The festival is in the arts district, which means it is in the part of the city where they have finished converting things. The warehouses here used to hold furniture, grain, medical equipment — something like that, it doesn't matter — and now they hold events. I walked six blocks from the bus stop, the asphalt still dark from recent repaving, and the gallery storefronts had the sparse lighting that signals expense without naming it.
The Confluence venue is bigger than I imagined. That was the first thing. On the website it looked modest — a converted warehouse, sure, but modest, the kind of space where sixty people gather and someone reads from a chapbook and there are cheese cubes on a table. But in person the building's brick facade runs half the block, and the sign out front is white on black, clean sans-serif: CONFLUENCE LITERARY FESTIVAL / 12TH ANNUAL. Under that, smaller: ORACLE-9: A RETROSPECTIVE. Under that, smaller still, which I had to step closer to read: THE SUBJECT SPEAKS.
I stood on the sidewalk in my jacket and read those three lines in order. Then I went inside.
The jacket is the only suit jacket I own. Black, slightly large across the shoulders, bought secondhand at Goodwill for my cousin DeShawn's graduation three years ago. My mother had taken it without asking, had it pressed, and returned it Thursday evening on a hanger without comment — just set it on the chair by my door and left. The collar sat flat. The lining was smooth. I had put it on this morning and stood in front of my bathroom mirror for longer than was useful.
People were filing in through the main doors as I approached, and they had wine glasses already, which meant there was a reception in the lobby I had not been told about or had been told about and not absorbed. The crowd was dressed the way literary festival crowds dress — good wool, interesting scarves, the ease of people who buy expensive things and have stopped noticing. Someone laughed. A group of three held programs and gesticulated at one another in the comfortable shorthand of people who see each other at these things regularly, and I followed them in.
The lobby was Edison bulbs and exposed brick, which I had expected from the website but which still landed differently in person. The bulbs gave everything a warmth that was not actually warm — curated warmth, the kind that makes a photograph look intentional. Volunteers in black t-shirts moved through with wine and sparkling water on trays. At least a hundred people in the lobby and more coming in, the noise the pleasant ambient noise of an event going as planned, and on a table by the entrance they had stacked the programs.
I picked one up — it was a proper program, not a photocopy: card stock, matte finish, professionally printed. On the cover: ORACLE-9: A RETROSPECTIVE alongside the cover art from last spring's collection. I turned to the table of contents. Two afternoon panels, a keynote, a wine reception, the evening readings. I turned to page fourteen.
THE SUBJECT SPEAKS
Darnell James reads ORACLE-9's Poem #743
Below that, a bio. Two short paragraphs in the same typeface as everything else, formatted exactly like the other artist bios on the surrounding pages. It said I was a graphic design student at Parkwood Community College. It said I had been the subject of ORACLE-9's Poem #743, "the most-discussed poem of the past year." It said I was "making my reading debut at Confluence." It cited the Intercept article — Keisha's article — as though the article were an academic credential.
Below the bio, a headshot. Not a headshot I had provided. The Intercept photo — the one Keisha had taken on her phone in the booth at the diner where we'd first talked, where I had been mid-sentence about something and not thinking about how I looked. She had printed that photo next to the bio of the keynote speaker. It had been reproduced in the program at approximately two inches by two inches. My face in that moment, caught mid-thought, now on page fourteen between the intermission notes and the evening schedule.
Someone had laid this out in InDesign. Someone had chosen the typeface and approved the margins and sent the file to the printer and signed off on the proof. Someone had proofread my name. Someone had formatted me.
I folded the program and put it in my jacket pocket, next to the copy of the poem. Backstage was through a door marked STAFF ONLY that a volunteer held open for me after checking my name off a list on a clipboard.
The backstage of a converted warehouse is just the rest of the warehouse — the part they did not convert. The front half had the Edison bulbs and the matte program covers; the back half had fluorescent shop lights screwed into the original ceiling, exposed ductwork, a painted concrete floor where the paint had worn through in tracks from years of equipment being rolled across it. The smell was old paint and something else underneath — the composite smell of a building that had been many things and still carried all of them.
Margot Levine was there. I knew her from the emails and from a photo on the festival's website — mid-fifties, gray-streaked hair cut efficiently, a lanyard with the festival logo. In person she had the focused brightness of someone managing several things at once while appearing to manage only one thing. She came toward me as I came through the door, both hands extended slightly, not quite a handshake, not quite a gesture, something prepared. "Darnell, welcome. We're so glad you're here." Her lanyard swung as she moved and kept swinging after she stilled. "You'll have all the time you need — I'll do a brief introduction, and then the floor is completely yours. There's water up there. Is there anything you need right now?"
There was a volunteer nearby with a tray of water glasses. Someone else was checking something on a tablet. Behind Margot, in the middle distance, Okafor stood near the wall. I knew she was coming. She had emailed two days before: I'll be there tonight if that's alright — a question that wasn't quite a question. I had not answered. She was there anyway, which was probably the correct choice. She was wearing the same kind of academic-professional clothing she wore in the photos from her talks — dark blazer, a good blouse. She was looking at something to the left of where I stood. Her hands were together in front of her, fingertips pressed. She was entirely composed except for the fact that she was looking at the middle distance rather than at me, which was not composed at all. I looked at her for a moment. She did not look back.
Margot was still talking — something about the lighting cue, about how the house lights would go down, about her introduction, and I came back to what she was saying. "That all sounds fine," I told her. "Wonderful." She managed a smile. "Can I get you anything? Water, or—" "I'm good." She moved away to manage something else. The volunteer offered the tray and I took a glass of water I didn't drink. Okafor had shifted position slightly, turned maybe ten degrees, now looking at a different section of the middle distance.
