Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

Here’s the truth: It will be impossible for my review of this book to be unbiased in any way because I am just pretty much madly in love with Karen Russell. She’s a magnificent writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time with her impressive first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like her debut novel, it too is wonderful, and you should certainly check it out if you have not yet had a chance to delve into this gem.

Swamplandia! follows Ava Bigtree and the Bigtree family as they fight to save their alligator theme park, located in the Florida Everglades, in the wake of Ava’s mother’s untimely death and the opening of a bigger, better completing amusement park on the mainland. The novel becomes a triple coming-of-age story for each of the three Bigtree siblings, Ava, Ossie, and Kiwi, and it is also a painful exploration into the complicated cycles of grief and identity in the aftermath of such a tragic familial loss.

Having lost my own mother a few months after my eleventh birthday, just two years younger than Swamplandia!’s brave protagonist, the hurt in this story was immensely relatable. But even without this connection, one of the most brilliant things about this book is the way in which is takes its incredibly foreign and unique characters and setting (alligator wrestling, possessions by ghosts, a theme park modeled after Hell, a mysterious bird man, a depression-era swamp dredge, the list could go on and on) and makes them immediately plausible, ordinary, and familiar.

Another striking feat of this novel is that each sibling experiences a deeply complex coming-of-age almost exclusively alone (either physically, emotionally, or both), and the quality of Russell’s writing is so good that the burden of this isolation is magnified onto the reader. I finished this book feeling more lonely that I’ve felt in a long time—but it was partly that well-known feeling of loneliness born out of turning the last page of a great novel and knowing that you’re saying goodbye to a wonderfully invented world you’ve inhabited almost without realizing it, as well as to each meaningful character contained within it.

Despite the (frankly tired, in my opinion) criticism Russell sometimes gets about her unnecessarily extensive vocabulary usage, particularly when writing in a child’s voice (I think you’re doing great as an author if this is what people are finding to complain about, by the way), I simply can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Read it? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin:  An infuriatingly big and brilliant novel.
2. Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White:  The Nobel winner you may never have heard of, White is Australia’s rightful heir to Virginia Woolf.
3. Remembering Babylon by David Malouf:  Another Australian, Malouf creates scenes in this novel that I can almost guarantee will never leave you.
4. Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt:  This, Grasshopper, is book length “essaying” in the true sense of the form.
5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion:  OK, so I could read her instructions on how to brush one’s teeth.  Still, the way in which she universalizes personal suffering could, perhaps should, summon the weary to form cults.
6. 

   Adam Levin - The Instructions

   Flap by Mark DeCarteret:  After Googling this poet, read his poems and try, if you can, to come up with a cogent argument as to why he is not more well-known.
7. Otherwise Elsewhere by David Rivard:  A poet who taps at the cold fragile glass of the lyric form, leaving behind a splayed beauty.
8. How To Live or A life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell:  A hymn to uncertainty.
9. The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young:  If you want some understanding of the aims of contemporary poetry, leave David Orr and Stephen Burt alone and let this slender little book lead into the necessary dangers.
10. Hard Ground photographs by Michael O’Brien, poems by Tom Waits:  A totally unrecognized “occupy” movement can be arranged simply from the notes of the once nameless and voiceless that grace the books final pages.

photo: Sigrid Estrada

In an intimate interview, the award-winning author discusses his process, growth, and the relationship between creation and mortality.

It wasn’t that she was sad, though she was. It was life’s awful brilliance – the eternity of every single thing, small and big. A flood brought misery with it, but the click of her heels when she walked was sublime. Families were executed in turbulent times, but the scent of home brought deliverance. She could, in a moment, be swept into melancholy, madness, or glee. At any moment, reality might be undone, and the true vision of her hysteria could overpower the night.

Julia cried when she was born, and she cried every day after. When a fly came into the room she cried, and she cried when the fly left. When there was no milk she cried; when there was more milk than she could drink she cried again. She cried at night and in the day, at dawn and at twilight. The doctors couldn’t say why.

Despite her parents’ concerns, Julia learned, grew and played like any little girl. Her mother thought the affliction might become worse with age, and that adulthood – with its setbacks – would bring a more terrible sickness. She stayed up nights and invented a time in which Julia’s heart was broken in some immature love affair, and Julia, unable to absorb the consequences, had to be hospitalized to prevent suicide.

She expressed her fears to Julia’s dad. Equally afraid, he only responded, “We will protect her.”

When she was five her mom and dad brought Julia a fish. Golden lived in a bowl with white pebbles on the bottom, and a green stone castle. Julia watched Golden float. Her eyes followed the easy roll of Golden’s fins. When Julia swam she kicked and struggled, but Golden was quiet in the water. Julia talked to her, and imagined Golden had the same problem with tears that she had. Only Golden’s tears were lost in the water, and became invisible.

“Don’t be sad,” Julia whispered.

When Golden stopped swimming they made a cake. Julia drew Golden’s portrait in the frosting. Julia cried, and her mom cried too, as she licked sugar from her thumb.

On her next birthday, Julia’s mom and dad took her to see a hot-air balloon. When the balloon lifted from the ground and into the sky above them, Julia hopped with excitement.

“There it goes,” her dad said.

Julia’s mom pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped Julia’s cheeks. Julia bit her lip and her weight shifted quickly from one foot to the other. The balloon drifted into the clouds and then a thousand more joined it. The pilots inside leaned out to her, each becoming ever smaller in the offing.

“Julia, come join us!” they shouted.

“I will!” Julia cried.

The pilots fired their burners and the balloons rose until they disappeared.

“You will what?” asked Julia’s dad.

Julia waved to the shrinking balloon.

They took a cross country train on family vacation. Julia’s mom pointed out the window to the mountains, cows, and crows. Julia touched the glass. There were more tears. They bought candy from a cart that passed through. Julia unwrapped a caramel and let it melt on her tongue until it dissolved completely.

Tragedy came in a rocky place where the trees were thick and green. The train left its tracks at a curve and slid down a long hill. It had been a quiet moment, just before nap time. Julia’s dad sat with his fingers intertwined and his eyes half-closed. Her mom read a magazine. Julia sat between them and kicked her legs up and down. Then the car tilted. Tree limbs shattered the windows. Leaves, dirt and stones violated the air. As the train twisted and turned over itself Julia’s tears floated in space around them. They splashed against a thin man’s suitcase and at the base of a grasping woman’s empty hand.

When the train stopped moving Julia lay between her parents and thought she was dead. Heaven seemed a strange place to her. Suitcases shifted and fell. Dust swirled in the sun.

For months afterward Julia lived in a hospital. During the day the nurses made her practice walking in the hall. She walked between parallel bars until her arms ached, or was strapped into a wheeled device that made her feel more machine than girl.

She was in bed one night when a meteor shower took place outside her window. The meteors were great fireballs that lit up the church steeple in the trees a mile away. Julia was so frightened she pulled the blanket over her head. She moaned and choked as quietly as she could. Her gown became damp with sweat, her legs trembled, and the muffled obliteration of everything she knew reached her from the unobserved distance.

When she woke in the morning the sky was clear. Instead of a field of ashes and fire the city stood the way it always had. Julia was terrified that she’d lost her mind; that she’d been misplaced in some endless delusion.

A nurse arrived holding a tray. She observed Julia’s bloodshot eyes and quivering lips.

“What’s wrong?” the nurse said.

“Are my parents alive?” asked Julia.

“What?”

The nurse gawked. Julia peered back. Her hair fell in stale black strands over her ears.

“You know they’re not,” said the nurse.

She placed the tray across Julia’s bed. It was runny eggs, juice, and toast.

Julia became convinced that she hadn’t invented the meteors, and was frustrated when the nurses wouldn’t believe her.

“It was real,” she screeched. She threw her pillow on the floor. “Real!”
A nurse put on the T.V. and pointed at the news.

“There’s nothing there!” she shouted. “Get your head out of the clouds!”

The nurse was a big woman with flabby arms. She lifted Julia like she was paper and put her on her feet.

“Now walk,” the nurse grunted.

Instead of walking, Julia went limp.

“Walk!” the nurse screamed. “Walk! Walk! Walk!”

