The taste was dry and sweet.

No, I don't know what that's supposed to mean, either.

It’s 8:30 on a quiet Monday night; in the darkness of a Republic night outside, songbirds on the wing are bursting into oily flames, for the temperature outside hasn’t yet dropped below 90 degrees. Nuns are openly cursing in the streets; dogs are forming into packs and have begun to hunt the weak and the defenseless for sport. The moment I step outside, I begin to schvitz like a summer pudding at a cheaply catered bar mitzvah and I start to fantasize about swimming buck-nekkid off the rockbound coast of Labrador. I wasn’t meant for this kind of weather. I’m meant, apparently, to hew large blocks of pressed permasnow into windproof lairs for myself and my mammal-skin-enveloped loved ones, spending my days harpooning hefty pinnipeds so that I may pass the sunless winter months gnawing upon their briny, hardened sinews. Instead, I am girding myself in long-sleeved dress-shirts, long pants and shiny sun-sucking black dress shoes in heat that brings me closer to understanding how, when the furnace-hot sirocco blows across the Mediterranean to Italy and Greece, the murder rates in those two fairly “I don’t really give a shit” nations soar exponentially. About seven years ago, a woman in the proclaimed “Armpit of Italy”, the Adriatic port of Bari, was said to have stabbed her cheating husband to death with a sharpened wedge of acutely aged parmesan, stopping only when her arm got tired. It makes me ache inside: nowhere in America could we find cheese that could take that kind of assault. Genius, pure genius.

Of course, I am wearing layers and finery because of my shiny new job, a week of which I have passed without being slain. I knew that, with the position and the fancy quasi-governmental accoutrements that came with it that I would have to dress less like a lumberjack, but I clearly wasn’t reckoning on it feeling like a crematorium outside. I find myself getting in my car, having scampered like an emu on methadone to get to it and shrieking in that tiny rainforest green microwave hell until the AC kicks in; once I actually get to work, I get out of my car and swear like a pirate until I am safely inside, where the cool air gives me back my precious dignity and my humble humanity. Needless to say, when, at around ten this morning the AC in Franklin Hall shuddered, sputtered, and with a final death-rattle, stopped working altogether, I began to fear for the safety of my coworkers and the internationals we’ve come to know and love. For, like the man who fears the advent of the full moon and the lycanthropic melee that accompanies said event, I cannot be held accountable for what I do and say when I am too hot to care. Plus, even if I am in an air-conditioned room or not, if I hear one more person say “It’s not the heat! It’s the humidity!” as if this were more profound than the translation of Mayan codices or finding the secret to turning cat litter into uranium, I will be wearing an attractive uvula necklace by that nightfall.

It was a good week. It took me all of thirteen seconds to nest myself completely in my new boy-cave in the belfry of Franklin Hall, having already mentally plotted how I was going to arrange and decorate it mere nanoseconds after I was offered the position. Of course, the seemingly effortless way in which I decorated my new office was, in fact, a Herculean battle of wills with myself. No, I reckoned, they don’t want you to bring in your Aztec human-sacrifice skull paperweight. No, they probably would find your graven bronze of Kali, the goddess of vengeance, a little macabre. Your wee stuffed Blackbeard doll? Best left at home. In the end, though, I’ve created an environment that stimulates me; my business cards rest in a rickshaw and I drink my coffee out of a mug that is a hideous human visage (a nineteenth-century ugly-mug from Conner Prairie), and nobody can stop me. I can already feel myself grow professionally; today, I got to sign my first Department of Homeland Security-ilk travel document for a young Indian woman, and I’ve already used my newfound power as a Designated School Official to enter the SEVIS database. Power: it tastes like chicken.

Last Monday, I was sitting in my office getting some training with my colleague when my phone rang. Since at the time nobody had access to my direct line, I was a little disturbed, yet nonetheless I picked up the receiver and answered.


Me: Office of International Services, this is Domonic.
Woman: Hello, may I speak to Domonic Potorti?
Me: That’s me.
Woman: Hello, my name’s Blankety-Blank, and I represent the Department of Homeland Security.

