Words are what we wretched writers are. William Gass.

I’m planning to keep this website pared to its essentials: publications as they come out, the occasional link, and a serialized novel or two. I’m currently looking into some self-publishing options for a couple novels, and this will be the place to come for that, too.

Bill Kte’pi, writer of wrongs

Special thanks to Gary Dreslinski for putting me in touch with Fey in the first place and making this possible.

Mr Marquand’s Travelers Guide to Tango (2nd edition)

Preface to the 2nd Edition:

Dear readers,

As you may be aware, the first edition of my Guide to Tango was published with certain irregularities, both in the text and the printing; in addition to the unusual book I was aware of presenting, an individual in the employ of our printing company took a number of liberties with the text, adding his own thoughts and voice, which — due to deadline constraints explained in the first edition preface — we did not catch in time to rectify.

To our surprise, and perhaps consternation, the edition sold out before we could recall it; readers liked the printer’s additions and elisions, even though those elisions eliminated what useful information might have been gleaned, and the additions were of a character entirely unfit for the MarquandGuides standard. As a result, we have retained them in this second edition. There was a good deal of internal debate over how to handle the printer’s glosses: would they be re-set in boldface or italics, in a different font, or bracketed off? In the end, we retained the glosses in their entirety, as they had been presented in the original edition: that is to say, there is no marker or typeface indicating what text is “native” to the writing of Mr Kramer, the Guide’s author, and what is the addition of the printer. To present it in any other way struck many of us in the office as artificial and precious: ultimately, as too self-conscious.

The Guide to Tango is therefore unlike my other Guides, in that it is deliberately marred, forcefully abridged. Please bear this in mind, and if you had sought a more traditional travel guide, do not hesitate to return this book in exchange for a product of equal or lesser value (might I suggest my Guide to Provence, now in its 5th edition?)

Yours respectfully,

Mr Marquand.

Hokkaido. 7th October 2006.

#

Preface to the 1st edition:

Dear readers,

It is with hesitation and bemusement that I present you with the latest in my line of Guides: the Traveler’s Guide to Tango. When I sent Mr Kramer (author of the Traveler’s Guides to London, Boston, Denmark, Iceland, and Cairo, among others) to the island of Tango, I hoped for an engaging, adventurous guide much like his previous work: a book equally suited to fireside reading as tour-bus consultation, a book handy to keep in your back pocket while walking the sandy trails of Tango or to read as vicarious vacation.

Perhaps that is what I received. Perhaps it is not. Suffice to say, Mr Kramer — who retains his employ at MarquandGuides Ltd — deviated from his previous form, and thus I present his text with the caveat that it will provide an entertainment markedly different from its brethren in the MarquandGuide family. Markedly different — but perhaps no worse.

I received Mr Kramer’s manuscript long after I had sent notices to the distributors, long after the book appeared in catalogues; he had run late, and I had extended him the good graces I could out of respect for his previous body of work. He gave no hint of the unusual nature of the manuscript he intended to send, nor has he since explained or acknowledged it. I am, in this instance, merely the vessel passing on to you the words he has chosen to share.

If this is your first purchase from MarquandGuides, please be both assured and warned that the Traveler’s Guide to Tango is not in any way indicative of the rest of our catalogue: it is, as they say, a thing unto itself, a thing with many cousins but no sibling.

As always, the dissatisfied customer may return the Guide for a product of equal or lesser value.

Yours respectfully,

Mr Marquand.

Reykjavik. 17th February 2004.

#

Mr Marquand’s Traveler’s Guide to Tango

Tango. It’s the name of the country, the city, the island, the people, and the language: it’s the setting and the focus of Every Summer Something Dies, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald called, in a fit of typical hyperbole in conversation with its author Ernest Hemingway, “the most beautifully crafted piece of fiction of this century.” The island is inextricably and immortally associated with the novel, which — for reasons never adequately explained in any of his endorsed biographies — Hemingway self-published in 1927, eschewing editors and publishing houses, overseeing every step from manuscript preparation to cover art selection himself. I’m a broken man. Even now, seventy-five years later, is it possible to breathe the name of the island without remembering Hemingway’s old men fishing for cod from their tarpaulin-shrouded boats, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and using figs for bait? Generations later, can we see the island on its own terms, divorced from Hemingway’s tale of sexual transgression and love “at the edge of life’s sunset”?

Of course not. Nor should we. To attempt to see the island outside of the novel is to deny the hold and influence of Hemingway’s work, of the island’s touches with fame in the outside world. Tango is a nation which traffics very little with the rest of Western Europe; it has lived a life mostly of seclusion, suffering Popes and paladins as it must, harboring Moors when it had no choice, but all such invaders have eventually been assimilated or repelled. Except Hemingway. He is still “Papa” here. You’ll find no “Hemingway slept here” signs over beds, as you might for George Washington along the United States’ eastern seaboard, but only because such signs are unnecessary. Tango sees few tourists. The locals know. He was here. He touched them.