Tears came. Julia couldn’t speak or move. She let her weight fall and the nurse dropped Julia on the tile. Then the nurse growled and stalked out of the room, her fat ankles struggling against her white sneakers. Her socks were pink with lace ruffles.

Julia lay very still for a long time.

When she could walk again Julia was taken to an orphanage in a large, wood house painted blue, with an iron filigree fence. Julia thought it looked haunted. She saw sorry spirits around every corner, and behind all the doors.

Julia was left in the front hall and the headmistress took her hand. The headmistress was a tall woman who walked with an angry limp. She had black eyes and spoke as if she’d been insulted at birth. As Julia was led upstairs a row of girls peered down on her from the second floor banister. They looked like dolls, or as if dolls had been made with them in mind.

Sometimes the girls went on field trips. At the aquarium Julia admired the starfish most. The other girls preferred the seahorses. A person in a scuba suit hung in the middle of a great tank and gave out pieces of pink flesh to the barracudas and sharks. The diver wore a mask but Julia could see his eyes were wide and excited. She watched; the other girls squealed, their faces to the glass, and the headmistress tapped her foot behind them.

At the petting zoo, on another day – at the first touch of a lamb’s tongue – Julia knelt on the ground – in the straw and dust – and she bawled, with her fingers curled into fists. The other girls stood far away and they whispered. The headmistress put her hand on Julia’s shoulder and shook her. It was no use.

“Is something wrong?” said an employee.

“Nothing at all,” the headmistress sighed. “Except this little girl who confuses crying with breathing. You’d think everything was a funeral.”

The employee, an old woman with thick glasses and breath like a candy cane, leaned over Julia.

“The lamb is just fine, dear,” she said. “The lamb is just fine.”

The clouds were pink and a warm, warm orange, in the shape of many things, and the sky beyond was cream.

When she was thirteen Julia took notice of an ancient woman who often passed by the orphanage. Her face resembled a ravaged skull, and her body was slight as a breeze. She wore long, drab gowns, even on the hottest days. Most notable was her head, which was bald and spotted with lonely islands of downy white hairs. The old woman’s gait was so proud, and her scalp so stunning, that Julia wept at the thought of her.

One morning Julia stood in the bathroom mirror and cut chunks of her hair away, until her own head was as bald as the old woman’s. She buried the hair she removed under a tree in the front yard of the orphanage.

“You’re never going to be adopted,” one of the girls said from the porch.

Julia wiped her tears and hissed. The girl ran inside. Julia showed her head to the woman as soon as she could. The woman opened her toothless gums and, for several minutes, laughed her approval.

The other girls in the orphanage wore brightly-colored dresses and had long, blonde hair. They had fine manners and sat up straight at the dinner table. In the evenings they tried on each other’s clothes and practiced kissing on their hands. They were adopted quickly, then new girls took their place, and the new girls were even prettier.

Julia did not want to be pretty. Her clothes were faded and mismatched. She gnawed her nails so they were uneven and raw, and refused to clean her ears. She licked her lips until they were chapped, then chewed them until they bled. Her eyebrows grew in a single line and she didn’t pluck them. At the dinner table she slouched.

Couples came to the orphanage and fawned over the girls, but when they came to Julia, crying, they didn’t know what to do. One would lean over her and ask what was wrong, and Julia would respond that nothing was wrong. The other would cross their arms and say, “You’ll never be adopted that way.”

Julia drew a collection of friendly houses. Inside each she sensed the remains of better days. The place felt like one she’d known, but she couldn’t complete it in her memory.

“What is that?” one of the girls sneered.

“Nothing,” she snapped.

Julia crumpled the page.

Julia didn’t think the life she drew was real, but then, sometimes the life she led didn’t seem real either. The colors were too vivid, and the people too strange. Events passed that seemed impossible, and sometimes she was the only one who saw them, and sometimes not.

She drew her mom and dad, and put the picture under her pillow next to a stamp with a yellow frog on it, and a plastic man with a top hat who seemed to have no purpose at all, and to belong nowhere.

The girls shared a room with two long rows of beds. The other girls decorated their beds with pink sheets and left fresh flowers on their bedside tables. Julia had no sheets at all, unless it was cold. Then she used one blanket, and it was brown.

During the night she was at the girls’ mercy. Julia kept her eyes closed tight, even when they surrounded the bed and tormented her. They pulled on her clothes, poked her stomach, jumped on her mattress, and smeared toothpaste on her face. They prodded and bit, spit in her ears, and when it was cold, they took her blanket.

She didn’t open her eyes, except once. A girl named Wendy leaned close and whispered, “You’re the saddest thing I ever saw.” Julia opened her eyes then. The girls were distorted and monstrous. It was so terrible that Julia closed her eyes again. The girls pealed. The game went on.

She took a walk one morning past the overflowed creek to the supermarket. She stood by the oranges and watched the boy at the cash register. He had dark skin and big eyes. His voice was soft as tissue. Her tears fell harder when she was near him, and she was embarrassed. She could see his back sway one way and then the other as he rang up old women’s cabbages and fish.

Julia sighed and took an orange, then she got in the boy’s line.

The boy twitched when he saw her. Julia eyed the candy. She put the orange in his hand.

“One orange,” he said.

Julia nodded and a tear came loose from her lashes.

“I think I’m going to the circus when it opens,” the boy said.

His nose was peeling. He and his friends swam in the creek on occasion, when no one else was around.

“Are you?”

Julia rolled her head, then shrugged and nodded.

“We could go together,” said the boy. The orange was still cradled in his palm. He handed it to her. “Take it.”

Julia held the orange in both hands.

The night of the circus, the girls wore their most colorful summer dresses and tied ribbon around their waists. The headmistress did the girls’ hair and put on their makeup. The bedroom was fogged with hairspray and powder.

No one attended to Julia, because she had no hair and she refused to wear makeup. She wore the only dress she owned – it was gray and black. Everyone else hated it, and the more they hated it, the more she wanted to wear it.

“Where did you get that thing?” the headmistress asked.

Julia couldn’t remember, so she made something up.

“My mom made it,” she said.

“That’s not true,” the headmistress said. “Your mother died long before you were big enough to wear it. Where did it really come from?”

Julia ignored her. She convinced herself that the dress had been sewn by her mother, and it became her most prized possession.

When the clock struck seven she sat in the front room and waited. The other girls’ dates came all at once. They were clean boys with blue eyes and stupid grins. The girls skipped down the stairs and were led out of the house on the arms of their immaculate escorts.

Julia waited patiently. It became late. The headmistress clucked her tongue and went to bed.

“It’s because of your hair!” she called from upstairs.

It was much later when the girls came home. Their faces glistened with sweat and first kisses. Wendy threw herself in the sofa across from Julia. She blew hair out of her face.

“We saw your boy tonight,” she smiled. “The one from the supermarket.”

Julia started. Wendy puckered her lips and extended her arms, then played her fingers on the cushions of the couch.

“He is a beautiful kisser, you know,” she smiled. “He invited me to go swimming with him.”

Julia’s mouth fell open in a great frown, her lips curled and her teeth bared. Wendy crossed her legs.

“I think I just might,” she whispered.

The girls tittered from the hall.

“Quiet down there!” came the headmistress’ voice, accompanied by the bang of her fist on the wall.

Julia leapt from her chair, but before she could put her hands on Wendy, the other girls were on top of her. They giggled and held her down. Julia sobbed and choked on their perfume and the cherry scent of their lip gloss, until she was too exhausted to move. The girls rushed upstairs, each one of them still sniffling with delight, until the door closed overhead.

Julia lay on the rug. The circus was long over. She went to the front porch and looked for the boy. A dog walked into the street, stopped to sniff a manhole cover, and continued on.

The rain came. Instead of going inside Julia walked to the bus stop. The bus arrived shortly after. The only other person on board was asleep in the back row.

“Something wrong?” the driver said.

Julia shook her head. She dropped her quarters in the slot then found a seat.

The driver shifted and the bus moved. The shudder of the bus was a comfort. The driver and the sleeping man in the back seat felt like friends to her. Julia closed her eyes. When she opened them a different man was asleep in the back row. Julia rubbed her eyes as the bus came to a stop on the edge of a vast lot. A tower at the lot’s center illuminated two great swaying hulks. Their backs glistened with water and massive chains were attached to their legs. Their trunks were listless and their mouths hung open. The elephants stood one behind the other. They lifted and dropped their ears. Julia could see tents and trailers. The shapes of people moved between them.

