CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

THEORIES OF DISPLACEMENT

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts In English

By Christopher William Francis Corning

December 2010

The thesis of Christopher William Francis Corning is approved:

Professor Martin Pousson, M.F.A.

Date

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Professor Ranita Chatterjee, Ph.D. Date

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Professor Katharine Haake, Ph.D., Chair

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California State University, Northridge

Table of Contents

Signature Page Dedication Abstract

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Theories of Displacement

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ABSTRACT

THEORIES OF DISPLACEMENT

By Christopher William Francis Corning

Master of Arts In English

Does language function to bring people closer together, or does it distance them from one another? Can a person ever truly get from here to there, or does there simply become here once a movement has taken place? To what extent does the label we put on a thing or a person affect the way that thing or person moves through the world? Theories of Displacement is the story of an aspiring writer near the end of his undergraduate career who finds himself wrestling with these types of questions. Surrounded by languages Russian, Japanese, literary academic, and twelve-step recovery lingothe young man recalls past romantic involvements as he wonders about the potential impact a job opportunity could have on his current relationship.

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Dedication

For Yuka; I wish Id been there.

With many heartfelt thanks to my generous and insightful readers both in and out of the CSUN English Department, especially KH and TK, whose encouragement, support, and direction have been invaluable.

Theories of Displacement Sergei rode swiftly down the bicycle path at five minutes past ten to his ten oclock Russian class, pushed along not just by the effort of his pedaling, but also by the sentence that reverberated in his consciousness: You can get there from here. His name was Sergei only in his Russian class, which he needed to pass in order to get his degree. The sentence stuck with him for a few reasons, but the reason that set the wheels in motion on this particular morning ride to class was that he looked forward with great eagerness to the day when he would no longer need to be called Sergei. He sped along on his bike as if he was racing toward the day he would be done with Russian, his enthusiasm about finishing distracting him from his annoyance at the students who insisted on walking in the bike lanes. If he pedaled hard enough, maybe he could even get here from there: break with his small-town upbringing and genetic predisposition toward substance abuse, and actually stop feeling as though he was a fraud for being on the university campus in the first place. But if he couldnt reach the point of feeling like he belonged on campus, he would happily settle for just passing the Russian class and moving on. If he had known as a freshman that he would be living with a Japanese girlfriend by the time he was a senior, or that he wouldnt be able to take second-year Russian until his final year of college, he might have made some different choices along the way. But then, if he had it to do over, maybe he would have chosen another major entirely, like substance abuse counseling or computer science, or anything that didnt require two years of foreign language education. That wasnt how his story had unfolded, though. Hed chosen writing, and hed chosen Russian. So he continued his ride along the bike path thinking of that sentence, I can get there from here, and narrowly avoided wondering how it might apply to his relationship with Akiko. He knew every bump, pothole, and curb along his route to the Foreign Language Building; they stayed in his memory the same way each jump in Super Mario Brothers and every secret passage in Zelda did, even though he hadnt played either in over a decade. The route he took to class was the very one hed described to Akiko, in their very first conversation, before he knew he would end up dating her. He stood outside the coffee shop on a cigarette break when she first walked up and spoke to him. She wore

light brown corduroy pants and a pink-colored polo, and she looked lost. Even with her casual attire, Sergei was awed immediately by her presence. She had an elegance to her composure that reminded him of a word hed once heard an English professor use to describe a character from some Victorian novel: gravitas. The term seemed to fit her. For a moment he was ashamed of his ratty jeans and scruffy goatee, but he ignored the feeling as he listened to her question. She spoke with no noticeable accent, preventing him from guessing her nationality as he was sometimes able to do with other international students who came through the caf. Her pronunciation was too polished to be that of a native speaker, though, which both accentuated her elegant demeanor and tipped him off that she was, in fact, an international student. She asked him how to get to the FLB, and something struck him about her use of that acronym with someone shed never spoken to before. He found something endearing about her assumption that he would know she meant the Foreign Language Building. Then he heard himself say the sentence out loud for the first time: You can get there from here. Maybe the idea struck him as odd only because he said it to someone whose first language wasnt English, but speaking to another American he might not have said it at all. Either way, from the moment of that first utterance, the thought was with him to stay. When he neared his destination, Sergei stopped pedaling and coasted to a stop, and then locked his bike to a parking meter before making his way in to the very same FLB. He hoped the classroom door was open so he might be able to slip in unnoticed. The Russian instructor never said anything about Sergeis consistent tardiness, but on days she did happen to see him walk in, she gave him a look that made him feel like a kid caught stealing a pack of gum. It was worse when the classroom door was closed because it locked automatically, so he had to knock lightly to get someone to let him in, a surefire way to get everyone in the class to notice him. This time he lucked out. The door was propped slightly open, so he made his way to his desk with very little commotion. As the instructor went on about transitive and intransitive verbs of motion, Sergei pondered how often he might be able to visit home, or , if he was to spend any significant length of time in Russia. He had, at times when he was particularly

inspired by the seemingly bleak prospect of finding work with a degree in creative writing, considered the idea of going abroad to teach English after graduation. At one point in the fall semester hed gone so far as to fill out an application his Russian teacher had given him for a summer program teaching English outside of Moscow. Not wanting to talk to Akiko about possibly moving away from her, hed never turned it in. Before hed met Akiko, Russia seemed like the obvious choice if he was ever to live abroad, no matter how poorly he spoke the language. Now that hed been with Akiko for nearly two years, and theyd been living together for over six months, he thought Japan might be a realistic possibility, too. Sergei had fallen in love with Akikos home country the previous December when hed joined her on a visit home to see her family. That two-week trip had given him not just his first passport stamp, but also reason to get a passport in the first place. He smiled every time he thought about Akikos grandmother, or obaa-chan, laughing as she watched him try to roll out buckwheat dough for soba. Sugoi, Kuri-chan! Sugoi! she cheered playfully, calling him by the nickname shed given him: Kuri-chan. He took the nickname as a sign that Obaa-chan harbored a special affection for him, and Akiko didnt bother to correct his misinterpretation. As much as he loved Japan, he wouldnt be able to move there for at least two years, until Akiko finished her Ph.D., if he wanted her to come with and help him find his way around. Why couldnt he just find a promising job prospect in his own time zone? Sergei tried to redirect his attention to the Russian instructor before his line of thinking went to its next logical place, the conversation he needed to have with Akiko once they were home together in the evening.

***

The name Sergei may have come from his Russian class, but it stuck with him outside of class because of something that had happened at the first twelve-step recovery meeting he went to as a college student. He had started going to twelve-step meetings when he was a junior in high school because his guidance counselor told him he could avoid a suspension for getting caught with drug paraphernalia if he went to six meetings in a month. Sergei had been living with his dad at the time in the depressing household his father and uncle shared after their father died from a heart attack. Sergeis first thought after being told to go to twelve-step meetings was that he might be able to convince his dad, who had been going to meetings off and on for as long as Sergei could remember, to take the meeting attendance sheet to the meetings he went to and get it signed for him. But Sergei knew that even if his dad wouldve been willing to get the paper signed which he wouldnt have beenjust asking for such a favor would have been met with one of his dads trademark extended monologues. His lectures could be triggered by something as benign as a question about the time, but inevitably covered topics such as Buddhism, auras, the powers that be, prophets, the Federal reserve, and sometimes even astral projection. Those rants were probably part of the reason Sergeis older brother John had stopped spending weekends with their dad once he became a teenager. Sergei missed weekends at his dads playing Nintendo with as much as he missed the days when he and his older brother both lived at their mothers house and started each day by getting high together before school. Most of those mornings they hadnt even spoken to each other; they just took turns smoking hitters until Sergeis ride showed up. By the time Sergei was told to go to twelve-step meetings, his brother John had already gotten clean, for the most part, courtesy of the United States Marine Corps. Rather than ask his dad, Sergei decided he was better off going to six meetings himself and getting it over with. To steer clear of his dad, he went to the group for drug addicts, not the one for alcoholics. The people he met in the meetings didnt seem anything like his dad, or like the people he remembered from the few meetings he and John had gone to on weekends at their dads house. Aside from being reformed drug addicts, the twelvestep people seemed suprisingly down to earth. It only took Sergei two weeks to get his six signatures for the guidance counselor, but he kept going to meetings after that. It

didnt even bother him much that some of the grouchy old bikers told him theyd probably lost more drugs in the carpet than hed ever used. Sergei was clean and serene fifteen months when hed moved out of his dads house to go away to college. Sergei wore a nametag to his first twelve-step meeting in the college town. It was his first day of Russian class, where hed been given a nametag that read in big bold Cyrillic letters, with Sergei written in smaller letters beneath. The Cyrillic alphabet seemed a little intimidating, but Sergei welcomed the challenge; combined with the fact that hed grown bored of Spanish in high school, his fascination with the idea of being able to decipher a foreign alphabet was part of the reason hed chosen Russian to fill his foreign language requirement. He thought it would be neat to have firsthand knowledge about the pronunciation of words containing the backwards R that appears in most popculture references to anything Russian. It was like being in on a secret. As the instructor gave nametags to each of the students, she coached them on proper pronunciation of their new Russian names. Sehr-gay, she said to him, repeating it slowly. Sear-gay, he repeated back. Close enough. She moved on to the next student. When he found the meeting place later that night, a small church near campus, he looked for the side door, as specified on the voice recording from the helpline number hed called. A young woman was stepping out just as he approached. She smiled and held the door for him, a pack of cigarettes in her free hand. He guessed he must be in the right place. Is this where the meeting is? he asked. Yeah, starts in about ten minutes, she said. Youre new, huh? Sir-gay? He hesitated a moment, taking a minute to pick up on the fact that she was attempting to read his nametag, which he now regretted not taking off after class.

Um, yeah, he said. I mean, Im new in town, not new to recovery. He would hate to be mistaken for a newcomer; he was very proud of his fifteen months. And its not Sirgay, its Sehr-gay. But thats not my real name. Oh, okay Sear-gay. Im Jess, she said. And that is my real name. He smiled and nodded. Jess. Short for Jessica just like his ex, Jessi. He wanted to know everything about her: how old she was, how long shed been going to meetings, if she had a boyfriend, whether she was seriously interest in recovery or just passing through. She looked as though she couldnt be more than a few years older than he was, and with her smiling bright blue eyes and clear complexion, she didnt have the look of a desperate, strung-out newcomer. She looked like she was about average height, a few inches shorter than Sergei. Her clothes fit loosely and looked almost like they came from a secondhand store, or more likely, were only made to look that way. Something about the way she held herself gave Sergei the impression that she came from an affluent background. Maybe she was what the other twelve-steppers would call a high-bottom addict, like they sometimes called him. He didnt contest the fact that he hadnt made as big a mess of his life as many other addicts had, but he resented the assumption that because he got clean young and was going to college, he must have had at least a middle class upbringing. He hadnt. Sergei thought about telling Jess that hed gotten clean in his hometown, and that hed just moved here for school. She might ask where his hometown was, and express surprise that such a small town had meetings he could have gone to. Or maybe she would ask what he was studying, and he could fumble to explain that he didnt know why hed come to the university, since hed grown up poor with an on-again off-again drunk for a father, and his brief experience at a math and science academy had already demonstrated that he didnt have enough class for academia. The silence had already become sufficiently awkward when Sergei reluctantly decided not to stay outside and have a cigarette with Jess. He didnt want to seem dull or worse, to come off looking like he was as attracted to her as he was, so he went inside to try to find a good seat.

Jess. He knew that if she had less than a year clean, she was technically off limits. In addition to the countless other slogans, such as keep coming back and easy does it, Sergei was very familiar with the oft-repeated suggestion: stay out of relationships for your first year of recovery. He knew that if he even tried to date a newcomer, his sponsor and other oldtimers would never let him live it down. He had seen too many other guys take heat for not heeding the warning: give the newcomer a chance; keep it in your pants! The slogans had been handed down from generation to generation, sponsor to sponsee, for who knows how long. The first time Sergei had shared in a meeting, his hands and voice shook as he repeated as many of them as he could remember: Go to ninety meetings in ninety days, dont pick up, no matter what, get a sponsor and work the steps, and so on, punctuating his efforts to share about his own experiences using drugs and getting clean. The phrases helped out with the fact that pretty much everything hed planned to say left his consciousness as soon as he raised his hand. He wondered how much the sayings had evolved over the years people had been repeating them to each other. He wondered who first issued the decree warning against romantic relationships in early recovery, and whether that same person had been involved in coining another clever saying hed heard once or twice: honeys and moneysfinance and romance are two of the biggest obstacles for an addict trying to stay clean. All of that aside, Sergei couldnt imagine that Jess would possibly be interested in him, anyway. Even if she did seem to get a kick out of introducing him to some of the other members at the meeting that night as Sear-gay. It was a good meeting. It felt a little different from the type of meeting Sergei was used to, but generally people shared about the same types of things he heard in meetings back home. The same books and pamphlets sat on the literature table, and the members seemed to be, more or less, the same eclectic assortment hed come to expect to find in meetings. One of the oldtimers from back home often referred to the mix of people you find in meetings as the bus stop crowd. Sergei liked that.

The second time Sergei saw Jess was at the departmental orientation for freshmen, where he learned that she was a senior in English. She was one of the honors society students who came to tell freshman what they might expect in the coming years. Sergei felt awkward as soon as he saw her with all of the other English department people, as he had no idea whether he should pretend hed never met her before, or what. After all, it was supposed to be an anonymous program. Hed never run into anyone from meetings out in the real world. He took one of the outer seats in the second row from the back, hoping to go unnoticed. Jess did see him, but not until just as she was headed to the podium to talk. Oh, hi Sehr-gay, she said with a wave, causing half the people in the room to look over at him. He could have done without the embarrassment of being singled out in front of the crowd, but it was nice not to have to wonder whether she wanted to acknowledge that they knew each other. Discovering that Jess was in the English department, was a senior, and was active in the honors society all seemed like very good reason Sergei could rule out the possibility of a romantic connection. What interest could such an obviously intelligent and accomplished womanwho was on the verge of graduation, no less possibly have in an ignorant freshman?

The forty-minute break between Russian and Sergeis next class wasnt enough time to justify going back to the apartment, so he typically spent the time on the quad, reading or writing. His next class was a senior-level literature course on Vladimir Nabokov, an intimidating class for him on a number of levels. For starters, the instructor was one of his regular customers at the caf where he worked. He made the mistake of telling her, one day as he rang her up for coffee, that he would be taking her course on Nabokov, and that it was especially exciting for him because he was also studying Russian. She responded by first correcting him on his pronunciationNuh-boe-kuhv rather than

Nah-bah-kahvand then proceeding to speak to him in Russian, discovering quickly that he was not quite conversational in his ability to govarit pa Russkie. Between his sense of shame about his rough Russian skills and the difficulties his slow reading caused in a course covering seven novels in a single semester, the Nabokov class was nearly as stressful as the Russian class. Sergei also learned that Nabokov had been fluently trilingual, and had published his first novel at the age of twenty-five. Great, all Sergei had to do now was reach fluency in Russian and Japanese, and then get a novel published in the next few years, and hed be right on track. On this afternoon, like so many others, he sat under his favorite tree on the quad, a large oak whose full branches hung low, creating what felt like an outdoor reading room. Even though he had been a remarkably slow reader for as long as he could remember, hed always loved to read. When hed finally begun to develop some social awareness in the fourth or fifth grade, his main way of comprehending relationships with other kids had been to imagine how they might be written about in the young adult sci-fi novels he loved to read. Hed always torn through those books much more quickly than anything assigned for a class, at least until he started making friends and spending time outside his house. Every year it got harder to keep up with assigned readings. Something about the knowledge that he was obligated to read something made the task of reading it that much more arduous. Even when he was reading things that werent mandatory class reading, Sergei labored over every page of the books he read. By the time he reached the end of a paragraph, he would begin to worry that he had missed some important detail along the way and have to skim the paragraph again before moving on, just to be sure. It was the same situation with entire pages, and the whole task could be so tiresome that there were times he fell asleep before getting through more than a few pages of an assigned book. Add the stress of trying to read for an English class filled with intelligent, well-read peers, and he sometimes wondered why he bothered trying to complete his reading assignments at all. Sergei wasnt sure how to balance his difficulties reading with the fact that, in most cases, he greatly preferred to write an email, or even a hand-written letter, than talk on
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the phone or in person. Real-time communication was far too immediate for him. Writing made it possible to gather his thoughts and be very deliberate and selective in how he chose to express himself. Talking face to face, especially if he had some reason to be nervous, or if there was any tension involved, usually left him feeling very pressured. He didnt have much faith his ability to always respond adequately or appropriately, and hated the idea that he might have some good point to make but not be able to think of it under the pressure of immediate communication. He also worried he couldnt keep track of what was said in conversations. What if he missed something? If he lost his place while reading, he could always go back a paragraph or page and discover what hed missed. More importantly, when writing, he was free to take his time to find the right words and phrases and put them together in the right order, building a solid case for his position. Casual conversation, for Sergei, was rarely casual. He didnt like getting caught leaning on the same words and phrases or delivering half-formed thoughts and ideas into the discourse. Words, once spoken, cant be snatched back out of the air and corrected. The written word can always be edited and improved upon. Having some advance time to think about what he needed to tell Akiko that evening should, in theory, make it possible for Kuri-chan to be well-prepared. He could organize his thoughts and ideas the way he might write a letter. He could anticipate and prepare himself for her responses and concerns. In theory, he could mock up a mental script of the conversation for himself, so he wouldnt be forced to think and react on the spot. In practice, however, he didnt have the slightest clue how Akiko would respond to his news. She hadnt said much when he dropped his education minor, or when he mentioned that he was sending his rsum to a nonprofit in California. She said less when he mentioned his phone interview. As far as he could tell, she had no interest in discussing the matter. With so little prior input from her on the subject, Kuri-chan was at a loss for his script. The sense of security Sergei felt when he was able to categorize, organize, and reorganize the world around him through language was what had prompted him to study English when he started college. As he understood it, that was what people studied when they

