Haunting

Haunting

Transcript for Haunting (Full Episode)

Jonah Willinhganz: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Speaker 2: You know what drug I would totally do if there were a drug that for like 10 minutes, I could just feel exactly like I did When I was a child

Christy Hartman: A few days ago, my grandma sent me something weird, a photo of our family from 10 years ago. Holding it up I zero in on myself in the picture, greasy hair, thick bangs. I'm wearing a nice gray sweater to cover up my goth clothes for my mom. I was 16.

The photo in my hand seems like a gentle threat from afar. Grandma seems to be saying, see, look at all the good things you'll miss if you don't come home this year.

And there are things in the photo that I will miss and that I can't go back to. Most of the couples in the photo are divorced. My aunt, the one who used to call me sugar and send me birthday cards that smelled like cigarettes has passed away. My dad too, so I can't go home.

This letter is a shadowy semblance of a place, of people, that no longer exist.

It's haunting.

You are listening to State of the Human, the Radio Show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm your host, Christy Hartman.

Today is Halloween. As you ready yourself for maybe the oddest holiday on the calendar, consider this. This is the only day of the year most Americans embrace the [00:02:00] idea of being haunted, and we do it in a pretty weird way. We carve spooky things onto pumpkins, put up manufactured spiderwebs, don costumes, and do the monster mash until 4:00 AM but then what?

Back in the closet for another year. But the reality is that we're all haunted all the time. That photograph in my hand reminded me of that there were ghosts in that picture of my relatives, of my former self. It reminds me of what Halloween was originally about. Before Halloween, there was All Saints Day and before Christianity there was Saun and all Hallows Eve.

Saun marked the beginning of the darker half of the year. It was a time when the souls of the dead could rejoin the world of the living through a small opening in the door of the other world. There were great feasts at which dead family members were invited and a plate at the table set for them. Masks were worn to protect people from the evil spirits, which were just as likely to appear as the spirits of old friends.

We still wear masks today, even if they might be a joke. But apart from that, Halloween has gotten pretty far from the soul of the festival.

Today on State of the Human, we're fixing that. We will not be talking about little kids who wear white sheets. We're letting, in the unseen we're mailing you that photograph. We're talking about how things we can't see nonetheless press upon us, affect our choices, our actions, and sometimes even our beliefs in very real ways.[00:04:00] 

We have stories about the ghosts that inhabit California's highways, about a spirit who is very hungry about the ghosts of our past selves that persist inside each of us. And finally, we'll bring you the story of a young man haunted by a country. Don't go anywhere.

25 years ago, professor Nicholas Jenkins was a tourist out on a leisurely drive through California. What happened in those hills changed his view of the golden state forever. He tells us his story.

Nicholas Jenkins: I was on a tour of California, never been here before. I'd been to visit a friend in Los Angeles and we'd driven giggling around Beverly Hills, looking at the stars houses, and then I took my rented Chrysler Park Avenue and headed out into the east of the state.

This car at Chrysler Park Avenue was a big boat of a thing, the kind of car that the designers might have had for a retired dentist. Somebody ultra cautious and anxious to preserve all the advantages in life that they'd accrued. So it spoke to you. I remember it said things like, please fasten your seatbelt.

I remember driving along these twisty roads, little tiny vineyards on either side of the road. It was a beautiful day, and then right in front of me there was this old bridge with one of those trellis across the top of the bridge. I remember looking at this bridge thinking, 

Hmm, it'd be a nice [00:06:00] place to grow roses.

And then almost immediately my car slammed head on into the stanchion on the right hand side of the bridge. I wasn't going too fast. I don't know why I hit the bridge, but I did. And when you hit an immovable object and that force ripples through the frame of the car and up into your body is like being hit with a hammer, I didn't roll or skidd.

I just came to a dead bone crunching stop. And then the moment that the car stopped, everything seemed to speed up. Having, having been going very slowly, at least in my mind, in my perceptions, everything started to go very rapidly. So I opened the door in a panic and the Chrysler Park Avenue said to me, don't forget to take your keys.

Don't forget to take your keys.

I tried to pull the keys out of the steering column. Of course, the steering column had compressed so I couldn't get 'em outside. Jumped outta the car, ran little ways off, and didn't realized that this was something that I'd really hadn't confronted before in my life. A situation like this, I didn't really know what to do.

I just felt completely alone. Eventually, I saw a cloud of dust rising from the other side of the bridge, so I ran across the bridge thinking to myself all the time. If I'd gone into that canyon, I would've bled to death by now. The cloud of dust gradually sort of crystallized into a battered pickup truck, and as it came to a halt, I looked inside and there was this old grizzled guy with a sort of golden orange beard.

I said, pointing, as you can see, I seem to have had an accident with [00:08:00] my car and he picked up a copy of an old newspaper that was on the floor of the cabin and he wrote on it deaf mute, and made the signal for phone call. Make a phone call. And then he beckoned me.