She left the bus and passed her way forward through the rain. She looked in the windows of the trailers. One held a band of singing gypsies. A burly man with a beard sat on top of a dresser with an accordion. A curvy woman with red lipstick was at a table with her legs crossed. There were two children at her feet. The woman sang.

Julia moved on. Another trailer held the fat lady. The next contained the bearded woman and the tattooed man. Finally Julia came to the trailer of a dark-haired woman at a tremendous desk. Julia knocked on the door. The rain seemed to fall harder. The woman appeared in a red and black tuxedo. She introduced herself as Donna, the owner of the circus, and invited Julia in. Julia stood in the warm trailer on a plush red rug. Water dripped into its fibers. Julia held her arms out and evaluated the ruins of the dress her mother had made.

“You’re sure a mess, aren’t you?” said the woman.

Julia’s features came undone and she fell on her knees and sobbed. Her hands covered her face and shook. Snot poured from her nostrils and into her mouth. After her surprise passed, the woman led Julia to a hammock by a window and helped her lay down. Outside the gypsy music played, the moon was clear between the rain clouds, and a moth clung to the window screen.

Days went by and Julia didn’t stop crying. Jugglers and clowns came and went. A pony was brought in on a leash. Dwarves did somersaults outside the window. Nothing worked. The tears didn’t end.

At a loss, Donna put Julia on the midway. A tiger had died a few weeks earlier. Donna gave Julia a red-sequined ballerina costume and put her on a stool in the tiger’s cage.

Visitors looked at her, moaned with sympathy, then moved on. Women who seemed very kind – some of whom reminded Julia of her mother – bent over their children’s heads in long dresses that hugged their rear ends, pointed, shook their heads, and led the children away. One evening Julia thought she saw the boy from the supermarket, near the back, peering over the shoulder of a man in overalls. She caught the boy’s eyes and he stared back, eyebrows raised. Then her vision blurred and she dropped her head. When she looked again he was gone.

A red and white sign was painted and placed above her. It said, “THE AMAZING CRYING GIRL!”

Julia no longer left her cage. She took her meals there, and did her private business in a corner, behind a black curtain. She sat on the stool all day and wept, and at night she slept sitting up. She wobbled but kept her balance, and salty tears slipped from her closed eyelids to the sawdust at her feet.

A member of the cleaning crew swept around her cage every morning. He was a dangerously lean man of seventy, who, due to cancer, whispered when he talked. One morning he put his face between the bars of Julia’s cage. Julia lifted her eyes to his.

“Why do you cry?” he asked, so softly Julia almost misunderstood him.

“Isn’t there every reason to cry?” she said.

The man didn’t respond. He looked on a moment longer into Julia’s cage. It was just long enough for Julia to catch the swimming moistness of the man’s eyes. She almost reached out to him. She wanted to ask if he missed the world they used to live in, where things were what they were supposed to be; if his escape was the same as hers; if he was who he said he was. She almost asked him if he knew where she was from, and if she could go back. Instead she stared, and after a moment the man shuffled away, his overalls faded and greasy with dirt, and Julia soon forgot him.

The circus traveled in a train painted with the faces of its most popular clowns. Trapeze artists in elegant dives flew across the churning body of the locomotive as it traveled over bridges and hills. Julia was transported in the same car with the dogs and ponies. Her life seemed now an unalterable night.

Her car shook. The train had been moving for days, and Julia was lost in thought and dream, with no recollection of time or place. The hot afternoons on the midway were one continuous stink of hotdogs and cotton candy; a blur of leering red faces and pitying looks. She floated in her body. The car bumped and screeched. The circus, she’d learned, was beautiful and ugly. Its delights were reserved for children. Its terrible mechanisms were in hiding below. Julia didn’t look for beauty where she was. It had been too long since anything touched her.

The train entered a soft curve, then all seemed still before a roar and a force lifted Julia and her cage free. She was tossed into a familiar space. She felt her tears splash across an ankle and back into her eyes as she was upended into the darkness. There was a horrible sound of metal twisting, bones breaking, screams, cries, then, a deep silence.

Julia lay on her side, afraid to move. She heard nothing. After a long time she stood, and found her cage had been battered open. She limped to a small spot of light in the dark, and pulled the door of the car free.

The country had been decimated. A layer of ash muted the miles all around. Trees hung low with soot, and the train was charred to black.

“Was it a bomb?” she said to no one.

There was no life. The air moved with floating powder, and soon Julia’s red-sequined tutu was as gray as the sky.

She stepped from the train and searched from car to ravaged car for survivors. There were only burned and mummified corpses that looked as if they’d been left embalmed some centuries before. Cars had been torn open, and human and animal bodies lay in the ash like distorted statues in a blanket of snow.

Just inside the muttering wind there was a sound of shuffling. It came from the car where her cage had been. Julia ran to the opened door and peered in. There a pink pony named Perfect was getting to her feet, and a mongrel dog named George was shaking his body at her side.

Julia put her arms out and helped the pony and the dog to the ground. Perfect searched the ash for food and George walked in a circle before resting on his haunches. A minor dust cloud rose around him.

Tears streamed down Julia’s face. She grinned and tears fell on her tongue.

“I guess we better find food,” she laughed. “This is the way. Come with me.”

Perfect and George followed her from the train and onto a path past a line of trees and a decaying row of friendly houses. Julia knew them. She’d learned to ride a bicycle in front of one; at the next she’d skinned her knee. Farther on was someplace better; someplace thrilling. A purple dragonfly buzzed across the path and disappeared into the keening ruins of the earth. George yipped. Julia skipped ahead.

1-12-2011, 8:42 pm—Deceased brought in from snow. After signing transfer form, delivering officer, Deputy Desmond Fogle [#347], makes crass remark about deceased’s ‘knockers’ before surrendering Oklahoma state license with the name ‘Heidi Gordon’ printed beside an approximate picture of the deceased. I examine picture, and for a fleeting moment believe it might be a practical joke. I scrutinize Deputy Fogle’s features; they are bent towards the clipboard in my hand. He yawns impatiently, waiting for me to sign off so that he can take a nap on the side of the highway somewhere. I scribble my name in appropriate blank and stand poised above her while he exits. Have not looked closely at the body until now, but the resemblance is stunning. Her skin is blue and her features mute. It is not possible for her to be the same person, but that fact does not interest me. I close my eyes, forget what I know—try to see how far I can stretch the suspension of disbelief.

*

“No more reading,” I remember saying.
“Lots more reading,” she responded. I lay on her chest in her room, beneath a canopy of shade created by her book. We both had an organic chemistry test in the morning, although, unlike me, she was determined to study. I readjusted my body, rested my fingers against the parts of her I knew were ticklish, hoping to distract her without her realizing. No use. I continued to lay with my ear pressed against her chest, listening for every fourth heartbeat. I kept time with my finger against her breast, lightly tapping until I came to the fourth beat, which I held in the air, hovering above her nipple until the rhythm resumed.

“Hey!” she said, suddenly realizing what I was doing.

“Weirdo.”

“I’m not a weirdo.” She closed the book and sat up, shifting so that now she was on top
of me. “What do you need, little boy? Are you looking for attention?”

I nodded.

“Do you feel neglected?”

I nodded again.

“Well, come here, little darling, and let mommy make it all better.”

I grabbed her by the waist and rolled her over so that her back pressed firmly against the carpet, kissed her and pressed with my tongue against her teeth.

“Little boy!” she said with mock astonishment. “What on earth will the neighbors think?”

“Knock it off,” I said, and kissed her again. This time she softened and relaxed into it, her body arching against the floor as I fumbled with her pants’ button. We messed around, and afterwards I laid on top of her again, head against her chest, listening to the quickened rhythm of her heart and counting once more the missed beats.

“What does it feel like when your heart skips a beat?” I asked.

“How should I know?”

“It’s your heart.”

My eyes focused on a freckle on the inside of her left breast, watching it blur and regain focus as I drifted in and out of thought.

“I’m surprised it doesn’t make you feel anxious.”