Nestled in the sea north of the coast of Spain, Tango has alternately been claimed as part of both that nation and France; it never denied such claims, nor acknowledged them. Its churches are officially overseen by the Bishop of Spain, but it continues to practice a brand of Catholicism which has been unchanged since the seventh century, when Saint Fxeres — Francis, in the Romance tongue — brought the Cross to the isle. The mass is conducted on Saturday evenings, in liltingly-accented Latin that crunches down on its fricatives and spins vowels into sugar-floss. Easter is the first Sunday of April; Christmas is the last Sunday of December. The liturgical calendar is built around the two, with the Feast of Saint Fxeres between them, on August 12th. Locals believe fervently in the near-divinity of Fxeres. There are no weeping Virgin sightings here, but Fxeres appears to everyone sooner or later, in dreams and prayers.

It is standard practice for a Marquand’s author to live for one year in the locale for which he is writing a Guide, or six months if the Guide is for a city in the nation of his residence. Ordinarily this year is spent traveling, albeit at a lazy and languorous pace: one can spend a year in France, in Italy, in Brazil, never under the same roof for more than a week. Not so in Tango, home to fewer than fifty thousand islanders. I feel, nearing the end of the year, as if I know them all intimately. When I tell you that the best meal for sale is available at Erck’s Blessed Table on Tamber Lane by Tangotango Point, that the fried cod sprinkled with local sea salt and “Tango vinegar” (Hemingway described it as “like syrup gone sour and angry”) is some of the best seafood on the planet, and is at its best when washed down with a simple Dr Pepper, I speak not only as an experienced traveler but as a local.

There are no television or radio stations in Tango. The local newspaper (simply, “The Tango,” at Hemingway’s suggestion, “since you seem to use the word for damn near everything anyway”) has a scattered circulation and is published with irregular frequency. Most people read it in groups at their favorite pub: scattered gossip and reprinted Reuter’s world news items, an infamously perplexing crossword puzzle (Tango lacks standardized spelling) and horoscope, comic strips from the United States, fumetti from Italy, bande desinee from France (Tintin reprints are especially well-received). Soccer articles are popular, although the game is not properly played here: apparently the Tango have had enough contact with Europe to be aware of the game, but lacking the flat land and fields which would ease its playing, they play an imperfect duplicate. Tango soccer is played on a beach with a dense rubber ball and two teams of six players each, with the teams alternating between “fish” (the team trying to guide the ball into the sea to score a point) and “trees” (the team trying to prevent the ball from landing in the water). Each game is played for three rounds; a round ends when the ball touches the water. Thus, the winner is pre-determined by the coin toss which dictates which team is “fish” first, and the score is always 2-1. Knowing the outcome of the game from the beginning frees the participants and spectators to enjoy the deeper essence of the sport.

There is no industry, nor pollution beyond the waft of pungent fish, the smoked-cherry smell of Dr Pepper fermenting in wooden casks. Electricity is provided by gas-powered generators or batteries; both the gas and the batteries are purchased from “Europe,” the generic Tango term for the mainland, for Spain or France or the United Kingdom or whoever happens to be selling things today. There are fewer than one hundred telephones on the island, and no cellular service.

As for American culture? In the 1920s, Dr Pepper began providing the island with free shipments of its soft drink, as part of a publicity campaign. A crate of Dr Pepper had washed ashore at the Turtlehead Lagoon. The Tango took to it like — well, like Tango to Dr Pepper, no comparison truly does it justice. Fishermen prowled the shipping lanes in search of cargo boats to hijack and ransack for bottles of Dr Pepper, solemnly divided among friends and family or auctioned off for chickens, cigarettes, and (in an incident Hemingway re-created for his novel, in Tescan’s famous flashback) wives. The peeling mural along the wharf at Tangotango Point portrays a leather-skinned, weather-beaten fisherman bearing a crate of Dr Pepper on his back as he trudges through the lagoon towards his grateful grandchildren and their beaming mothers.

The Dr Pepper corporation decided to begin shipping its product to the island in return for the assurance that the fishermen stay out of the shipping lanes. They could have appealed to the Spanish or French navies, presumably: but why argue with a public devoted to your product? The year Hemingway’s novel was published, Dr Pepper briefly ran a “Good Enough for Tango — Good Enough For You” campaign, to no noticeable effect. The signs are still visible here and there, on the walls of T.G.I. Friday’s and Cracker Barrel.

