels weren’t looking so great, either. The shoe repairperson glanced at the shoes without touching them. “Sweetie,” he said. “You need new shoes.”
I went to several shoe stores and asked to see whatever they had in women’s size eleven. Nobody made women’s shoes in twelve. Almost nobody made eleven, either. Sometimes the salespeople would admit outright that their largest size was ten. Other times they brought shoes in European size forty-one and said they were U.S. eleven. This was untrue; a European forty-one was an American ten. The shoe would physically not fit on my foot, and still the salesman—it was only men who did this—would jam in the shoehorn: “It’s an eleven, you asked for an eleven, it’s your size.”
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Ivan sent me a long message, even though it wasn’t his turn. The beginning was a sci-fi meditation about a boy in a desert with some light green melodies floating through something. The boy turned into green vapor and wanted to break apart, or come together, it wasn’t clear which. This went on for a considerable time. Then the subject changed. I summon you words, o my stars, condensation of matter, he wrote:
You are the second stage of creation. You fill the empty space and the desert. You may be a means to an end, but that end is the beginning of everything. Without you, there is nothing—no soil for creation.