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wanted to be writers. They didnt study writing, and they didnt set out to be writers, as far as he knew. They studied English, they taught English, and they tried to write in their free time if they could manage it. Some very lucky few managed to write and publish books, and then they could leave their day jobs behind and enjoy fame and fortune. He gradually learned that it had been an immature understanding of the writing world, but hed never been exposed to any other view on things. So he declared his obligatory minor in secondary education to make sure hed be able to find a teaching job once he finished school. He tried to imagine himself happy living that simple life: teaching English when high school was in session and spending the breaks writing novels. He was only slightly deterred his notion from adolescence that writing is something that shouldnt be taught. If youre really creative, if youre really an artist, college would do more than just waste your time and money, it would stifle your muse. As a high school student, Sergei had wondered briefly whether maybe he should just try to write on his own. In the end, he hadnt been able to shake the feeling that someone with his grades and test scores should at least give college a shot. Combined with his intense desire to move out of his small town, and particularly his dads house, the sense of obligation to go the college route had eventually won out. Now, as Sergei tried to read Pale Fire, he couldnt help but wonder how he could possibly hope to be a successful writer, considering his difficulties grasping even a few of the seemingly endless underlying complexities of meaning that arise in a novel made up of the interplay between a 999-line poem by a fictional poet and its extensive commentary by a fictional editor. The classroom discussions about possible references in Pale Fire to real life writers and literary works made it clear that Sergei was shamefully behind as a reader. In the previous semester, hed taken a course on Samuel Beckett that left him feeling pretty much the same way. He began his college career hoping to become a writer because hed been captivated reading books like Brave New World and 1984 and having long philosophical discussions with his first serious girlfriend, Jessi. He missed those conversations. He wanted to learn how to write those books, and he didnt see how reading these works by authors obsessed with language would help him get there. All that language gets in the way of meaningful social commentary.

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Maybe it didnt help that he and Akiko never had conversations like the ones hed had with Jessi. In the time since he and Akiko had started dating, his attitude toward the English department alternated frequently, sometimes from one week to the next, other times on a minute by minute basis. He went from being convinced that writing assignments for lit classes were nothing more than tedious exercises designed to suck all the joy out of reading to believing deeply that he wouldnt be qualified to craft a page of prose until he was intimately familiar with all that had already been accomplished in the field of English literature. And as much as he felt like he should write about social issues, growing up poor in small-town mid-America didnt seem like it could compare to being a political refugee in post WW-II Europe. As much as hed felt like an outcast growing up in one of the poorer families in town, thanks to Jess he would never be able to forget his privileged status as a heterosexual white male. He could even hear her voice in his head, labeling his relationship with Akiko as a symptom of colonialism. Maybe his reluctance to talk with Akiko about literature had something to do with that voice. These meandering thoughts detracted from his already-challenged focus as he sat on the quad trying to read. It was a beautiful spring day, one of the first temperate days of the season, so the quad was bustling with activity: guys with beards and baggy shorts tossing a Frisbee back and forth, blonde girls wearing sorority T-shirts shaking change cans for a philanthropic cause, and couples napping together in those few patches of grass with the best direct sunlight. As he watched a bicyclist narrowly avoid hitting a pedestrian walking on the bike path, Kuri-chan wondered whether Akiko was in her lab doing experiments or at home taking a break. He pictured her on her bicycle, riding along at her leisurely pace, sitting upright with impeccable posture, her hair pulled tightly in a bun and her book-bag hanging loosely at her back. He smiled, and thought again about the idea of getting there from here. It brought another saying to mind: All roads lead to Rome. It had always seemed like an odd statement to him. It seemed no different from saying that the sidewalk ten feet in front of him led to the sidewalk in front of Akikos lab, which in turn led to the intersection where she sat on her bicycle waiting patiently for the signal to change from dont walk to walk. Did the roads in this college town lead halfway across the country, over the plains and prairies, the canyons and rivers, to that

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office building somewhere on the West Coast where he might take his first job as a college graduate? Then again, you can get there from here might apply to driving from one place to the next, or even finishing Russian and getting a bachelors degree, but it sure didnt mean that reading about Shade and Kinbote was going to get him any closer to understanding Nabokovs relationship with Robert Frost. Or, more importantly, even if writing a paper about these speculations helped him pass and get a degree, would it actually help him achieve his dream of becoming an author? Or the job prospecthis only job prospect would it be a move toward the life he wanted? After all, it was a writing job, and it also involved doing something he believed in: helping addicts stop using drugs and stay stopped. But what would moving halfway across the country do to his relationship with Akiko? He found it difficult sometimesmost of the timeto gauge their emotional distance. He chalked that up to Akikos reserved Japanese manner. It couldnt have been his part in the relationship, of course. For all Kuri-chan could tell, if he decided to move halfway across the country, she might react with the same cool indifference she displayed in response to his suggestions for places to go for dinner, or his ideas about which movie to rent at the video store. He was nearly paralyzed just by the thought of having to make a major life choice like moving to another state for a career opportunity. Most of the other students he talked to, from people like the Frisbee-throwing stoner who hadnt shaved in months to the sorority girl who hadnt spent an entire weekend sober since her freshman year, all appeared to have some sense of what they wanted to do with their lives, or where they wanted to go. Sergei knew he liked to write, but in spite of his years as a student of English, he still had no idea how that might correspond to a practical living. Sergei closed his book and slid it back into the front pocket of his bookbag, the place marker stuck in the same page it had been when he pulled it out half an hour earlier.

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***

The last time Sergei had pondered a major life move had been long before he first became known as Sergei. At the time, most of his friends and family had known him affectionately as Corndog. He could still hear the voice of his math team advisor from freshman year, Mr. Anderson: From now on, were gonna call you Corndog. Mr. Anderson made the pronouncement on the triumphant bus ride back home from the regional math competition. Corndog took first place in the individual competition for freshmen, but he also drew lots of attention to himself prior to the award ceremonies by eating five and a half corndogs at the campus food court. What Mr. Anderson didnt know, but most of the other kids on the math team probably suspected, was that Corndog and one of his closest friends snuck away to get high before meeting up with the others for lunch. When he got home that evening, Corndog went to hang out and get high with his stoner friends. As they took turns smoking one-hitters and played Spades, he told them the story, intending it as a way to make fun of Mr. Anderson. They all seemed to find the nickname pretty amusing, and wouldnt even let Corndog finish his story because they kept interrupting to refer to him as Corndog and laugh hysterically. The nickname stuck. One of the things Corndog most appreciated about algebra was that things, for the most part, should always follow a clearly defined path. Solving a math problem, he speculated, should be free of all the ambiguity and uncertainty that came with making life choices. It was this same quality that appealed to him about writing computer programs. His seventh grade math teacher, looking over his shoulder one afternoon as he solved algebra problems, encouraged him to think about learning how to program if he got the chance. He had already played around writing simple number-guessing games as a child, on the computer at his grandmas house. When the other kids stopped playing the Carmen San Diego game long enough for him to get a turn behind the greenish monochrome screen,

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he worked obsessively until he was able to replicate the game hed seen his friends brother playing once on their home computer. The game Corndog wrote started by generating a random number between 1 and 100, which the player would try to guess in fewer than ten turns. He took note very quickly of the fact that, even with the games initial element of randomness, the execution of the program was utterly predictable and reliable. When he played the game, his responses to the prompts became just as systematic as the program itself. Each time he entered a guess, the program responded by telling him whether his guess was too high or too low. As he perfected his system of guessingalways choosing the number exactly halfway between the known possibilities for high and lowhe started to wonder whether his knowledge of how the game worked, from a programmers perspective, contributed to his ability to devise such a strategy for guessing the right number. He figured that it was a simple enough game that he, or anyone else who spent much time playing it, would stumble upon that approach fairly quickly. It hadnt been until he joined the math team his freshman year of high school that Corndog finally got a graphing calculator of his own, gifted to him by the freshman math teacher who knew he couldnt afford one himself. He set to work immediately, writing a few simple programs. The first was just a program made to store some of the formulas they used a lot in class, like an electronic cheat sheet. Immediately after that, he did his best to recreate that number guessing game hed written on his grandmas computer, and he was amazed at how well hed retained it, considering the habit of smoking pot and drinking hed developed in the years since then. He was also a bit surprised at how much more quickly he grew bored with the systematic game play that had somehow kept him entertained for hours when he was still pre-pubescent. When Corndog talked to the other guys on the math team about the programming feature on the calculator, one of them told him about a transfer cable that made it possible to share files between calculators. The guy transferred a bunch of programs hed gotten from his brother to Corndogs calculator, including a few games that seemed fairly complex, like Pong and Tetris. Corndog opened the Tetris game in the program editing
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screen to try to figure out how it worked, and while he could understand some of the functional commands, he couldnt quite figure out the parts about displaying and manipulating different shapes. By that time, he had already been smoking one-hitters with his older brother John before school every day, so he got a lot more enjoyment out of just mindlessly playing the game. He convinced himself to stop trying to figure out the code part, because it wasnt like he had any ideas for games of his own that he needed the information for. Instead he focused his energies on trying to get his initials in the high score list. Programming and playing those mindless games became Corndogs go-to reaction to any suggestions from Mr. Anderson that he consider applying to a math and science academy hed heard about. It would be good prep for college, Mr. Anderson assured him. Rather than try to imagine what it would be like to go away for school, whether it be prep academy or college, Corndog took refuge in the games on his graphing calculator. Nowadays Sergei could easily get back into that same mindset, taking Akikos phone and playing its built-in Space Invaders-like game if he needed a break while they studied together at the coffee shop. She invariably gave him dirty looks when he did, as she considered those games a waste of time. Dont worry, hed say. You have plenty of battery left.

Once he took his seat for the Nabokov class, Sergei noticed an AV cart at the front of the room. He felt some relief as he remembered that they were supposed to start watching a film adaptation of The Defense, but he also regretted that he had been trying so hard to finish Pale Fire if they wouldnt even be talking about it that day. He took advantage of his spot in the back corner of the room watch the other students wander in and take their

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seats. It was the most diverse class hed taken in quite a while, in terms of the academic backgrounds of the students, mostly because it was cross-listed under a few different departments, and was made up of both undergrads and grad students. Sergei recognized some of the students from a Comparative World Literature course hed taken, along with a handful of grad students from the English department. He wasnt sure, but he also suspected that some of the students were majoring either in Russian or in Russian literature, as they brought Russian-language versions of each of the novels to class. There were still a few minutes until class began when the instructor came in and started to fuss with the AV setup. The cart was just inside the door when she came in, but in order to plug it in and make sure everyone had a clear view of the screen, she would have to do some rearranging of things. As it became clear she would need to move her own table and chair out of way, Sergei felt like maybe he should go up and help out. Before he could react, though, a couple of the students in the front of the room got up to start rearranging furniture. The classroom was pretty full, so there wasnt much room to move the desks around. As everyone moved things around, a girl in the next row turned and looked at Sergei, gesturing as if to ask if it was okay to push her desk back between rows, beside his, to sit by her friend. He thought it curious that she didnt speak, but her silence was certainly wasnt out of character. He couldnt think of a time that shed participated in classroom discussion in all the weeks of class up to that point, let alone said anything directly to him. The only times hed heard her speak had been rare occasions when she turned and spoke softly in Russian to the young woman who sat behind her, to the right of Sergei. As she looked back at Sergei to see if it would be okay to move her desk back, he was tempted to act like he didnt know what she was trying to ask, and see how long it would take her to verbalize the request. He couldnt bring himself to do it, probably for the same reason he typically tried to avoid looking at her: he found her attractive and suspected she knew it. He moved his desk to make room for hers and tried to smile politely. She let a slight smile show as she moved her desk, avoiding eye contact as she slid it back right next to Sergeis. Her desk was so close to his as to actually be touching. He felt like he

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should try to move a little more to give her space, but his desk was already butted up against a storage cabinet on his left. She squeezed herself through the space between her desk and her friends, and then she leaned and whispered something to her friend, probably in Russian. The friend giggled. He couldnt help but wonder, of course, whether it had been something about him. It wasnt unusual for her to do something like that, whispering to her friend and giggling together in a way that seemed designed to attract attention, and more specifically, to attract his attention. The instructor made a few announcements about the course schedule for the rest of the week, and then she dimmed the lights and started the movie. Sergei slouched in his seat a little, trying to find a position in the hard plastic chair that might be relatively comfortable for the next eighty minutes or so. He put his feet in the basket under the seat in front of him and let his right arm rest on the top of his desk. His desk had a right-side armrest, and the girl next to him had a left-side armrest, so with their desks pushed so close together, they essentially shared an extra-wide armrest. Just as he did when sitting next to a stranger in a movie theater, Sergei made a special effort to stay clear of the boundary between his own personal space and that of his neighbor. Not that the girl would have noticed; she sat with her hands together in her lap. Sergei was sufficiently engrossed in the film that he didnt notice when the girl moved her arm onto her armrest, or the fact that his own arm had made its way closer to the thin space dividing his desk top from hers. He didnt notice as their arms gradually moved closer and closer. He only took notice when the soft skin of her forearm brushed, ever-soslightly, against his arm. He was the type of person who was easily drawn deeply into the world of movies and television, so much so that having a television on in a room rendered him nearly incapable of having any semblance of coherent or intelligent conversation. Still, that made no difference when the girls skin touched his. Immediately he was back in the classroom, sitting at his desk, and deeply aware of his arm and hers. Hed forgotten all about the narrative taking place on-screen, and had been re-inserted into a much more compelling narrative involving the young woman sitting next to him. A normal reaction, he suspected, might have been to pull away, look at her
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and smile awkwardly, and reposition his arm in such a way as to prevent further inadvertent contact. But he let his arm remain still, a difficult task in the first moments but one that quickly became much easier. The girls arm continued to rest gently against his, enough so that Sergei was absolutely convinced that she must have been aware of the contact. She didnt pull away. Sergei recalled a few key passages from Lolita, and how Nabokov had constructed those first moments of illicit physical contact between Humbert Humbert and the nymphet, Dolores Haze. Sergeis own connection to the young woman beside himirrational, nonsensical, primarily a product of his own imaginationa moment of physical contact now served as a bridge between some kind of fantasy and some kind of reality, however disparate the two narratives might be. As she moved, very slightly, her arm drew away from his and then closer again, all without breaking the contact. Each moment of the contact sent new waves of sensation up his arm and down his legs, and he felt incredibly antsy but dared not move. He thought for a second about Akiko, but put that out of his mind as fast as he did any thoughts of moving, of breaking this nonverbal bond of desire.