Dr Pepper has had more effect on Tango culture than any other mainland import save Hemingway himself: it is used not only as a beverage and medicinal tonic, but as an ingredient in local cuisine and brewing …

Oh, this is ridiculous. Why am I typing on and on about Dr Pepper when I should be typing about — when all I can think about is — Marian? The year is nearly up. They’re going to send me off somewhere else. I’ll get three months at home in New Orleans and then off I go, to Belize or Beijing, Venezuela or Venice, God knows where, God knows why.

There’s an expression here on the island: “The sea brings in the new and leaves with the old.” Or maybe that’s a line from Hemingway’s book. I can’t remember anymore. The sea brought me in: a steamship which docked at Tangotango Point, where I was greeted by curious children and women. The men were all at sea or in the pubs. The sea is going to leave with me soon, from that same dock, maybe on that same ship, and will the children still be curious?

I will keep Marian in the present tense. She has hair the color of pecanwood, skin the color and sheen of honey. When her lips part — not to speak, not to kiss, not to eat, but when they part of their own accord when she is lost in some unvoiced thought or in the tumble of sleep — they do so crookedly, revealing teeth a trifle overlapping, the hint of a smile a trifle too wide to be perfect. Her breasts, though: her breasts are the perfect twins of the ones Mariel revealed in Animal House. Her hair is as soft as tresses of velvet, and her thighs are sweet, and her skin is always warm, as though she has stored up the sunlight like one of the many bright green lizards which crawl past me in the mornings when I make my way to the pub to break my fast.

Marian, Marian, Marian.

I should finish the book. I should finish the damn book and leave the damn island and go on to the next. Venice or Venezuela. Beijing or Belize. They’re all islands in their ways. They’re all one thing surrounded by another.

I need to get out of this funk. I’ll delete all this later. The Guide will be what it’s supposed to be: a slightly, but not intimidatingly, erudite walk-through of a romantic country which appeals to the wandering hearts of the over-read. For now — oh, I don’t know. I could write for hours about the shapes Marian’s legs make when she moves in her sleep. I won’t. I’ll write about –

Here we go.

Mr Marquand encourages his writers to live “immersed in the local culture” to the greatest extent possible, but I always try to bring a little of home with me — a few trashy novels, or a DVD to watch on my laptop, a stash of Twinkies, that sort of thing. This time I brought a few CDs to listen to on my Discman. The only native music on Tango is played with turtleshell drums — and only turtleshell drums. I’ve listened to these albums for so long I know them by heart.

So let me tell you why Len’s You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush is the greatest pop album of all time.

Why Len’s You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush Is The Greatest Pop Album Of All Time

by Noel Kramer

Like me until a year ago, you probably know Len as the one-hit wonder that had the summer hit “Steal My Sunshine,” with the girl — I don’t know their names, I lost the liner notes in a squall — adding her breathless vocals to the guy’s poppy hip-hoppish bits. But there’s more to it than that hit. It’s the greatest pop album of all time.

Because it opens with the most important question you can ask about a man: “Does he like butter tarts?”

Because its one hit is the first track on the album, which means people who buy it for just that song can pop it in, listen, pop it out and move on to the next — the Xymox album they bought for the “Wild Thing” cover, or the Chumbawumba album they got for that “I get knocked down but I get up again” song.

Because it segues from that hit to an upbeat party song that sounds like mid-80s rap, like an outtake from a Beastie Boys or Run DMC session, without the false “back in the day, we din’t do no cussin” smugness of Will Smith.

Because it uses that Speak-n-Spell robot voice that people don’t use enough anymore, while a guy beat-boxes beneath it, which makes it pretty much the band I would have put together in fifth grade if I had been able to.

Because the rhythms and synthesizer music are so simple at times that it’s like the ghosts of every kid who ever fiddled with a Casio keyboard while dreaming of being a rockstar teamed up and haunted the studio in which this album was recorded.

Because one of the songs starts with manufactured crowd noise. It’s a first album — we know you guys didn’t record this live at Wembley, for God’s sake. You’re a small-time Santa Monica hip hop pop group. But tossing the fake crowd noise in there like a laugh track, it’s brilliant, it’s charming in its obvious manufacture: it’s the well-formed urn of pop music studio stings. The rapper even talks to the audience, but it’s obviously just “flavor.” Don’t look down on that. This is bubblegum: flavor and texture are all that matter.

Because the girl who sounds like Marian has a great voice, but they don’t let her sing more than a few phrases of the choruses. Why is that? Does she stutter? Does it take them forever to get a decent take of a brief phrase, and they don’t want to risk giving her more responsibility? It’s an intrigue which takes hold of your ear somewhere around the seventieth listen, when you realize that the entirety of this woman’s verbiage would fit in the nutritional information box on the side of a can of Dr Pepper.

