The Artificial Mountain

Well we were all set to build Indiana's first official mountain. But then some folks showed up all yelling about how this mountain we were building might destroy some habitats. "There's no need to worry about that, folks," our foreman said. "What we're gonna do is build this mountain from one-hundred-percent natural habitat. If anything we'll be adding thousands of tons more habitat to your state, in an upward direction." Well this got them to squawking amongst themselves. One old man came forward and asked did we have a permit. "Everything by the book," said the foreman. "Fact of the matter is we have a book full of permits, for anything you'd like." Did we have a permit for falling in love with one's own sister? Yessir, we did, and the foreman handed a copy of it to the old man. The old man smiled to break your heart. He called out, "Bitty!" and an old woman appeared out of the crowd with a sort of glow all over her face. It was the sweetest thing you'd ever seen, those two old people coming together after what must have been years. They held hands and ambled back to their car. The foreman waved them off with his hat in his hand, and wished them luck, and we turned to start on our mountain. Read More

In preparation for the visitors, the house was being cleaned from top to bottom. Everybody was miserable.

The professor was miserable because it was impossible to concentrate as mattresses were carted onto the patio, beaten with sticks, and abandoned in the sunshine. Since the operation his attention had not fully returned.

After scanning the Lancet in preparation for court--the government was trying to deny his vaccine a clinical trial--his gaze wandered to the front of the house. There was glass on the tiled section of the driveway. Estella had managed to break a window while moving the mattresses onto the veranda.

Juan Villoro, born 1956 in Mexico City, is one of the finest Latin American writers of his generation, though little known in the United States. Author of three novels, including the internationally renowned El testigo, and numerous short stories, as well as criticism, memoir, travel-writing, screenplays, and several works of children's literature, his full-length books have not been translated into English. He is perhaps as much admired in Spanish for his journalism as for his fiction, and his story "Among Friends" displays Villoro's talent for combining journalistic detail, comic invention, and personal drama with an acute portrayal of his home country in a time of violence and disorder.

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The airport is deserted at two in the morning, Pyongyang time. A tractor stands on the apron behind an unroofed, unpainted cargo container. It hisses into life as he passes into the custody of the ground guards. The turboprop, which has brought him all the way from Karachi, spins down its engine. He looks back at the aircraft. The red bulb mounted above the wing has been his companion through six hours of uneven sleep. Now it blinks, and turns off. The phalanx moves him through the terminal, past rows of formica desks and tables. They square up on the main road, in silence.

When the reading is over and the inevitable question-and-answer session begins—and there's nothing wrong with that, of course—the question invariably arises. "When exactly did you start writing?" 

He'd felt it slipping away with every passing week. He only had another three months, four at most, to amount to something. Striding, sliding almost, in a frenzy of purposelessness down the street, he looked straight ahead, eyes narrowed, clutching groceries bought in panic, nothing he could actually eat (a lime, some broccoli). He needed to get back and sit at a table, clear it and clean it, then sit at it, straight-backed, focused. It was this tedious necessity of going out, buying produce, eating, which was holding him back. And then all the endless cleaning, and the sudden fear of what would happen if he did not speak to other people for days on end. Would he forget how the world was? He'd stopped reading the news. He knew nothing. He paused, contemplated in the cold, then walked in to a small convenience store. He needed table polish. Read More

Morning but what was happening? Where were the children and their somnolent post-sunrise protests as my wife prepared them for the halls of Oak Elementary? Had I not become accustomed to pulling the covers and drowning in a half-conscious lullaby of clinking dishes and discouraged intimidation over missed bus rides and future discipline? Why was my wife not rushing through the house with a barbaric urgency, complaining about perceived tardiness, issuing me a list of endeavors to ruin my saintly frolic with the morning? Come to think of it, why was I still in bed? Why had the previously dependable alarm clock not kept its half of our agreement? Who can you trust to rescue you from the dark hours if not your lifetime-warranty appliances? Read More

To visitors, and there aren't many of those, Matteo says his apartment is a pied-à-terre, that he lives in Milan but that he's in town temporarily for scientific research. For a pied-à-terre, his apartment is nice. It's got rats, but no one notices. At night, when it's quiet, Matteo hears them gnawing. True enough.

Matteo is employed by a science magazine, Nature Methods; four days a week he does administrative work for that magazine. It started off as an after-school job, but after he graduated he never left. He's seen editors come and go, including the editor-in-chief. Read More

Many students at Pomona College had Dave Wallace as a professor. (He insisted we call him "Dave"; we always called him "DFW" when he wasn't around.) And many students also considered him a friend—even if being a friend meant dealing with his byzantine yet internally consistent and fair network of rules for social contact with the world. I came to think that this interface was necessary for him as a teacher, that it acted as a sort of membrane to let students in and keep critics and literary paparazzi out. In any case, I'm thankful he made this effort with my classmates and me. What follows here is exactly the sort of thing he hated. He couldn't stand being the center of attention. He'd found that even praise could be harmful, and so he'd brush it off as if it was beside the point, or as if he wasn't worth it. Of course he was worth it. But if a workshop got particularly warm and congratulatory, Dave would say, "Let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs." Read More

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of "dignity." She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn't think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels. We were endlessly self-reflexive individuals who had been marked by dabbling in drugs and semiotics; the media world we inhabited made life feel squalid, disposable, and fearful; we could hear, when we opened our mouths, the culture industry's language and not always our own. We were trapped inside ourselves—and in there wasn't even a "self." More like an empty lot crisscrossed by gusts of addictive compulsion, and littered with cultural debris. The situation made you feel ashamed. It bankrupted concepts like "dignity." Read More