“What would I be anxious about?”

“Complications.”

I had not meant to say it—that was my anxiety, not hers—but now that it was out, I continued: “Your heart sets the rhythm for the rest of your body. If that rhythm isn’t stable, your body’s like a band with a fucked up drummer. Like free jazz or something.”

“I like free jazz,” she smiled. “And besides, my rhythm is stable, it’s just different. More interesting, you could say.”

I listened for the fourth beat and felt how, as it passed, my entire body seemed suspended, as though my own heart were waiting for hers to start beating again.

“And besides, isn’t it all just perspective anyway? What if it isn’t a lapse, but a pause—a four p.m. siesta before the factory doors open again and everything starts anew, refreshed?”

“However you want to look at it.”

“I think that you could use a siesta.” She smiled and crawled on top of me, positioned her ear against my sternum and held her hand over my stomach, began slapping it rapidly once she’d dialed into my heartbeat. I tried to inhale, to breathe deeply and force my heart rate to slow, but her fingers continued to slap my belly at the same blinding pace, until the skin there began to flush.

“See there?” I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her up onto my chest. “Totally dependable. Never misses a beat.”

She smirked.

1-12-2011, 11:16 pm—Wife calls to ask when I will be home. Late night, I tell her, which is a kind of code the other has learned not to question. I circle the table. ‘Heidi’ lays upon it, still dead. I stare at her from different angles. Karen died years ago, but my mind cannot stop postulating the improbable. I imagine one scenario after another; far-fetched sequences of events to justify how the girl I once knew might have ended up on the table in front of me. As if it mattered. A corpse is a corpse… but even as I think it, I know it is not true. Late night. Sleep has been scarce. Deputy Fogle [#347] has advised that I practice thinking about nothing. Is this the same as not thinking? Have tested this method on several occasions now, lying in bed next to well-meaning wife, thinking about not-thinking, about the color black; thinking about the globules of color radiating on the inside of my eyelids, and about many things in a fevered, stream-of-conscious fashion, trying to convince myself that I already am dreaming. The result is a waking nightmare. Method is faulty. Late night. Even the freckle on the inside of her breast is where it should be, although the breasts themselves have swollen over the years. My breath catches and I look away. It can be awkward, surrounded by naked bodies. One feels there is some haunted part of them still capable of objecting. I look at her again and decide that this one, at least, does not mind.

*

By the time I received my first graduate school acceptance, Karen had already been accepted to four different schools, including Johns Hopkins’s medical program: her first choice. I remember celebrating with her the night she found out. I also had applied to Johns Hopkins, but hadn’t heard anything as of yet. “I think acceptances are rolling,” she said. “I’m sure yours is on its way.”

All that followed were rejections, except for one, and that wasn’t even to a medical program, but to the one law school I applied to out in Colorado. Not sure what made me apply. A change of pace, maybe? Deep down I think I knew I wasn’t cut out for medicine, but Karen was, and I believed I was pretty cut out for her.

I did not tell Karen about my acceptance, but continued to hold out hope for the final school on my list: The Annapolis School of Medicine. Annapolis, after all, was only a stone’s throw away from Johns Hopkins. I could see her on the weekends. Possibly during the week, as long as I promised not to keep her up too late—a promise I fully intended not to keep. When the rejection finally came, I hardly looked at it before crumpling it up and tossing it in the wastebasket. I did not tell Karen, but continued to check the mail as usual, cursing whenever I was with her and found it empty.

“Don’t worry,” she would reassure me constantly. “Any day now.”

Meanwhile, she commenced preparations for her own impending departure. We were still five weeks away from graduation, but she had a trip scheduled to tour the campus, meet her professors, all of that stuff.

“Maybe I should come too,” I said, the two of us laying together on the eve of her departure. “Annapolis isn’t that far away. I should probably check it out just in case I do get in.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t gotten your offer yet. You should call them, say you’ve got other acceptances pending or something. This is ridiculous.”

“Yeah. Ridiculous. So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About me coming with you.”

“Oh. Well, of course I’d love for you to come… Do you think you could get a flight this late? Obviously you could stay in the hotel with me, but how would you get back and forth to Annapolis? You’d need a rental car or something…”

“Forget about it,” I sighed, and rolled over onto my back. “I probably won’t get in anyway.”

“Don’t say that! Of course you’ll get in.”

“Right. Of course. But what if I don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“Us. What will we do if I don’t get accepted to the program in Annapolis?”

Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling. I couldn’t tell whether it was a thing she’d not considered, or one she’d considered exhaustively. I knew the answer: we were too young. Too young to keep up the long distance, and too young for me to follow after her… unless, of course, I could find some personal reason that would not put any pressure on her, or me.

Karen did not answer the question. Instead, she chided me for being so negative. I apologized by going down on her, then drew up and pushed our two bodies together. She loved the way my face smelled after I went down on her. We fucked and came and, even after I was finished, my hand slipped beneath the covers and pressed between her thighs. There was a moment of questioning in her eyes, but only a moment. I don’t know how many times I made her come before she finally forced my hand away, but I know it was not enough.

Afterwards, I laid with my head on her chest, listening once again for the fourth beat: that pause, my sanctuary. Her body was relaxed, drifting in and out of half-sleep the way one does sometimes after sex. My eyes remained fixed on the two suitcases standing side by side in the corner, and I clung to her, drinking her in as gently as possible so that she would not notice. It was as if I could not get close enough. Until every fourth beat, that is, when everything felt suspended and I experienced the temporary relief of stasis. It always passed though, too soon. No matter how I clung to her, her beating heart always resumed.

1-13-2011, 12:53 am—The blue has faded from deceased’s skin, resuming a healthy corpse-like paleness. She’s still cold to the touch though. I was sitting next to her on the steel table, savoring the buzz from a nicotine patch, when my hand pressed against the bare skin of her shoulder. Unsure, still, whether gesture was intended or accidental. I was surprised at how the cold actually transmitted between us, like a current between two wires, mingling with the nicotine and chilling the base of my spine, causing my testicles to draw up into my body. The air feels cold in my lungs. The quality of light in the room has shifted, now tinged with something that makes it appear darker while, at the same time, more crisp. World feels diminished, compressed to the size of this room, this table, the distance between our cold, increasingly mutual bodies.

*

The problem with an arrhythmia is that it is difficult to distinguish from a long QT interval—i.e. the time it takes for electrical impulses in the heart to recharge between beats. Unlike an arrhythmia, a long QT interval may appear stable, without actually being so. There is always the threat of the charge not picking back up, or, just as bad, picking up a fraction of a second too late. I’m not sure exactly when it happened to Karen, although I’m told that she was sleeping. For a long time afterwards I would try to simulate the rhythm myself, drumming it on my chest at night and sustaining every fourth beat, like counting sheep, until eventually I would drift off and the rhythm would cease altogether.

I accepted the University of Colorado’s offer and attended law school there, which turned out to be a much better fit than medicine. Later on, I combined interests by studying forensic law, and after several years, put together a campaign for county coroner. It was a long shot: the incumbent I was running against had been coroner for the past five years, was a physician of some standing before that, and unfortunately, his years in office had passed as uneventfully as a ship in the night, which is all anybody wants from a coroner.

Except that’s not entirely true.

During our one public hearing—which took place on a winter night in February and was attended by a grand total of six people, including us candidates—I asked him about his relationship with the bodies in his care.

“Relationship?” he repeated, drawing out each of the vowels sardonically.

“Yes, relationship. Are you not often called upon to spend late, quiet hours in the morgue? And are you not frequently alone there, surrounded by any number of deceased bodies, some of them female, and some of them admittedly attractive?”

His face went red immediately, and he looked to the moderator for help. Neither one of them seemed to know quite what to say.

“You can’t be serious,” he finally sputtered. “What is wrong with you, to even consider asking me a question like that?”

I would not answer.

Instead, I continued, addressing the rest of the room, which, besides the moderator, consisted of two janitors and a junior reporter from the local news network. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s just that I’m unsettled by your unwillingness to even consider the question. Do you honestly expect us to believe that, in the five years you have served as coroner for this great county, with deceased persons circulating through your office on a regular basis, many of whom are both young and attractive—not to mention nude—that the thought, no matter how brief, of fucking them has not flittered across your mind?”