Because some of the lyrics are so ridiculous that I’m not sure my life would be complete without hearing Japanese salarymen singing them in a karaoke bar: “impair my tribal lunar-speak.” What can that possibly mean? It doesn’t matter. Does it really mean any less than any other pop lyric? Meaning is overrated.

Marian tells me that the Tango have a great affection — almost a sacred reverence — for slow-burning straight-faced practical jokes. She insists that her neighbor’s uncle — which has all the sound of “my roommate’s cousin’s girlfriend” — was married for seven years before his wife told him she was the identical twin of the woman to whom he’d been engaged.

This is how Hemingway first describes Tango, in the opening chapter of Every Summer Something Dies:

“A fist of stone in a jungle glove. Gap-grinned fishermen and chicken farmers nestle in its grip. The sun glints along native art made from the glass of Dr Pepper bottles and the battered aMarquandum of Dr Pepper cans hammered around turtle shells.”

In the last twelve years — eighteen, if you include college — I have spent no more than three months at a time in a place I referred to as “home.” I have been paid not only to travel to other places, but to live there, to learn to love them. I’ve harbored my secrets while doing so: that I loved Scotland more than London, even though it was London I was paid to write about. That Cairo I never grew to love, and I spent most of my time there with the English-speaking expatriates, sharing German beers and British crisps while playing darts and euchre in the Foreign Correspondents Club. That there is nothing to write about in Tango, nothing suitable for a travel guide.

Where is my home?

Home is what you make of it. Home is where the heart is. Home is where you hang your hat. Home is where you can never go back. Home is where, when you do have to go back, they have to take you. Home is a bottle of gin and a limeskin grin. Home is comfortable shoes and jeans that fit just right. Home is rereading a favorite but nearly-forgotten book. Home is take-out and sitcoms. Home is a state of mind. Home is a mindless state. Home is where everybody knows your name. Home is where honey I’m. Home is an electric milkshake. Home is purple people eaters. Home is take my wife please. Home is a verb. Home is a thousand terrible things. Home is Smallville, Metropolis, Yoknapatawpa, West Egg, Castle Rock, the Dreaming, Clan Island. Home is Neverland, Oz, Wonderland. Home is Narnia, Prydein, Middle-Earth. Home is Times Square and the French Quarter and the Tenderloin and the Combat Zone. Home is a temporary anonymous zone. Home is warm puppies and cold-morning football. Home is turkey a little too dry and cranberry sauce from a can. Home is hearths and mantles and grandfather clocks. Home is a quilt that knows the shape of your sleep. Home is “if you steal my sunshine.” Home is the creak of your foot on the third stair. Home is jiggling the key to open the door. Home is knowing what’s in the room in the morning before you open your eyes. Home is doo wah diddy. Home is diddy dum diddy doo.

This is what H.L. Mencken said about Every Summer Something Dies:

“Surprisingly and improbably mature given Hemingway’s relative youth at the time of its writing; even in comparison to his work of the same period, it reads like the narrative of an older man, a wiser man, one whose glimpse of this small European island lightened the burden many years had lurched upon his back. Granted, too little attention is paid to the effect Tango had on Hemingway’s work from that point — too often discussions of it are limited to the single story. But neither should that story be overlooked as an odd footnote in the storied career of one of our finest writers. Hemingway’s focus of a complicated intercultural romance will undoubtedly provide fodder for critics of many an age to come, as they read into his prose any number of interpretations bearing on colonialism and imperialism, the changes in Europe following the Great War, and the nature of race and sexuality in the 20th century: but at its core it remains, as all the good stories are, a story about a boy and a girl, a story about loneliness and loss.”

This is what Marian said about Hemingway:

“Papa fell in love with the island, and great-grandmother mistook it for falling in love with her. He was her first and last and always, although he stayed no more than a year. He was always typing away at that typewriter of his, banging away at the keys by day and great-grandmother by night, and when he left Tango, he left the typewriter with my great-great-uncle Extre ["Hector," in English], to use at the paper. When he left Tango, he left a baby in great-grandmother’s belly, my grandfather Ernist.”