Just before we started driving, had a little bit longer exchange with him on the margins around the crossword, in an old copy of the Fresno Bee. He would write something and then I would reply to it, and it turned out he was a gold prospector. He'd been living on his own for years and gold prospecting in the hills.

He was like, you know, one of the last vestigial relics of the gold rush. This old guy still living the dream out there in the hills thinking he was gonna find riches. The whole landscape was so kind of quiet that birds would land on the road in front of us. And then this old guy, I never knew his name would make a popping sound as he pointed his fingers at the birds must have driven for about half an hour before we got to the nearest phone.

And he just dropped me there, drove off into the distance, didn't ask for anything. And so I called the highway patrol and I showed him the way back to the bridge where the car was still kind of gently steaming. And we were standing there looking at it and he said, technically, I don't have to do anything more.

I've written the report. But I'd like to give you a ride back into Fresno where you can stay for the night 'cause it was getting on now, it must have been late afternoon. And we started to drive back through these hills. I remember saying to him, this is just such a beautiful place. This is such a, such an idyllic [00:10:00] place.

And he looked at me and said, with a smile, the golden state. And I said, yeah, that's what it looks like to me. And he said, it's true. It is beautiful. But I've been in the highway patrol for over a decade now, and I've driven these roads many, many times. And every corner on this road has something associated with it in my mind.

A family towing a boat went over the side of the road there. At the next corner, somebody wrapped themselves around a tree, a couple on their honeymoon were hit by a truck just back a few hundred yards along the road. Every one of these corners has something associated with it in my mind.

I think a lot about the moment when I hit that bridge and I imagine flipping over into the side of the canyon, I think about the life that I wouldn't have had. I think about the experiences that I wouldn't have had, and that's really haunted me ever since. And I think about things that did happen to other people, people that I never knew.

And I'd have to say that that highway patrol officer changed my vision of this beautiful, pristine, golden blankness that I, in my laziness, had thought of as being California, the golden state. He put some shadows into the gold for me.

[00:12:00] At every bend in the road, there's both sunlight and shadow beauty and these forgotten tragedies and silent ghosts.

Christy Hartman: Nicholas Jenkins is a Stanford professor and poetry critic.

Now let's go to Vietnam for a more traditional ghost story. Stanford senior Dong-Nghi Huynh went home to Vietnam in 2009. We'll let her tell the rest.

Dong-Nghi Huynh: My aunt passed away in Vietnam a month after the end of my freshman year at Stanford.

When I came home to Saigon, I joined my family in the process of sending her spirit to the next life. We prayed every Sunday for two hours in the morning and kept our house filled with the incense smoke in her remembrance. This practice would end after a hundred days of continuous prayer. And then I would return to the US.

In the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism, these 100 days are an important intermediate period between death and rebirth.

There was a constituent of our family, my grandmother, a few aunts and uncles who felt that my aunt had been taken before her time and was now spending this intermediate period lost between this world and the next. They were afraid she would somehow miss her opportunity for rebirth [00:14:00] and get stuck in the after world, or worse, that she would be reborn in misfortune

to avoid such spiritual mishaps. My grandmother made the rules clear when I arrived at my first prayer session. Attendance was essential. Devotion was critical. Crying during prayers was forbidden.

My grandma leads a clan of five daughters who are all overly outspoken, a little insane, and often too demanding. She also has three sons, one the perennial joker, the other, a man boy shy of adulthood, and the youngest, the family's official errand Boy, and my grandma is the matriarch who rules this group of divas and clowns.

My loudest aunt was second in line to the throne. We called her second aunt and she acted as caregiver and part-time mother to her siblings and to us. They're kids. I called her mom and spent my summers in Saigon, alternating between her house and my grandma's. When she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer eight years ago, our family took comfort in the fact that it was discovered early.

She underwent chemotherapy and surgery after two years. Her doctors in Saigon assured her that the tumors were gone. She spent a year in good health and when she started feeling ill again, the same doctors told her the cancer was in its final stage. Our family tried everything to battle the disease. My aunt never gave up pursuing new treatments when certain chemotherapy medications were not allowed in Vietnam, she flew to Singapore to get treatment. With me at her side, we spent three weeks during Christmas there where I translated for her and slept [00:16:00] on the floor beside her hospital bed.

Three months before her death, she learned of a new oncology hospital in Wangzuo and flew there for their experimental treatment. When the Wangzuo doctors found her cancer unresponsive to their medication, she asked for surgery to remove the wall of tumors that had lined her abdomen and intestines.

They were making it impossible to sit up or to lie in her back to eat or digest her meals. When I asked her case doctor in Vietnam why the Wangzuo doctors advised against the surgery, he responded, imagine taking a handful of mushroom seeds and tossing them to the ground. The manner and speed at which the spores grow in clusters is how it looks in your aunt's stomach.