“Young man, you are insane.”

“Not once?”

The hearing ended with him storming out of the hall, still not having answered what, to me, and evidently to the other citizens of Arapahoe County, was a perfectly legitimate question. Weeks later, after I had been elected the new Arapahoe County Coroner, and the video of the hearing had gone viral, I met again with the junior reporter who had been there at the hearing, and who had since received a promotion. She joked with me, congratulated me on my election and the unusual tactics I’d used to secure it, but eventually she could not help steering the conversation back to that night, turning the question around on me. She worked hard to suppress her laughter as she asked: “Would you, Mr. Harper, ever consider amorous conduct with one of the deceased trusted to your care?”

Obviously, after what had happened, there was only one answer I could give. She smiled, and I returned her warmth with ease. “Consider?” I repeated, and rolled my eyes for a moment before answering: “Well sure, Nathalie. I suppose in certain unforeseen circumstances the thought would at least occur to me.” We both laughed and shook hands, and she congratulated me once more on my victory.

1-13-2011, 1:03 am—I rest the tips of my fingers against the deceased’s eyelids, feel the gently sloping astigmatism pressing against the other side. Her mouth, the skin of her neck, her shoulders: all are relaxed, lacking any tension. I bend my head to her breasts and locate the freckle on the left—like a hole in ice—turn my head so that my ear rests above her sternum. My fingers hover, poised above her breast and waiting; waiting for the rhythm to resume, waiting for the night to come swirling back into focus. We remain like that, poised but not moving, the silence spreading around our increasingly mutual bodies.

In an intimate discussion, the bestselling author talks about her writing, overcoming a psychologically abusive childhood, and her dances on the dark side.

Kathryn Harrison

TRANSCRIBED BY DYLAN BROCK

Ben Evans: I’d like to begin with a quote of yours from an interview you did a few years back: “In fiction and in non-fiction, I’m someone who really wants to vivisect myself, to really just cut it open and to show…” Given that philosophy, how do you as a writer, as someone who I have to believe is an intensely passionate person, go about establishing the right balance of gut-shot honesty and artfulness in your work?

Kathryn Harrison: Well, I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think there are ways of being artfully honest and artfully dishonest. I’m not sure it’s an either/or. Do you see what I mean?

BE: Oh, that’s what I’m saying – embracing that philosophy of cutting yourself open and wanting to make yourself visible on the page, especially in your memoirs.

KH: I think I see. How do I do it. Is that what you’re saying?

BE: Yes.

KH: I’m sorry. I was making it more complicated than it was. I think it actually provides a level of relief to establish a clinical perspective on oneself, if you know what I mean. I suppose if you tried to come up with an analytical term, it would be that the narrator is the observing ego in a way, and it just allows you… I think writing is a discipline that allows you, or creates for you, a distance between you the observer and you the observed, and that it’s an interesting, and useful, and essential difference.

BE: Do you think you lose an edge, I guess, an advantage as a storyteller, this now concerning your fiction, when you expose so much of yourself and your history in memoir? Is some of the mystery behind you as an author gone?

KH: (laughs) I don’t know, I might be the wrong person to ask about the mystery of me… I think that there’s a temptation to read a book like The Kiss, and because it is so intimate and naked a revelation of part of my life, there’s the tendency for people to believe that they know me through and through, that I’ve exposed my whole self, but that actually is not true. Those were four years out of fifty, and one particular relationship, one particular lens through which to see my family and myself, and, you know, there’s a lot more, but people forget that.

BE: In that respect you’re kind of like, having written The Kiss, like Reggie Jackson – he had this great career but everybody remembers him for the World Series and the three home-runs.

KH: Right. (laughs) That’s not a terrible thing to be.

BE: No. It’s great, because you knocked it out of the park, right?

KH: Well, thank you. That’s very generous.

BE: Do you ever feel pigeonholed as a writer, or constricted, because you had such success with that
book, when entering into different projects?

KH: No. I think actually the book was the opposite for me. It was freeing in a way, because the three books that were published before had been well-reviewed, and I had been a meticulous literary novelist… sort of like a goodie-two-shoes A-student, and I think it’s very easy, maybe even – no, I don’t know that it has anything to do with gender – it’s easy to get trapped in the box of, oh, I did this and it was good, I did this and it was good, and say, “What’s the next thing I’m going to do that’s going to be really good?” and that’s not the way to go at it. In this case I wrote a book to which people had wild, intense responses, both negative and positive, that I heard and had to deal with such vitriol that it was kind of like an inoculation. I felt like, “Wow, I don’t have to be careful anymore. Nobody can say anything more shocking or worse than they’ve said so far, so I can really do anything.” That just opens up the world of possibility for a writer, an artist of any kind.

BE: It’s really interesting. When I began these interviews almost three years ago, I’d ask everyone, every author or poet I interviewed, “What role does mortality play in shaping your work?” I’d always try to get them to say that their work was catharsis – and so many authors are reluctant to say that, and I understand why: because at some point, to refer to my earlier question, I think they feel that if it is just this belligerent emotion, then they’re compromising the artistry in the work, and it’s unfiltered. Still, it’s really nice for me to hear you say, “I’m scared of death,” and “This is really my catharsis.” Actually, after three years, you’re the only one to finally establish that and come out and say that.

KH: Come clean? (laughs) Yeah, I’m like that, I guess.

BE: It’s really nice to hear.

KH: I’m the kid in the street saying the emperor has no clothes. Well, have your read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker?

BE: No, I have not.

KH: Oh, well, it’s a book that you, I think, should read.

BE: Have you yourself, having gone through all this crazy, crazy stuff you’ve gone through, have you cobbled together a good philosophy of life and your life and living, now you think?

KH: I think I have. I’ve had the blessing and the curse to have been exposed to quite a number of religious faiths: I was raised by my Jewish grandparents, but my mother and I, we were Christian Scientists until I was ten, and then she became a Catholic, and I followed her, so I was thoroughly Catholicized, and then by the time I gave it up in college, in came my father, who was a Protestant minister, and I married a Quaker, so I’ve see a lot of the pursuit of faith up close, and I’ve probably come to a point in my life – I’m going to be fifty in a couple months – that I’m not just a cafeteria Catholic, I’m just a cafeteria everything. I pick and choose. I’ve chosen from different disciplines and faiths, but there’s a Catholic theologian and archeologist, actually, who was excommunicated for heresy, but one of the things he said was that everything that rises must converge. His name was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and that’s what I believe. There are a lot of paths up as well as a lot of paths down.

BE: To have that kind of black and white, well, not black and white, but definitive moral belief…

KH: Well, the rigidity… But I think it’s because people are scared.

BE: I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. If anything…

KH: A lot of people can’t take that. A lot of people really just don’t want to say, “I’m scared, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if there’s a God,” or if when all is said and done, my life will be meaningless…

BE: There’s a freedom there.

KH: They would really rather subscribe to dogma that tells them a different way with some kind of authority: the Pope, Jesus, Buddha, Allah… You create these huge authority figures. You know it’s all very Freudian, isn’t it?

BE: It is.

KH: Sadly. I mean, not sadly because I actually love Freud, but it is. It’s really all very Freudian.

BE: It goes back to Kant who actually established an objective grounds for morality with the absence of a God, and if that can exist, I just believe in the power of reason. I’m hoping like hell that seventy-two years, when mouth cancer ends up getting me, will not be the end. As I’m sure we all are.

KH: (laughs) Most of us, yeah. Unless you’re sixty-two and have mouth cancer and are just hoping to live ten more years.

BE: That would be bad news bears… So, there’s this beautiful line in The Kiss, and I’ve crammed: I’ve read six of your books since we decided to do this interview.

KH: Oh my god. My apologies.

BE: No, I enjoyed them. But this line from The Kiss kept coming back to me, of your mother, you wrote: “I cannot remember a time that I was not aware of my mother’s fragility. That’s part of what has convinced me of her surpassing worth – the way only the best teacups break easily.” It’s really in stark contrast to your depiction of your mother that, you seem to be and sound like, a pretty strong person. And I guess we’ve already touched on this a little, but how much did the memoirs and writing those empower the strength and resilience you now posses? And when did you choose to write it – I know you had dabbled and you had thought about writing the memoir because your previous three novels dealt with that…

KH: Right.

