Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai

Author:Rebecca Makkai [Makkai, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

He had a tooth pulled in the spring of 2012. He was allergic to strawberries. He excelled at tennis. There was no food in his refrigerator. He was dead before they could interrogate him. His blog has been erased.

We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns. We’ve obtained a new map, with slightly different colors.

We will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound like fate.

PAINTED OCEAN, PAINTED SHIP

To Alex’s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Cyril College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it aloud to Malcolm on the phone:

FOWL PLAY

Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” many times since joining the English Department in 2008, but she developed an unexpected intimacy with the poem when, duck-hunting in South Australia this June, she accidentally shot and killed an actual albatross.

Moore, whose doctoral dissertation at Tufts focused on D. G. Rossetti and his muse Jane Burden Morris, took aim at what she thought was a goose.

“My students are never going to let me hear the end of this,” she says.

Because the birds are protected under Australian and international laws, Moore incurred a hefty fine—hopefully the extent of that legendary bad luck! She has no plans to hang the bird around her neck. “The wingspan was over two yards,” says the 5-foot-2 Moore. “That would be asking for it!”

Those exclamation points killed her, the way they tacked the whole episode down as farce. And the cheery italics. None of Alex’s tired sarcasm had come through. She vowed in the future only to give quotes via e-mail, so she could control the punctuation. (“You’re my favorite control freak,” Malcolm said.) Plus there was that photo to the side, her book-jacket photo with the half smile, perfect for suggesting Pre-Raphaelite intrigue and scandal, but here verging on the smug. A month stuck dealing with the South Australian police and Parks Department; half her grant spent on the fine; her research summer wasted; and all of it snipped down by a freelance writer named Betsy into photo, irony, pretty blue box.

And as for the bad luck, it was just starting, waiting for her back home like her postal bin of unopened mail. Not the “hefty fine” kind of bad luck, but the “Your career is over” kind, the “Why aren’t you wearing your engagement ring?” kind.

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