The sensations Sergei felt radiating through his body from his point of contact with the girl reminded him of the beginnings of his relationship with Jess. The first time Jess called him to see if wanted to have with dinner with her, Sergei was sitting in his dorm practicing the Cyrillic alphabet, barely two weeks into his first semester of college. He found something deeply satisfying about learning a foreign alphabet, which was something his high school Spanish class hadnt been able to offer. Sure, he knew that was called ey-nyay and pronounced like ny, as in aos, pronounced anyos. And he knew to roll his Rs, and pronounce ll as y as in tortilla. Those small differences about the Spanish alphabet seemed far too minor for Sergei, and the fact that so many people seemed to know at least a little Spanish made the language seem a little too

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mundane or commonplace for Sergei. Understanding an entirely foreign and much more complicated set of symbols that far fewer people could read, on the other hand, such as the Cyrillic alphabet, felt like another story altogether. As he got those first grueling days of class out of the way and slowly gained an ability to sound out the words on the various posters hanging up around the room, he reveled in the knowledge that he had acquired a rare skill. But then, the ability to read words on posters was quite different from the ability to recreate those words by hand on a sheet of paper. So Sergei was writing out letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, and even practicing some of the few words he knew hurry, hello, and thankswhen Jess called to ask him to join her for dinner. For all the same reasons he was sure Jess wasnt interested in him romantically, Sergei was sure she must have meant the dinner invitation to be platonic. She seemed to him like the kind of person, both as a college student and as a person in recovery, who liked to make a big show of being grown up and mature. What better way to pretend to be a sophisticated adult than to have dinner with a member of the opposite sex with strictly platonic motives? Go downstairs and wait out front, she said. Ill pick you up in a few minutes. Sergei sat on the stone bench in front of his dorm building and smoked a cigarette as he waited. From where he sat facing west, he could see a fair distance down University Avenue, the road that spanned the northern border of campus. The four lanes of traffic seemed like a thin separation between campus and the residential neighborhoods to the north. Sergei was still getting used to the urban environment. His only other experience living in a city had been his brief stay at the academy, but that campus had been situated on the outskirts of a much more suburban community. Jess honked as she pulled up in front of the dorm in an old Volkswagen sedan. Once she learned that Sergei had never eaten Thai food, Jess insisted that they eat at an Asian restaurant she knew off-campus. It wasnt a Thai restaurant, but more like a pan-

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Asian type of place. According to Jess, it was the only place in town that served any Thai dishes. Pad Thai is good for virgins, she told him as they looked over their menus. He looked up from the menu, wondering for a moment if he was that obvious, until he realized she was talking about eating Thai for the first time. If you like spicy stuff you can try some of their yellow curry. The curry here isnt the best Ive had, but its still good. Sergei nodded. He hardly paid attention to his anxiety about the food, as he was too nervous about making her think he was an idiot. And somewhere underneath that, he was starting to feel the onset of some serious apprehension about telling his sponsor that he went out to dinner with a girl. Yeah, so he had more than a year clean now, but sometimes he still felt a little like a newcomer. And he knew if she didnt have at least a year clean, having dinner with her definitely wouldnt fly with his sponsor, even if it was platonic. He stole glances at her between failed attempts to read the menu. Her dirty blonde hair was cut short around the sides, a bit uneven and spiky, with slightly longer bangs hanging down to her eyebrows. She had light blue eyes, and the corner of her mouth curved up a bit higher on the left side when she smiled. What did she want to talk to him about? Recovery? Literature? The university? Had he judged her only on the way she carried herself at the freshman orientation, he would have never been able to imagine her using drugs. As he watched her look over the menu and listened to the way she described the food, she no longer seemed like the same girl from the honors society. They ordered pad Thai and yellow curry to share, and she insisted on Thai iced coffees, too. After placing their order, Jess explained that shed been clean since halfway through her sophomore year, just a few months longer than Sergei. So I take it your using didnt interfere with your schoolwork that much? he asked, once they had received their drinks. No, not too much, she said. I just didnt like what it was doing to me, so I quit. So no treatment or anything? Just straight into recovery? Thats how I got clean.
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Yeah, no, I didnt want to go to rehab. Those places are horrible for reinforcing gender stereotypes and pushing their patriarchal moral codes down peoples throats. Im sure I would have gotten all kinds of shit for being bisexual. Mm-hmm, Sergei mumbled. He wasnt sure what else he could say to that. Jess ease in pronouncing some of the phrases she used reminded Sergei of the way his dad rattled off some of his most beloved terminology when delivering one of his diatribes. But this was a new language, one Sergei hadnt yet had time to process. Well, I mean I did just come out over the summer, but it was because Im working on my Fourth Step, and my sponsor said that I need to be sure to get out all my secrets as part of writing the whole searching and fearless moral inventory. Ive heard they make you do like a life story thing in treatment too, so it probably would have come out then. I see, Sergei said. So have you dated girls, then? He felt slightly uncomfortable asking, but she was the one who brought it up, so why not? No, not really, she answered. You know, once you take some gender studies and queer theory courses, youll probably understand it better. Sexual orientation is primarily a political thing, Sergei. Sergei couldnt help but think that she might be taking some of the things she read a bit too literally. But he felt a little more at ease, taking her coming out as a sort of confirmation that it was a platonic date. He didnt feel nearly as nervous with her, and he also got some relief about trying to figure out what he would tell his sponsor. He and Jess talked for a while about recoveryshe filled him in on some of the local gossipand about their favorite booksshe told him his reading list was overrun with old dead white guys, and that he needed to branch out a little bit. She promised to loan him some more diverse reading material. They drove back to campus after the meal, which she insisted on paying for, and walked back to the dorms together from the student lot. Sergeis dorm came first, so they stopped

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at the front door to say good-night. Sergei noticed that he felt more comfortable and at ease than he had any time since hed first arrived on campus. That was really nice, he told her. Thanks so much for dinner. Im no longer a virgin... at least when it comes to Thai food, he laughed. Im always happy to deflower, she snapped back quickly. She smiled at him and let the silence linger a moment. Just as Sergei began to reach the limit of his comfort level for looking her in the eyes, she broke the silence: Any time you want a ride to a meeting, just call. I will, he answered. Thanks for being so welcoming. Sergei opened his arms to give Jess a hug, the way he would if saying good night to any other recovering addict. She hugged him back warmly and held him closer and longer than the typical after-meeting hug he was used to. When the embrace ended, Jess surprised Sergei by kissing him on the lips. He didnt pull away or resist, but he did not actively return the kiss. She parted her lips slightly and he followed suit, and she closed her lips momentarily on his bottom lip, and then released. She stepped back, smiling. Good night, she said. With barely a seconds pause, she turned and walked away. With that, Sergeis newfound sense of comfort and ease had vaporized. He knew he would take a lot of heat from his sponsor, and possibly other members, if he openly dated Jess, even though they were both safely out of the one-year cooling-off period. But did she even want to date him? His sponsors only response when Sergei mentioned meeting her had been some offhand comment about the psychological implications of his first romantic involvement in recovery being with a girl whose name was the same as the last person he had dated while using drugs. He suggested that Sergei wait it out a bit before making a decision. After that conversation, Sergei caught himself thinking about the name issue on a few separate occasions, in the same way he might daydream about a sentence hed read in

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class or something he heard in a meeting. So what if this girls name was Jess, and his exs name was Jessi? Granted, they had other things in common: they were both pretty in ways that Sergei would describe as wholesome to avoid the next-door neighbor clich; both were academic but seemed to possess healthy senses of skepticism; and so far, it was beginning to seem that Jess was just as brash as Jessi had been in terms of instigating a relationship rather than waiting for Sergei to do so. Maybe some small part of him was trying to recapture what hed had with Jessi? Dropping one letter off an algebraic equation or some string of letters could make all the difference in a calculation, a word, or a sentence. Wouldnt the same be true for a person or a relationship? All else aside, Jess differed from Jessi in at least one critical sense: she was in recovery. At the next meeting he went to after the kiss, Sergei stood outside smoking, wondering how he was supposed to act when he saw Jess. Hed walked to the meeting, which was close to campus, because he hadnt been able to work up the nerve to call and see whether she would be driving there, or even going to the meeting at all. He smoked anxiously, taking drags in fast succession so the burning end of the cigarette grew abnormally long and misshapen. He finished one cigarette and lit another just before Jess walked up, seemingly engrossed in conversation with the girl she arrived with. Jess walked up and hugged Sergei with far less affection than when theyd parted after dinner. She didnt bother to speak to him beyond a quick Hi, or introduce him to the girl she was with, who she continued talking to as she breezed past Sergei and went inside. During the course of the meeting, Jess conspicuously refrained from looking at Sergei, and instead seemed to be completely engrossed in what each person said while sharing. Still, he got the distinct impression that she was keeping tabs on him in her peripheral vision, making sure that he was paying adequate attention to her. She didnt acknowledge him again until the close of the meeting, when everyone gathered in a circle for the closing Serenity Prayer. He put his arms around the shoulders of the two men beside him and looked across the circle at Jess, who smiled as she embraced the people next to her and then bowed her head for the moment of silence. He took that as a good sign, even if

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she did avoid him after the circle broke and everyone drifted slowly to the parking lot to decide where to go for foodthe meeting after the meeting. The group reached consensus to go to one of their usual haunts, a pizza restaurant a couple miles down the road from the meeting place. Sergei asked one of the men from the group for a ride over. Walking in, Sergei was a bit surprised to see that the place was half bar, half restaurant. He was accustomed to people in recovery who went out of their way to avoid establishments that served alcohol, but maybe the group felt it was safe since they were all there together. Even though only a few from the group had come in, the waitress seemed to recognize them and gestured toward a group of tables on the far side of the dining area that had been pushed together to make one long table. At a glance, Sergei guess there was room to seat at least sixteen people. He didnt know how many people from the meeting were coming. He walked slowly as he followed the other early arrivers to the table, trying to stall long enough for Jess to arrive, so he could see where she would sit. In spite of how slowly he made his way across the room to their table, he wasnt able to stall long enough. He arrived at the table and looked back to the entrance, and there was still no sign of Jess. Sergei felt an uncomfortable combination of panic and disappointment as it occurred to him that maybe Jess wouldnt come. Maybe shed gone somewhere else with the girl who came to the meeting with her, or went back to campus to study. He reluctantly sat down on the far side of the table, with a view of the door, and made small talk with the middle-aged man he rode to the restaurant with. It wasnt until hed been sufficiently distracted answering questions about what meetings were like back home that Jess finally showed up at the table and took a seat across from him. He smiled in acknowledgment and continued to listen patiently as the man next to him talked at length about the year or two hed spent in Sergeis home town decades ago. The man was surprised that Sergeis hometown even had any meetings. Jess smiled back at Sergei briefly enough that he could easily have missed it. She didnt miss a beat in her conversation with her friend, in which she seemed to be completely absorbed. Sergei tried to appear interested in what the man next to him was saying, but it grew increasingly difficult to do so. Even the mans voice was boring. Sergei picked up his

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menu and started scanning the items intently, hoping the man might stop talking for a minute. He didnt. Sergei continued to stare at the menu, unable to summon enough focus to actually read it, only looking up sporadically to glance at Jess. Distracted as he was by the constant chatter coming from the man next to him, he managed to achieve clarity just long enough to think about the implications of the fact that Jess had just come out as bisexual. He felt a rush of embarrassment as it occurred to him that she might be on the verge of getting involved with the girl she was talking to. Disappointed by his own foolishness, he made one last desperation effort to pick something off the menu as the waitress took an order from the man next to him. He resigned himself to an evening of dull conversation with a middle-aged recovering addict with whom he probably had very little in common. Just as he started placing his order, Sergei felt something touch his foot. He pulled back slightly, thinking someone had accidentally brushed his foot, and continued with his order. After a moment, as the waitress asked what kind of dressing he wanted on his salad, he felt it again, this time more slowly, but firmly enough that it seemed like it must have been intentional. He looked at Jess. She was still engaged in conversation with her friend, but looked at Sergei for a moment and winked slyly as she brushed her leg back and forth against his under the table. Sergei wasnt sure how to respond. Hed never played footsie before, and the tingling sensations running up his leg from the point of contact were almost too much for him to take at first. He didnt want to spoil the secret, though, so he kept as still as he could. That seemed to intensify the excitement and pleasure her touch caused, underneath the table, unseen by the rest of their companions. He felt like he should reciprocate, but couldnt figure out a way to do so without seeming clumsy or awkward, like those first times he kissed a girl. Jess wasnt overly aggressive with her affections, but simply rubbed her leg against his slowly and lightly. The waitress had gone to put in their order, Jess remained involved in her conversation with her friend, and the man next to Sergei was now repeating his anecdotes about Sergeis hometown to another guy whod come and taken a seat on the other side of him.
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The rest of Sergeis evening ended up being, as he had suspected, largely made up of dull conversation with the older guys, who sat mostly to his left. Jess continued talking with her friend and some of the women, most of whom were sitting on the end of the table to his right. Sergei wondered if they segregated by gender that way every week, or if it had just sort of happened that way organically. In spite of paying little or no attention to Sergei above the surface of the table, Jess continued with her gentle flirtations below. She varied her affections, alternately rubbing and resting her leg against his, which remained still. At one point, she got her other leg involved, as she wrapped both of her legs around his calf, hooked one foot around the other, and squeezed his leg tightly between hers. All the while remaining completely disengaged from his presence in the group talking and laughing around the table above.

When class ended, Sergei waited for the girl to break contact first. Once she moved her arm and started to collect her belongings, he did the same. He sped away from Nabokov and his growing sense of guilt as fast as he could make his Cannondale move, which seemed like a good way to channel out some of the surplus energy the illicit contact had generated throughout his body. Should he even feel guilty? It wasnt like he was considering cheating on Akiko or had done anything to betray her trust; he just didnt move his arm away when the girls arm touched his. Sergei didnt even know the girls name. But the point of contact between them, while not arousing in a particularly sexual way, had stirred up more excitement in Sergei than he typically felt in his relationship with Akiko. But that might not have been a fair comparison. Maybe it was just the thrill of doing something in secret, like playing footsie with Jess. So the missing sense of excitement with Akiko, then, was probably a good thinga sign of mature, rational behavior. As his guilt subsided, Sergei flashed briefly on thoughts of the mature and rational conversation he needed to have with Akiko later. He channeled a burst of

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renewed energy into his pedaling in hopes of bypassing that stressor, if only for a short time. Sergei loved that the university campus had separate paths for bicyclists, but somehow the universitys admissions processes failed to screen out the types of students who thought it reasonable to wander off the unusually wide sidewalks onto the narrow strips of paved surface clearly labeled bicycles only. Sergei considered people who walk on the bike path to be a nuisance and a hazard, but despite all the complaints he regularly vocalized about them, these errant pedestrians served a couple of important functions for Sergeis frenzied treks along the campus bicycle paths. First, he drew a certain measure of sadistic pleasure from the genuinely horrified looks on the faces of these fellow students when he sped toward them at completely unreasonable speeds. He knew, of course, that he wasnt going to hit them, but when they saw him coming and their minds instantaneously calculated his velocity and direction, their initial reaction was invariably a terrified paralysis that overruled any impulse to escape to one side or the other. Even in cases that his targets did see him approaching early enough to overcome the initial paralysis, Sergei was moving far too quickly to leave them sufficient time for evasive maneuvers. Sergei invariably cut to the left at the last possible moment, once he was sure he provided the bike-path trespassers the greatest scare possible. With any luck, his recklessness endangerment might motivate them to take advantage of the ample sidewalks in the future. Sometimes the bike-path walkers traveled in his same direction, preventing Sergei from savoring in his amusement at the panic-stricken looks on their faces as he passed. In those cases, he had to settle for the audible gasps, real or imagined, that they let out moments after he passed, as they suddenly became aware of the great bodily harm from which they had just been spared. Either way, it was in the moment of passing that the pedestrians served their second purpose. As he whisked past, their incredibly low relative speed gave Sergei a basis for comparison, making his own quickness seem suddenly more real to him than the air breezing across his cheeks or the feeling of the tires moving swiftly over the pavement. He only regretted that his classes were so close together, and his apartment

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with Akiko not much farther away, as his bicycle rides grew shorter the faster he rode, greatly reducing his ability to savor those fleeting moments of unadulterated joy. At home with Akiko, working on his Russian homework, he didnt know whether he was Sergei or Kuri-chan. Maybe he was neither. Or both. Some evenings when he was able to stay focused on his schoolwork, especially something intensive like practicing conjugations for the endless list of Russian motion verbs or reading anything by Nabokov, he continued to feel like Sergei. More often, though, he felt obligated to embody Kuri-chan in her presence, to be sensitive and respectful. He certainly made an effort not to act too much like Corndog around her. And who would he be if he took the job out in California? He wondered how best to broach the subject with Akiko. He didnt know which worried him more: that she might try to dissuade him from leaving, or that she would welcome his departure. Akiko sat on the couch with her Macbook writing an email to her students about spectrophotometry. Kuri-chan sat at his desk in front of his Russian homework, but he wasnt making any progress. Instead he stared at Akiko, transfixed both by his admiration for her drive and by the thought that he too could have been a scientist. Sure, not a microbiologist. Probably not any kind of biologist, for that matter. Biology and chemistry were far too messy and unpredictable for him. He wasnt comfortable with the idea that you could take a certain kind of powdery substance and put it in one type of liquid with no reaction whatsoever, and then put the same powder in another seemingly-identical liquid to yield a frothy mess. Nevermind the idea of what various powders meant to the people in his recovery groups. As far as hard sciences were concerned, Corndog preferred things a little more intuitive: when one ball with a particular mass and velocity collides with another ball of specified mass and velocity, its simple enough to predict what will happen. Thats why he wouldve had to go with something like physics, or maybe even astronomy, if he was going to try to be a scientist. Even those calculations, unfortunately, were often complicated by the fact that objects in nature had imperfections and irregularities, not like the smooth round steel orbs hed used for experiments in physics class. He would do best, he imagined, just sticking with his first love: math.

