Jamestown

  “D’you do it?”

  “Yeah, I came.”

  “I’m coming home right now. Save some fridge for me.”

  “Is the coup off?”

  “Of course the coup is off, everyone’s got electricity. Plus Martin’s giving away gadgets down at City Hall.”

  “D’you get anything?”

  “A coffeemaker and a microwave. Guess where I am.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The West Side Highway, ten minutes from home. Guess what kind of transportation I’m in.”

  “A car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ours?”

  “Mine.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t know. You know what else I got?”

  “What?”

  “Food.”

  “So?”

  “No I mean food food, real food.”

  “Plants?”

  “And animals. Ham, I’ve got sliced ham, and not your fake sliced ham. You know where we can put the ham?”

  “In the fridge!” we say together, as if coming.

  “I’ll be home in nine minutes,” he says, and squawks off. Squawkneekwa. Wonder where the filaments of her former self are now. Maybe in my eye, or in that ham. No, I know where they are. They’re in our newfound electricity that suddenly runs our fridge. Think of all the energy, total number of joules outputted by a vivacious young female of the species over the course of an unremarkable and foreshortened life: we sucked it all up in a tube, and now it’s gonna keep our ham sandwich cold, and will continue to when we’re gone from the Earth. And when the Earth itself is gone, on will go the fridge I now stand before in awe, I’d like to think. Its rectilinear form floats on through the black and airless cosmos, and inside, a lit cube of air, and inside that, a ham sandwich on a flat plastic shelf, kept at edible temperature for all eternity by the used-up life of a girl I may once have known.

  To the Reader

  The foregoing novel is an ahistorical fantasia on a real event, namely, the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in 1607, in what is now the state of Virginia. Following are some of the books I found to be of value in my research.

  Philip L. Barbour, editor. The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter: 1606-1609. 2 volumes. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

  Edward Wright Haile, editor. Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony: the First Decade: 1607-1617. Champlain, VA: Roundhouse Press, 1998.

  Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

  David A. Price. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf, 2003.

  Helen C. Rountree. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

  Helen C. Rountree and Randolph E. Turner. Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and their Predecessors. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

  John Smith. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith. Edited by Philip L. Barbour. 3 volumes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

  Thank You

  Ray Abernathy, Michele Araujo, Nick Balaban, Kate Brandt, Gabriel Brownstein, Linh Dinh, Leslie Falk, Bram Gunther, Anne Horowitz, Neil Levi, Gillian Linden, Michael London, PJ Mark, David McCormick, Denise Mitchell, Bruce Morrow, Richard Nash, Maggie Nelson, Tina Pohlman, Kristin Pulkkinen, Sylvie Rabineau, Ellen Salpeter, Sergio Santos, Carole Sharpe, Myron Sharpe, Susanna Sharpe, Amy Sillman, Adam Simon, Mike Smith, Jacqueline Steiner, “Bob” Sullivan, and my colleagues at Wesleyan University.

  I am also grateful to the New York Foundation for the Arts for a 2004 fellowship in fiction.

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