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One needs to be a little lost to find it on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85 still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself. Its lower story windows broken, boarded, but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough to taunt the empty village outside its gates with State employment. Our lives, that “campus” and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child, and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me. I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There: bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch— patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving, stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze.
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Mel and Sol must have recognized one another from the start.
Chemicals—bio-signals?—telegraphed; moved them toward one another in ancient, primal ways. Scarlet wished to God she could cheer for the sermon on the mount. Easy to say I am glad you are happy. Harder by far, it seemed, to cheer the apparatus of happiness. She drew up bluejeaned legs, hugged her knees.
Mel insisted she was happy. Scarlet didn’t buy it. Some fat lie lay coiled like a python in the engine room of that story. From the beginning Mel endured Sol’s vanities, his dogma, his pronouncements, though much of it whipped her bloody. His laying down of absolutes. I don’t have affairs, I have relationships. On and on he talked about how he loved his wife, the golden angel Winnie. Never dreaming it might pain the mistress at his knee every Saturday, who smiled whilst his words stabbed her in the head, over and over. Smiled as she bade him goodbye, softly shutting the door. Then the smile fell off. Scarlet knew this from years of e-mail, before Mel stopped reporting. Once Mel had actually slipped into a clarinet concert of Winnie’s, come home, and wept. She would never, never allow him to know.
What was Scarlet to do?
Witness.
Cheer.
Cheer when she could.
…
Sol had everything. Authority, wisdom, money. Devoted slave-wife. Adoring female
students. Perfect control. Except, Mel said, his grown children were having trouble. Stumbling in the world. Surprise surprise, thought Scarlet bitterly. Sol’s response to his children’s trouble, according to Mel, was characteristic. He would swoop in on them—drove up to their homes announced, wifey Winnie alongside him in the car like Robin to his Batman. Squared off theatrically with his kids and their spouses, confronting them with some sort of moral reprimand or ultimatum—until someone fled the room in anger or tears. Then he took his wife by the arm and drove off, head erect. Or he withheld his visits, a royal withdrawal. Wrote long letters instead, detailing his philosophy of life in many single-spaced pages. His wife’s responses to the children’s distress? Sol doesn’t say. Winifred Armantino, from what Mel had gathered, was reared in North Dakota. Lines of demarcation were clear: Husband king. Head never higher than his, Mel had once murmured, a line from The King and I, making Scarlet laugh at the time.
Winnie claimed an art of her own. This, it was gathered, somehow saved and excused her.
Clarinet with the city symphony, later a wind ensemble called Scarborough Faire.
Sol had confided to Mel that his wife did not understand the music she played as well as he did, though course he’d never suggested that to her, and though he himself did not read musical notation. It was the music’s spiritual core he understood, saw into, far more deeply.
As she aged, Winnie stopped her public performances, giving private lessons. Then those, too, fell away. She puttered now, saw to the household—a villa on a hill, overlooking a pear orchard. Perhaps she even cleaned the villa herself, though Mel doubted that. They had money.
Winnie’s great task was to minister to Sol. She would burst into his home office when she wished to show him something that delighted her—an ad for a yogurt maker, or a new diet. He always let Winnie interrupt him, he repeatedly told Mel, because her heart was so innocent. Once he’d upbraided his wife, he admitted, about an improperly baked potato from the microwave. This was an image Mel never, ever forgot—nor, on hearing it, did Scarlet, silently thanking God Mel had been spared marriage to this man. Always, Sol praised Winnie to Mel. Hours of praise, months, years of it. Elaborate descriptions, soaked in amused affection. Diets, gardening, a program she’d seen on television. More diets. Cabbage soup, grapefruit, lemon and honey. He told Mel many times how much weight Winnie had lost. Mel listened, smiling. She herself had always gained weight effortlessly, fought food cravings all her life, and now, exacerbated by chemo and countless medications, had grown wide, doughy, puffy.
Scarlet though it stunning that a gifted man could behave this way. Sol appeared to have no glimmer he was cutting his lover to internal ribbons with adoring reports of his wife’s weight losses. Year after year Sol marveled over his beloved Winnie, chuckled aloud at her endearing foibles. Mel listened with luminous eyes; asked fond questions. Chuckled with him at his wife’s childlike qualities, at the purity of her heart.
When Sol went home Mel fell into bed.
Scarlet rubbed her hands against the tops of her thighs.
Mel wants it this way.
Wants?
Accepts. And why, cannot matter. Not to you, not anymore. And not out loud.