This is what I wrote about my first day in Tango, in the diary section of the waterproofed gilt Day-Timer Mr Marquand gave me for Christmas my fourth year of employment, when I’d just returned from a year of cross-country skiing and comic books in Iceland:

“There are no planes to Tango: there is no landing strip, no airport, not even for the puddle-jumpers I’ve taken through the remote Midwest or the rainforests of South America, when rainforests still sold books. I’ve taken a steamer out of France — not Spain, but France, for some reason having to do with tariffs, something the captain assures me through muttering and pipesmoke ’should have been dealt with by the EU by now’ — and the ship is barely small enough to dock at Tangotango Point. Mainland legend has it that the Point is named because, when the Spanish told the King of Tango that he couldn’t call the country, the people, the language, the city, his son, himself, AND the harbor all by the same name, he replied, ‘Very well, then the harbor is Tango Tango. I will name it after both my son and my people.’ Those few sailors who are familiar with the Tango — primarily by reputation, I think — tell jokes about them the way other people tell Polish or Basque jokes, with the punchline sometimes resting on the apparent frequency of ‘Tango’ as a first name for both men and women.

“What do you call a Tango woman who marries your uncle? Tante Tango.

“What did the Spanish king say when he declared his protectorship of Tango? Tengo Tango.

“What do you call a Tango man with two teeth? Tango.

“There’s a curious … lack, or maybe shadow at the most, of humor to the jokes, as if the whole notion of Tango, the island itself, the people themselves, is the funny part. Or maybe it’s the language barrier. I have never quite understood the nuances of French puns — I’m still not convinced the French understand them, either.

“While my luggage was sent up to my room at the Fxeres Hotel, the concierge offered me a shot of Tango rum: a potent concoction, I later learned, made by introducing a sea-dwelling yeast-like bacterium to a cask of Dr Pepper in order to ferment it. It’s sometimes fortified with a spirit distilled from fermented algae, but even on its own it packs a kick like ouzo, and is far less smooth. To make Tango vinegar, about which Hemingway raved so much, they mix the rum with native hot peppers and smoked seaweed, and let it sit in the sun for a year.

“Dinner was fried cod with crunchy flake salt and Tango vinegar. I remember Fergus telling me in Glasgow that he’d eat a whale’s fart if they seasoned it with enough salt and vinegar first. The cod isn’t battered, so it’s little like the fried fish of fish-and-chip shops, but it’s so fresh it makes no difference. In other parts of the world, cod is becoming more and more difficult to find: even the stodgiest, most traditional chip shops — where there’s nary a Mars bar nor fried pizza to be found — are turning to haddock. Not so in Tango. Cod is plentiful here, and leasing the fishing rights of the southern waters to European fisheries pays for most of the local government’s expenses.”

Over and over again I talk about what Tango lacks, what is not present, as if I can define it by taking the notion of another place and sanding off the edges which do not fit. Enough of the nots. This is what Tango has:

Beaches, sandy white and rocky grey and sandy again but blue-grey this time, on the northwestern shore.

Fishermen, concerned mostly with tides and cod and the figs they use as bait.

Marian, bastard great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, with her half-relatives’ arched eyes and her own crooked mouth and canted thighs.

Food, seafood so sweet and fresh it’s almost like fruit. Soft-shell turtles fried in spattering oil or roasted on split sticks over crackling flames, eaten with salt and vinegar or thick slathers of mayonnaise, the meat rich and sweet, the shell giving like the crust of a creme brulee. Fried cod, coal-baked cod, cod preserved in salt and lime juice, cod smoked in palm leaves, cod marinated in Dr Pepper, cod stewed with turtle and island potato and conch and hot peppers and a yellow kelp that thickens and enriches the stew before being removed, like bay leaves. Sea urchin, boiled, sliced into the tiniest of slices, stuffed into roasted hot peppers, and mixed into mashed island potato which is scooped up with turtle-shells.

Soccer played as passionately as anywhere else in the world.

A people who are almost universally literate, who write stories or memoirs or arcane jokes (often about soccer, fishermen, or “Tongo,” a folk tale fool) in notepads which are passed around to friends, family, and passing strangers, to be returned at leisure and whim.

That’s as may be, but the internet tells me something else altogether about Tango. During the late-70s Hemingway revival, celebrities wanted to rally round the Tango flag the way they had for India and would for Tibet, only no one could find it on a map. Someone did a little searching, and someone else did a little checking, and apparently there’s no such place. Never was. Hemingway was having one on. Guy wrote a dissertation in 1983 for Princeton — Fitzgerald’s alma mater — about what real-world places probably inspired Hemingway’s Tango, but most of it seems to be out of his own head.

A tradition of hospitality and familial responsibility which is taken nearly as seriously as in Islamic countries.

Saint Fxeres, whose frequent appearances in dreams and visions are taken so for granted that I have found myself wondering if he might be real. People speak casually, regularly, about talking to Saint Fxeres about the inconsequential things in their day-to-day lives.

Warm weather which is never too hot, except for the noon hour at high summer, when it takes a bath in the cool northern lagoon, shaded by palm trees leaning out over the crinkled-cellophane waters, to take the edge of the heat off.