BE: So how did you decide to write it, and can you just go on a bit about how freeing it was to finally write?

KH: Yes, I think that writing was not something that enabled my strength, but something that was probably an expression of my strength, or having reached a point of strength from which I could write it, and it was never a book I planned to write, I think maybe the opposite was more true. It was a book that I planned not to write. But I was working on a fourth novel, and I had turned in a draft, and it was, as everybody who read it says, my agent and my editor, “Well, you know this is really wonderfully well-written, but these characters are totally unsympathetic and you don’t want to read about them.” And I said okay, and I agreed to have a meeting with my editor in a week, and in that period of time I tried to go through the book and figure out what was wrong with it. I arrived at a meeting having some things written down that I planned to do and she said, “So, Kathryn, what are we going to do here?” and I said, to my surprise, “Well, I don’t even want to write this book,” and she said, “Oh. Well, what do you want to write?” and I said I felt I needed to write a non-fiction account of what happened between me and my father, and she said, “Oh,” because she knew what that meant. She had been my editor from the beginning, and my first novel was one of those palpably autobiographical first novels that were sent off to… for legal reasons I made extra changes so that it was… the identity or the likeness of any family member of mine was completely disguised. She knew that that was more truth than fiction. So she asked me if I felt that I really wanted to do that, or could do it, and I said, “I don’t know, and I don’t want you to tell anybody else in the company that I’m doing it, because I really don’t know if I can do it.” But I wanted to try, and I left the office with my head spinning, thinking, “What did I just do? What did I say?” I was shocked, and I just remember my heart pounding, thinking, “Oh, I must be nuts,” but I was also kind of excited because… because I’m not… there was a corrosive, wearing effect of keeping that part of my life walled off and secret. It was finite – I haven’t been in touch with my father for many, many years – but it was a huge experience and a formative one, in many ways for me, and it wasn’t really possible to wall-off such a large chunk of who I was and how it related to who I became without having these defenses erected within me – period. I knew that for my children – not for my husband, because he knew – that they’d run up against this place in me where I said, “This far and no further.” I didn’t want to be that as a mother. I mean, I knew that was the kind of mother I had, so I guess I made the great over-correction as I made the great over-share. I was also tired of living in a culture that sent me many messages that it wasn’t okay for me to talk about this. One of the things that was really shocking to me when the book came out was how many reviews took the position that this was not something that should be written about. I just thought that was… I was literally flabbergasted to read something like that. I wouldn’t say that this is cocktail party chatter, but I thought this kind of thing is what books were invented for. And, you know… I was glad that I had sort of thrown down the gauntlet and said, “No. I don’t agree. I refuse to keep my mouth shut and say this never happened.”

BE: Ten years from now people will be writing about something that’s faux-pas now and it will be… the same controversy will arise.

KH: Right.

BE: Forever and ever.

KH: The French have an expression for that. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

BE: Well, even after reading six of your books, that is obviously the most poignant to me. I thought it was written just beautifully. Everyone wants to call your writing sparse on the back of every book. Sparse! Beautifully sparse!

KH: (laughs) That’s good. That means that I rigorously edit my own sentences, which is what I intend to do.

BE: If the picture you paint is so expansive, it’s difficult to call the prose itself sparse, for me. The pictures, especially in The Seal Wife that I got of Alaska, I feel like Michener couldn’t have done it better and integrated the emotion in there.

KH: Well, thank you.

BE: But I… I know these questions, so many of them, revolve around having read the memoirs, for me, because so many times as a reader I think I con myself into believing I know an author’s person through their work, but after reading your memoirs, it’s difficult for me to read your fiction and not probe for connections.

KH: Right. I’m sure.

BE: So, on that note, many of the male characters in your novels, notably Will Moreland in Envy and Bigelow in The Seal Wife, seem to be almost hyper-sexual creatures, do you think your image of your father, your relationship with your father, led you to shape your male characters in this way?

KH: Well, that’s an interesting question, because it’s turning it around for me. I have considered the type of males that I write about, and I would connect them more with my mother, actually. Perhaps my experience with my father underscored something, but the fact of… I discovered that it was not only possible, I won’t say easy because it never is easy, any of it, but when I discovered it was possible for me to write in a male voice, I just loved it because it gave me a way to linger on my relationship with my mother, in which I really was the unrequited, frustrated lover. She was always out of reach, in contrast to my grandparents with whom I lived, she was twenty or twenty-two and young and beautiful and just seemed as if she were covered in fairy dust and always leaving, so I have a keen sense of a decidedly female love object always slipping out of grasp, fear that there is no possibility of salvation from the misery of being human unless one can reach and obtain and touch that female ideal. I think you see that in Bigelow with the kite and the seal and his pursuit of this woman who won’t speak to him, and in The Binding Chair, the Arthur character and his pursuit of the Chinese woman, and any number of male characters, and they are hyper-sexualized and hyper-sexual because I think this ancient part of myself, this early part of myself was not a particularly sophisticated creature. I think that I was somebody who just wanted my mother, I wanted her. I wanted to posses her. I wanted to somehow break through her surface. I wanted her in a very rudimentary way and it worked out well for drawing in male sexuality, if that makes sense.

BE: You have… It’s crazy. You must psychoanalyze or have psycho-analyzed yourself all the time, and just mind-fucked yourself time and time again.

KH: (laughs)

BE: I’m serious.

KH: The one true onanism: the auto-mind-fuck that never ends.

BE: You know, I’ve had OCD and I’ve struggled with that and panic attacks and what-not, and I can’t imagine going through (what you have), but I suppose we have as much strength as we need it always seems like, until we need to summon it, we don’t know it’s there.

KH: Right, right, and that’s one thing, I actually have been through psychoanalysis, glory be, because I don’t know what I would be without it. Really it just saved my life. Really.

BE: It’s so interesting.

KH: Yeah, there’s such a sort of… well, it allows you to just sort of escape the whole notion of judgment, humans judging other humans, and just begin to perceive them for who they are: creatures of needs and vulnerabilities, and the world just is, I think much richer and with many more levels once you’ve begun to see it through a psychoanalytical eye. But anyway…

BE: And when you can take the ego out of it, you know, it’s really helpful.

KH: Yeah.

BE: I don’t know, but on a lighter note, let’s talk about the mass-murder book you just wrote.

KH: (laughs) It’s no wonder that I’ve been told that there’s a sort of sense out there in the world that I must be a very dark and twisted person, and so people are often surprised to find that this isn’t so, that I’m lighthearted and full of pranks.

BE: Well that’s the catharsis. Pranks! I can see you with pigtails running down the street after breaking Mr. Hooper’s window or something…

KH: Right, right – Pippi Longstockings.

BE: All right, so your most recent book, 2008, was While They Slept, which examines the 1984 case of Oregon teenager Billy Gilley murdering his abusive parents and sister. Talk to me about just the experience of researching and recounting this happening and writing this book. I have to imagine it was difficult.

KH: Yeah, it really was, and in ways that I actually didn’t anticipate. I’m never sorry that I did it, but I entered into it with the sort of pure sense of intellectual curiosity and, of course, identifying with Jody as somebody whose life just sort of cracked open, or cracked into two pieces, and there was then and than there was now, and the two weren’t connected anymore. You were the same person, but something had bisected your life. I heard about her through a friend, who’s also my agent, and we were just chatting on the phone one day, it wasn’t even a business call or anything, and she said, “Oh I just spoke with this young woman today. She was so interesting. You would have found it fascinating,” I said, “Oh, really. What? Why? Who?” and she told me about Jody, who had taken her thesis that she wrote for Georgetown, that creative thesis about her brother, looking at the murders through his eyes. I’m blocking the name of it now, a strange, famous Catholic term… anyway, she was going to see various editors to sell it as a book or a book proposal, and it was ultimately turned down, because everybody thought that it was a very strange idea to tell the story of what happened in her family from her brother’s point of view rather than her own. So that’s sort of interesting from the start – her desire to do it that way – and then I’m somebody who’s sort of a sucker for true crime anyway. I just really love it.

BE: Just like the wife in Envy.