{the wet sound of trouser-chili being pressed out of my bowels can be heard distinctly}

Woman: We’ve recently received a request for naming you as a Designated School Official. We’re doing the background check and I have some questions for you.
Me: {swallowing tongue} OK.
Woman: I have some information that you have spent a considerable amount of time in a predominantly Muslim country. Is this correct?
Me: Yes, I spent nearly six months in Turkey.
Woman: I see. When was that?
Me: In late 2000, early 2001.
Woman: What was the nature of your stay?
Me: I was studying abroad during my junior year.
Woman: And what was the nature of your study?
Me: I was studying archaeology and art history.
Woman: I see. During your stay in Turkey, did you ever study in an Islamic medrese?
Me. No.
Woman: During your time in Turkey, did you, or did anyone you associated with, participate in movements directed by the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker’s Party?
Me: No.
Woman: Did you, during your stay in Turkey, ever visit the Islamic Republics of Syria or Iraq?
Me: No.
Woman: I see. Well, I am going to dispatch an agent from Homeland Security to you to complete this interview. His name will be Stephen Sechrist.

At this point, my brain folded in upon itself; Stephen Sechrist was one of the OIS’s former Graduate Assistants, known for his immigration acumen and his singular ability to eviscerate with cruel, Satanic practical jokes. Just when I was going to demand to speak to him, another woman’s voice came on the line.

Oh yes. It was Brooke. Former Front Desk Gangsta Numba One, and there she was, making me defecate in my undergarments for her own amusement. I expected this from Steve; from Brooke, never. Had she realized that I would spend the rest of my natural existence trying to find a way to make her pay, perhaps she would have reconsidered. The worst part of it all was that I was genuinely terrified that some government minion really thought that I went to Turkey to learn the subtle arts of beheading and issuing fatwahs; I don’t have any documentation, save my exam results, that I didn’t take the midnight bus to Baghdad every weekend to mull with mullahs.

In the dark of some night, dearest Front Desk Gangsta Soul-Sistah, I shall come to thee and level a pointy finger of reckoning that will shudder you. Or maybe I will just bide my time until you are weakest, like a newborn wildebeest on the Serengeti, and then I will come.

Or, maybe, when I see you next, I will hug the breath out of one of my best friends – one whom I miss daily and whom I wish were here, sweltering in the hearthstone-heat of the Republic, by my side in the office where for two years we were inseparable.

Here’s hoping you have a friend good enough to call you on the first day of your new job, having a coworker pretend that they are an attaché to a monolithic government entity and making you genuinely feel as though you’ve gutted an infidel whilst crying “Allahu akbar.”

I leave you with a portion of a correspondence a visiting scholar had with Brooke. This, if anything, makes those of you who aren’t in this field understand how insanely difficult, and yet intensely amusing, this line of work can be. Maybe that’s why we stay in it, after all: laughing until you are about to puke at some things our internationals say makes it all worth it sometimes.

"I met my husband 11 years ago when I was a teacher at a University Preparation Academy. He always supports me with belief and delicacy. Also, he enjoys travel and reading that made him healthy to run 3 miles a day. My daughter is always bright with full of humor, and sheis honest that she never lied or said a bad word until today. Moreover, she looksfor her own work and finds interes in reading, travel, painting, and languages like English and Chinese. That established her dream to be a simultaneous interpreter. My father has made this peaceful family with loyalty and sincerity. My mother makes participation on every house workwithout skipping, and she is a good cook. My pet dogs, Joy and Dodo, are another part of my family. They greet me graciously on my exit orentering my home, and sometimes they show attitude. Also they snore like big man."

Also! *ahem*

"From an old saying, there is hair in front head of chance, but it is bald in the back. Therefore, you can catch if you grab the front, buteven Zeus cannot catch if you miss. I am determined to study and examinenew things. I will try my best with resolution to endure all pain to pass knowledge and wisdom to my country, which everything lacks."

I remain, as ever,

Dom

A cry in the dark.