I found a chair near the back wall and sat down. The audience murmur came through the wall as a kind of ambient pressure — not individual voices but the sound of many people at rest, the frequency of a crowd that has not yet become an audience. Chair legs on concrete. The vibration of it arrived in my feet through the floor.
I took the poem out of my pocket. It had been folded in quarters for four days and the paper was soft at the creases. I unfolded it and held it in my hands and looked at the first line, which I did not need to read to know. My hands were shaking. Not badly — the paper didn't rattle — but there was a fine tremor in both of them, a fact my body had decided independently of anything I'd decided. I was aware of it the way you're aware of a sound in another room: present, noted, not addressed.
Through the wall: three hundred people. The people who had been reading these poems for three years, who had sent letters to journal editors about the power of ORACLE-9's work, who had argued at dinner parties about machine creativity, who had voted it a Pushcart Prize. The people who had not known the names of the people the poems were about, because the poems did not name them, and who had not thought to wonder about that, because why would you wonder about a name that isn't there.
My mother was out there somewhere. I had not seen her come in — she had arrived before me, which she had texted me at eleven this morning, already here, and then nothing else, just those two words. I knew her posture in that room. I could not see her through the wall and I knew it anyway: the way she sits when she has made a decision to be present without being approving, back straight, purse on her lap, both hands over the clasp. She would not have a wine glass. She would not be talking to the people beside her. She would be sitting in that room the way she has always moved through rooms where she was outnumbered — with precision and without apology, carrying something she earned.
Marcus was in there too. He had texted at 5:47 PM: here. Just that. He would be near the back, I thought. Near an exit. He has been near exits since ORACLE-9 wrote about his hands doing something his hands had not done, and a school district had decided to take a careful look at his employment situation, and then decided to take a permanent look. Twelve years in a classroom. He finds the exit in every room now. He told me that. Actors had stood at the podium where I was about to stand — that was in the original announcement, prominent actors reading ORACLE-9's poems aloud, giving voice to the machine's output. They had stood there and been applauded. They had inhabited the poems as performances, which is what you do with a text — you give it your voice, you step into it.
I am not an actor. The poem is not a text for me to inhabit.
I am the thing the poem was about. I am what got rendered into twenty-four lines. I am the data that turned into a probability that turned into a narrative that turned into a listing on page fourteen of the program between the intermission notes and the evening schedule. The audience murmur shifted slightly through the wall — more settled now, the sound of people finding their chairs. I folded the poem back along its creases and put it in my breast pocket. I drank the water I had not wanted. The glass was cold in my hands, which was useful.
The house lights dimmed all at once, which you could feel as a shift in the ambient light even backstage — the quality of the light in the corridor outside changed, went from general illumination to something more focused. Through the wall the crowd noise dropped and then went quiet in a way that is different from quiet, the quiet of three hundred people choosing to be silent together. Margot came back through the backstage, calm in a different way now — not the managed calm of handling logistics but the performed calm of someone about to step in front of an audience, her lanyard tucked inside her blazer. "I'm going on in sixty seconds," she said. "After I introduce you, take whatever time you need. No rush." She looked at me for a moment, and her face held something between professional pride and a recognition that whatever was about to happen had exceeded the frame she'd built for it. "Thank you for doing this," she said, and went through the door.
I stood up. My legs were steady, which I noted. Through the wall I could hear Margot's voice, amplified, the clarion quality of a microphone bringing a voice into a room: Good evening, and welcome to the twelfth annual Confluence Literary Festival. The introduction she'd been saying versions of for twelve years, calibrated and easy. The audience settled into it. I could hear the rhythm of it without hearing the words, and then the words arrived: Tonight we have something unprecedented. The sound of it. The way those words — unprecedented — both described and did not describe what was about to happen. A word from the institutional vocabulary, a word that means this has not been managed before, a word that also means we are managing it now.
I moved to the door. Through the narrow gap I could see the stage — the podium in its cone of light, the microphone stand adjusted for my height, the lectern wood pale and solid. The audience was in shadow. Three hundred people who had paid for their tickets and their wine and who were waiting now, in the dark, to see what came next. Then: please welcome Darnell James. Applause. Three hundred pairs of hands, and I noticed, in a way I had not anticipated, that the applause was cautious and genuine in equal parts, not quite knowing what it was applauding, not quite knowing what I was — whether I was a guest or an exhibit, whether this was a reading or a reckoning, whether they were supposed to feel moved or implicated or both. I pushed open the door.
The stage light hit. I had not been on a stage before, not like this. The light was not warm — not Edison warm, not the curated warmth of the lobby. It was cold and direct, the kind of light that doesn't flatter, the kind designed to illuminate rather than to imply. It caught the pale wood of the podium and held it. Everything beyond the light was shadow, three hundred people in the dark. I walked toward the podium, and the walk took longer than it should have — or it did not take longer, it took the time it took, but each step had a weight to it that I had not expected, each footfall on the stage floor landing with its own small specific sound. My dress shoes on the boards. The sound of that. I could hear my own approach. The audience was silent in the way that three hundred people are silent when they are paying attention to a single sound, and the sound was me walking toward the podium under the cold light, my jacket across my shoulders the way my mother had pressed it, the printed poem in my breast pocket over my chest.
The podium was closer now, and I had imagined this walk taking nothing — the crossing of a distance, just walking across a stage the way you walk across a parking lot. I had not imagined this weight. I had not imagined how visible the podium would be under the light, how structural, how permanent-looking — the kind of object that has been in many rooms and will go on being in many more, into which many people have poured something true or something practiced or something they could not distinguish between. My hands were still. The tremor had stopped somewhere between the backstage door and the middle of the stage. Maybe the light did that. Maybe it was something else. I put my hands on the edges of the podium and looked out into the dark room where three hundred people were waiting, the wood solid under my palms.
I reached into my pocket.