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He turned back to his Russian homework and considered how the sense of satisfaction that came with writing out a complete Russian sentence by hand was uncannily similar to the joy of solving a complex algebraic equation. As a high school student doing algebra, he enjoyed the process of translating the various elements of an equation into equivalent symbolic expressions a step at a time, until finally arriving at the desired mathematical statement. The formulation of each statement contained within it the logical imperative for the next statement. The problem was always equivalent to the solution; it was simply expressed in different terms. Writing out the Russian sentences gave him a similar feeling. The construction of each word was like the translation of one mathematical expression into another: much like x2 can be written as xx, moving a feminine noun from nominative to accusative meant changing the final letter from a (ah) or (ya) to (oo) or (yoo). Homework, not being acted upon, is domashnyaya rabota. Homework, being completed diligently by Sergei, is domashnyuyu rabotu. Sergei found it far more enjoyable to practice nominative, accusative, prepositional, and all the other case endings for nouns than to try to memorize transitive and intransitive motion verbs and all their irregular conjugations. It felt like trying to tell whether or not the powder would fizz in the liquid just by looking at them. Sergei imagined maybe his sense of identity worked like the transformational rules for declining nouns into the appropriate cases. The times he felt most like Corndog were family situations, or when he compulsively immersed himself in information on a topic, especially anything related to math or computer programming. Like his childhood obsession with encyclopedias, he sometimes lost hours of homework time by bouncing from one Wikipedia page to the next. With people in recovery, on the other hand, and also with people in his college classes, he felt most like Sergeispeaking up about his ideas, willing to make mistakes and learn from them, and open to suggestions and to being corrected. When he first started dating Akiko, and especially when hed gone to Japan with her, he was most definitely Kuri-chan. Quiet, polite, observant young gaijin soaking up the culture. But now that they lived together, figuring out who to be at home was a constant challenge. Coming home from class or a meeting, he would still feel like Sergei, but that didnt feel right with Akiko. As Sergei, he wouldnt hesitate to bring up

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something hed read in a conversation, but Kuri-chan knew to be very careful about the topics he raised with Akiko. At one point when theyd been dating for a few months, he made the mistake of mentioning an article hed read about the phenomenon of hikikomori, young Japanese men who become extremely reclusive to the point that they didnt leave their homes or even their bedrooms for years at a time, in the context of a conversation over dinner about one of his friends in recovery who had a tendency to isolate. Sergei had barely even begun describing what hed read about hikikomori to Akiko when she stopped him. Thats different, she said. He is nothing like Japanese person. Well yeah, Sergei said, noticing that she was sitting up straighter than usual, her brow slightly furrowed in a way that made her seem both resolute and defensive. Im not saying its the same, Sergei went on, but there are just some similarities, you know? No, she answered. He hadnt seen her so rigid before. You dont understand Japanese culture just because you read the article about something in Japan. Your friend is not like Japanese person. Sergei hadnt pushed the issue, and instead took the conversation in a different direction, noting to himself that it was probably better not to offer any commentary on Japanese culture in future conversations with Akiko. This didnt change anything about Akikos own tendency to get into a mood where she offered up statements comparing the ills of American culture to the superior strengths of Japanese culture. The attitude wasnt one that she seemed to harbor all the time, but instead seemed to be a function of some frame of mind that periodically came over her. Sergei might have even been tempted to blame hormonal factors for the phenomenon, had it followed any type of regular schedule, but that wasnt the case. The timing of it was unpredictable, but not its course. She would begin with some criticism of Sergei, or rather a criticism of Corndog, because it was more commonly a Corndog trait that seemed to be the triggering event, like his remarkable appetite for consuming information or food, or the ease with which he became engrossed in video games or TV. Once she got started on one of these rants,

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Sergei knew it was best not to engage her, and let it run its course, from deep moral failing of American culture of consumption to the triumph of Japanese values of moderation and hard work. The predictability of the rant was reminiscent of his fathers long-winded monologues, except that instead of being lofty and circuitous, Akikos script was direct, forceful, and had a subtle underlying note of scorn that Kuri-chan had great difficulty not taking personally. The first time he had been subjected to that type of lecture from Akiko was in their first few months of dating, before they had even made plans to visit Japan together. Shortly after it happened, Sergei called and told his sponsor about the conversation, and said he was thinking about breaking up. If you really think youre not compatible, by all means break up, Sergeis sponsor told him. But it sounds like maybe you just got your feelings hurt. Think about her situation for a second. Shes been here in this country for what? Three years? And shes dating a fucked up drug addict? She might need to adjust, you know. Its natural shes gonna have times when all she can see is everything thats wrong with here against everything thats right back home. Sergei gave it some thought and decided his sponsor was probably right, not realizing that it might be a repeat performance. The next time she went there, he did his best to play Kuri-chanquiet and respectfulas he listened to her complaints. Tempted as he was to suggest to her that maybe she was just feeling frustrated and homesick, Kuri-chan instead remained silent as Akiko reminded him that Japanese people are thinner than Americans because they eat plenty of vegetables, and arent nearly as lazy. He aspired toward being Kuri-chan with Akiko as much as possible, but the longer they were together the more difficult that was to maintain. Not so much because of her occasional criticisms of all things not Japanese, but because he was simply accustomed to being Sergei so much of the time. She might tell him about a confrontation with one of the postdoctoral students in her lab, and he would talk to her the same way he might talk to one of the addicts he sponsored. Akiko usually responded with the same type of impatience she expressed when Corndog played games on her cell phone or lost track of time reading things on the Internet instead of studying. If he was going to ignore his
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studying, it was better to at least give the appearance of working, which was currently all he was doing with his Russian motion verbs. As near as Sergei could tell, there were far more rules in Russian grammar governing verbs of motion than there were for English grammar in general. He loved Russian when it was just the Cyrillic alphabet and simple sentences, but he grew tired of the work when it came to memorization of which verbs were transitive and which ones were intransitive and then figuring out which cases that meant for the respective nouns. His sense of disillusion over the way Russian was shaping up reminded him of his first semester in college, when hed taken business calculus. Sure, his time at the academy had already put him off math, but the only math class he took in college managed to leave him not just disinterested or complacent, but dissatisfied. Now motion verbs seemed likely to do the same for Russian.

It was probably no coincidence that business calc put Sergei off math in the same year hed been involved with Jess. The night she played footsie with him, he caught a ride back to his dorm from the man who talked too much. The man had surprisingly little to say as he drove Sergei back to the dorms, which left Sergei to ruminate on what exactly Jess was doing with him. He said good night to the man and went up to his room, where he heard the phone ringing as he unlocked the door. Its about time, Jess said. I thought I was going to have to let it ring all night. I want you to come over. Sergei spent the night with Jess in her dorm and woke up late for his eight oclock business calc across campus. He still considered himself a virgin when he walked into class twenty minutes late, wearing the same clothes from the night before and a baseball

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cap to cover his unwashed hair. Prior to that semester, he had been a virgin only by Clintonian standards, as his sponsor put it. His ex, Jessi, hadnt been willing to have intercourse, but had no qualms about performing oral sex. His sponsor always insisted that, intercourse or not, once youve had someone else make you cum for the first time, you cant un-experience it. Once youve become a pickle, theres no going back to being a cucumber. Nevertheless, Sergei considered himself a virgin after the first night hed spent with Jess, and had explained to her as they lay in her bed together wearing only underwear that he didnt want to move too fast. His first time should be important, should be memorable. She smiled and told him society seeks to engender that feeling among teenagers for its social utility, not because sex is actually so incredibly sacred. But Im very sensitive to the harm of pressuring people into becoming sexually active before theyre ready, so I wont push you, she went on. Youd be shocked at the number of teenage girls who are fooled into thinking their first sexual encounters are consensual, when they were actually coerced against their own will. Its very upsetting. Sergei nodded. Again, he wondered if maybe Jess took the things she read too literally, but he thought that, as a male, he probably wasnt qualified to offer an opinion on this particular matter. He flashed on a memory of lying on a blanket with Jessi by the soccer fields at the academy, talking for hours about society and philosophy. He wondered for a moment whether hed ever pushed Jessi to go faster than she wanted, or unknowingly influenced her to renegotiate the boundaries shed set for herself. One thing was clear: he couldnt recall a time when Jessi had said anything that left him feeling unqualified to comment in the way Jess seemed able to do. Before he had a chance to savor the memory of his conversations with Jessi, he was pulled back into the present moment by the sensation of the tip of Jess finger running along the inside of the elastic band of his underwear. They didnt have intercourse that first night, but Jess did make him cum. He also brought her to orgasm, which was something Jessi had never let him do in those few opportunities they were able to find a way to have some privacy together indoors at the academy. Sitting un-showered in business calc in his day-old outfit and ball-cap, he wondered
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whether he still smelled like sex, whether the students sitting near him were suspicious. The professor worked out examples of compound interest problems on the board, and Corndog shook his head in disgust, annoyed that they called this stuff math. He missed the old problem sets from his algebra competitions. Sergei couldnt seem to slip back into the role of Corndog in math class that morning; he wasnt able to pay much attention to the lecture that morning or follow the example problems being worked out on the blackboard. He was too busy working out a problem of his own, trying to sort out the events of the previous night in anticipation of his imminent conversation with his sponsor. Sergei tried to think of how he could best fit the details into a narrative in which the choices hed made the night before didnt seem to be in such clear conflict with the types of suggestions he had come to expect from his sponsor regarding romantic involvements. He might be able to avoid the difficult conversation altogether by not mentioning anything about it to his sponsor, or by lying outright, but he knew that would never fly. His sponsor had made his position on lies of omission clear before Sergei picked up his keytag for thirty days clean. As it turned out, the conversation with his sponsor wasnt nearly as painful as hed worried it might be. As long as he didnt let it get in the way of his schoolwork and his stepwork, there shouldnt be a problem. His sponsor also asked, though, if Sergei was spending time with Jess because he cared for her or simply because she fulfilled a need. Is she just a means to an end, he asked, pausing for emphasis in a way that mightve been more effective if he hadnt made a habit of doing it so frequently, or can your appreciation for who she is as a person stand as an end in itself? It was a phone conversation Sergei remembered well. His sponsor had a knack for irritating questions that made it difficult for him to remain blissfully ignorant to the deeper implications of some of the choices he made. I care about her a lot, Sergei answered, fidgeting with the remote control to his stereo as he pictured Jess. He pressed the power button on the stereo remote, watched the lights come one, and pressed the button to open and close the CD tray a few times. He did find

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Jess preoccupation with all of the politically correct gender studies stuff tiresome. And he wasnt crazy about the way she shared in meetings, always finding ways to couch her message of hope for the newcomer in some narrative that pointed back to just how smart and hip she was. But she was very attractive, and they had an undeniable chemistry with each other, much like hed had with Jessi. I think my sense of appreciation for her is honorable, he answered. He wanted very much to believe it. Jess was true to her word about not pressuring him to move more quickly than he wanted to move. Each of those first three nights, they began by sitting with each other in her papasan chair. She told him stories about some of the English faculty, each time reducing the person to a single representative quality or trait, like hes just stuck on old-school Marxism, and the only reason she even teaches is because it gives her a fresh room full of people to whom she can condescend each semester. Sergei suspected the people she talked about were probably more complex than she made them out to be, but he didnt bother to question her pronouncements. The second evening she did the same, but with people from meetings: the main thing that keeps him clean is giving creepy hugs to all the girls after each meeting, and if shes not the poster-child for codependent sponsorship, I dont know who is. He found her self-assured tone off-putting, but he tried to see past it and view her as a multi-dimensional person. Resting in the papasan chair with his arm around her, running his fingers through her hair and playing with her earlobes, he had no difficulties overlooking her sense of self-assuredness. Each of those nights, Jess stopped talking at some point and simply gazed back at Sergei with the same admiration with which hed been staring at her. She must have either run out of steam or just finally took notice of his prolonged silence. The first night, Sergei was still unsure of her intentions, even as they cuddled together in silence. He ran his fingertips along her cheek, traced the curve of her jaw, and then turned his hand to let the backs of his fingers brush down her neck. She reached up and took his hand in hers and held it to her cheek, stroking the inside of his palm with the tip of her thumb. Your hands are so soft, Jess said. Its amazing. She continued to run her fingers along the inside of his hand, and then added, If I felt like reaffirming patriarchal order, I
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might say they feel soft as girls hands. Sergei made a conscious effort to avoid rolling his eyes. Jess curled three of his fingers down into his palm, and then she took his index finger into her mouth. Sergei hadnt been expecting anything like that. Jess sucked gently on his finger, and he had trouble processing all the sensations she was causing. Hed never spent time with a woman who was so forward. No woman who struck him as intelligent, anyway. Do you want to get in bed? I promise Ill be on best behavior? Her best behavior, he discovered, simply meant respecting his boundary regarding intercourse. It didnt, on the other hand, preclude nudity, oral sex, or anything else he might have been able to imagine with his limited bedroom experience. The second night he stayed with her, she laid the groundwork for what would happen the following night. In the midst of their naked passion, she brought her mouth to his ear and, between nibbles on his earlobe, whispered something to him. I know were not there yet, she said, but just so you know when the time comes, I have a whole bag of condoms in my closet. The thought of a whole bag of condoms was enough to distract Sergei, momentarily, from the task at hand. He gave her a slightly puzzled look. Oh, its not like that, she said. We hand them out on the quad every month, since the uptight campus administrators wont let the health center give them to students. Oh, he said. Thats probably a good thing. I may be liberated, she laughed, but I certainly dont need an entire bag of condoms for myself. Between laughs, she reached down between his legs and took hold of his erection. But I suppose with you around, maybe I will? For the rest of the semester, Sergei made it to two, sometimes three of the four meetings of his business calc class. When he did show up, he was late. He stayed with Jess nearly every night, only sleeping in his own dorm a couple times a week, primarily to prove that

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he was capable of doing so. Sergeis first experience with intercourse happened the third time he stayed over with her. He wouldnt have admitted it to his sponsor, but his first experience with intercourse sold him on the idea that hed lost his virginity when he got his first blow job. The main distinction between a blow job and intercourse, in his experience, was a different orifice and a different body fluid. Sergei went to the same meetings as Jess at least three or four nights each week, whenever he wasnt working at the caf. They didnt ride to meetings together, sit next to each other, or give off any other signs they were a couple, because they wanted to avoid the stigma and attention the twelve-steppers put on members who dated each other. Sergei and Jess still went out for food or coffee with other addicts after their meetings, and Jess often replicated the events that had taken place the first time they went out together after a meeting. She sat directly across from Sergei whenever possible and played footsie with him under the table as he tried to maintain conversation with the others. She seemed to know that it both turned him on and pissed him off at the same time, and they always met back at her place after returning to campus for sex that Sergei could only describe as great. Much like that first night, they rarely engaged in the same conversations among the recovering crowd, regardless of whether the conversations were divided by gender. He did tend to eavesdrop on whichever conversation she was in any time he happened to hear her talking, and he was convinced that with any topic, she could always be counted on to make at least one definitive statement about the final truth on the matter before the conversation could be considered complete. It was just like her habit of pinning people down to a single defining factor, but she seemed to do it across the board: OBriens has, hands down, the best pastrami anywhere in the city, and That group hasnt put out a single tolerable song since their second album. He was glad they didnt tell others about their involvement with each other, as he wouldnt have wanted them to know he was with someone who constantly talked that way. Then again, no one else seemed to mind, and no one talked badly about her on the rare nights he was out without her. Maybe he was the only one bothered by it?