No surgery could safely remove that. They were wrong. My aunt went ahead with her surgery and the risky procedure miraculously revived her for two weeks. She could eat near solid food, got out of bed and took a few steps and began to talk and laugh like her old self. She flew back to Vietnam, feeling revived. I heard the news from my brother over the phone and shared in my family's laughter 7,000 miles away.

A week later, my aunt was bedridden again, and I'm morphine. She died four weeks later. She was 55 years old.

I returned to Vietnam well into the hundred day funeral ritual. By this time, my cousins had hired a new housekeeper named Chi, to care for their mother's house. Chi was a quiet young mother of 24 from a village, a few hours south of Saigon. Every day, she readied my aunt's altar for prayer and cleaned her old bedroom.

One day in mid-August [00:18:00] while mopping the floors, she bent down to hand wipe a stain on the tiles. That moment she felt the shift in the air of the room. She later described as the feeling of being watched. Getting up, she felt lightness in her head.

She headed in to take a nap soon after. As she laid down, she asked her head housekeeper to sit by the bed and held her hand. My Aunt often did this when she was alive.

She began to ask why the kids, my cousin's aunt and Min had changed the layout of the living room and why they had spent so much money on elaborate flower arrangements for the altar. The head maid was speechless. Chi had started working at the house well after the funeral, had never seen the room's previous layout.

While Chi napped, our housekeeper called Anna Min, they came home an hour later to find chi crying in front of the altar, holding my aunt's picture and asking why the altar had been set for her. They called my aunt, who called my grandma, who called my uncle. Within two hours, the majority of our family was at my aunt's house.

It takes three men to pull chi off the ledge of the fourth floor balcony where possessed she toes the edge dangerously. Chi is about five one. Surprisingly, the men break into sweat as they take a hold of her wanted her legs, another grabbing her waist, and the last holding onto her right arm. My cousin Min and his eldest sister Lynn, try to calm chi down, but she does not respond.

Instead, [00:20:00] Chi's feet remain firmly pressed to the ledge and she stares intently at the ground many, many feet below. The men pull her backwards, but she's unyielding. Lynn now in her early thirties, is the eldest of my deceased aunt, three children. She pleads to, chi's back. Please don't, mom mom, please don't.

As if something snaps in her, she turns back to look at Lynn. Her eyes are dilated and the blacks seem to be expanding with the whites. There's a moment of silence as the wind whistles sharply and snakes around Chi's body to reach the rest of us.

Suddenly chi leaps out of the men's slack and grip back onto the sturdy surface of the balcony. Everybody, including me, breathe a sigh of relief, but relief only comes momentarily. Chi has taken the stairs four steps at a time to the main floor of the house.

Food offerings in the Buddhist tradition are an act of connecting with the spirit world.

Offerings to hungry made without indication of name or relation are signs of respect and compassion for those without families to feed them. Offerings to deceased family members, on the other hand, are meant both to feed the hungry stomachs of the dead and the desperate grief of the living.

In her possessed state, she has the insatiable appetite of someone starved. She does not verbalize her hunger, but instead signals to her family that she's hungry while she waits for food. She slams [00:22:00] her hands on the table. Hard, loud s slaps that make the wood table and my skin jump. Most of my family, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, my deceased aunt's kids are sitting around the table watching chi and consoling her.

We address her as we would my aunt, calling her mom, big sister, daughter.

When the food arrives. She lunges forward grabbing rice, meat, and vegetables from the plates and shoving them in her mouth. She swallows before she can chew. Chi's hair loose from her bun, hangs limply on either side of her face and creates a curtain behind which her wet food filled hands disappear.

Scraps that she cannot fit into her mouth, drip down her chin and fall onto the table. Eventually unable to stand the sight. Lin and min reach forward to slower. But as they approach, she shrieks and yanks protectively at her plates. We are stunned silent. A part of me realizes the absurdity of placing our desperate longing for my aunt and this young woman and the odd events happening to her.

I've held myself back thinking that this might be anything else. Schizophrenia, maybe the opportunistic gamble of a woman out to ring our pain and get our money. Another last spirit, even capitalizing on the moment to get a meal. But seeing Chi stuff herself like a starved animal, guts me. In life my aunt was a devoted cook, a restaurant owner and a proclaimed foodie of superior taste buds, and it torments me that she could have spent the months after her death in this starvation.

And it occurs to me that I really do wish it were my aunt in this woman's body, so at least I would know she was having a good meal.[00:24:00] 

My family has never gotten along with my aunt's husband who cheated on her during the last two years of her life. When my aunt spent her time in chemotherapy, he took another woman out to dinners, on weekend trips, spending the money my aunt had saved during her life. His children have a complicated relationship with him.

Min, unlike his sisters, holds no affection for their father. Anna and Lynn. However, waiver between disapproval and a naive confusion sort of love during an interlude when she has returned to herself. My family spends the time conversing in the living room. Chi is washing the dishes in the kitchen as we wait for the monks to arrive.