Last night I awoke alone in my dark apartment completely bathed in my own brine from a terrifyingly vivid nightmare involving Meryl Streep, a dingo and an infant. Oh wait, that was A Cry In the Dark, and it was a nightmare for a number of other reasons. Watching that scene over and over again (once I rewound it twelve times in a row, and each time I laughed just as hard as I did the time before as she flailed about shrieking "A dingo's got my baby!" like an escaped mental patient), I fall into a Zenlike state of almost supernatural bliss and exude the aroma smoldering sandalwood.

But no, this particular mental regurgitation was about work. It's been a while since I've dreamed about work, but with my impending transition to the Foreign Student Advisor position (T minus five days), it's been on my mind more than usual. Mostly, I am now remembering the hundreds of times when I was really glad to be able to hand something off to an advisor, and, uh, that's gonna be me at the receiving end of that white-hot diarrhea tornado in less than a week. You know, when people come in with issues like:

1) Hello! I've been secretly working illegally off campus for more than a year and I am being audited by the IRS. In addition, my dependent spouse has also been working, which I think is illegal for her visa status, and she's uninsured and is about to give birth to our seventh child, who we think may have rickets. My visa is expired, and I think my travel document expired too. I've been academically dismissed from my department for ethics violations involving downloadable term papers. I can't return home for fear that I will be executed via machete by a paramilitary death squad in a steamy jungle. Also, I bought a car and now I can't register it because I need a Social Security number, but I can't get that without legally working . I also think I may have contracted a parasitic load at a locally owned Amish buffet. Can you help me?

2) Hi! I am applying for a visa in two week's time, but in the interim I will have undergone gender reassignment and will apply in my new gender. I also come from a country that is so dangerous that it doesn't have an American Embassy or consulate, so I must carry my child on my back across a three-mile-high mountain pass and illegally enter another equally hostile but oil-rich country where I will wait in line for ten days for a visa interview. If I haven't died of exposure, I will need to submit proof that I intend to return to my country of origin, but due to the fact that I have three fatwahs issued against me, I have no intention of going back. If they find out I have done this they will stone my elderly parents in the streets like rabid dogs. Do you have any advice?

3) How's it going? I was born in W, I am a permanent resident of X, I am a dual citizen with W and Y, and I am about to marry someone from Z. This morning I dined upon chilled lamb marrow and some Orangina. Two weeks ago I had a growth resembling the profile of Abraham Lincoln removed from my inner thigh by some guy who does same-day surgery out of his van, which is parked in the Marsh parking-lot. My middle name means "chinchilla" in a language I have never spoken. When I was thirteen I watched my best friend get devoured by an anaconda. I enjoy collecting tiny ceramic animals, but most especially hummingbirds, one of whom came to me in a dream and told me I was secretly their queen. When I was born, I was clutching a shiv I'd fashioned out of one of my mother's lower ribs. Can I apply for curricular practical training?

Truth be told, though, I prefer the "faucet" kids to the "toothpaste tube" kids. The faucet kids, once you tap them, tell you everything you need to know and way, way more, most of which makes you dance inside. The toothpaste tube kids need some squeezin' every now and again, and by "squeezin' " I mean "stabbin' " or "squirtin' ", depending on how precious the information is. The best, though, are the "just one more question" hostage-taking angels. I'd much prefer the truth. If you are going to keep me from doing something else or helping another person for a half-hour, don't give me the hope that the end is in sight. Just lay it on me. Tell me that you have forty-seven questions and I will begin subtly slashing my veins under the desk. Oh no, don't mind how blanched I look; I had a rancid frittata for breakfast.

The sad remnants of Hurricane Dennis are hovering overhead, shrouding those of us ensconsed in the Republic with a lingering mist and providing enough of a low-pressure trough to make me see merry little stars in the corners of my peripheral vision. My sinuses are filled with what seems to be industrial epoxy of some kind and the skin on my hands is flaking off in sheets, mostly between my fingers. And, perhaps most alarming of all, I just managed to get the song "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister in my head. Since there are no landforms to speak of to fling myself from, I shall remain alive.

Well, that, and I have a pumpkin to attend to as well.

I remain, as ever,

Dom

Mağaraya.

To the cave.