A secret. A deep secret which Marian has made me swear not to reveal, on penalty of being denied the right to her bed. As her husband the king has already discovered us, and she and her brothers have paid the price, possibly that oath is no longer binding.

When you remove yourself for long periods of time from the electronic hubbub of the world, from the television and movies and music and radio and billboards, you find strange snatches of it return to you, things you never could have recalled except in silence. They become lodged in your head like melodies. All week I have been remembering part of an episode of The Greatest American Hero, the 1970s superhero show with William Katt and Robert Culp. He’d been given a suit by benevolent aliens, a suit which bestowed upon him great powers — and he’d lost the instruction manual. The episode which haunts me, the snatch which lingers in my head, had something to do with the end of the world (by nuclear war, of course) being precipitated — triggered? — by the song “Eve of Destruction” playing on a car stereo. I have no context in which to place this; I don’t know how it was resolved, except I imagine William Katt — Ralph, his character’s name was Ralph … Hinckley? — found the bad guys and defeated them by pushing them into walls until they dropped their guns and detonators.

Tango is much like that, in its way. A haunting melody with no context. A strange chorus overheard only because of a lengthy silence. Marian’s face keeps reappearing to me, like Fxeres, like “Eve of Destruction,” like a chorus: her face as the king’s guards led her away, down the rocky path to the beach where her brothers had already been speared and dropped off the ledge where their bodies would feed the piranha. Her look of indifference peeking out from a calculated mask of despair. She wept, as she was expected to weep; she pledged her love for me, as she was expected to pledge; she begged forgiveness from her husband, as she was expected to beg; and through it all, she simply kept walking, one foot in front of the other, until she reached the beach.

I did not tarry to watch her die. I knew I was safe: I knew that as a “European” — never mind that I’m American — the king would not touch me, and knew just as certainly that I had officially outstayed my welcome on Tango. But I could not watch her die.

Nor could I stop thinking about her great-grandfather.

The best book I’ve read — with all due respect to Hemingway, and Every Summer Something Dies — is Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. It’s a story about water. No one really ever says so, but it is. Gatsby comes from the Midwest — the vast landlocked Midwest — to coastal port city New York (and Long Island, at that, never mind that Fitzgerald calls it West Egg). He comes into his wealth because of a ship and the ship’s captain. He increases and retains his wealth through bootlegging: the sale of very special water. He pines for Daisy by watching the green light blink from her house across the waters. In the end, when Gatsby is dead, Nick leaves by boat.

The sea brings the new, and it leaves with the old.

This is the last sentence of Every Summer Something Dies:

“The tide nudged against the beach even as the moon dragged the waters further and further from shore, the waves lapping against the sand as if anxious for one last taste of Tango.”

This is the last paragraph of Every Summer Something Dies:

“I knew at last that I would never understand them, these Tango people, ‘inscrutable’ as they say of the Chinaman, even in their laughter and their jokes ’stoic’ as they say of the monk. I left by boat, as I had come, with the rising sun at my right hand, the smell of burning palm leaves in my nose and the taste of fig and forbidden on my tongue. I had watched her die, watched her husband put her to the spear himself, and I could not stay in the place where her life had ended. The tide nudged against the beach even as the moon dragged the waters further and further from shore, the waves lapping against the sand as if anxious for one last taste of Tango.”

This is the secret Marian told me, in my hotel bed with hotel sheets with rattan blinds rattling against the yellowed glass of the window:

“My great-grandfather wrote Every Summer Something Dies, just as you’ve heard. He wrote it on a typewriter in this very hotel, banging away at the keys until it was done, and then he sent it to a printer in your America. He spent his days with the typewriter and his nights with my great-grandmother, but he was not Ernest Hemingway. He was only a man, only a Tango, and his name was Tangotango, named for his father and uncle. He always planned to reveal his joke to the world, but he died before the first reviews came out.”

This is the last entry I made in the diary section of the Day-Timer Mr Marquand gave me for Christmas after a year in Iceland accompanied with a Nick Cave CD and a collection of Doonesbury comic strips:

“I fly out of Barcelona in a week, after taking the train from France. I have not yet written the guide, and I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t know what to tell Mr Marquand. I don’t know what to tell tourists who want to come to Tango to see the island Hemingway immortalized, to see a story which has not been run down by age and commercialism as Key West has, as West Egg has, as Metropolis has. I don’t know how I can possibly expect to retain my job, nor what else I can do for a living, whether Fodor’s or Lonely Planet would hire someone exiled from Mr Marquand’s fold. I know only that I did not watch her die, that I could not watch her die, and now, banging away on my laptop as I banged away at her lap, I sit in the boat, watching the water list against the beach, the tide nudging it even as the moon drags the waters further and further from shore, the waves lapping against the sand as if anxious for one last taste of Tango.”