The conversation topic turns to discussion of why my aunt's spirit is returning. If we had prayed to help her accept death and begin the journey to rebirth, why was my aunt's spirit still here? Why had she not known that she was dead until just this afternoon?

My youngest Aunt Tao, brutally blunt and often stubborn, brings up my aunt's husband and suggests that her spirit can't rest in peace knowing that he still lives in her house.

Very rapidly, the conversation turns hostile. Aunt Tao continues, he's disgusting. I'm sick of you standing up for him after what he did to your mom. Lynn is indignant, don't hypothesize. She says, you are only making everything worse. Aunt Tah responds. She told me before she died how she wasted her life on a man she no longer loved or respected.

More voices begin to join the fray. The fighting turns ugly sitting back, I can already see invisible alliances being formed and [00:26:00] it's a surprise to me. That above the screaming and the yelling our head maid can hear the peculiar silence of the kitchen.

When she checks the faucet is still on, but Chi is nowhere to be found.

When we find the front gate left open, we spill onto the streets. This area of the city is dead in the evenings and the unease of seeing both ends of the road shrouded in black emptiness, fills me with a terrible fear. We yell Chi's name repeatedly running down the road and hear no response when we find her.

She is sitting on the curb of the sidewalk with her knees pulled towards her chest. She is about a mile from the house. She's crying into her hands. Her tears have wedded her bangs to her face, and when Lynn and Aunt Tah approach her, all she can do is stare at them. When she does talk, she speaks in a low whisper. All she says is, please stop fighting.

It doesn't seem like much, but I'm sure these words triggered something in everyone. My aunt used to say these same words when we fought before the thought that in death she was though trying to bring the family together to mother every last member from oldest to youngest makes my cheeks burn with shame.

My heart breaks for the woman who until the end, fought to stay alive more for everybody else, than for herself.[00:28:00] 

That night I returned to my grandma's house. The next day we would've to pray for three hours to call my aunt Spirit. I stayed in the room she used to occupy when she was living at my grandmother's house. Where I last saw her and where she could still muster a quick witted joke. I was exhausted, drained, but most of all, I was hopeful.

I wasn't sure what to make of what I had seen, but I really wanted to believe that life didn't end when you died. I wanted to believe that I had a chance to speak to my aunt because I never got to say my goodbyes. I barely slept. In my head, I was contemplating what she would say if she could speak to me, which she still called me, little daughter?

The youngest addition to the ranks of her biological children. Would she understand that I couldn't fly back to Vietnam those weeks leading to her death because of finals? Would she tell me it was okay that I left her alone in the hospital room in Singapore for several hours? While I roamed the town wear and aimlessly pretending to buy food?

Could she see me now? And did she know that I missed her and will continue to miss her?

I pose these questions into the darkness of the room and into the pillows where I thought, where I thought I could still detect the scent of her hair.

Christy Hartman: Welcome [00:30:00] back. You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Christy Hartman, and today we're talking about haunting. We host a few ghosts on our program, but let's forget about the supernatural. For now, it's time to talk about Proust. Yeah. Marcel Proust, producer Rachel Hamburg brings us this next story with help from Stanford, professor Joshua Landy.

Rachel Hamburg: We are constantly being erased and new versions of us keep emerging. 

Joshua Landy: Days in the past cover up little by little, those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. 

Rachel Hamburg: This is Stanford, professor of French and Italian, Joshua Landy. 

Joshua Landy: The problem is essentially, who am I? 

Rachel Hamburg: Maybe it's just because I was a lit major and therefore a Proust nerd, but I really, really feel this. The way the past swallows us up or buries us, or whatever metaphor you want.

The Rachel, who could barely pronounce Mama and Dadda somehow became the Rachel who wrote Dolphin training manuals in her spare time, and that Rachel somehow became the Rachel who loved Proust. Where did all of those other Rachels go? And if they're gone, what constitutes Rachel? 

Joshua Landy: Our ego is composed of the super imposition of our successive states, but this super imposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain, incessant upheavals raised to the surface, ancient deposits. 

Rachel Hamburg: For Proust's character, these ancient deposits aren't just memories. They are just remembering your junior year and high school summer vacation, or how you sat by your friend's pool Almost every day. Memories like that aren't enough. They usually fade with time and they eventually disappear, but there's a different kind of memory.

Maybe you've experienced this. Your roommate [00:32:00] puts on a cologne for the first time that your friend from back home once wore, and all of the sudden you're back in that summer vacation. You're at a pool party, you're eating watermelon. And across the pool, there's your high school crush smiling at you mysteriously sipping a soda.

It's been years and most of your life from then has faded, but now you feel the flood of anxieties that you had then. You actually become your teenage self if only for a moment.

And according to Proust, this is basically the best thing that could ever happen to you because whatever part of you can be both past you and present you, that's the real you. 