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They didnt spend a great deal of time alone together outside of her bedroom, and talk between them grew to be very much one-sided. Sergei listened attentively when Jess spoke but rarely had much to say that she wouldnt cover on her own, if given time to. She occasionally prodded him to get him to talk more, but he was resistant. Once or twice he gave in and participated wholeheartedly in conversation with her, feeling compelled to play devils advocate against some radical feminist talking point or obscure slant on recovery literature she inherited through her sponsorship family. Sergeis waning enthusiasm for spending time with Jess made itself apparent in her dorm room, too. One night, after she had already made him cum, Sergei fell asleep with two fingers inside Jess. She didnt talk to him for two days, and he considered the time off a relief. By that time, he was nearly done with his freshman year, and Jess was almost ready to graduate. He was pretty sure that Jess would move back home, over six hours away, which would be a convenient way for him to avoid the trouble of having to break up with her. It would at least give him the option of blaming the break-up on circumstances: Im just not comfortable with the idea of trying to maintain a longdistance relationship. They hadnt talked about her plans, though, and he felt he was reaching the limits of his ability to endure her company. Sergei didnt feel like he had spent enough thinking about how he should approach his conversation with Jess when her neighbor inadvertently forced his hand one night. Sergei had met the guy a few times before, usually by passing in the hallway on the way to or from the mens bathroom. They met that way again one morning, but this time the neighbor stopped him. Hey man, can you do me a favor? Im going out of town for a week, and I was hoping your girlfriend could feed my fish. Could you ask her? It took Sergei a moment to realize the neighbor was referring to Jess. They had never talked about their relationship in terms of labels, and hed never really thought of her as his girlfriend. The fact that they kept things quiet among their recovering friends led him

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to think that if they had to put a label on what they were doing, they would be called lovers. Um, sure, Ill ask her, Sergei answered. After that uncomfortable encounter, Sergei decided he should talk to Jess sooner rather than later. He had never broken up with anyone before, much less someone with whom hed never had any sort of discussion about relationship status. He figured there wasnt much sense in trying to plan what to say. Jess may have been predictable in a number of conversations, but when it came to their relationship, Sergei had no idea. Your neighbor just called you my girlfriend, he said as he crawled back into bed with her. It kinda got me thinking, maybe we should talk about what were doing, and what were gonna do. You know, like when you graduate and stuff. Okay, she responded. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, Do you think its something we need to talk about at this hour? We both have to get up in the morning. He was a bit surprised by her response. He definitely wouldnt have figured her for someone to simply try to stall. On some level, he suspected that if hed reached this point in thinking about their relationship on his own, shed surely already seen it coming for weeks. Her hesitation to talk about made him think she must have already seen the writing on the wall; she didnt anticipate a pleasant conversation, or one that would end up having favorable results for her. She couldnt seriously think it was too late. It was barely past midnight. Its really not that late, he said. And I would really like to get a sense of where youre at with things, if thats okay. I mean, unless youre not ready to talk about it. I dont want to force you if youre not ready. Jess didnt respond, but instead just stared at Sergei. It was rare that he ever saw her look sad, mostly when people in meetings shared especially sad stories. The only time hed seen her get emotional about her own life was when shed told him the story of her grandparents passing. In that case, her expression seemed slightly affected to him, as
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though she wasnt actually moved to sadness by telling the story, but rather that she felt she should be, like she was doing her best to approximate a look of sadness. He wondered, for a moment, if she thought that by feigning emotion in his presence she might be able to inspire him to become emotionally intimate with her. After all, the sex apparently hadnt done it. This time, though, her sad expression seemed genuine, and pained him. For the first time, he felt a little bad about not wanting to be with her. Hey, look, its okay, he said. We can talk about this later. Youre not ready. No, she said. Theres no sense putting this off. My sponsor already thinks I shouldve initiated this conversation a while ago. Oh. So youve already talked to her about this? Sergei had been under the impression that Jess was talking to her sponsor about the relationship as rarely as he was with his sponsor. Following the conversations with his sponsor about getting the relationship started, Sergei ducked and dodged most of his sponsors inquiries about the situation with Jess. He figured his sponsor would take issue with the fact that he continued to sleep with her in spite of not feeling all that enamored with her. He wondered what prompted Jess to talk to her sponsor about things. How did that conversation go? It went well, I think, she said with a sigh. I always appreciate her input, otherwise Id have a different sponsor. That makes sense, he said. Now that theyd agreed to talk, he didnt know how the conversation should begin. She had already talked to her sponsor about it, so maybe he could let her start. He stayed silent for a moment, hoping shed take the hint. Well, she finally said, after waiting slightly longer than he was comfortable with. Ive been meaning to tell you that Im thinking about staying in town when I finish, not moving back home like I talked about before.

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Sergei nodded. As the implications began to settle in, he thought it might be even harder to break things off than hed hoped. At least if she left town they wouldnt have to see each other anymore; they could just have a clean break. When we started hanging out, we agreed that we would be exclusive with each other, she went on. But I think its only fair that I let you know now that even though Im not leaving town, I dont see much of a future for the two of us. Not as an exclusive couple, anyway. Oh, Sergei said. Not what hed expected. Im sorry, Jess said. She reached up and put her hand on his cheek, her face bent with genuine concern. Her emotion seemed far more sincere than the time shed described her grandmothers passing. Sergei was impressed. I just havent been feeling it lately. I wouldve told you sooner, but I still thought Id be leaving town, you know? Its okay, Sergei said. Really, I mean it. I honestly didnt think things were going anywhere, either. It was fun while it lasted, right?

Sergei snapped out of a reverie and found himself still sitting in the living room, still avoiding his Russian motion verbs. He considered switching over to one of his other Russian assignments, one of the projects that wouldnt be due for a while, to see if the variety would inspire him to stay focused. He wasnt crazy about the idea, though, as hed already tried that trick on other occasions with limited success. One of the projects involved finding a story from a Russian news source to give a report on in front of the class; the other was memorizing Russian proverbs that would be on the final exam. Every

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Friday they spent the last five or ten minutes of class practicing the proverbs aloud together before getting out for the weekend. Some of the Russian proverbs were very close to their English counterparts when translated, like when the cats away, the mice will feel free. Others were quite different, such as only the grave cures the hunchback. That one stuck with Sergei because it corresponded to the English saying that a leopard cannot change its spots, which was sometimes mentioned in reference to drug addictsonce an addict, always an addict. People often shared about how recovery changed that, at least in the sense that addicts no longer had to be condemned to the miserable existence of active addiction because another way of life was possible. Another saying he heard sometimes in meetings that was similar to the leopard saying was that a pickle can never be a cucumber again. Sergei thought that was more fitting for addicts than the leopard saying. One of his friends whod spent some time in the Middle East said that the analogous saying in that part of the world was something like: once the camel lies down at your door, it will not get up again. Sergei didnt get it. The only Japanese proverb he could recall Akiko ever telling him was that if you lie down after eating, youll become a cow. She reminded him of it often. Kuri-chan put down the list of Russian proverbs, finally accepting that he probably wouldnt be getting much Russian done. He reluctantly let his mind wander back to the conversation he needed to have with Akiko. He watched her clack away at the keys on her Macbook and wondered if she was still writing emails to her students or if she was working on her dissertation. He briefly recalled driving to pick Akiko up for their first date, nearly two years prior. The moment he got in his car to go pick her up, he was overwhelmed by the feeling that he had made a big mistake asking her out. She had come into the caf one afternoon, a week or two after shed stopped and asked how to get to the FLB. In the time since shed asked him for directions, Sergei had thought of the sentence you can get there from here on a number of occasions, which kept Akiko in his mind, as well. He was pleasantly surprised to see her again. He smiled at her as he took her order, and he got the impression she didnt remember him.
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Were you able to find the FLB okay? he asked, once hed given her change and a receipt. As she put her change back into her billfold, he could see that she was trying to figure out what he meant. After a moment he heard her gasp very quietly, obviously just remembering that hed given her directions. Yes, she said, putting her billfold in her purse. Thank you. I was running late that day, and the one-way streets confused me. Your directions were helpful. Oh, good, he smiled, closing the cash register. Glad I could help. He was usually too self-conscious to take advantage of being the coffee guy as a way to strike up conversation with pretty customers, but for some reason he felt compelled to keep talking to Akiko. Completely unscripted, he stumbled his way through a conversation that might have looked to an outside observer like a suave pick-up. While making her latte, Kuri-chan raised his voice enough to be heard over the steaming milk and asked Akiko her name. He recognized her name as Japanese, and momentarily considered asking her if she was familiar with Haruki Murakami and his writing. He had recently read an interview of one of Murakamis translators, whod said that Murakamis voice in his original Japanese works had Western influences that couldnt be adequately captured in the English translations. How do you translate an Eastern text with Western influences into a Western language and still convey that the original text had a Westernness that distinguished it from other Eastern texts? Kuri-chan decided not to ask about that, though. Not only would it be too difficult to try to explain, but just a few semesters earlier he had struck up conversation with a German girl by asking her about something he read in his Nietzsche class. He didnt like the idea of repeating the same gesture, so he settled for the more pedestrian line of questioning and asked what she was studying. As Kuri-chan poured milk over the espresso, Akiko explained that she was working on her dissertation for a Ph.D. in microbiology. He told her he was studying writing, so hed be happy to read her work and offer some comments, if she wanted. Akiko said sure, and handed him a copy from the portfolio she carried. That was easy. She explained that it

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was a slightly older draft, but not much had changed. Next was the moment he regretted as he drove to her house: the moment he asked if she would be interested in getting together Friday and talk about the paper over dinner. He had already started to ask the question before he even realized what he was doing; he surprised himself with his uncharacteristic brashness. It was incredibly rare that he asked a girl out before he was absolutely certain of a positive response. Sure, Akiko had responded. Heres my number, she said, scrawling her digits in pencil at the top of the first page. Kuri-chan was by no means ignorant when it came to science, but he wasnt able to make any kind of sense of the abundant technical jargon packed into her dense research paper about Pasteurella multocida. As he drove to her house that Friday night with absolutely nothing intelligent to say about her paper, he feared that their cultural gap would also be too much. He knew his older brother Johns fiance, from Okinawa, would be thrilled if he dated a Japanese woman, but he also worried people might start to think yellow fever ran in the family or something. He had flirted with plenty of the Asian women who were regular customers at the caf before, but hed never thought seriously about going any further than harmless flirtation. Kuri-chan only met Johns fiance once, before theyd gotten engaged, when she joined John on a visit home during leave. Even if hed had more extensive interactions with Johns fiance, Kuri-chan didnt think it wouldve helped him be more at ease with the prospect of trying to hold up his end of dinner conversation with Akiko. And he had no idea whether Akiko was skilled enough in English to hold up her end of a discussion either, so hed just have to wait and see. Sitting across the table from each other, an appetizer and glasses of iced tea between them, Kuri-chan and Akiko had no problem finding things to talk about. He asked about her family and about where shed grown up, and he explained to her that he was in recovery because his period of teenage experimentation had yielded some conclusive results about his inability to manage his intake of illicit substances. She nodded politely,

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and she congratulated him when he told her he would soon reach his five-year anniversary of getting clean. They continued chatting long after their dinner plates had been removed. Akiko told Kuri-chan about her first year in the States at an intensive ESL program on the east coast, about the lab politics she had to deal with as part of her Ph.D. program, and about how nervous she was to be a TA for undergraduate biology courses. They ordered dessert, and before they knew it the restaurant was closing. They stopped for a cup of tea at the caf before Kuri-chan dropped her off at home, and walking her up to the door and giving her a kiss on the cheek before he said good-night. Months later, when they traveled to Japan and he met Akikos parents, Kuri-chan told them the story of how big a mistake he thought hed made as he drove to pick her up that first night. Akiko told her parents that Kuri-chan had never said anything about her paper, not at that first date, or any time since. You know, she added, you were also much more eloquent back then, too. He looked at her with a mild surprise. That wasnt something he wouldve expected from her. It seemed like a premeditated comment, one shed been waiting for the right opportunity to make. She wasnt the type of ESL speaker to have a word like eloquent accessible for spontaneous conversation. Whatever, he teased. I got ya now I dont need to be eloquent anymore. In spite of the time that had passed since that trip to Japan, Kuri-chan still vividly recalled the feelings and sensations he experienced during their not-quite two-week stay. He was most profoundly affected by the handful of early-morning train rides into Tokyo from Akikos rural hometown an hour or so north of the city. Something as simple as a particular kind of sound could transport Kuri-chan back into that train car, Akikos head resting on his shoulder as he watched the rapidly alternating views out the window: farmland, then city, then farmland. The train car was nearly empty when they boarded, but with each successive stop, the train grew more crowded, and the views of farmland grew shorter while the views of city lengthened. In spite of the train car filling to standing room only, the only sounds were the high hum of the train speeding down the tracks and

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the musical tones played each time the train came to a stop at another station. During the last of their morning train rides, a young woman stood directly in front of Kuri-chan, her legs carefully positioned so she could keep her balance with the trains varying speeds, and effortlessly used both hands to apply her make-up. Shed clearly done it countless times before. Kuri-chan mightve offered the girl his seat, but he didnt want to disturb Akiko, who was fast asleep like nearly half of the other passengers. Kuri-chan thought of Japan as the type of country where a person could really get there from here. He and Akiko had taken the train to downtown Tokyo, to the big Buddha at Kamakura, to the old capital city Kyoto, all from a station two blocks from her parents house in a rural farming community north of Tokyo. Hed said to Akiko at one point during their trip, All trains lead to Tokyo, dont they? She had responded with the same look of annoyed bewilderment she usually got when he tried to make an observation about the way things work in Japan, as though he could never fully understand because he was gaijin. Akiko stood up from the couch and brought her Macbook over to Kuri-chan, asking him to check the email she was about to send to her students. She spoke English with no noticeable accent, but occasionally a sentence or two with awkward ESL construction found its way into her writing, most commonly in the form of placing an article in front of a noun where none was needed, or failing to place one when it was. She regularly had Kuri-chan read through her emails to find those minor errors before she sent them on to her students. He welcomed the break from the homework he couldnt seem to focus on anyway, and after correcting a couple of awkward sounding sentences in Akikos email, he suggested maybe it was time to start making dinner.

***

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Discovering his knack for crafting clear and understandable prose had been one of the first times Corndog felt a nudge away from math and toward writing. At his English teachers suggestion, Corndog went to meet with the guidance counselor to see if he could fill out one of the personality quizzes that was supposed to help students decide what sort of career to pursue. The guidance counselor gave him the test and, in the twenty minutes it took Corndog to fill in the appropriate bubbles on the answer sheet, reviewed Corndogs student records. Heres my test, Corndog said, holding the scan-tron sheet out over the large brown institutional desk cluttered with various papers. The guidance counselor took the form from Corndog and put it in an envelope. I was just looking over your test scores from the last state assessments, and theyre quite impressive, he said. I really think maybe you should start thinking about applying to the university lab high school. Youd have to work out a way to get there and back every day, but I think it would be a great opportunity for you. You have a lot of potential. Corndog disliked that word, as it sounded to him like this is something you should be able to do, so if you screw it up youll be letting everyone down. In spite of that, the idea of going to a different school seemed like it could be interesting, so he agreed to fill out an application. He looked around the room at the dusty motivational posters on the wall while the guidance counselor rifled through papers looking for the application. The posters were colorful and cartoonish in a way that, along with the heavy dust, made them look as though theyd been put on the wall in another decade. I cant seem to find the applications right now, the guidance counselor finally said. But I do have one for this math and science academy up by Chicago. With your math scores, it might be a good fit. Why dont you go ahead and fill this out, and Ill get you one of the other applications when I find them. Corndog filled out the application much like the way hed taken the standardized tests, enjoying the satisfaction that came with putting the correct information into each of the

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boxes and blanks. He put his completed application and his release form for the school to share his test scores in the mail that same afternoon. The guidance counselor never came through with an application for the other school. Corndog had all but forgotten both applications, the one he submitted and the one he never had a chance to submit, when he received an acceptance letter from the academy midway through his freshman year. Up to that point, he hadnt even realized that the academy was only a three-year school. The letter invited him to come visit in the spring, tour the campus and the dorms, and begin taking placement tests for his classes. He looked forward to the chance to try something different, as his primary sources of stimulation in his home town were algebra problems and bong loads. Corndog began most mornings his freshman year by getting high with his older brother John, who was a senior at the time. After smoking a few hitters with John, Corndog would catch a ride with his friend Jake over to the high school for math team practice. Practice consisted of forty-five minutes of problem sets before first period, after which Corndog and Jake would sneak into the unmonitored upstairs bathroom to share a cigarette. Corndog didnt tell Jake that he smoked pot before math team practice; Jake wouldnt understand. Solving the algebraic equations in the problem sets was one of Corndogs favorite pastimes, and getting high beforehand only heightened the pleasure of the experience. Being stoned helped him reach a level where he felt as though he was nearly unconscious as he meandered his way through the step-by-step process of translating each element of an equation into an equivalent symbolic expression, generating one new algebraic equation after another, until he finally arrived at the desired mathematical statement. Corndog seemed to have a special talent, high or not, for finding the right expressions to begin unraveling the math problems. He sometimes thought about it like untying a knot; some of the other students on the math team yanked and tugged on different edges of the string, just tightening the knot, where he seemed to be able to find the right spot to gently pull so the messy tangle of string could be taken apart and stretched out along the table. Mr. Anderson suggested at one point that Corndog consider studying computer

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programming, as his skills with logic might translate well into coding language. He fondly recalled writing simple BASIC programs on his grandpas Commodore 64 in the fourth grade, which proved to be good practice for his current hobby of writing games for his graphing calculator during especially boring algebra lessons. In algebra, Corndog came to understand, the formulation of each statement contained within it the logical imperative for its own next statement. The problem was always equivalent to the solution; it was simply expressed in different terms. After earning first place and his new nickname at regionals, he went on to take seventh place at the state competition. After the tests had been administered, but before the awards were announced, Corndog and Jake narrowly avoided getting caught smoking pot in a McDonalds bathroom. They still made it to the awards ceremony without incident. When he went to the academy for a weekend visit and orientation, Corndog found himself enamored with one of the students on the student host committee. Jessi had fair skin and curly red hair, and she was the student host responsible for giving a tour to the group Corndog was assigned to. He stayed near the head of the group as she led them through the main building, past the tennis courts and soccer field, and then through one of the dorm buildings. Jessi smiled a lot and joked around with the group. She commented as they passed the cafeteria that only three students were known to have died from eating the food. When they passed the soccer field, she explained that while the soccer team had a mostly winning record, the academy had never been defeated in American-style football. She waited a moment before clarifying that the school didnt have a football team. Corndog stayed close and laughed at all her jokes, not because they were funny, and not to impress her, but because something about her delivery, and her presence in general, made him feel at ease. They made eye contact a few times, and by the end of the tour it seemed almost as though she was directing her tour monologue directly at him. The other students in the tour group didnt seem to notice. Maybe he was imagining things. After the tour finished, Jessi told the students they were free for the evening, so they could go with her to the girls soccer game if they wanted, or go back to the visitors
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dorms and relax. Most of the students decided to go back to the dorms, but Corndog decided to stay with Jessi and go to the soccer game. The two walked past the dorms back out to the soccer field, where the home team was already beginning to do their stretches for the final game of the season. Jessi explained that her roommate was on the soccer team, so she had been to most of the games that year. Jessi didnt like all the running involved in soccer, so her sports activity was limited to softball. Do you play any sports? she asked, as they took seats in the mostly empty bleachers. Well, yeah, Im on the football team, Corndog told her, but I missed some practices early in the season so this year Ive been on second string the whole time. Dont see much time on the field, so when I do its a little hard for me to remember what Im supposed to be doing. Thats too bad, she said, seeming genuine. He was glad she didnt seem to treat him like he was just making excuses for not being more athletic. Corndog did his best to keep up conversation with her, beginning with talk of where she was originally from and what her interests were, but moving on to books, politics, religion, and philosophy. Being two years ahead of him, Jessi was able to tell Corndog about some of the instructors she had that year and what he could expect from various classes. That soon led to discussions about some of the novels that had shaped their respective worldviews, especially dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World. Corndog didnt realize it at the time, but this would form the basis of his relationship with Jessi. For Corndog, the worlds of those novels were fascinating, but he hadnt been the type of reader on the first read to make correlations between the books and real-world situations. When Jessi talked about them, though, she became animated and expressive, her eyes wide with enthusiasm about the power of the ideas she read about to change the world.