KH: Exactly. It’s almost impossible for it to be too down-market. Lurid is an essential part of it. Anyway, here was this lurid story, which was that one day, this eighteen-year-old kid, shot and killed, or rather bludgeoned his parents and his little sister to death in the middle of the night, and then wanted to run away with his sixteen-year-old sister, and I thought, wow, that really is a story. I asked about it every year or so, not religiously, but just when it popped in my head, because it was an interesting story, and finally one time I asked about it, and my agent just threw her arms up in the air and said, “Jody’s never going to write that book,” and, sort of analogous to what happened with The Kiss, I heard myself say, “I will.” Then we both looked at each other and she said, “Are you being serious?” and I said, “Yeah, I’d love to write that book,” and she said, “Well, I guess I need to put you in touch with Jody,” and we met, and she’s not someone who’s quick to trust. Why would she be? We had a long dinner in Georgetown, in Washington, DC, and then she got back to me, and I told her the reasons why I found her story compelling – as I did. I felt really drawn to it – it was pulling me; I wasn’t going after it – and she talked about her frustration about the fact the she really felt that she was not… she didn’t have the psychological strength to undertake the writing of the book. You know she took a whole year off from work, and every time she really sat down and returned to that world, she just fell to pieces, and she couldn’t do it. She decided it wasn’t worth sacrificing her mental health. But she really did want the story to be told, so once I understood that I wasn’t exploiting her – sort of writer to writer – that I wasn’t taking her material away from her when she wanted to write it, I felt a little more comfortable with the whole idea of writing the book. But it was not… that didn’t mean that it ever became a comfortable book to write because I was feeling…

BE: This might be.. I’m sorry to interrupt.

KH: No, no. Go ahead.

BE: I know this is dangerous ground, but when writing the book, was ever there an impish voice in your head saying, “This could have been me. I could have responded to kind of the psychological abuse that I suffered the way Billy did?”

KH: Oh! Well, I don’t think I could say, “Well, this could be me,” because I didn’t believe that I did have that capacity. I think that… I know that pushed to the end of my particular rope, my tendency is toward self-destruction rather than attacking outward. But that is not to say that there was not vicarious gratification or pleasure that I experienced in Billy beating his father to death. Yeah, is that pretty and politically acceptable? No. But did I feel it? Yeah. So I am somebody who’s in a position in which I am inherently exploiting other people’s lives, you know, the narrative of their life together and apart, because of my own psychic agenda.

BE: Well, I think there’s an empathy there.

KH: Yes, there is empathy, but you know one always… there is definite empathy but that doesn’t mean you can relax and stop holding yourself to a kind of ethical auto-interrogation every once in a while just to make sure that you’re staying on the right track, because after all, these are people whose lives have already been…

BE: Decimated.

KH: …walloped with a completely enormous and unjust amount of pain and you don’t want to add to it at all. You just really have this sense of “Do no harm,” and both Jody and Billy were people who had very clear ideas about who they were, and they saw themselves in one way, and I don’t know that I represented them as they saw themselves. That had to be hard, because I was never going to allow my sympathy for one or another of them to sway my attempt to reveal the story as honestly as I could. I actually found it easier to talk to Billy, because he’s less emotionally defensive than Jody, and you know he’s kind of good at making an emotional connection. You know, leaning forward, and seems relaxed when talking, and cracks jokes, and makes eye contact and stuff like that. He’s easier… you have a sense of somebody who’s allowing themselves to be present with you… so even though Billy did bludgeon his parents to death, I have this sense of sympathy for him, whereas Jody is very defended and does not betray emotion, and, I think, found the project much more debilitating than she expected it to be, and was sometimes highly defensive in a way that I completely understand, yet it made it very difficult for me as a writer.

BE: How do you inhabit that world, and just write this book and then go cook dinner for your family?

KH: Well, I think if I couldn’t just… I think if the demands of family and regular life…

BE: I don’t mean to say that you’re a woman and you’re cooking dinner for your family.

KH: No, no. That’s fine.

BE: How about eat?

KH: Well I often am a woman cooking for her family, and my husband would prefer that I didn’t do that, so yes, I do cook for my family.

BE: Okay.

KH: And thank God, there’s a reason that I have to just stand up at a certain point, and I just really have to stop working, because otherwise you know I just get very fixated on things, and I think it would be a horrible thing to really just enter that world and only come up for air or a sandwich every once in a while. I think that would be… I found it hard enough to write as I did, you know, with periods of normalcy – laundry, dinner interspersed – you know it was really hard material.

BE: You’re dancing in the dark, Kathryn, and you’re coming up for air.

KH: (laughs)

BE: You’re “dancing on the corpse’s ashes” as the song says. That’s amazing to me. I don’t know if I could get that deep into something. I was really reluctant to read While They Slept because, I don’t know, it’s just something that’s really disturbing to me, and I don’t know how you do it. I think that’s really a testament to what you’ve been able to overcome and come out of in your own life, that you are able take on that subject.

KH: I know there’s also that old saying that “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” and I wonder if I’m in the first group.

BE: Well, let’s talk about your next book.

KH: Okay.

BE: Polygamist mass murders a cult…

KH: Not polygamist, although I have to say I really have enjoyed Big Love.

BE: Yeah, that show?

KH: And you know it didn’t really occur to me until maybe after eight episodes that the person in the show that was sort of the sinister, compelling heart of it, Bill, you know the polygamist, really reminds me of my father.

BE: Really?

KH: And not physically, not in the way he looks, just in that sort of patriarchal and parently, misogynistic, I’m-declaring-how-the-world-is stance, and it’s just it’s not so creepy and so strong that I can’t watch it, but it’s definitely creepy enough that I feel I must return to it and study it.

BE: So were you, I mean, I get this from the memoir, but were you so direly in need of affection and acceptance? You know, is that how you kind of got lured into that whole thing, the relationship with your dad?

KH: Yeah, I think so. I think that you know, that if my relationship with my mother had been different, then I wouldn’t have been vulnerable to my father, but two… there were two aspects to my childhood that made me vulnerable to him. One was what I did and did not know about my father. You know I wasn’t… I understood implicitly that there was a tacit rule that we never spoke of my father, so that we never brought him up, and most of the time nobody else did, either. Every once in a while my mother would give me some bits of information about him, and you know I knew he was a minister or, as somebody put it to me, a man of God, and I was young enough and it was about the right time that I got him really all confused with Martin Luther King and these really sort of sacred, powerful, superhero figures, and that idea, coupled with the fact that he abandoned me, perhaps not intentionally, but in the completely, hopelessly egocentric child’s perspective – you know, that if he went away it was because I wasn’t good enough – you can’t escape feeling that way, so there was that, and there was my really anguished relationship with my mother, from whom I was deeply alienated and at whom I was furious in ways that I couldn’t begin to admit at the time, and then in comes my father. You know he is just like… Well, the thing is that I think I had so, so complex and fully fleshed fantasy of who my father was that I almost didn’t see my real father’s personality behind that created image.

BE: It’s amazing how you make it… You kind of convey how it could happen, you know, and you’re able to map yourself emotionally throughout the process and you make it really understandable as to how it did develop.

KH: Yeah, well I think you know that was really the… If I had one agenda in writing it, it was just to make it understandable, because I think that the power of the taboo is such that the mind naturally and normally recoils from the idea of incest, and there’s a really reflexive, knee-jerk response, of “Well, you know, that doesn’t happen, that can’t happen, that can’t happen in a nice family, that can’t happen in somebody who isn’t, you know, retarded or on the wrong side of the tracks,” or whatever, but it… it’s really something that requires examination and understanding in order for it not to happen, and instead the very opposite occurs, in which people flinch away and just refuse to see it.

Delly thought she was a cat person, even though she didn’t own any cats. She collected dozens of feline figurines, but whenever she went to the local animal shelter to possibly adopt a real cat, she always heard her mother’s voice, echoing from that afternoon when she was six years old and had stopped to pat a stray.

“Don’t touch that thing!” her mother shrieked. “It has fleas! And filth! And probably AIDS! Don’t you know that AIDS was brought over to the United States by cats?”