Joshua Landy: That's the thing that hasn't changed and that's what allows you to reenter your old body, so to speak, your old self. It's your ticket in.

It's the fact that although all kinds of things have changed, this, this core, namely your perspective, the way in which you perceive the world, the way in which you organize the data of experience that hasn't changed. 

Rachel Hamburg: And how does one re-inhabit a former self. It is not with hypnotherapy or dress up or even by writing books.

Nope. Usually in Proust novel, it's by smell. 

Joshua Landy: The main character from time to time experiences, beautiful moments of memories that come flooding back. He'll just be, let's say, drinking a cup of tea, which he's dipped a Madeleine into, or he'll just catch the scent of petrol fumes and all of a sudden unbidden, he'll start to remember his childhood.

And it's not just the places that he remembers. It's not just the people he remembers. He remembers the self that he was at that time. He becomes the self that he was at that time. 

Rachel Hamburg: Proust knew it almost a hundred years ago. And scientific research into the brain is proving him right. It [00:34:00] turns out the olfactory bulb, which is the part of the brain that processes smell, is nestled right next to a part of the brain called the limbic system, which is associated with memory and emotion.

And right nearby is the amygdala, which also processes emotion. So you can see a Crayon and you're reminded of other crayons. But if you wanna be the girl who loved crayons and drew worlds based around an imagined friendship between killer whales and dinosaurs, or the boy who immortalized the best Power Rangers episodes on the walls of his house, if you wanna be that kid again, you have to take a sniff.

Christy Hartman: So I want you to shut your eyes. Okay. And clear

Rachel Hamburg: White Plaza, early afternoon, warm, but not hot. Your typical perfect Stanford Day. Visitors strolling happily with their new Stanford swag, students zipping by on bikes and skateboards. Little did they suspect that they will soon be transported, yanked back into their past by their noses. I didn't wanna just believe something as transformative as Proust's theories, because I don't know, Proust wrote it down so eloquently. I wanted to know if a smell could really bring back people to the past. So my co-producer, Christie Hartman, and I did a little experiment in Why Plaza, hoping to reawaken some ghosts.

Speaker 9: Let's see. Okay, closing my eyes. Smells like cooking.

Speaker 11: Um, yeah, that definitely, I'm thinking like we're kind of a rose garden, like flower garden, like the one I had in, uh, girl, 

Speaker 12: uh, that smells edible, like, uh, juice.

Speaker 10: It makes me think of, um, childhood. 

Rachel Hamburg: We brought five scent chosen according to the highest standards of literary experimentation. 

Reminded of us: Crayons, pine, tortilla chips, turmeric and bubble gum

Speaker 9: on a long trip as a kid with and sniff books. 

Rachel Hamburg: We invited people to close their eyes 

Speaker 9: scratching and wondering and 

Rachel Hamburg: take a whiff 

Speaker 9: what the smell is [00:36:00] and sitting with my sister and, uh, not having a screen. 

Christy Hartman: Do you like, do you feel like that kid again or do you 

Speaker 9: It's probably a little bit more remembering it, although I guess there is also a sensation in the skin of like, no, no air conditioning.

Christy Hartman: Thank you. Sure. 

Speaker 9: What was it? It was tortilla chips. Was it? Oh, how about that?

Speaker 10: Like a kitchen or like a garden um, cooking with my mom maybe after like, getting stuff from the garden, like basil during the summer, um, like for dinner and stuff sometimes. Okay. Um, like if we were like both home. It feels like nice to like, have something familiar. Um, like I'm a freshman, so everything's been kind of crazy, but, um, it's like nice to like think of back home I guess. 

Speaker 12: That immediately brings my grandmother to mind because she carried those in her purse and whatever she'd come to visit, she'd give me juicy fruit. So yeah, my grandmother pops right outta that bag. 

Christy Hartman: Do you feel like the kid who was getting juicy fruit when you smelled 

Speaker 12: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. About five years old before starting school.

Christy Hartman: You feel like you're five? Yeah, but it's brief. It doesn't last. Did it make you feel good to, to like feel like you're a 5-year-old self?

Speaker 12: Sure. I love my grandmother. I'm sorry. She's gone. Does, does everybody respond this way?

Rachel Hamburg: So we can re-inhabit the past sometimes. We just need the right scent of bubble gum or pine or tortilla chips to bring us back there. We can be the 5-year-old at grandma's hip, the 12-year-old, sweaty and bored in the family car. We can be back by our mom's side cooking basil. I think it's nice to know that the ghosts that haunt us [00:38:00] aren't necessarily vindictive or mean.

They have something to tell us as much as we change over time. We don't. As much as your memories fade your past, whether you are five and waiting for bubblegum or 63 and writing a six volume novel your past lives. Your past lives live on.

Christy Hartman: Next up, Stanford sophomore, Nina Foushee tells us a story about what happens when the ghosts inside us unexpectedly come to the surface. 