But for the moment, here’s the original, now over 11 years old. This is probably the oldest thing I’ll let anyone read. To be fair, there are things about it I’d be too old to think of now, which is appropriate.

The Cheshire

Alice took a long, enthusiastic drag off her cigarette the minute she got out of work – eight hours writing blurbs for young adult novels without a cigarette break; she’d thought of quitting (the job, not the nicotine nipple) more than once, but Maryann – her parole officer – wouldn’t stand for it.  Alice had quit heroin, quit drinking, quit pot and acid and coke and whoring and cheap makeup – but she drew the line at her two-packs-a-day.

It was raining, and like always Alice had to keep from looking up to see where the tears were coming from.  Old habits, older even than the ones worn by the nuns at the orphanage – older than me, too, Alice reminded herself, making that daily half-assed stab for sanity.

She hopped up the crumbling steps to the entrance of her apartment building, repeating her mantra: There’s no Wonderland.  Nothing behind any looking glasses – hell, no one even had looking glasses anymore, just mirrors.  Made with mercury, not silver – Mercury, the god of speed, suited the 20th century better than any metal of warding.  Nothing behind the mirror except a medicine chest full of mood stabilisers and sleeping pills.  And whoever she was, she wasn’t Alice Liddell.  That Alice had married, mothered, and died long before this Alice could’ve been born.

She unlocked her apartment door, both locks, and dropped her purse on the table while she listened to her messages.

Beep.  “Ali, it’s Maryann, I can’t make our appointment tomorrow – call me and reschedule?”

Beep.  “Hello, Miss Little.  I’m calling about – about your ad, in the weekly?  I don’t know why a raven’s like a writing desk, but I, uh – my name’s Eric, I’m thirty-seven, divorced … I’ve got a good job … uh, my number is 253-3179, call me whenever or I’ll call when you’re home.”

Beep.  “Alice.  It’s been difficult finding you, thank you for placing the ad.  You have a photograph of me, I believe?  A daguerrotype –” Alice dropped her cigarette and fumbled to turn the volume up on the machine.  “– with Dinah.  I’m afraid I haven’t a number where you can reach me, but I’m … anxious to see you.  I shall try again later.”

There were more messages, more would-be suitors responding to her personal, as well as a creditor and her sponsor checking up on her (”a hundred and three days, kiddo, keep it up!”), but Alice didn’t hear them – she was fumbling through a shoebox in the closet, tossing aside her degree in English, AA chits, a nostalgic needle, and – there.

It was a faded yellow daguerrotype – the only thing she’d been found with other than jumbled memories and a blue gingham dress when she stepped out of a Kansas City revival theatre in 1981.  It hadn’t been faded then – the yellow was from cigarette smoke more than anything else. It was a simple, unassuming, highly improbable photograph – its subject a large, fluffy, white cat in a Victorian rocking chair.  Under the chair, a second cat’s tail swished just out of range of the left leg – but there was no second cat, just the tail fading off to nothing and naught.  The Cheshire.

“There’s no Cheshire Cat,” she repeated to herself, “no White Rabbit, no Wonderland, dammit, no Queen of Fucking Hearts.”  She’d tried to find her way back – tried every drug she could, hallucinogenic and otherwise; tried meditation, trances, pain rituals, sweat lodges, prayers and madness and hypnosis and psychotherapy.  Nothing.  The photo was a hoax, her memories symptomatic of a dissociative disorder.

The problem – well, one of them – was she’d never thought of herself as the “real” Alice, the one Charles Dodgson wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for – she had no memories of that Alice’s life, only of the life chronicled by Lewis Carroll – madness and tea parties and talking animals.  Worse, her memories conflicted, as she remembered Alice’s Adventures Underground, Wonderland’s first draft, as vividly as she did the two published novels.  What’s more, she knew why a raven was like a writing desk – or she had.

In a daze, Alice stuffed the daguerrotype in her purse, fed Pepper (her sixth cat), and fell asleep on the couch, dreaming caterpillar dreams with a thousand shoes.

Alice spent the next day succinctly summarising the contents of the latest three novels in a series about an adorable and mischievous pair of twins with a penchant for solving crimes their police chief father was always stumped by, her mind constantly wrapping itself around the phone message of the previous evening, like chocolate molding itself around chewy nougat.  She wanted a drink.  She badly wanted a drink.  A glass of wine, preferably an Italian red; a stiff shot of Remy Martin cognac, with the tiniest hint of sweet cream swirled in; anisette on the rocks; Captain Morgan’s and Coke in a red plastic tumbler.  She’d called her sponsor four times before lunch, but she couldn’t explain why she wanted the drink so desperately, and moral support only got her so far.

