Circa 1987, new curvilinear Soviet architecture emerged as a rejoinder.
A smirk was intimated in an Upper West Side church—white stucco, domed belfry atop a “crab shell,” hints of Santorini/Novgorod—observers zooming out. No one was inside.
I had spoken Russian aboard a Leningrad harbor barge while preserving study abroad; classmates had tried on yellow linen shirts from black trash bags before roving. The propellers churned. I called siloviki inside nearby Art Nouveau rowhouses reactionaries—and not due to neorococo stone finials out front.
This architecture came to a hilltop Cincinnati church. Jigsaw puzzle boxes stacked in a silent narthex. Tiled restrooms empty. A permanent deacon for the parish: the architect. A ceramic bowl of magazines balanced on an upside-down brass turtle. Peeling plastic, Deacon revealed the bowed window between narthex and sanctuary had a syncline/anticline red, yellow, and blue glass mosaic; the celestial diagram’s top half gave a clear view of a semicircular sanctuary.
Deacon installed a balcony, pleasing Father. I proposed stairwells feeding from an enlarged narthex into the sanctuary; they were partly bricked off, underimagined, interstitial, undone instantaneously.
A former housemate of mine arrived with his wife. Perhaps they would work remotely in Ohio, parish membership with looping children.
I recognized the wife from undergrad, a rumored DC nonprofiteer. Her husband having been a federal IT worker, I sensed legerdemain—that those thriving at nonprofits ostensibly share with Feds a “shocking normalcy.” Her still face divulged little.
“I’ve never been so pleased,” the roommate told me under the porte-cochère, where the driveway “excavated” a parabola of negative space. He was perhaps a brother.
“I want a divorce,” shouted the wife.
Eyes misted.
Across a table, freshly permed, my aunt told the woman: “I’m happy never to see you again, love.”
An evil was mine; my architecture nearly Soviet in its curviness. Tall trees were leafing; overcastness evoked distant continents and a trickiness tied to the curvilinear trend.
Circa 2003, our messy, ponytailed Leftcath mother was antiwar.
Crossing the rundown valley bisecting town, my brothers and I ascended to a park. Lean elders were looping in peace trains in low grass. Forms hinted at Canada. The sky was immaculately blue. I as a teen girl feared the draft while flowing.
Yet as I walked home alone through the valley, someone unknown barked: “You’re in a high-crime area! You belong to the military!”
I saw myself in desert camo: a crone already beamed next to a shopping cart and boxy Cadillac. I recalled the pacifists’ lean frailness.
My mother supported my enlistment.
But dissidence had marked me. The Army turned me into a mere lake researcher.
Alone in a dark touchscreen-flowchart room in fatigues tight across my cleavage, I discerned blue on modeling of Berkshires winters east over to Amherst. Often winter cold above 20 Fahrenheit. One could triangulate the vast, drained, legendary, precolonial Lake Hancock like a kidney bean between Youngstown and Pittsburgh.
Freemasons.
Brass fanfare overtaking silence.
For a reason, you hear the line: “Servicemembers punch their own ticket.”
Much later, in a dorm parking lot with bookshelves, yellow-wood chairs, I was happened upon by a high-school classmate, my former best friend. She gave a customary, mock-disparaging “Yerrhh-yerrrhhh” like an old timer and/or exchange student, seemingly confirming I was still funky in a struggle despite potentially confusing others. She barked as though on a bad phone connection, “You need to try places with fast response times! The one that electrifies the jack o’lantern! Hello?”
One short and one tall lesbian editor were nibbling on sensible, refrigerated foods.
I sidled up; another childhood friend, brown hair halfway to her waist, yelled at me: “I’m kind of getting over that you’re gonna be in my care in old age.” By sentence’s end she was booming—a warning, severing.
I verbally raged. By then I was a guy again, outdated.
A left turn climbs south through high grass. Suppose you want countryside on the next road down in a new-to-you go-kart. Suppose south becomes north.