Nina Foushee: They met working at that restaurant on Mason Street. It served a hundred dollars Cabernets that people drank without looking up. The customers brought disinterested spouses, garnishes.

They didn't tip well. Neither ellen nor Thomas did Coke, which was rare for the wait staff there. Thomas had tapped his fingers on the countertop beside her. She looked up the Mariotti family asked to be reseated. He said, okay, there's something else. Mm-hmm. Could I take you to dinner? Sure.

The night they shared dinner for the first time. She had a bruise at the base of her hand. He touched the spot as though taking her pulse and murmured sana sana cola de rana si no sana hoy se sanara mañana.

He told her that this would make it better, and she opened her mouth and shut it quickly to keep from laughing. Later he admitted that he had felt bold, almost drunkenly so for clasping, her tiny wrist.

The first time he stayed the night. Thomas left early the next morning to buy coffee mouthwash and American spirits. There had been only decaf in the cupboards. When he returned from the grocery store, she was [00:40:00] sitting on the kitchen counter reading. It was his sweater she was wearing and reading glasses she'd taken from the restaurants lost and found. You weren't here. When I woke up, she kept her eyes fixed on her book, a kind of punishment. He started to pull the bag of coffee beans from his backpack as a reply, but she motioned for him to stop and said, you didn't leave a note. I thought, I assumed you would sleep in, and why would I leave a note?

I considered you sensible, mostly. She pulled down her reading glasses to look up at him and was flooded with delight at their morning, his sweater. You would like this book she said and threw it at him.

He still did not leave notes. He later told her that when he said something like Your hair looks nice in a braid, she was supposed to know that it meant you are beautiful and that when he played her music he chose carefully in order to tell her things. Johnny Cash's, it Ain't Me babe, on the stereo, and he would watch her as though there was something she should know.

The two of them sometimes shared a single cigarette on her front porch. After a few months she stopped pretending to know how to smoke in front of him. Then things were serious.

When she spoke to her younger sister, Thomas could hear the all-Knowing Ellen, the one who would mother, anyone without warning. Most recently, she had been perched on the kitchen counter trying to talk on the phone motion for Thomas to take out the trash and pick up a banana with her toes.

You absolutely can't invite them. Those bastards always slip in some joke about us being fake Jews because mom converted serve stuff from the deli on fifth. No, not with, okay. Absolutely not. Dad wouldn't drink Manis Chitz and he's an alcoholic. I know about the budget. [00:42:00] I know. Love you too, Elise. Alright. Don't bend. Not a bit.

She spoke constantly of her family as though somehow invigorated by the knowledge of who they were and where they came from. She regarded her kin with the same awe historians afforded the prominent members of their favorite civilizations. With her sister, she let herself be part of the historic triumph that she believed her family to be. Otherwise, she consider herself a mere descendant, a movement downward.

Still cross-legged on the counter, Ellen's eyes lit on Thomas with a fervent pride she sometimes tried to mask with levity. There's gonna be a Hebrew naming ceremony. We're going to hand my niece to our rabbi and listen to all the wisdom of Genesis condensed into the 10 minutes that we can keep Grandma Rose awake for.

Dad will get drunk and use a napkin as a yamaka and we will sing. But the best part, Thomas, the point is that we, a whole bunch of us say to her, you are Miriam. Miriam, we are here. We are naming not just the baby, but the feeling we have about beginning things. It's like a wedding. We're doing the motions of bearing witness.

Thomas pretended to focus on putting a new garbage bag in the bucket beneath the sink. What should we send? He asked. We're going and we're going to bring her a hardback copy of the Little Prince to read when she turns eight. But it's in Arizona, he said, I lived there for six years thomas. That congressman, he said with the mustache, Alva.

Maybe He said something about boycotting Arizona. Wait, wait, wait. You are the one who puts family before politics. Do you not remember the conversation with your mom? Where I had to pretend to be pro-life? Bad things actually happen in Arizona. He said they detain people who look like me. We have to be there, she said.

[00:44:00] The naming ceremony would be their first trip together, and she realized she didn't know if he had ever traveled much when she asked. He said he used to, and then picked up his cigarettes and walked out of the kitchen. She followed him out the door onto the front porch, feeling like a child shunned for having some unanswerable trivial question. Thomas smoked when he didn't have a good answer. I don't really wanna take the trip. He said, looking down his nose at the end of the cigarette as he tried to study his hands enough to light it. But you have to. She reached over to tuck the tag into the back of his shirt. I won't drive.

He said he took a long drag and held the smoke in his mouth, taking the cigarette from him. She looked at it for a moment and then stubbed it out with her Sandal, I'm cold. Will you come inside and make soft boiled eggs? He turned around and looked at her hands before taking them in his own. When the week of the naming ceremony came, Ellen found a map of Arizona in the dashboard.