She smoked behind the building during her lunch hour, something she rarely did because it meant getting behind on work.  She pinched the skin between her thumb and forefinger till her chewed-down nails drew blood.  She rubbed her temples with her knuckles, twisted her gold studs into sparkles of pain in her earlobes.  She wasn’t sure which she was fending off – the drinking or the madness.  Or if there was much of a difference.

As she recited her mantra and hopped up the steps after work, she realised it wasn’t her apartment building she was hopping into – it was a bar she used to frequent, not so many months ago.  Not so long ago that the bartender didn’t pour her usual the moment she sat down, a Tanqueray and tonic with wedges of both lemon and lime.  R-rated Sprite, she called it.

She took the drink, left a five on the counter, and retreated to the booth by the jukebox.  She stared at the glass while the ice melted and the condensation crawled down the outside, wetting the cocktail napkin.  She didn’t sip, knowing sips would become swallows, birds of fancy that would swim in her gullet crying out till she fed them tequila worms and let them fly.

“That way leads to madness,” she whispered.

“All ways lead to madness, Alice,” he said from next to the jukebox.  “We’re all mad here.”

He sat down across from her, just another guy in a leather jacket and jeans too tight and sunglasses too dark for a smoky bar.  Just another rummie in a purple-striped turtleneck, with odd-shaped nails and a tattoo of a mushroom on one of his knuckles, smoking Camel filters.

“I saw your ad,” he said.  “Did you get my message?”

She nodded.  He took a sip of her T-and-T, fishing an ice cube out with his tongue and cracking it between his molars.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Who are you?”

“Alice.  Alice Little.”

He grinned.  Grinnnnned.  Like a smile grinding against the walls of the face.  “Little Alice.  Not so little anymore.  Not so Alice anymore.  Or are you?  The ad makes me wonder.”  He took a piece of clipped newsprint from his pocket and laid it on the table – her ad.  “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” he read.  “SWF, attractive, vivacious, enthusiastic mental explorer.  #6868.”

“Do you know the answer?”

“Do you want it?”

“I want a cigarette.”  She pulled one out and he lit it – she inhaled while the flame still touched, tasting the fire against her tongue.

“How long have you been here?”

“I just came in – maybe half an hour ago, an hour.”

“No, not the bar.  Here.  Now.  Out of Wonderland.”

“Sixteen years.  I walked out of a showing of the movie – the Disney version – with no idea where I was.  I spent a month in a hospital before they sent me to the orphanage.”  She took the daguerrotype out of her purse, laid it next to the personal.  “This was pinned to the inside of my dress.”

He nodded, running a fingernail along the photo.  “Poor Dinah.  She misses – missed – you.”

“Who are you?  How are you?”

He smiled, and turned the ad around so she could see it better.  “An acrostic,” he said, pointing to the first letter of each word after the opening question.  “S-A-V-E-M-E.  What do you need saving from, Alice?”

“Right now, from this drink.  I’ve been sober fifteen weeks.”

“It’s just juniper berries gone bad.  Take a sip.  What’s the worst that can happen?  You’ll think you’re a character from a children’s story?”

“I can’t be who I think I am.”

“No one is who they think they are.  Why should you be any different?”

“You can’t be who I think you are.”

“No one is who other people think they are, either.  Maybe I’m an afternoon-shift manager in a novelty shop in the mall.  Does that help?”

“No.”

“The name of the shop is Cabbages and Kings.  Among other things, they sell bongs shaped like caterpillars and hats a friend of ours would have adored.  Ask me what you really want to ask me.”

“Can you take me back?”

He took her hand in his, prying it off the wet glass, and held it up to his mouth as if to kiss it – but instead licked the drops of condensation off her fingertips, like a cat with cream.  “Alice.  Darling, naive, Alice.  There’s no back to take you.  You never left.”

“I am her, aren’t I?”

“You are – and you aren’t.”

“And you’re him.”

“I am – and I’m not.  Maybe we recognise each other because you’re Alice and I’m the Cheshire Cat.  Maybe we’re descendents of the originals.  Maybe we’re brother and sister, separated after our parents’ deaths and so traumatised we sought refuge in the books Father read to us as children.  Maybe we’re simply mad.”

He produced a small square of paper with a bright red-and-orange Smurf Village mushroom drawn on it, slid his fingers between her lips, and placed it under her tongue.

“I haven’t done any drugs in over a year,” she said, but left it where it was.

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes.  Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

He took the sunglasses off.  His eyes were those of a cat’s.  “It isn’t, Alice.  It isn’t anything like a writing desk.”

And he faded away, leaving nothing but a grinnnnnnnnnn.