Tumbledown stone walls hugged bends in the highway heading north. Flanking them, leafing honeysuckle shaven into hedgerows. I photographed roadkill crimson with glaucous entrails strewn across the yellow center line. The vista at sunset was pearlescent just shy of the combination prison/power plant.
Blue moonlight swooped as I zoomed. A lion prowled. I evaded and was spotted by security. His flashlight on me, I called myself a tourist. It almost felt true.
Intruders materialized over the southern horizon; their tolerance for eating-club chaos suggested extraterrestrial grace. Amongst them: a towering AMAB they/them with long, wavy, dingy blond hair who bellowed: “You can fuck allll the way off.” I removed yellow items, Gatorade and gummies, from an unlocked vending machine to gift amidst locker-room dankness. This crowd meant to counter me—they/them had once opposed posse members on the Right—arguing online, they had joined forces and now spooked away.
Camels trampled me in high grass. I said, truthfully: “This is gentle.” A Bactrian folded in its legs and rested next to me.
It must have been the following day when I photographed a hotel in daylight. Its facade, clad in two tones of marble, pseudo-half-timber, curved logarithmically along an avenue behind a lawn until abutting an intersection. Too big to be Tudor despite “rambling.” The sign read: Postmodernism Inn. My suited father was inside with my brother; their hair looked good almost mussed. They feared tabloids. My dad was NATO’s president.
The city magnified me towards the horizon. Behind me, my brother went: “You don’t even know what college is like.” I was even wearing a blazer!
Later, a Latina in a navy skirt and suit jacket invited me into a room off the avenue: terrazzo floor, cacti, macrame, candles in niches. In a living front page headline, my mom went: “Achievement is NATO as success in our reality.” The host seemed unknowable. Sensing I had it made, I wandered out.
I crossed a cobbled pedestrian alley curving downhill into density. Dressed-up Black people nodded me into a nearly personless room. Sheet cake and honey barbeque drum sticks were on a buffet table—one man said: “You’ve got a good mom”—after all, my mother was the parent who was NATO’s president. In my mental picture, like the headline photo: my mom in pantsuits, poise. Blond bob. Raised, lecturing finger.
I wanted to tell “my” story repeatedly: my mom, NATO’s president, me: a cultural phenomenon. If only I believed in myself.
I had no memory of these people. I zoned out at the sight of the room’s cavernous center. Perhaps no one was meant to be here.
Frenchpersons converge upon the mountain pass in tulles, crêpe, pinks, khakis, and blues while grey wall panels and curtains roll on tracks, hinting at back rooms. Tight-lipped masses climb steps towards the pass as though the gala consists of incremental arrival; one aligns with chandeliers to partake in an age upon seeing a schoolmate who sought his fortune in China. The future may be better.
Floor cushions are piled high. In the white, sunlit, round atrium, Donald Trump is in karate stance in his pink Guinevere turret maiden hat. Diaphanous fabrics surge martially from my hands. The number of cushions progressively decreases on which one can leap. Women in mauve and fuchsia taffetas have occupied them loudly. He is in reach; I am that close to destroying him, yet he presses my face into his chest’s jutting aluminum pipes. The breasts pendulous. His ruddy-blond hair long. I become his, little and American, as sludge feeds into my mouth, leaving him immaculate.
On a leafy backroad, I tell a country boy: “There’s no way to know how a civil war would go.” I gesture to the knight’s cart next to me: “There’s an Andrew on level one, two, and three. It’s marvelous I know Andrews, let alone three—and that they’re all here. A war would be Andrew against Andrew here and there. All merely Andrews.” I gesture at the Caucasian faces grinning in sunlight as though in a grid diagram.
Back at home, toughs keep away—perfect burglary statistics—slush accumulating, feathery white. Out my back door, a mossy-snouted snapping turtle, still as driftwood, floats in a puddle where a brick walk has subsided. My back door would be enclosed, but sand has been excavated. I shift sand beneath the tarp to close the lip where the blue tarp tent meets the ground. My advisor would have thought of this—indeed I may have caused trouble for literature.
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Stephan Crown-Weber is a writer and translator who lives in his native Central Kentucky. He is at work on a mummy novel.