I gripped the deceptively small keys in my right hand; with a start, I realized that I was gripping them a little too briskly as the tines dug painfully into my newly-leprous hand-skin, creating tiny red crescents in my palm. The hazy morning sun glinted harshly off the blindingly white paint of the vehicle I’d soon be cramming with the confused and international; the dull crimson crest of Indiana University was clearly visible on the driver and passenger doors. I’d never driven something this large, and the thought of being responsible for seven lives simultaneously enthralled me and made me vomit a little in my own mouth. A Suburban. I clambered into it and turned the key and the giant land-cruiser roared to life, taunting me with enticingly smooth handling and a gas pedal that ached to be pressed to the floor. Be a good boy, I thought dully. People think you are responsible, and I’d no doubt be given the posthumous Dogpiss of the Year Award should I roll the damn thing on Indiana 37 with a carload of weeping internationals, begging for their lives in several East Asian languages. They didn’t pay $12 to end their lives on another continent, only to be scraped off the highway with snowshovels. With a heavy sigh, I accelerated to the speed limit and cruised out of the Motor Pool parking lot to the International Center, where a dozen non-Anglophone angels awaited their trip to the cave.

As a small child summering in West Virginia, I remember well being taken to gigantic caverns nestled deep within the Smokies, replete with paralyzingly acidic bat guano and the pathetic remains of paleo-Indians who’d attempted to explore a world that must have seemed impossibly otherworldly. I remember staring at ghastly translucent fish, leftovers from a bygone age, their eyes becoming completely useless in the pressing dank and darkness of the cryptlike caverns. Later, in my grandmother’s attic, in a small room utterly devoid of any light, I became briefly convinced that if I stayed in there too long my own eyes would cloud over and then leak out of my ten-year-old sockets. I didn’t know whether that would be cool or not, but I was guessing that I’d not be ever held accountable for doing pre-algebra homework ever again. As visions of Annie Sullivan holding my wee hands under the water-pump held court in my imagination, I drifted off into blessed, childlike slumber.

The internationals assembled, looking a little bleary – after all, it was 8 AM on a Saturday – and I piled six of them into my SnowBeastmobile. After about ten seconds, I realized that I’d managed to get six Mandarin speakers all to myself. They were all Taiwanese, born on the rim of the Ring of Fire in a country whose founders fled their homes on the mainland so that they wouldn’t be butchered by the Mao Zedong-led Communists. What none of them knew was that I knew enough of their freaky tonal language to develop a rudimentary understanding of what they were gossiping about. I’d hoped that it would be racy if not just juicy, but mostly they talked about their schoolwork, how flat Indiana is, and how you can’t find good Sichuan hotpot in these parts. Secretly I was hoping that they’d talk about the hairy mofo in the front seat and how badly he reeked so that I could impress them with my linguistic acumen, but the opportunity never presented itself. I’d heard more wildly saucy tales at my grandmother’s pitch-in dinners, and that was in Renick, WVA, population 43. So I fixed my eyes on the road ahead as it snaked south through corn, then more corn, and then, after that, more corn still. Knee-high by the Fourth of July my ass; this corn clearly was touched by the sweet-smelling hands of the Baby Jesus himself, as it was taller than I and bore the luscious white and yellow treats gravidly. As we neared Paoli, Indiana, we began to see signs indicating that we were in Amish country; like the leaping stag Deer X-ing signs, these are meant to warn you that something potentially lethal could be just around the bend in the road. How would we explain to these kids what the Amish were? That there were people who deliberately lived like it was 1850 because they really, really wanted to? Chances are good that most of them had family living at home or on the mainland who would have plucked one of their pulsing eyes out of the socket for decent, reliable electricity and clean running water and connection to the net, and here were people who were surrounded by it and would have nothing to do with it whatsoever. We explained that the Amish were a group of people who escaped to North America fleeing from persecution in their homeland, and who wanted to maintain autonomy in the face of a world that was turning in a direction they didn’t find savory. Then it dawned on me: Duh. These kids would TOTALLY understand what that’s about; their grandparents did it by crossing the Straits of Formosa in the late 1940s. Granted, Taiwan’s no Lancaster County, but the sensibility resonated inside them. Mostly, though, they wanted to know if they could shop at Wal*Mart, and after we explained that yes, they did, they seemed a little more at ease.