Like many things her family gave her, it was now covered with coffee stains and her father's legible scrawl. Being an aunt, she knew would mean being the funny one and the one who arranged hair without tugging, and the one that gave you hot chocolate in a plastic mug and taught you to call it chocolate tea.

Going to Arizona would mean putting herself on the altar of raising good things. She had been packed for weeks.

On the eve of their departure, Ellen could hear Thomas moving about the house late into the night. She knew that the next morning in the car, she would drive and chatter and beam with an excitement that bordered on violence. Thomas would ask what music she wanted in the car and she would say, just talk to me, no music. They left before Sunrise and Thomas didn't have his usual cup of coffee because he said he wanted to sleep in the car. When they were on the road, he was silent, but his hands would shake even when he was asleep. They stopped once somewhere in Colorado and they put the front seats down [00:46:00] and slept in the car.

The next morning, Ellen pushed the passenger seat upright and leaned over to wake Thomas. Will you promise not to smoke in front of my niece? She may be the only one that I ever have. Thomas looked at her weirdly, his eyes unfocused. I do think that I could probably make a good uncle. What will you make an uncle out of? Ellen grasped Thomas's shoulders?

Will you teach her to play harmonica and give her a Swiss army knife engraved with her initials? I will make her sit on the floor and listen to Sylvia Rodriguez and I will take her to the backyard and teach her to pick weeds, and we will go on picnics with hardboiled eggs and saltines. What if she isn't naturally musical?

I would never let that happen.

The Arizona Mountains appeared with a kind of force they were bruised, a purple blue, and Ellen recalled that first dinner how Thomas had spoken to the bruise on her wrist. She looked at him sleeping in the seat beside her, his arm limp across the console. This was the closest they'd ever been to Mexico, the country of his ancestors.

Just south of them lay the family stories that Thomas had but didn't tell. She wondered when she would truly know his family. He was raised by his mother, a proud woman in South Cleveland, who on the few occasions they'd conversed, had regarded Ellen with a weariness that boarded on distaste. Maybe Thomas would take Ellen to Mexico and he would speak in the language of [00:48:00] his mother.

She would feel close to him then to the things that came before him or made him. To the mountains ellen vowed that if they did take that trip, she would not envy his distant pass, the word she cannot pronounce. She rolled down the windows for the smell of creosote and sunlight for the days of rolling in washes with her sister to come back.

Friends said Arizona was where people went to die. It was true, but Ellen saw a kind of dignity to the desert. Ellen felt for Arizona a kind of pride prided a childhood so fruitful in a land so barren.

When they arrived at the synagogue a shorter freckled version of Ellen came up to the car holding Miriam Elise, Ellen's sister smiled with Ellen's same fervor. Thomas, so it takes a naming ceremony to finally meet you, Ellen jumped out, leaving Thomas to climb over and find a place to park the car. Elise, hello, Miriam.

Hello, baby girl. How are you? Ellen grabbed Miriam from Elise's arm and began to dance her around the parking lot. Ellen's father and mother were waving their arms wildly near the synagogue entrance, trying to get Ellen's attention. She walked over to them feeling impatient for the ceremony to start. The realization that they were grandparents was startling.

Ellen felt her throat tightened before they had even taken their seats inside the synagogue. She could not speak because there they were in a row looking at the baby, Miriam squirming in Elise's arms. Ellen watched her dad lean over to ask Thomas questions a little too loudly as the rabbi lit candles and wrapped Miriam in a prayer shawl.

Thomas reached across his seat to take her mother's hand. He always shook with both hands so that his handshakes were a kind of embrace. Ellen's mom was explaining the ceremony to Thomas and her dad was telling her that he [00:50:00] expected more grandchildren. When the rabbi and toned

Ellen met Thomas's gaze and the room quieted.

After the ceremony, when they were seated on the bench, drenched in quiet in the scent of Gardenia, she knew something had passed between beneath the stained glass, as they looked at the child, that was all of creation.

She did want to move nearby for them to start that household where Miriam would come for sleepovers. Ellen knew that he would say yes, that the details wouldn't matter, that it would mean agreeing to one thing, staying the same. For a long time, she had planned the question, taken long walks with it. She barely noticed that he had started speaking because her mouth was full of what she was going to ask.

She was tasting his response. I was baptized in Mexico, he said they put you in some kind of little white nightgown. You only wear it once and then they dunk you in and everyone is clapping and overjoyed. But in all the pictures I had this serious red face like I knew to hold my breath and I was baptized there because you get baptized in your home with the people that are going to watch you grow up and keep your hand off the stove and teach your first corridos.

Ellen had never seen Thomas cry before and her shock at his words was replaced with a nauseating sense of voyeurism. I remember the church pews of my parish in Hermosillo, how I imagined what it would be like to be the priest wearing those heavy robes, trying to carry all the confessions and all the remedies for sin. Could one person really do all that?

