Free Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo

always the consolation prize? I’m sure that’s a cliché, but still, I hated all those curtains. I wanted to take a match to them. The hot, cottony smell of the old sewing machine with its worryingly frayed cord was for me the smell of her perpetual defeat. Indeed, once she and my father were divorced, she bought a house in Asbury Park and married a rotund potter named Ed. She hasn’t moved in twenty years. She never makes curtains anymore. The most exotic place she travels is Bermuda, in the spring. She is happy.
    It all seemed obvious to me then: that my father was continually laboring to open a seam in the world, to split it until it gave up a knowledge it didn’t know it had, while my incandescent mother, like a cursed princess in a fairy tale, was continually stitching the winding sheet of her own entrapment. An entrapment in motion, in picturesque places, but an entrapment nonetheless. It all seems less clear to me now, of course, less easy; they did love each other. Was he really so much freer, never turning down a commission, driven to every collapsing roof or unmoored staircase or solid, impenetrable façade, like a knight in a different fairy tale who is condemned to an endless series of nearly undoable tasks, cutting through stone, iron, concrete? He was as quixotic as he was heroic. Over the years of the big work, rotting warehouse by condemned house by roofless armory, he broke his own body down, crumpling a vertebra, a kneecap, a hip, losing the hearing in his right ear. The structures he cut open cut openings in him as well. Metal pins hold significant parts of him together these days. After the collapse of the marble wall at the half-built fascist gymnasium, he was in a coma for two weeks. We were told he might die. My mother, in the hospital in Rome, went and kneeled in the hospital chapel. When he woke up, she left him.
    Also, question to self: am I my father or my mother? Think twice before answering.

Prague
    H IGH ABOVE THE old town square, the skeleton on the Orloj strikes the hour of noon. The air is sweet. Zach and Alicia and I, along with a throng of tourists, watch the medieval skeleton with his little hammer. We have left the hotel in search of throat lozenges, socks, and a candle for Alicia’s room. All we’ve found at the big mall in the center of town are the socks and bad gelato in supernatural colors. Zach is spooning up neon-green gelato; Alicia’s is bright yellow, in a cone; mine is a swirl of blue and red that tastes sort of like almonds and sort of like bubble gum.
    “We should go to the Kafka house,” I say. “It’s not far. I think there’s a bus?”
    “When I was on tour with Beck in Russia,” says Zach, more to Alicia than to me, “I went to Stalin’s house in Georgia.”
    “What was it like?” Alicia delicately licks at her bright yellow cone.
    “Wooden.”
    “Huh.”
    “He was a fascist,” offers Zach, eating a spoonful of neon-green gelato.
    I don’t bother to correct him. We haven’t spoken about the fumble in Göteborg, and I know that if I acknowledge it in any way, I will lose. I carefully do not look at him, nor take note of the proximity of his elbow to Alicia’s. Shirtless boys with rats on their shoulders pass through the crowd in the square. On one corner, a white, beefy man with short gray hair kneels on the ground, his forehead touching the cobblestones, before a cap with coins in it. On the opposite corner, a man who looks not unlike him does the same thing, except that he is bent over a dog.
    “We’re playing with Frogs and Foxes tonight,” I say. “And this other big group, some kind of musical collective.”
    “That Frogs guy is such a douchebag,” says Zach.
    “I’m thirsty,” says Alicia.
    A Britney Spears song plays somewhere in the crowd; somewhere else, a pop song in French prances along. Prague is warm at midday, cool by dusk. We arrived yesterday, took a ride on a tourist boat down the Vltava, admired the swans, looked at the