After about two and a half hours of driving, we pulled up a large hill into a parking lot set amidst a faux oldey-timey “village.” As the Suburbans disgorged, I became filled with dread: what the hell was this place? And would twelve international students survive this experience? One of the buildings was clearly marked with the words “Cavern Tour Tickets”, so we trudged up the grade to the shanty. Inside, in addition to the tickets, you could buy enchanting artifacts like flamingo pink Indian Princess headdresses and bat pencil sharpeners; in a smallish pen outside, two vastly pregnant goats frolicked in the hearthstone heat along with a black she-wolf (ok, ok, it was totally a dog) and a nearly feral cat. As we stared blankly at the gravid she-goat’s engorged girl-parts, a woman burst forth from the hut and began to shriek at the top of her lungs like a sodomized baboon. The tour had begun.

We descended seventy-three spiral stairs into the dankness of the cavern, which mercifully was a brisk fifty-three degrees. Our guide-woman-thing began to shriek about the difference between stalactites and stalagmites (one requires less energy to impale a hapless tot upon) and how Nature Herself poured the waters of the centuries into the caverns, creating the bizarre formations that we were urged not to touch. “You have oil in your skins that will repel water. Do you want to stop this here thang from growing? Do ye?” she screamed, the butt of her horsewhip gleaming dully in the fluorescent light. We shook our heads rapidly in the negative as she prodded us forward towards the Eerily Beautiful Underground Waterfall Thing, which indeed was moist and surgey. The best part, though, was that the calcified mortal remains of the discoverer of the caverns (Daniel Boone’s younger brother, Squire) were interred in a bizarre wooden casket next to a jarringly modern marblesque memorial donated by the Daughters of the Somethingorother. It’s not every day you get to roam around in a cave-grave.

After about an hour, we ascended the stairs into the pressing heat of a southern Indiana afternoon to frolic in the “village.” This consisted of a “bakery” that sold various microwaved fleshy treats (I had a hotdog encapsulated in barbecue), a soap shop that sold small stuffed animals with invigoratingly exfoliating underbellies, a candle store that smelled like a box of Crayola crayons and a store that sold rocks of various shapes, colors, and preciousness. After briefly toying with the idea of buying a rock animal I thought was a donkey with a rocket-launcher on its back (secretly, it was a squirrel I was holding the wrong way), we hiked to the top of the hill to the bizarre memorial cairn and natural cave entrance. The whole experience, save the caverns themselves, inspired an overwhelming sense of “what the eff?”

We crammed the internationals back into the Suburbans and then headed down into Corydon, the first capital of Indiana and the site of the only Civil War battle in Indiana. Unbeknownst to us was that this particular weekend was to have been the reenactment of the Battle of Corydon, a two-day event sure to be replete with men in ill-fitting, improperly antiquated clothing who’d neglected to bathe and whose devotion to all things Civil War would terrify the confused internationals, who for the most part barely conceived that the US was briefly torn in two in the 1860s. All it would take would be a man with a bayonet-tipped rifle and these kids would defecate their aforementioned meaty treats into their drawers. I can just see their letters home now. “Dear Mom”, they’d begin, “Today I went to a place where men with weird facial hair in old, yak-smelling clothes shot big guns and pretended to be dead all day for fun. Kisses, Xiao Fei.” All was well with the world, though, once it was discovered that there was an old-time ice-cream parlor in town; within moments, they fell upon it like naked-headed carrion raptors onto a putrid water-buffalo.