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The people in control are completely pulling the wool over our eyes all the time, Jessi said to Corndog, as they watched the soccer teams make their way back and forth across the field in front of them. Corndog nodded, beginning to see her point. Yeah, I notice a lot of that on TV, he said. Hearing the news broadcasters repeat the same phrases over and over while flashing pictures of things were supposed to feel strongly about. It reminds me so much of newspeak. I know people say this every other decade, but our generation, she went on, weve got a chance to do something about it. Watching TV, whether its news or so-called entertainment, it all just pushes us back into the herd. Technology might be a tool created by the system, but it also has a lot of potential for subversion, now that the Internet can make it possible for everyone to have a voice. Now we dont have to go through the corporate filtration system to be heard. Corndog nodded again, but he wasnt very sure about that. Sure, every student at the academy was given their own individual email address, so Internet accessibility was definitely on the rise for certain populations. Corndog still found it difficult to imagine people in his hometown even getting on the Internet, let alone going online to research or discuss radical ideas about subverting the dominant paradigm. Jessis passion was contagious, though, and they continued to chat as the other team arrived and did their stretches, the game began, and the game ended. Corndog offered to walk Jessi back to her dorm, as it had gotten dark by the end of the game. They left the bright, artificially lit soccer fields and wandered up the concrete path back toward the dorms. They didnt speak, and Corndog breathed in the cool spring air and the smell of freshly mowed grass. He began to feel cold by the time they approached her building, the last of the seven dorm buildings, and the furthest from the visitors dorm where Corndog would be staying the night. So are you going to be with us tomorrow? I mean, you and the rest of the student hosts, he asked as they stood at her door.

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No, youre going to be doing your placement exams all day, she said. Then she smiled, and added: You might have known that if youd been listening today! She lightly slapped him on the front of his shoulder with the back of her hand. He laughed. Well, you know, we could probably use someone there to make a bunch of corny jokes about the tests were taking, thats all. Yeah, yeah, you say that, but you laughed at more of my jokes than anyone else in the group today, for the record. No comment, he laughed, noticing for the first time just how green her eyes were. Did your parents bring you? Are you leaving right after the exams? Yeah, my mom brought me, and she has a shift at work tomorrow night, so we have to get on the road as early as we can. He looked at Jessi and tried to remember a time hed ever felt so comfortable and easy around a pretty girl. There had been a few times when hed had long conversations with cute girls back home, but only over the phone, and only when he was high. He felt like he could sit somewhere with Jessi and talk for hours. Whens your curfew? We dont have to be in our rooms until midnight on Fridays, she said, but we have to be in the building by ten oclock or our key cards wont work. She reached in her back pocket and pulled out her key card. Oh, okay, he said. It was only a little after nine, but he couldnt seem to say anything more. She smiled again. Here, she said, reaching into her other pocket and pulling out a slip of paper, some kind of receipt. Let me give you my phone number in Chicago, and my address. You can write me letters over the summer so we can continue our conversation. That sounds great, Corndog said. I always wanted a pen pal.

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Here, she said, tearing off the part shed written on and handing it to him. Have a safe trip home tomorrow, and I expect to hear from you soon. Corndog took the piece of paper and looked at it. Shed drawn a little heart over the i in Jessi, something that probably would have annoyed him if done by anyone else. I should go in now, she said. Youre starting to look cold. She hugged him briefly, then let go, told him to have a safe trip home, and swiped her key card to go inside. Corndog watched as she walked through the lobby, swiped her key card at the entrance to her wing of the building, and disappeared. Over the summer, Corndog sent Jessi letters from his downstate hometown every week, sometimes every few days. They talked once or twice on the phone, but more often he wrote her, pen on paper, about some of the ideas he had in response to their previous conversation. He found a singular sense of fulfillment in writing letters to Jessistarting with one idea at the beginning of the letter and following it over the course of a paragraph or a few pages, the ideas growing and evolving with each additional word, every sentence, paragraph, and page. Writing letters felt to Corndog like exposing a side of himself he didnt show other people, and yet he felt safe when he imagined Jessi reading them. Having her read his words was a sense of intimacy hed never experienced before. He wrote to her about the Vonnegut novels he read over the summer and how they captivated him. She sent him a postcard while bicycling across Iowa with her family, from a city whose name was the same as Corndogs surname. She wrote that she really enjoyed his writing, and that he should consider putting his ideas together in some type of manifesto. He couldnt decide what was more exciting about that idea: that he would be able to say he wrote a manifesto, or that he knew Jessi would read it word for word. He admired her deeply for her concerted efforts to respond with letters of comparable length, even though she obviously gave more time and attention to decorating the margins of the pages than she did to some of the sentences she wrote, especially the ones that seemed to do little more than take up space. Jessis filler sentences seemed nearly as meaningful as

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the lines that contained actual substance, because to Corndog, the filler meant she wanted to keep the dialogue alive even when she had nothing to say. To occupy his free time that summer when he wasnt writing to Jessi and reading her letters, Corndog smoked lots of pot and went to occasional keg parties in the woods or in abandoned barns. Corndog never bothered to tell Jessi that he felt a more intimate connection with her than he ever had with anyone before. As he wrote each of his letters, freely stringing together words and ideas the way he used to lay out the variables and expressions that made up his algebra solutions, he experienced a unique sensation, different from the satisfaction of watching the ideas grow and take shape and become something larger than the words on the page. This other feeling when he thought about Jessi was lightness in his limbs and a tingling in his brain, knowing that she would sit and read his words. He felt the same reading her letters, in a way that he hadnt even felt when he read compulsively as a child. Each day he waited until the mailman came before going to meet his friends to get high, in case the mailman might be carrying a letter from her. They both had email accounts provided by the school, but neither had parents who were willing to pay for a modem or let their children tie up the phone lines for hours at a time just to send messages to one another. Emails wouldnt have been able to compare to Jessis letters, anyway. Corndog loved her paper selections, cutesy pastel stationery with borders and trim she drew in herself with special markers, the kinds that came with tips shaped like hearts and stars. She numbered her pages inconsistently, and she folded the pages in ways that made them bulkier in the envelope than they needed to be. She never wrote as much as he hoped she would, though she wrote a fair amount. She wrote in praise of his ideas and his writing, and she wrote about how wonderful it would be to break free of the system and start new, like on a commune, but without the hippies. Her letters werent nonstop sunshine, though. She sent him a note one week from the Sunday school class she supervised, horribly upset.

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Were filling their heads with the lies so early, she wrote. The myths we all buy into seem so harmless, but only because were all fed the same crap before we have a chance to learn anything different. We hear it everywhereschool, church, TV commercials, and even game shows! Its gross! Please, pleaselets not forget this when we grow up. Lets not be part of the real world when we finally have a chance to get out. I dont want to forget. I dont want to be another cog in the machine. I wish we could just run away, and find a place where people dont think humans own the planet and get to do whatever they want to it. Corndog admired her passion, and agreed with her point that it would be a shame to forget what it was like to see the world that way. He wondered if the we she wrote about was meant to refer only to her and him, or generally to like-minded individuals who recognized the inherent flaws of civilization. He liked the idea of running away to live at peace with nature, or of finding a way to shake society free of its self-destructive tendencies, but most of all he just liked the idea of continuing on with Jessi, sharing ideas about what was right and what was wrong, and about what they could do together to change things, to make things better. As long as it was with her, he was on board. In his final letter to Jessi before he began school at the academy at the end of that summer, Corndog wrote that he would love to have coffee with her sometime when they got back to school. He didnt mention to her that deep down, he was okay with the idea of civilization going along exactly as it was, as long as he could stick with her. He daydreamed just as easily about running away together as he did about staying in the civilized world, and running a quiet little used bookstore or coffee shop together where people could sit around day and night, talking about their subversive countercultural ideals and about how good it would be to get away.

***

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Kuri-chan stood at the kitchen counter and sliced the vegetables for dinner as Akiko washed the rice. He hated washing the rice because he could never tell when it was clean enough to start cooking. Slicing vegetables, on the other hand, seemed pretty simple. Sure, when Akikos brother once visited, he shot a confused (or possibly horrified) look at his sister upon seeing Kuri-chan slice an onion. It was the same sort of look one adult might give another upon seeing someone elses child blatantly wipe snot on the wall in an elevator, as if to say, Should we stand idly by and watch this happen, or should we intervene? It was in those types of moments that Kuri-chan most suspected that Akiko simply tolerated him, remaining with him not because she felt an affection for him, but rather because she was simply too polite to walk away, and he hadnt given her sufficient reason to do so. The look Akiko gave her brother said, in a language Kuri-chan could understand, I know; he has no idea what hes doing. Just let it go. Hed been slicing the vegetables for a while now and his technique had improved quite a bit. Akiko started the rice maker and went back to the living room as Kuri-chan went on to season the chicken. Among the many things that Kuri-chan enjoyed about staying with Akikos family when they visited Japan was the way they had prepared their meals. The kitchen space in their home, right next to the dining area, wasnt particularly spacious. Not by American standards, at least. This didnt stop Akiko, both of her parents, and her brother and sister from all occupying the space together, moving around in their own paths, orbiting each other as they each contributed to the preparation of the meal in their own particular way. As Kuri-chan sat at the round dining table, he tried to look for ways he could help out, but he couldnt see a way to step in that wouldnt disrupt their finely choreographed movements. He certainly didnt want to be the disruptive element that upset the balance. The dining room table and chairs were the only real furniture in the house, at least in the way that Kuri-chan typically thought of furniture. The front room had a small computer desk and chair in one corner and a piano in another corner, but was otherwise just lots of open space. They had no television, only a stereo. In the morning, Akikos mother, okaasan, used the open space in the front room to fold and sort laundry while listening to the radio. Anywhere else, Kuri-chan wouldnt have liked the idea of his freshly-washed

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clothing being stacked on the floor. But no one wore shoes in this house, and the hardwood floors stayed very clean and maintained a polished appearance. Walking through the front room in the mornings, Kuri-chan resisted the urge to get a running start and then see how far his socks would let him slide, the way he had in his mothers house when he was just a kid. The rooms upstairs all had traditional tatami floors, which remained open space most of the time, like the front room downstairs did. Akikos brother had a small desk in his room, and in the middle of her sisters room was a kotatsu tablelike a small coffee table set into the floor with an electric heater underneath and a blanket over the top. Akiko and her sister would put their feet under the table as they brushed their teeth at night, the blankets wrapped tightly over their laps to keep the heat from escaping. And when it was time for bed, everyone would pull their futon mattresses out from the closets and unroll them onto the tatami floors for sleeping. The word futon initially made Kurichan think of the cheap couches in the States that easily converted into beds, but he quickly realized that, like so many other things, the American futon was far different from the traditional Japanese futon. Before they went to sleep each night, Akiko lay on the floor next to Kuri-chans futon, asking him how hed enjoyed the day and telling him what was on the agenda for the following day. Being home looked good on her. She smiled at him sleepily as she delayed the moment when she would get up, close the sliding partition between the two bedrooms, and go to sleep. Kuri-chan couldnt figure out why they had more pillow talk in Japanwhere they slept apartthan they did any other time back in the States. And it wasnt just the pillow talk. From the moment theyd landed at Narita, Akiko had been extraordinarily affectionate; wrapping her arm around his as they waited outside the terminal for a bus, and sleeping with her head resting on his shoulder on all the bus and train rides theyd taken. This felt like more affection than shed shown him in all the months theyd been together, and they had been sleeping with each other since the same month they started dating. After the first time theyd had sex, Kuri-chan couldnt help but wonder whether Akiko had let it happen simply because she didnt object, and not

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because she was actually interested in sleeping with him. But then in Japan, when they slept in different bedrooms, Kuri-chan felt a sense of physical chemistry with Akiko hed never experienced back home. By the time they were back in the States together, she was her normal self again. Her normal American self, anyway. Kuri-chan first made the connection that one of his favorite parts of learning Russian had been learning the Cyrillic alphabet only when he began to learn hiragana during that trip to Japan. After sitting around the table with the family, eating the meal they all had a hand in preparing, the family would sit together, drink ocha, talk, and laugh. One by one, they split off from the group, excusing themselves to go to bed. They rolled out their futons, crawled under the heavy blankets, and went to sleep. Kuri-chan struggled a bit with jet lag, so when he went to bed and found he wasnt tired, he practiced his hiragana. As he had with the Cyrillic alphabet, Kuri-chan found a singular pleasure in putting the pen to paper and drawing the symbol that corresponds to a sound. A bit further into his study of Russian, however, Sergeis handwriting went the same way it had in English, in that it became increasingly difficult to read. His Russian handwriting, more often than not, was a sloppy cursive script. As he was required in his assignments to build a larger vocabulary and to give more attention to the constructions of various types of sentences, he was also forced to become so concerned with the sentence as a whole, or even the paragraph, that he no longer had time to give the letters sufficient attention to retain that same visual aesthetic he once enjoyed so thoroughly. At times he nearly resented sentences and paragraphs for stealing his attention away from the letter. Something about the resentment felt similar to the anger he experienced while he had studied at the academy. The slow pace at his public high school gave him time to daydream about the concepts they were introduced to. He was free to let his mind wander, and to think about the different implications and ramifications of some idea or theory they were introduced to. By the time many of the other students were beginning to get a basic grasp on the idea, Corndog was already bored with it and ready to move on to something new. When he studied at the academy, however, they covered so much material, so many different ideas, concepts, and themes, that Corndog couldnt take the same leisure.

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Kuri-chan continued to prepare a meal for himself and Akiko as she worked in the living room. Perhaps it was only Kuri-chans apprehension about the impending conversation, but as he cooked dinner he couldnt stop thinking about something his mother asked when hed told her he was moving in with Akiko: Does she want you to? At the time, and while he and Akiko looked for an apartment together, Kuri-chan had thought nothing of the question. He hadnt missed a beat when he told his mom, Yes, of course she wants me to move in with her. We wouldnt be talking about it if she didnt. But from time to time, when he was alone with Akiko in the apartment and felt like he was reverting back to Corndog, he wondered if maybe his mother was a little more perceptive than hed given her credit for.

Corndog had lived in his mothers house his entire childhood, right up until he left to see whether the academy could help him achieve his potential. The academy billed itself as a pioneering education community, specializing in math and science education, and Corndog traced the earliest beginnings of his loss of interest in both math and science to the brief time hed spent there. After having been one of the most talented math students at his home high school, Corndog found it incredibly discouraging to compete with some of the most talented students from all around the state. His response to competition when he wasnt a clear frontrunner was to give up completely. In his English classes, however, he quickly found that so long as he could construct a reasonable argument about something, it didnt seem to matter all that much whether it was right. If Corndog didnt choose the right formula or equation for a particular math or science problem, no amount of figuring would make it possible to arrive at the correct answer. With English, as long as he could back up a claim with a convincing enough argument, all sorts of nonsense could be justified. Hed gotten good practice when he and his buddies sat
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around getting high, because everyone was always eager to debate each other fervently about any statement made, right down to which was better: Mountain Dew or Jolt. As much as Corndog felt those arguments forced him to be precise with his language, he hadnt found them to be very stimulating on an intellectual level. And, of course, they werent even remotely as gratifying as the letters he had exchanged with Jessi over the summer before going to the academy. Shortly after his first semester at the academy had begun, Jessi took Corndog up on his invitation to go out for coffee. He took Jessi to a caf hed discovered with his roommate when scouting for good off-campus locations to go when they were high and smoke cigarettes without getting caught. The caf was a small local franchise, with a full breakfast menu served all day and a variety of special ice cream desserts. Corndog was nervous, and it only made things worse that Jessi wasnt a smoker, because he wouldve felt bad smoking around her. Before Jessi, he had barely so much as kissed a girl, so no part of this endeavor came easily to him. Over coffee, they talked about some of the things their letters over the summer hadnt covered, like their family backgrounds and what their home high schools had been like. Jessis parents were together, her father a cop and her mother a stay-at-home mom and Sunday-school teacher. Her family seemed a little more establishment than Corndog mightve expected, with how radical she came across in some of her letters. He was a little uncomfortable, at first, telling Jessi about his dads difficulties holding down a stable job due to his bouts of binge drinking. She came across as very non-judgmental and made him feel safe talking about it. They talked about their siblings, and Corndog told her he was kind of surprised to find himself proud that his brother John had joined the Marine Corps. Long after the waitress had stopped refilling their coffee mugs, but before Corndog worked up the nerve to talk about romantic matters, Jessi suggested it might be time to start walking back toward campus. As they neared the far side of campus, by the line of trees just past the soccer field, Jessi put her arm around Corndogs, and pulled him close as they walked. Surprised, Corndog struggled to finish the sentence hed been in the middle of.