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Dilruba Ahmed, a 2009 poetry alum, recently had a poem featured on The Slowdown, an American Public Media podcast. Read an excerpt of “Bring Now the Angels” below:
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But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance . . . Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water— endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R? —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
ABDUCTION
The act of being taken. Away, perhaps.
In Greek mythology, abduction precedes violation. For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woman after woman is removed from a place of safety and transported elsewhere for violation, by ship or chariot, sea or land, or the ethereal machinations of the gods. Blossoms and baskets are dropped by these maidens, life interrupted.
The Metamorphoses are tales of violence and resulting human change: to trees, to animals, to birds. When I read these tales as a young woman, I imagined transformation as both punishment and safety. When the gods shape-shifted a person from human to nonhuman, it might be punishment; however, that transformation made further violence less likely.
In fact, on the cover of my college edition of Metamorphoses, a Duchamp-like figure of a woman, geometrical, transitions to a tree with roots as feet and leaves as a bower of curled hair. She has become impenetrable.
I thought of the myths as having a sequence:
1. Abduction 2. Sexual violation 3. Transformation
Sequences radiate clarity. They can be interrupted, or, perhaps reversed. I’m comforted by these mathematics.
Alphabets have sequence, too; however, language itself isn’t constrained by its origin in order. Words are formed by disorder, and translation reorders that disorder further. The Greek verb viasmós collapses the concepts of abduction and violation, as does the Latin verb rapto. It doesn’t matter if English separates them.
Word, body, mind. I can separate these pieces of experience, aligning them with abduction, violation, transformation. But when I open the cover of Metamorphoses, on its heavy paper backing is inscribed a room number with the name of the dorm I lived in the second semester of my junior year.
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The obstacle described here is barbed wire, rows of carefully entangled and interconnected snarls of barbed wire built in front of British front-line trenches in Sanctuary Wood near Ypres in Belgian Flanders in June 1916. Rows of wire designed to protect British and Canadian soldiers from waves of German infantry. Rows of wire which are no longer there. Had you been riding by with the family on a bicycle on that summer day in 2016 you could not have seen the beginning of the trench system, with its saps and parapets and traverses, nor the expanse of barbed wire, thirty feet across, lying in wait in shallow hollows in front of the firing trench at the edge of the wood.
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Welcome to Farmsteadburg! Here you may spend your Credits. Take over the decrepit farm north of town. It was willed to you by old Uncle Alfred. He left instructions in his journal: Get this place in shape! Fix the broken timbers, unclog the well, clear the south pasture. But first you need better tools. Lift stones to shape, gather branches to bend. Craft them at the Work Bench. Or go to town and buy them in Smithy’s Shop (if you have the Credits!). Use Work Points to hoe, plant, and cultivate. Advance the Farmer skill tree. Soon your pantry will fill with radishes, lettuce, carrots, and more. Eat them for Health Points, or sell them for Credits. Recover Work Points by sleeping at night. Do you hear a voice beneath your bed? Go to the earthen cellar and listen. Then start digging!
Season shift: Spring Carnival. Fish for fish in the river. Try different rods and lures. Win medals for fish records! Talk to suitable paramours: Polly, Lilly, Layla. Learn what they like, and buy them gifts (flowers, ribbons, lockets). But also: boy paramours (Charlie, Hector, Dax). Everyone is welcome! If courting takes up all farming time, collect green apples in the woods. Cook recipes in your Kitchen (built with blueprints from Paul the Master Builder). During night, tunnel deeper into the cellar. Find the voice! Is it the ghost of Uncle Alfred? Burn his journal in your Blacksmith Furnace. Then use the ore you mined while digging to refine your tools!
Season shift: Summer Festival. Apprentice with renowned entomologist Sir Zeke and catch butterflies for Insect Display. Then: Butterfly Pinning Mini-Game! Hold thorax until wings separate, pin thorax to spreading board, find veins of forewing and hindwing, and pin, pin, pin! Show Display Case to Dax. See Heart Points rise! Take quick nap at Campsite Bedroll to recover Work Points. Then spend them on Basket Weaving with Lilly. Assure her that Dax is just a woodcutting companion. Attend religious celebrations at Church with Charlie. Get to know congregation and learn new recipes as Trust Points rise. Raise livestock to collect milk, butter, eggs. Brush them, feed them, give your animals custom names! Bake muffins, biscuits, Bundt cakes. Give apple pie to Layla because it will raise more Heart Points than Shop-bought gifts. But: Exhaustion. Health Points low. Work Points low. Never enough Credits for top-shelf inventory. In bed, the voice keeps you awake. No time to sleep. There’s too much to do!
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Mel and Sol must have recognized one another from the start. 