While walking towards a small apothecary named “Butt Drugs” – no, I am not making that up – I managed to step on a small baby bird that had fallen from its nest. I only knew something had happened once I heard the shrill death-cheep; when I looked back, there it was, still and quite deceased. I’d like to think that, since it was frying on the four-hundred degree sidewalk in its own broth, I’d euthanized it, but let’s call a spade a spade: I’m a ruthless slaughterer of the innocent, apparently. The ghastliest thing about it was that something made the offending shoe squeak the whole rest of the day anytime I put any weight on it; like the Tell-Tale Heart, I was doomed to hear that bird and rue my own inattention for all eternity. As I’d mentioned in one of my previous ‘blogs, my first memory as a child is of coming upon a baby bird who’d fallen out of the nest to cook on hot pavement; clearly, this is karmic retribution for all of the nuns I’ve helped to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It was a good day, truth be told. The countryside of southern Indiana is spectacular, with verdant, rolling hills alternating with the lush fecundity of deciduous forests and the rustling expanses of corn. The internationals all survived, though some will n’er forget the day they went to the Town that Time Forgot when they tell eerie stories to their children while they tuck them into a humid Taipei night. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will trust me more when they come into the office for immigration advice, I having delivered him or her safely home from a cave. Well, until I have to squirt warm “water” in their face with the Bottle of Divine Intervention.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic

Once again, I suckle at the 'blog's nourishing teat.

Ok, eww.

Once, while I was in the local mall (hell, the only mall) here in the Republic, I sat down with a lardy treat from Auntie Annie's Pretzels and Liposuction Hut and began people-watching, which essentially for me means "making up people's lives in my head to amuse myself." As I was devouring said treat, a small child walked up to his mother, who then sat at one of the little tables in the plaza. He reached up under her doubleknit and grabbed her breast, and then, as I sat there aghast, half of a piece of partially masticated pretzel hanging from my unhinged jaw, he unhooked her bra and fell hungrily on her ghastly pale, awaiting teat. For ten minutes he suckled and then, tenderly, rehooked her bra and smoothed her sweater down over her (noticeably smaller) breast, and then ran to rejoin his nasty, candy-sticky friends. The whole time this was happening I found myself unable to tear my gaze away from it, as though I was watching a Nigerian stoning. The mother read a copy of People Magazine the whole time and seemed utterly unruffled by the trauma that was being inflicted upon casual onlookers. There, in public, a gigantic white human breast being suckled upon by a voracious SEVEN YEAR OLD.

Now I'll get letters on this from all of you out there who feel that "children know when they're ready" and that "this sort of thing cements a bond" and "how is that different than if an infant was suckling?" Well, I'll tell you what. If the kid can ASK FOR A DRINK OF LIQUID HOT HUMAN MILK FROM YOUR BREAST, it's time for him or her to be eating solid foods. I shudder to think of all the tiny Norman Bates-types who are being spawned at this very moment. I can hear it now, as one of them walks away from being sentenced to death for murdering eighteen flight attendants and gnawing the flesh off their skulls: "My mommy let me drink from her 'til I was fifteen. She's so soft."

*sound of whiskey being chugged directly from the spout*

My new position begins on the 18th, a precious week and change from now. I am currently resisting the urge to "nest" in my new office, because a) I haven't actually transitioned yet from the Front Desk and b) I want my coworkers to respect me for as long as possible before they see my decoration style, which could most aptly be described as "ethnographic artifact Hiroshima." I've briefly toyed with the idea of bringing my framed poster of Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies in, but I hear the food in asylums is simply wretched. My nekkid-above-the-waist Indonesian mermaid might raise an eybrow or two, as would my terracotta Aztec mask with a human skull in its maw. Once the decision is made, though, you can be sure that I will provide those of you who still read this (despite what would seem to be my betrayal of your loyalty) with color photographs.

In a month and a week, I leave the sanctity of the Republic for my new boy-lair up in Greenwood. I'm already feeling a little wistful, even though I will be here in town five days a week in the heart of campus, delivering internationals to their makers. What gave me pause, though, is that in the span of ten minutes, Indiana went from being a place I live in to being my home. Sure, Maine will always be home, but now it will be a home I visit and not a place to ultimately return to when everything here is done. It's a little rough getting used to that idea, but in the end, this is what's best for me - and for the people in my life. I will miss it. Mostly, though, I will miss mocking ridiculous, pompous tourists who come to Maine to "rusticate" and who treat the "colorful locals" as if we have extra chromosomes and have been drinking undistilled airline fuel. Defecating on their things while they are out buying blueberry scented candles and lobster plush toys is a particular moment of Zen for me, each and every time I do it.

More 'blogs to follow, my lambs. I swear it on the festering forelock of Nicodemus. (Movie name?)

I remain, as ever,

Domonic