Etc.’s Wife

The story is: he peed his seat in English 101, and Dash 
the security guy was a half hour late so by the time 
the chair was wheeled down the hallway, past the sumptuous 
regalia of stars on a poster for the Astronomy Department, 
and Marine Biology's scroll of squiddy life-forms, 
to whatever sanctum of fumigatory rehabilitation 
the college reserved for its chairs, the student in question 
had already been expelled … not for the loosening 
of his bladder, of course, but when he was questioned 
about this by the Dean of Squeamish Interrogation, 
he'd offered up immediately that he'd "been drinking 
overly," and so was in admitted violation of the policy 
on alcohol consumption and, although the chair returned 
in a day, the student never did. To understand this 

story really, though, we need to see the gyroscope of flies 
above the day-old lamb and goat shank in the market 
in a desert city of lovely rugs and burnt-out cars 
and millennial tent-and-camel music and just-this-morning's bombs. 
Alouf has tended his family's market stall 
for thirty years, as does his pious obedient daughter Aliki, 
and, every now and then, when it suits her tempestuous moods, 
his slut-of-a-Westernized daughter Renee, and they 
will commandeer this blanket arrayed with day-old meat 
through boredom that began when Allah first created  
the desert wastes, to—now, for example—the jittery streets 
in response to the raids in response to the fiery hellflower 
in the air above the bombed American military compound. 
That's one story. In the story underneath, the gyroscope 

of flies and the hellflower share a narrative momentum that 
begins with a hidden incendiary device in a "gift" of goat shank, 
and somebody's daughter hanging around the soldiers on leave 
as they linger about the baubleware of the market. 
When, and how, and even which one of the daughters …  
all of that's smoke in the wind. It turns out he 
was mildly retarded, part of why his urination 
couldn't be controlled, and so he speedily offered up that drunkenness 
as the offending cause: it made him "one of the guys," 
it reinvented him, in his mind, with a cool excuse, 
and not his old congenital embarrassment. And yet, by the time 
his mother picks him up, the sour smell of defeat and humiliation 
is more rank than the seat of his pants; and then they vanish … 
smoke in the wind. Now through his window, the Dean of Etc. is idly 

observing that car drive off as he waits for his wife—as usual, 
late. Of course: she's happily been aroused and rumpled 
in the utilities room with Dash. That ancient story. And 
sometimes she's simply wandered the halls alone, a little 
lost—both in and to herself. When she studies the poster 
of stars and void and solar explosions frozen by Hubble 
into light-years chalices and roses, mesmerized 
by this … she suddenly thinks the story is with the fish
—the weirdly fringed and hinged and chandelier-bodied 
lives of marine biology. And when she studies the fish, is deep 
in their deep … then the story is with the stars, 
the gassy helices and butterflies of radiance, that take her 
out, and further out, beyond the idea of "person," and beyond 
a "wind," or "air" itself, or any story we make of them.