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You know, people never take the time to just lay in the grass, Jessi said, slowing her walking pace. Do you want to see if we can find a good spot under these trees? How could Corndog argue with that? Bet I can find one before you! She said, letting go of his arm and running toward the trees. Corndog gave chase, and she laughed as she scrambled to stay ahead of him. As he caught up to Jessi, he grabbed her as if to try to hold her back and pass her by, but she kept laughing and held on, preventing him from getting away. She wrapped both arms around him and held on, and he quickly stopped trying to break free. Lets lay down, she said, her voice soft. Okay, Corndog laughed. But its supposed to be lie, isnt it? Jessi let go of him and slapped him on the shoulder. Oh, that does it! You just missed your chance, buddy boy! She started to run, but he caught her. He wasted no time wrapping his arms around her as shed just done so she couldnt get away. Okay, he said, still laughing. We can lay, we can lieit doesnt matter! Lets just experience the grass together. With that, he let himself fall to the ground, pulling Jessi down with him so that he broke her fall. She lay on top of him, face to face, and looked in his eyes. If by experience the grass you mean smoke weed, thats a no, she said. No, I didnt mean that at all, he said, his sense of worry about Jessis sudden seriousness being overpowered slightly by the splendor of having her so close to him. He could feel her breath on his lips. Okay, good, she said. I wont tell you how to live your life, but I just wanted you to know up front that Im not going to be the stoner girlfriend.

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She continued to stare into his eyes, and he let her words settle in for a moment. Looking into her eyes that way, he knew he was experiencing the sort of thing that might be described in prose as losing track of time, not knowing whether seconds had passed or hours. But he knew exactly how much time was passing, and the only thing that made it feel like a long time was that he knew what came next, and he was terrified to bring his face those few inches forward, to touch his lips to hers. Then, he did it. From that first coffee date forward, Corndog had spent so much of his time with Jessi oftentimes on the way to or from their patch of grass under the trees, on the far side of the soccer fieldthat he began noticing that students he didnt know gave him funny looks when he wasnt with her, as if the mere sight of him called to mind the couple and an instinctive curiosity about the whereabouts of his missing half. The couple exchanged letters with each other even more frequently than they had over the summer, in spite of the fact that they spent most of their free hours together in person on any given day. Any circumstance that forced their separationclass, 10 oclock dorm curfew, and Jessis frequent weekend trips home with familywas a time for writing letters to each other. The days and nights with Jessi passed quickly. Even with all their discussion of how harmful civilization was to the human spirit, Jessi was still able to focus on completing her school work. Corndog was too preoccupied with his disdain for society and his infatuation with Jessi to accomplish much in the way of schoolwork. As a senior, Jessi spent Wednesdays off campus doing research for an independent study project, and because her family didnt live far from campus, she spent many of her weekends at home. This left Corndog with lots of time for getting high with his roommate and a few of the other students who were having a hard time living up to their potential. When he and his roommate were caught getting high in their dorm bathroom on a Wednesday afternoon, it did little more than speed along the already inevitable reality that Corndog was not going to successfully finish out the year at the academy. Jessi had already been warning Corndog that if he didnt try harder, he could easily not be invited back for his junior year. When she came back to campus that Wednesday evening and he told her what had happened, she said that she didnt want to deal with it,
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and spent the rest of the evening in her own dorm. He and his roommate sat in the lobby of their dorm watching sci-fi TV with their neighbors, and Corndog complained to his roommate about Jessi abandoning him when he needed her the most. It seemed like the right thing to say. His roommate just nodded, not looking away from the TV. The next night, before his mom picked him up to come home and serve out his one-week suspension, Corndog and Jessi walked to their usual spot on the other side of the soccer field. Jessi didnt speak when Corndog met her in front of her dorm and started their walk to the line of trees, so by the time they reached their spot, he was starting to feel a bit anxious. He laid the blanket out on the ground, noting that by the time he returned from his suspension they might need to add a second blanket to insulate them from the ground, which was getting colder each night. Jessi lay down on her stomach, as she sometimes did when they first came out, and folded her hands under her chin staring back in the direction of campus. Corndog lay down next to her, on his side, and admired the way loose strands of the hair that had slipped out from behind her ear coiled along the soft skin of her cheek. Her silence, so uncharacteristic, continued to amplify his anxiety as the moments passed. Finally, she turned to look at him, resting her head on her folded hands. She looked sad. You know, she began. Probably more than anyone else we know, I think I get all the reasons you would not want to participate in this corrupt system. But why cant you just, well, put up with it? At least until we get out of here and can move on with our lives? Corndog watched her face as she spoke, noticing that the way she delivered her words seemed marked not by sadness, but by tiredness. The weariness seemed contagious, but it could have just been his reaction to the thought of struggling through another two and a half years at the academy. Corndog looked away, staring off at the campus buildings as Jessi had when they first lay down. If it was this difficult to muster any interest in his classes now, with Jessi at the academy, he could only imagine how much more difficult it would be over the next two years, when she was at college somewhere else. What else kept him there?

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Its fun to daydream about running away, she went on, but the reality is that were going to have to play by the rules for a little while if we really want a chance to change anything. Jessi reached over and put her hand on the back of Corndogs neck and squeezed. He continued to stare at the campus. You cant just write me letters, you know. You need to study writing, so you can go out there and reach other people, too. Corndog turned back to her, momentarily envisioning the possibility of getting high less and leaning into his education. But still, the thought of two more years at the academy without her seemed intolerable. Do you really think so? he asked her. I mean, does a person have to go to college to be a writer? Not that Im saying I wont go to college, but I guess I just dont like the idea of forcing myself to do thisthis academy thingjust because its going to get me from where I am right now to somewhere else. He took her hand that shed placed on his neck and held it to his cheek. Honestly, Jessi, the only reason Im still at this academy is because I want to be with you. And next year youll be gone. I just want to do my best to get through the end of this year, and then I can figure out whats next, okay? In spite of their conversation, when he returned to campus after his suspension, Corndog continued to skip classes and miss assignments. Any time he wasnt with Jessi, he was getting high with his roommate or other friends. Jessi tried harder each week to convince him that he should stick it out, to play by their rules long enough to eventually get a chance to fight the system from the inside. He didnt bother to argue with her theory, but instead just continued to get high and skip class. By the time the second semester started, Jessi had stopped trying to convince him. They had only exchanged three single-page letters over the two-week winter break, and those letters were limited mostly to details about family holiday celebrations, and how much they missed each other. When they came back to school in early January, it was cold and there was snow on the ground, so they couldnt visit their spot on the far side of the soccer field. Instead, they were forced to do like other couples, and sit next to each other in the TV chairs in the dorm lobby watching bad sitcoms, careful not to show too much affection with the risk of being written up by the on-duty resident counselors.
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It only took until the third Wednesday of the new semester until Corndog and his roommate were in trouble again. They were caught before they even had a chance to get high because Corndogs roommate dropped his rolling papers in the dorm lobby just as one of the dorm counselors was walking past. The dean of students informed Corndog that he had a choice: he could either withdraw from the academy on his own, or he could sit through a formal disciplinary hearing with the school administration to determine whether he would be allowed to remain a student, and what the probationary terms would be if he was. Corndog didnt have much trouble deciding whether to fight for an opportunity to remain a student at a school that made learningsomething he normally enjoyedfeel like such a steep climb. The last time theyd spoken, Corndogs father had suggested that next time he come home maybe he could come live with him. His father had meant for the summer, but once Corndog realized he was coming home sooner, he called and made plans to move in with his dad. After the months of being forced to steal cigarettes at the grocery store because it was so hard to find a buyer, it would be nice to be go back to having his dad buy his cigarettes again. One of the only regrets he expected to have about leaving the academy, with the exception of leaving Jessi behind and having no sense of certainty about their future together, was that his time there had been his only real firsthand exposure to anything beyond small town life. It pained him to cut that short. Each time hed returned home to visit from the academy, he felt a nebulous, growing sense of anxiety that always took at least a few days to wear off. Similarly, when hed gone back to the academy after his break was over, with each mile he drew closer to campus, the unspecified sense of trepidation and hesitation returned, though it felt slightly different from the feeling he got when he returned home. At one point hed wondered if maybe the feeling just came with the drive itself, that something about being transported from one place to anotherfrom his small rural hometown to a progressive academic campus in an average-sized suburban citybrought about some type of psychic movement in him that he didnt quite understand or know how to process.

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Corndog had been an avid reader as a child, tearing through all sorts of books that exposed him to narrative representations of countless different cultures, real and imagined. There were also times when he opened an encyclopedia to look something up, only to become so intrigued by other articles that he found himself, hours later, sitting with the open encyclopedia, unsure of what he first meant to look up. This type of fascination with the larger world outside wasnt common in his hometown, or at least the guys Corndog spent most of his time with didnt seem to have much interest in anything beyond the city limits, anyway. He and his friends had actually debated extensively one night, while high on mushrooms, about whether their hometown was, in fact, boring. Corndog remembered that hed felt strongly, during the course of the discussion, that the outcome of that debate would have lasting meaning for him and his group of friends, and yet he couldnt recall what the final analysis had been. He just knew that hed argued fervently that there was no way they could know what they were missing. During his final ride home from the academy, with his brother John driving and all his belongings in the back seat of the van, Corndog couldnt stop thinking that hed missed his opportunity while he was at the academy to find out what hed been missing in his hometown. He didnt regret any of the time hed spent with Jessi, but he started to feel bad for devoting all the time he wasnt with her to getting high or acquiring cigarettes with his roommate when there had been so much else he couldve been doing. John happened to be back on his ten-day leave after Marine Corps boot camp when Corndog decided to leave the academy, which meant Corndog didnt have to make the drive home with his mom. Still, when John came to pick him up on campus, he gave Corndog fair warning that before taking him to their dads house, he was supposed to take him home to see their mom first. When the van crossed into the city limits of his small hometown once again, Corndog wondered if the unease he felt each time he was coming and going was the constraint of those limits, holding him in. Maybe the anxiety that had plagued him each time he went back to the academy after a break might have been the prescient sense of approaching the far end of the elastic tether his hometown had him on, a deep-seated and ineffable knowledge that soon the tether would retract and bring him back within the city limits. And then there he was, again.

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Corndog found his mother sitting at her desk, checkbook and bills fanned out in front of her. He felt a pang of guilt as he thought about how expensive the academys annual tuition must have been. His mom probably wouldnt get any type of refund for the year because hed attended well into the second semester. He knew the school charged tuition on a sliding scale in cases of need, like his, and they allowed for installment payments over the course of the school year. Maybe she hadnt paid for the whole year yet, and at least shed have a few payments left she wouldnt have to make. Still, he knew it had probably been a challenge to scrape together the payments shed already made, however much they were. He doubted his father had been paying child support. Corndog walked up beside his mothers desk as she typed in numbers on her calculator, but he didnt say anything to announce himself. He knew she saw him in her peripheral vision. As she finished her calculation and wrote a figure into the balance column on her check register, Corndog experienced another wave of guilt, recalling the $150 graphing calculator that was stolen when he left his backpack in the dorm lounge unattended all night while he and his friends were out getting high. He hadnt told her about that. She stared at the check register long enough that it became clear she was no longer paying bills or balancing her checkbook, but instead was collecting her thoughts. So, she said, finally turning to face him. What do you have to say for yourself? Any other time, Corndog might have grinned at her tendency to sound clichd, but not now. Corndog remained silent. He started to feel as though every particle of cigarette smoke that had been come to rest in his clothing from the last cigarette on the ride home was now dislodging itself to float over into her range of smell. He wondered if his eyes retained any of their redness from the mornings farewell joint. That was when Corndog noticed how red his mothers eyes were. He felt his shoulders drop, and he let his gaze come to rest on the dusty heat vent on the floor beside the desk.

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I guess I just dont know how to handle you, she said. Ive tried severe punishments; Ive tried letting you figure it out on your own. But you just wont stop pissing away your potential. With her pronouncement of that loathed word, Corndog felt his sense of guilt turn a sharp corner to take the shape of resentment. He had smoked pot every day his freshman year, in school and out, and finished the year with straight As and awards for regional and state math competitions. He could have easily stayed in his hometown and skated through the rest of high school that way, but because he did so well he was shipped off to some newagey school for smart kids, a place sure to help him fail. And now, because he hadnt played into their offbeat educational approach, with college-like class schedules and independent study projects, they had made it look like he couldnt handle smoking pot and going to school at the same time. I dont like to get in between you and your father, but you need to know that I dont approve of you going to live with him. She looked away. I guess the best I can hope for is that maybe living over there will give you a feel for what your life will be like if you keep this up. She said the over there part with a special note of scorn, as it referred to Corndogs uncles house, where his dad had been renting a room for the past couple years. The house had previously belonged to Corndogs grandfather, but his grandfather had died of liver failure just before Corndog started high school. His grandfathers death was one of the reasons he advocated so strongly for marijuana over alcohol, even if he did still lower himself to drinking liquor when left with no other substances to ingest. But even before his grandfathers death, the house Corndogs father lived in had seemed symbolic of a certain kind of hopelessness; usually two or three adult men living with their father and brothers, all of them alcoholics with various levels of ability to function normally with regard to holding down jobs and paying bills. Corndog had spent many weekends there as a young child during the odd six- or nine-month periods his dad moved back there after failing to make rent during one of his alcoholic binges. If his dad happened to be sober during the weekend he and John stayed over, they would eat wonderful home-cooked
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mealsCorndogs favorite was chicken-fried steak, green beans, and mashed potatoes and play marathon games of Monopoly or Yahtzee. More often, spending the weekend at that house had meant playing Super Mario Brothers with John and possibly getting twenty bucks to go pick out whatever they wanted at the convenience store, just as long as they didnt forget to get a bottle of grapefruit juice to cut the vodka with. In recent years, Corndogs visits to his dads place meant smoking cigarettes freely and staying up all night watching cable television, both things he couldnt do at his mothers house. He knew she wanted her talk of his living over there to be sobering, as if to suggest that he was on track to end up just like his father and uncles, and eventually his grandfather, but he couldnt help but imagine the sense of freedom he would have if he lived there. The household had an undeniable appeal in its lack of judgment. He tried to maintain the somber look on his face, but couldnt stop imagining the possibilities. All he could think of was the steady supply of cigarettes and the freedom to smoke as he pleased. I know youre going to do what you want, his mother added. But try to remember while youre living there that if anythings gonna change, something will have to change. Once John had finished helping carry everything into their fathers house from the van, he wished Corndog good luck and left to go back to their moms house. Corndog went up to his new bedroom alone and looked at the boxes and luggage. He quickly found himself overwhelmed by the prospect of having to decide how he would arrange his room. It was never a simple task, deciding how ones own personal space should be organized. He soon gave in to his sense of despair, and rather than trying to unpack everything, he went into one of the boxes, took out a smaller box he found inside, and sat down in the middle of the unmade bed. The shoebox he took out was filled with a collection of letters, all from Jessi. There were also a few other items in the box, like a Gonzo PEZ dispenser shed picked up for him when she went home one weekend, and a polished rock with an indentation, meant for

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rubbing to release nervous energy when one is stressed or worried. Jessi had gone home more often than Corndog, and each time she brought him back at least one letter sometimes two, and usually some small gift, a trinket or souvenir. For a while, Corndog had tried keeping the letters Jessi gave him in chronological order, but eventually that became too difficult. The collection had gone from a small paperclip to a larger paperclip, and then to a rubber band. When the rubber band could no longer hold the letters, hed emptied out the shoebox that had been his hiding place for lighters, matches, and rolling papers. Corndog had favorites among the letters, usually the longer ones, which he would occasionally take out and re-read, slowly, and carefully. As her words recaptured some thought theyd shared with one another, hed recalled their conversations, wrapped in each others arms on that thin cotton blanket spread out under their tree behind the soccer field. When he read about their mutual hopes of living simply on the land, away from the civilized world, he recalled the scent of her hair and the feel of her breath on his neck. Corndog reached into the box and pulled out the most recent envelope, a plain white legal envelope with a single sheet of college-ruled loose leaf paper inside, folded neatly in thirds. Shed given him the letter the night before, just before his final curfew call. They had spent the day together, walking to the caf arm in arm and then sitting together on the same side of the booth as they held each other in silence, her head rested on his shoulder. They sat long enough that the manager came and politely explained that they would need to order something besides coffee if they wanted to stay any longer. She had skipped all her classes that day, and when they walked back to campus she clutched his right arm tightly to her as they walked. They walked past the row of trees, but didnt stop this time. As they stood in front of his dorm before curfew, Jessi looked into Corndogs eyes. Neither shed a tear. She handed him the envelope, and then she turned and walked back to her own dorm alone. He unfolded the sheet and read the words once again. Good bye, she wrote.