And then we came here and my mom said, never talk about Mexico. Which is like saying, don't mention your last name or the weather. And then what I wanted to remember couldn't be said. I was six, Ellen, I was six and I had memorized my whole address, [00:52:00] and my TIA finally let me use the microwave on my own and watch Alero at eight o'clock.

The point isn't losing Mexico. I know that people lose places, but I want to get to be here and still now speak about that to the person that I, that I want to. Here he swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment. I've been saying I was born and raised in Cleveland ever since I'm a born again. His lips twitched slightly and his hands fluttered in his lap.

What I'm saying is, I wish I didn't remember this desert crossing. I'm not a, I don't have, I came here without papers, but I, I want to be able to be with you and one day ask you to without you thinking that, that, I just want Thomas kept talking. He told her that when people knew, they no longer saw him as Thomas, but as a certain kind of Mexican.

He knew the few defined camps, the pitying, the horrified, the condescending, and those with the Messiah complex. Ellen was standing and she could see him fumbling in his pockets for a napkin, a cigarette, more words. She turned the gate and fixed her eyes on the ground. She felt that she was watching her words fall, seeing the indentations they made in the soft dirt of the garden.

I take you to the place where, where my family took me and you. You didn't even tell me that, that you were raised Catholic. She turned away without looking up and pushed the gate open with her knee. Black spots of mascara appeared on her dress. She watched her feet, but could not remember the path she took out of the garden through the synagogue cemetery and into the parking lot.

People were getting ready to drive home and Ellen fixated on the pairs of hands, shutting car doors, lifting [00:54:00] children growing old, but not apart. Ellen watched for Thomas from inside the car. When she saw him enter the parking lot, she unlocked the passenger door and turned on the radio. On the drive home to Cleveland, she kept the music loud and her eyes and hands faced forward.

The next few months, ellen thought about Arizona. Every day she would drink her decaf in the kitchen, reading and waiting for Thomas to wake up. Thomas still worked at the restaurant. He said it would be hard for him to find another job. Ellen listened for the sound of the screen door closing to know when Thomas went out to smoke, but she stopped following him outside.

She became impatient with her sister's calls. Ellen asked how Miriam was doing, and her sister asked how Ellen was doing. Thomas started leaving his shoes on the front porch, so his steps through the house became silent. One day he came home late and Ellen waited from outside. She saw him walk up the street, his hands in his pockets.

She looked down at her hands knowing his were shaking. Where were you? She asked, and he said, Ellen, I can't move to Arizona.

She stood up and walked into the kitchen. She wanted to destroy the coffee maker to rip up the package of cigarettes left on the counter. Then he was in the kitchen. She hadn't heard him come in, and she felt desperate to be busy, to be decisive, to be occupied with changing the garbage bag. His lips twitched as he reached across the table for his cigarettes.

She grabbed his wrist. Remember when, when you took my wrist in your hand and, and she couldn't get the words out, couldn't let go of his wrist, she wanted to ask what it had meant When he said those [00:56:00] words, his hand around her wrist, what had it meant?

It meant it'll get better, ellen, that's what it meant.

Christy Hartman: That was Nina Foushee's fiction story, what Can Be Named?

Today's program was produced by myself, Christy Hartman, Rachel Hamburg, will Rogers, and Charlie Mintz with help from Xandra Clark, Natasha Ruck, and Jonah Willinhganz. Thanks also to Nicholas Jenkins and Joshua Landy and all the people we talk to in White Plaza. Today's program featured original work from Dong-Nghi Huynh and Nina Foushee.

The passages you heard from Proust in Search of Lost Time, were translated by Enright, Kmar, Mayer, and Reve. Our program featured music from Neuroleptic Trio, California Ramblers, Coda, sun Helo, broken Gadget, Zoe Lidstrom, carnivorous Snowflake, gist, Dan Friel, Jason Murray, Owen Calori, and Sylvia Rodriquez

for their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, Stanford's Oral Communication Program, Hume Writing Center, and Bruce Braden. You can find a podcast of this and every episode of State of the Human on Stanford, iTunes, and on our website storytelling.stanford.edu.

Remember to have a mask ready in case any evil spirits come through the other world tonight or any night. We'll be back next week from the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Kristi Hartman. Thanks for listening to [00:58:00] the show.

Singer: Adonde van las palabras que no se quedaron a donde van las miradas, que un día partir, acaso flotan eternas como prisioneros de un ventarrón o se acurrucan entre las cejas buscando gan? Acaso ruedan sobre los cristales o gotas de lluvia que quieren pasar? Acaso nunca vuelven a hacer algo? Acaso se va y a donde va? En qué estarán convertidos mis viejos zapatos a donde fueron a dar tantas hojas de un por dónde están las angustias que desde tus ojos saltaron por mí adonde fueron mis palabras sucias de sangre de abril. A donde van ahora mismo. Estos cuerpos que no puedo nunca dejar de alumbra. Acaso nunca vuelven a hacer? Acaso se van y [01:00:00] a donde van.