Act I: The First Batch

The first batch of submissions arrived in a burlap envelope at 7 PM on a rainy Tuesday in October, 1954. The editor — he never signed his name, though those who knew him called him Arthur — opened it at his kitchen table on the fourth floor of a walk-up on Avenue B.

Inside were ten question-and-answer pairs, typed on different kinds of paper. Some were on lined notebook paper. Some were on what looked like invoice forms. One was on the back of a postcard that showed Coney Island and had been mailed from Coney Island but never sent.

The questions were all the same. Nobody knew who asked it. The question was: What are you afraid of, on a Tuesday night, when you are alone in a room and the radiator is hissing?

The answers were ten different Americas.

Act II: The Echoes

The dishwasher from Greenwich Village wrote: "I'm afraid of the silence after the last customer leaves. When I'm washing the last glass and the kitchen is empty and I can hear my own breathing. That's when I know I'm alone in a room and I'm fifty years old and I came here with nothing and I'm leaving with nothing and the only thing I've built is clean plates."

The Harlem jazz singer wrote: "I'm afraid of forgetting the melody. I have a tune in my head — I've been working on it for two years — and if I forget it, it goes where melodies go when a black man dies with a song inside him. Into the ground. I'm afraid of being a graveyard for music."

The McCarthy informant wrote: "I'm afraid of my wife knowing what I told them. I told them three names. Three names and thirty families. I sit in this room and I hear my wife in the next room humming and I think: she would hate me if she knew. So I sit in this room and I tell lies to the empty air and the radiator hisses and I pretend it's her saying something I can't hear."

The French expatriate wrote: "I'm afraid of America becoming what it pretends to be. A country where everyone has a chance. That's the lie, you see. Not the corruption, not the fear. The promise. If America were just a corrupt, afraid country, I wouldn't mind. But it promises and that makes the corruption sacred."

Act III: The Dangerous Pamphlet

The third batch contained a question that made Arthur put down his coffee and stare at the wall for a long time.

Q: What would you do if someone asked you to name your neighbors?

There were only five answers this time. Four were safe. The fifth was from a seamstress in the West Village who wrote:

"I would refuse. I would close the door. I would go to my room and sew until my fingers bled. Because naming your neighbors is not information. It is betrayal. It is taking the thing that makes a street a street — the fact that you see each other every day and pretend not to — and turning it into a weapon. I have sewn dresses for women whose husbands named their neighbors. I have sewn funeral dresses for the neighbors who were named. I know the difference between a stitch and a snare."

Arthur published it anyway. He typeset the pamphlet himself in his basement, using a hand press his father had brought over from Italy in 1921. He printed two hundred copies. He folded them by hand. He put them in brown paper and twine.

Act IV: The Last Pamphlet

The final pamphlet of the series was the most beautiful and the most dangerous. It contained only three Q&As, but each answer was longer than all the answers in the first batch combined.

The first answer was from the Italian tailor on the Lower East Side. He wrote about building a country with hands that knew only thread and needle. He wrote about being called an illegal alien and responding: "I am illegal the way a rose is illegal. The law does not know my name."

The second answer was from a Cuban exile who had arrived six months before. He wrote about leaving Havana and the thing he missed most was not the music or the sea. It was the sound of people speaking Spanish without checking to see who was listening.

The third answer was from Arthur himself. He had never answered before. He had only collected. But this time he wrote:

"I am afraid of this pamphlet. I am afraid of the radiator. I am afraid of the Tuesday night when I sit at my table and open a burlap envelope and read ten strangers telling me what they fear. I am afraid because I realize that I am the one being named. Every answer names me. I am the person who asks. I am the person who listens. I am the person who prints and folds and hides. I am the one who thinks that if I can just collect enough fears, I will understand the country that makes them."

He printed one hundred copies of this pamphlet. He did not distribute them. He kept them in a box under his bed, next to his feet, where the damp from the basement floor would slowly ruin them.

Let them rot, he thought. Let them rot beautifully.