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Living with his father as he finished high school actually turned out to be a positive influence, as his father had been attending twelve-step meetings and not drinking for almost six months at the time. It wasnt long after moving in with his dad that Corndog was told he could avoid a three-day suspension if he went to some twelve-step meetings. He might have just opted to take the time off school to stay home, smoke cigarettes, and read, but with a semester of straight Cs from his time at the academy, he didnt want to risk three days of homework and possible quizzes or tests he couldnt make up. Corndog saw a few interesting people close to his age at the first few meetings he went to, and he joined them at a greasy diner after one of the meetings. They smoked cigarettes, drank coffee, and talked music just like his stoner friends, even with similar tastes, but they just didnt get high anymore. A guy and a girl not much older than Corndog each had keytags for ninety days clean, and another guy had a keytag for six months. Even after hed gotten all the signatures he need on his attendance sheet, Corndog kept going to meetings. Why not try and see if he could get a thirty-day keytag for himself? If he could get a little bit of clean time and stop letting drugs play such a big part all his decisions, maybe he would find a girl he liked and have a shot at something that could last.

Kuri-chan paid limited attention to his cooking as he alternated between thoughts of his conversation with Akiko and the idea of being a writer. He couldnt get why he felt like he had far less to say as a writer after nearly four years of college writing classes than hed thought he had in high school. Especially when hed been with Jessi, hed felt absolutely certain that he had something important to say to the world. And hed hardly written a thing, outside of the letters he wrote for Jessi. Now hed written at least a dozen short stories over the course of his undergraduate career, and each time he started a new

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one he found that the messages he wanted to communicate never ended up being what the story was about. The way the stories took shape seemed baffling and mysterious, and he was met with confusing, if not conflicting advice from his instructors like write what you know, and the text we must be interested in writing is the text we dont yet know how to write. So each time he wrote, he just sat in front of a blank screen, waiting for some interesting phrase or scenario to strike him, so he could begin writing, and then he did his best to reserve judgment and not to force things. And what came out in the end were stories, which he then took to class to see how other students reacted. No matter what his instructors and the other students suggested, he tried very hard to keep his revisions to a minimum. He didnt want to inadvertently break something and ruin the story. Kuri-chans approach to cooking was a bit unorthodox, too. His instinctual approach to the task of trying to cook a particular meal involved focusing primarily on what the end product should look like, which typically preoccupied him so much that he became somewhat incapable of adequately handling the individual steps along the way, like slicing an onion. As a result, his meals usually ended up looking more or less okay (certainly not the idealized versions hed been shooting for), but took an inordinate amount of time to prepare. His process of learning to cook had gone in the opposite direction from his study of Russian, in which the individual letters and words he wrote became more inscrutable as the sentences he was capable of formulating grew longer. The more experience he gained as a cook, the less he was concerned with the appearance of the finished product as he devoted increasing attention to the individual ingredients along the way. As he improved his skills with the component ingredients, he learned to prepare meals much more quickly, and each successive meal actually looked a little more like it had been prepared by someone who knew what he was doing. His holistic approach to cooking yielded meals that consisted of individual bites he savored so much more, and yet the more quickly he wrote by hand to capture a thought or idea, whether in Russian or English, the more unintelligible it became.

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With Japanese, the idea of sloppy handwriting was still a long way off for Kuri-chan. For a few weeks following his visit to Japan, he had practiced hiragana in a workbook Akiko had given him to occupy his time during their flights over the Pacific. When shed given him the workbook, shed explained the three main sets of Japanese characters to Kurichan: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is a phonetic alphabet for native words, katakana the phonetic alphabet for foreign words, and kanji the collection of symbols borrowed from Chinese that stand for whole words. The workbook began with the fortysix characters in the hiragana set, and so Kuri-chan had made his best effort to memorize the phonetic meanings as he practiced drawing each character, filling up blank pages in a notebook with line after line of ah ih uh eh oh, ka ki ku ke ko, and so on, mumbling the sounds to himself as he went along. Just as hed once been excited to learn how to write down familiar Russian words like (privyet-hello) and (spasiba-thanks), for a brief time he found pleasure in his ability to write some of the Japanese words hed heard a lot, like (nani-what) and (samui-cold). Just discovering what the base sounds for the language are had been fascinating for Kurichan, as it changed the way he thought about the different sounds he heard during his visit with Akikos family. He wondered how many sounds hed missed completely because his untrained ears hadnt been able to distinguish them. As he thought about hearing those foreign sounds differently, Kuri-chan wondered if his conversation with Akiko might be easier if he could speak Japanese. Maybe there were just too many nuances and subtleties in the way emotion affected English speech that Akiko didnt pick up on, and vice versa. Kuri-chan recalled a Japanese phrase shed told him when hed been practicing hiragana: Niwa ni wa niwatori ga iru. Not knowing Japanese, it sounded to him like Akiko had simply repeated the syllables ni wa three times, followed by a couple other words. She had explained to him that it was a Japanese tongue twister, which just meant that there were two chickens in the garden. She then rattled off an even longer one, about chickens in the garden in front of the house and behind the house, but that one had been far too complicated for Kuri-chan to try to memorize. Even if he had memorized it, he still would have understood only as well as the shorter one, which is to say that he knew it was interesting from an intellectual

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standpoint, but that still didnt mean he could hear the meaningful distinctions in the way the sentence was vocalized. Maybe emotions could be like that, too, he speculated. When he practiced hiragana, the ability to record the sounds of Japanese in writing felt like a big deal to Kuri-chan. That had only been until Akiko explained to him that even with a perfect grasp of both hiragana and katakana, he still wouldnt be able to make heads or tails of a Japanese newspaper. Newspapers were written in kanji. In Japanese, a person could be a fluent speaker of the language, perfectly capable of writing out all of his or her thoughts using hiragana and katakana, and still be considered illiterate if unable to decipher the thousands of symbols that made up the complicated system of Japanese kanji. The ni wa tongue twister, Akiko had explained, could possibly even be difficult for a native speaker to read in hiragana, because it would just be the repeating syllables with no clear indications of where one word ended and the next began. But when written in kanji, the sentence would be perfectly clear and understandable. That had been enough to dash Kuri-chans nave hopes that perhaps learning hiragana would be sufficient to get by if he ever wanted to spend more time in Japan. Kanji seemed far too complex, not just because there were so many symbols, but because the symbols didnt even retain the same pronunciations from one sentence to the next. Kuri-chan had bugged Akiko during their visit about one of the characters he saw on lots of signs, , which Akiko told him was the kanji for person, or hito. Written in hiragana, that would be . But then, as Akiko had explained, it was pronounced differently when used in the construction san nin or three people. Kuri-chan knew he would be the type of person to say something stupid like san hito for three people, which wouldnt have been nearly as cute as the way Akiko said dealer shop when she talked about the car dealership where she took her car for oil changes. Kanji was nearly enough to put Kurichan off the idea of trying to learn Japanese at all. But he knew that he had to finish his final semester in Russian and put that behind him forever before he could, in good conscience, swear off another language entirely. Kuri-chan called Akiko into the kitchen when the ricemaker sounded its alarm so she could begin preparing the plates. He had already finished sauting the vegetables, which

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were holding on low heat on the back burner, and the chicken breast in the oven was nearly done. Before moving in with Akiko, most of Kuri-chans meals on the rare occasions that he ate at home consisted of highly-processed goods requiring little prep work. One of the staple meals in his repertoire, as a matter of fact, had been macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. It wasnt that he had an aversion to cooking, or to vegetables; his problem was primarily his distinct inability to select ingredients. Before moving in with Akiko, he hadnt even bothered walking through the produce section when hed gone grocery shopping. He now had a rather convenient arrangement with Akiko: she selected the ingredients and he assembled the meals. Chris-tuh-fah! Akiko exclaimed, invoking her best rendition of Adriana from The Sopranos as she walked into the kitchen. Akiko and Kuri-chan watched The Sopranos every week, and Akiko giggled every time Adriana was on the screen, shouting in her thick Jersey accent at her fianc, Christopher. Akiko loved to tease Kuri-chan, whose real name was Christopher, by mimicking the Jersey accent when she was feeling energetic. It was almost, but not quite, reminiscent of those rare times when Christopher had gotten in trouble as a child, and his mother would invoke his full name, followed by both middle names: Christopher William Francis! Come get your cereal bowl and take it to the sink! He wasnt sure why his parents had insisted on two middle names; maybe they just hadnt been able to agree on one. Akiko, on the other hand, had no middle names. Kurichan had wondered, when he first learned that she didnt have a middle name, what Japanese mothers shouted to indicate how much trouble their children were in. But then, maybe her lack of middle name was as uncommon in Japan as two middle names was here in the States. Comin right up, Christopher responded. You wanna come get the chopsticks and water? The show didnt start yet, did it? No, Akiko said, walking into the kitchen. But theyre playing highlights from last week, so we have to hurry. She picked up the chopsticks and water glasses Christopher had set on the counter, grabbed a couple paper towels, and headed back to the living room.
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After dishing up the food, Christopher carried the meal into the living room, balancing two plates in one hand and two bowls of rice in the other. He was proud of this little gem hed taken from his brief experience as a waiter, but whenever he did it Akiko told him he should be more careful. Thats not called being efficient, shed say, thats just lazy. Christopher set the plates on the coffee table and took his seat on the floor next to Akiko. Just before plunging their chopsticks into the warm rice, they both said itadakimasu, the traditional Japanese saying that precedes a meal. Akiko followed that with, Thanks for cooking! The two ate in silence as they watched TV. Their time together as a couple now largely consisted of evenings much like thisdoing homework together in silence, watching TV or a movie, or Christopher reading while Akiko solved Sudoku puzzles. It was comfortable, and it was wordless. For Christopher, it seemed like the perfect example of something hed once heard in a meeting: intimacy is shared experience. No words were necessary, he thought. Once the episode ended, Akiko set her empty plate on his and said gochiso-sama deshitait was a feastas she took the dishes to the kitchen. So Akiko, Kuri-chan said when she walked back into the room, not sure how he wanted to bring the topic up. Can we talk about something? Okay, she said. Do you want to play cards? At least a few times a month, Akiko badgered him to play rummy after dinner. He rarely wanted to, but he sometimes gave in and agreed to play. Sure, Im game, he said with a sigh. Maybe it would make the conversation easier. Or maybe it could make up for not moving his arm away from the girl in class that afternoon. Either way, he knew Akiko loved playing cards. Yay! Ill get the cards, she said, scurrying off to the other room as Kuri-chan cleared some space on the coffee table.

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The first time Kuri-chan had told Akiko he loved her, when theyd been dating for almost six months, was after a particularly difficult evening of poker with friends at her labmates house. Hed been wondering, probably since the first time theyd had sex, when it would be appropriate to say that to her. In high school, hed felt comfortable telling Jessi he loved her just a few weeks into the semester they spent together because theyd expressed so many of their thoughts and ideas on paper in a short period of time. Sergei had never said I love you to Jess, on the other hand, as there had been so little time between their first sexual encounter and the moment he began to lose interest in her personality. With Akiko, absent the charged intellectual connections and the intense physical chemistry, he hadnt been sure how he would know when to say I love you. Akiko had already complained to Kuri-chan on their way to the poker game about her stressful day of arguing with her lab manager about experiment protocols, and then she spent the entire evening in a cold seat at the poker table. When she flopped a high straight in the final hand of the night, Akiko pushed all her chips to the middle, certain that her luck had finally changed. Her labmates boyfriend called her bet, and then he made a flush on the river card to beat Akikos straighta bad beat by anyones standards. Akiko stared at the river card that completed her opponents flush, her face slowly twisting from shocked disbelief into a look of pained disappointment and frustration. Her labmates boyfriend was a bit too enthusiastic as he raked the chips, which finally pushed her over the edge. Shut up! Akiko shouted, standing up to throw her cards across the table at him as tears dripped down her cheeks. She sat back down immediately and hid her face in her hands, and Kuri-chan exchanged awkward glances with the labmate and her boyfriend. He put a hand on Akikos shoulder as the others slowly started to gather their belongings. Akiko hadnt said anything as they rode home together that night. She faced away from him as they lay in bed. He rubbed her back gently, wishing she couldve won that hand, or any hand, or that shed had a better day at work. He just wished she wasnt hurting, especially over an accumulation of such trivial things. He leaned in close, kissed her on the neck just above her shoulder, and whispered in her ear, I love you.
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So, he started again, as she shuffled the cards. Remember that letter I sent to the nonprofit place in San Francisco? No, she answered. She dealt out seven cards each to herself and Kuri-chan. Well, he said, organizing the cards in his hand, I told you about it, but maybe you forgot. I sent this nonprofit company my rsum about a month and a half ago. They publish materials for recovering addicts, and sometimes do workshops in places where there are lots of addicts to help train volunteers for community outreach type stuff. You remember? No, but go ahead with your story, she said, holding her cards close. Its your turn. Okay, well, last month I sent them my rsum and a letter of interest, he said. He took a card from the top of the pile, put it with the rest of the cards he had, and tried to decide what he should discard. He got rid of the nine of clubs, putting it face up on the discard pile. So, I got a letter back from them, and they wanted to do a phone interview, which we did this morning. He watched Akikos face, trying to read her reaction, but her focus seemed to stay with her cards. She picked up his discarded nine and laid down a set of nines on her side of the table. They said they liked my rsum, and we had a good talk on the phone this morning. Still he could read nothing on her face. Now they want to fly me out for a formal interview. Thats good, she said. She discarded a seven of hearts. Well, I just thought maybe we should talk about it, you know? He drew another card from the deck. No help. I mean, its on the west coast, and I dont think they have any options where I could work from here. They are a nonprofit, after all. Okay. Well what do you want to talk about it? He smiled at her awkward syntax. Well, I just thought maybe we should talk about what we would do, you know, as a couple, if I got a job out of state like that, he said. After holding it in his hand for a bit,

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but not thinking about it very critically, he discarded the same card he had drawn from the pile. Its just an interview, she said. She picked up the card he discarded and laid down another set. You dont have to be ready to move just for an interview, you know. Yeah, he said weakly. I guess that makes sense. He pondered the cards in the discard pile for a moment and tried to see if any could be used with his hand. And I guess maybe that takes some pressure off, too. He drew a card from the deck. But what would your thoughts be? I mean, you know, if they offered me a job. How would you feel about it? Well, I think you should go with whats best for your future, you know? If they offer you a job that pays you enough, and its good for your career, then that would be something you should do. Dont you think so? Yeah, that makes sense, he said. He discarded another card, not paying any attention to what it was. He studied Akikos face, searching for any sign as to how he should take the matter-of-fact tone of her responses. It could simply be her cultural disposition, offering only a rational response without letting on to the emotional attitude behind it, or perhaps without even recognizing the emotional component. Or maybe it meant she would be happy for him to leave? She drew another card. Yes! She played the card she drewthe nine of diamondswith the set of nines on her side of the table, and discarded her last card. I win! Yep, you got me. he said. Her enthusiasm with a win always made him smile. But maybe we should go ahead and count up our scores, just in case, he joked. With no sets on the table, his score could only be negative, and with no cards in her hand, Akikos score could only be positive. Best two out of three? I kinda want some dessert, she said in a mildly plaintive tone. Do you wanna go by the caf for some tea?

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Sure, he answered. He gathered up the cards and gave the deck a single shuffle. We can play two and three over there. Im not gonna let this defeat go unanswered. The two put on jackets before going down to the front of the building and getting on their bikes. Kuri-chan let Akiko ride ahead of him, mostly because he couldnt count on her to keep up if he went first. Shed been willing to adapt her route from the apartment to the coffee shop on Kuri-chans suggestionyou can get there from here much faster this waybut hadnt found a way to get her to reconsider the casual pace with which she rode. She told him many times, especially when he drove: if you want to get there faster, leave earlier. Sergei watched Akiko with as much patience as he could muster as they gradually made their way from the apartment to the caf. It nearly seemed like a different path altogether when he rode at her leisurely pace, and it occurred to him somewhere along the way that hed never gone anywhere with Jess or Jessi on bicycles. Anytime hed gone someplace with Jess, it was in her car with her driving. He and Jessi had walked everywhere. Sure, riding a bicycle was his favorite of the three, but did they have to ride so slowly? He sped up a bit to ride alongside Akiko. So about that job, he said. I think Ill go ahead and call them tomorrow, so I can schedule an interview. Okay, Akiko answered, maintaining her steady pace. Sounds like a good idea.

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