THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 77
perhaps the simultaneous existence of
the disparate realities that hold our frag-
ile world together in its brittle shell. The
music tiptoed along the knife edge of
its key, its tones, giving the illusion of
freedom when there were always far
more missteps than safe harbors and
nimble plunges into grace.
W
hen Valente came over on a Fri-
day evening, his long hair hung
in greasy locks and his face was patched
with dirt.
“We had a match today,” he explained
and took the beer Jack offered.
“I thought you were the coach,” Jack
said.
Valente drank deeply, answering too
quickly and choking. “Yeah, but when
we win I let the girls tackle me.” He
coughed to clear his throat. “Blood in,
blood out, you know—like the military.”
“Blood in, blood out? How many
girls tackle you?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen? You should
see me,” Valente said. “I’m like Gulliver.”
Jack pointed at his face. “Did some-
one punch you in the eye?”
Valente’s voice was soft and wistful.
“Man, those girls are crazy,” he said.
“They love to beat me up.”
A silence fell, and they briefly re-
garded the birds streaking through the
backlit trees, stencilled silhouettes
against an aureate sky.
Jack coughed lightly in his fist.
“So...what should we do about this
hollow?”
“Hollow?”
“The chamber in the wall.”
Valente seemed not to understand.
“Oh, that,” he said after a minute. “But
who cares about that?”
Who cares? Jack thought. You were
the one who brought it up!
“Here’s what you do,” Valente said.
“Drill a hole in the wall and run a fi-
bre-optic spy camera through it.”
“I don’t have a fibre-optic spy cam-
era,” Jack said.
“Yeah.” Valente nodded. “Too bad.”
In the creek at their feet, tiny fish
idled and darted in the current. Jack
watched them move beneath the braid-
ing water.
Valente finished his beer, crushing
the can between his strong, heavy hands,
and grinned.Jack grinned back. “Hey, why’d you
get kicked out of school?” he asked.
Until that moment Jack had felt in-
different to this question, or worse than
indifferent: he felt the answer would
disappoint him. But a sudden annoy-
ance at Valente had overcome him, a
sense of the precise limit to what Valente
could be or do, a sense—how to put
it?—of some insuperable grossness in
Valente’s character that would never,
even with boundless fellowship and
care, settle into sufficient self-awareness.
Standing beside the green-violet Rici-
nus, the former football player kicked
at tufts of moss and a crust of caked
mud that lay along the bank of the creek.
He smiled without turning, as if at the
little swimming fish.
“I wasn’t, you know, ‘kicked out,’”
he said.
“You weren’t.”
“I could’ve come back.” Valente gazed
at the trees. “Didn’t want to.”
Why was that? Jack asked.
Valente squinted inquisitively as the
leaves above them shook like silver-
green sequins. “I was doing so much
acid that summer,” he said after a min-
ute. “Summer after they told me to take
a year off. I don’t remember why, but I
had keys to George Diehl’s apartment.
You remember Diehl? I never liked that
kid, but he was always down to get high.
Well, George was away for some rea-
son, and I’d been tripping all night. I
couldn’t come down. I remember it was
sunrise when I got to his place, and I
lay down in his bed, but I couldn’t sleep.
So I started pacing from room to room.
For, like, hours. There were just four
rooms, but I couldn’t stop. I was get-
ting spooked, so I decided to watch
something. George had this projector
hooked up to a DVD player, but I
couldn’t find any DVDs, so I just pressed
Play to see what was in there. All of a
sudden there were these people danc-
ing and singing. Tons of them, in match-
ing costumes, doing elaborate routines.
They made shapes like flowers, geo-
metric shapes. All this stuff. Too much
to follow. At first I thought, This is
cool, but then I started to get a bad
feeling. They were like aliens. Like they
were on a different planet, dancing in
outer space. Somewhere you could never
get to, you know? And then I thought,
No, I was wrong. It was our world, theBUILTTO WAIT
coarse skin, like a laborer;
shoulders up, like horses;
made for cold, like fire is,
a radish holds its heat.
in winter, we keep
the least
becoming, what’s not bright,
what burns your throat,
these old,
strong roots.
black radishes:
my back ached, i suppose,
from taking them—
the way you feel sore
when you’ve loved
with effort. when you’ve
stilled your thoughts
with work.
bitter flesh, like wanting;
smoky gray, like coal;
built to wait, like stones are,
even winter needs to eat.—Rachel Betesh