Delly, at six, was only barely aware of the United States as something she mumbled during the Pledge of Allegiance in school, and she had no idea what AIDS could be, except it sounded terrible. She’d wiped her fingers on her shirt and cried all the way to the closest restroom, where her mother soaked Delly’s hand and arm all the way up to her elbow in water so hot, it left her skin pink.

Much later, Delly knew what AIDS was and she knew monkeys carried it to the United States, though she wasn’t sure how the monkeys got here or how they transmitted the disease. Even so, as much as she loved cats, she just couldn’t bring herself to touch them. At the shelter, when the cats pressed themselves against the bars of their cages and rolled their green and blue and yellow eyes, Delly still swore she saw vermin and filth flying in black and grey flecks from their fur. Her figurines, though, could be dusted, and she did so, twice a week.

Her mother, still alive, gave her a new figurine twice a year, on her birthday and at Christmas, though she tsked at her every time, as if it was possible to catch AIDS from ceramic cats. And when she called on Saturdays, she always wanted to know if Delly was going out that night and with whom. Most of the time, Delly wasn’t. Her mother always wondered why. When there was a date, she always wondered why there wasn’t a second. Delly told her mother, “Oh, you know, Mama. He was just like all the others. After only One Thing.”

Which wasn’t true at all. It was Delly after the One Thing. Sometimes she got it, but usually only once with each man.

Delly knew she wasn’t that attractive. Her father refused to pay for braces when she was a teenager and so her buck teeth still protruded beneath her upper lip and pressed into her lower lip, creating two permanent red and moist indentations. She could never do anything with her hair, and so she didn’t do anything at all and it fell lank and lifeless down to her hips. Her eyes were crossed just a bit and sometimes she saw double. And she was heavy, always shopping in Lane Bryant and Torrid for the latest and sexiest wear for a size 28 woman.

Despite the teeth, the hair, the eyes and the weight, she felt that if she wore just the right clothes, a man would want her to strip as fast as possible. And then he would stay to watch her get dressed again and undressed and dressed and undressed until suddenly, twenty-five years flew by and it was time to celebrate their silver anniversary. Twenty-five years of dressing and undressing and never sleeping alone.

But all of the men she dated were fast, lasting barely twenty-five minutes in her bed, let alone twenty-five years. They kissed her briefly on the teeth, gave her hair and breasts an obligatory stroke’n’grope, found their way between her legs and came. Then they left, before she even had a chance to offer them the frostbitten wine she kept constantly cooling in the refrigerator.

Most of the men came from the Internet. Delly was great at cybersex, possessing fast and talented fingers on the keyboard. So by the time she met the latest man, he was usually primed and ready to go. And come. And leave.

But most Saturday nights, she was alone. And even when she wasn’t, she still slept by herself in her full-sized bed.

One evening, as she sat on the front step of her apartment building with her cell phone and her mother’s voice in her ear, a large dog stepped out from behind the garbage dumpster across the street. He stood still for a moment, caught in the setting sun, and his gray and white fur seemed to catch fire. His muzzle lifted to the sky, one leg raised in a point in her direction, he seemed as grand and ceramic as her cats, but then he lowered his nose and began to sniff. As he smelled the curb, the fallen garbage, the fire hydrant, he kept looking up at her and his eyes flashed alternately black and red. He stared right at her as he lifted his leg and blasted a heady stream of iridescent urine on the only tree, a skinny thing with just a few brown leaves. Then he started crossing the street. Delly couldn’t see a collar.

“Hey, Mama?” Delly asked. “What do you think of dogs? Are they vermin too?”
“Oh, no,” her mother said. “Dogs are regal. Majestic. Honorable. Think of Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, or Benji. Dogs save people. They didn’t bring diseases to our country.”

The dog sat next to her. His tongue hung out of one side of his mouth, giving him a cheerful and rakish appearance. Delly felt his hot breath against her knee.

When her mother finally said goodbye, Delly reached out tentatively to stroke the dog’s head. “Hello, Mister,” she said. He closed his eyes against her touch, then stood and walked down the street. Delly watched him go. Before she went back upstairs for an evening of television and dusting her cats, she reached into her pocket, pulled out her favorite snack, a Slim Jim, unwrapped it, and left it at the bottom of the stairs. When she came back down at nine o’clock, just to peek out, it was gone.

****

She began to leave a Slim Jim at the base of the stairs every morning before work, and again in the evening, at around seven o’clock. They always disappeared and she assumed the dog was eating them. Sometimes she saw him. He stood a few feet away and wagged his tail, a long slow sweep that held grace and power. Once, she held out the Slim Jim to him directly, but he just lowered his head and rolled his eyes coyly up at her. Another time, when she came down at nine o’clock to peek out the front door, he was sitting at the base of the steps like he was watching for her. The Slim Jim stuck like a cigar out of his mouth. He lolled his tongue around it, then drew it in and chewed slowly. He watched her the whole time, then licked his muzzle and trotted away, his tail swaying.

On a Saturday when Delly actually had a date, she wasn’t home at seven and when she and Brent came back to her place at ten, the dog was sitting on the bottom step. Delly felt guilty, but she didn’t want to say anything in front of her date and she didn’t have a Slim Jim in her purse. So as she passed the dog, she ducked her head and smiled secretly at him. She took Brent quickly into her bed. She tried to concentrate, but she kept seeing the dog, waiting downstairs for his snack. She thought of the way he looked at her when he ate his Slim Jim, a look of guarded gratitude and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. A strength of some sort. A directness.

Brent, she noticed when he rose above her, kept his eyes closed. Although she invited him to stay afterward, even mentioning the chilled-for-months wine, he left, mumbling something about having an early morning church service and he’d call her. After the door closed, she lay there for a while. Usually, this was the time she used to masturbate, since the men were all so fast. She reached into her drawer for a vibrator, but then just rested it on her belly. She was distracted.

Pulling on her robe, she tucked a Slim Jim in her pocket and went downstairs. The dog was lying on the sidewalk in front of the building. When she came out, he rose quickly and wagged his tail.

At that time of night, no one else was around, and so Delly wrapped her robe more tightly and sat on the bottom step. Peeling away the cellophane, she put the meat stick down on the sidewalk. “Here you go, Mister,” she said. When he lowered his head to eat, she touched his back, just running her fingertips down his spine. His tail moved slowly, beating against her knees. When he was done, he sat down and looked at her.

“Don’t you have an owner?” Tentatively, she ran her hands over his neck. His ruff was smooth, there were no breaks where a recently lost collar could have nestled.

He moved suddenly, pushing his head between her legs and pressing his forehead against her stomach. His nose, pointed down, stopped just above her crotch, and Delly attempted to close her knees, thinking he could smell the sex she’d just had. But he didn’t seem to want to move. She stroked him a few more times and he heaved a huge sigh. When he did, she felt his ribs against her thighs.

“All right then,” she said. “You might as well come up. Tomorrow, I’ll get you something besides Slim Jims.”

She placed a bowl of water for him in the kitchen, which he drank rapidly, and when she dug through her refrigerator for leftovers, he ate those too. Then, despite the late hour, she gave him a bath, just in case. She used her own shampoo and when she was done, he smelled like a fresh field.

That night, he slept at the foot of her bed. From time to time, he rested his head on her ankle.

****

She kept calling him Mister because it seemed to fit, and she bought him a black leather collar with shiny silver studs shaped like dog bones. She got a leash too and at night after work, they walked around the block together. He was a very neat dog, never messing up her apartment. She left the television on for him during the day and when she came home, he was on her recliner, watching Oprah.

When Delly told her mother about Mister, she had to come over and meet him. “Oh,” she said, running her hands through his fur. “Oh, he’s beautiful, Delly. He looks like Rin Tin Tin and Lassie all rolled together.” She brought him gifts, rubber squeaky toys and bones and brightly colored bone-shaped biscuits. She brought him a bed too, a soft sheepskin one with a brown leopard print, but Mister preferred to sleep in Delly’s bed at night, the recliner during the day.

As the nights went by, he slowly moved up from the foot of the bed, until he stretched full-length next to her, his head on his own pillow. Delly sometimes woke up pressed against him, her arm thrown over his filled-out ribcage. Other times, she woke with her back to him, his muzzle buried in her hair.

As Delly grew used to their walks, they went farther and farther, venturing into parts of her own neighborhood that Delly only glanced at as she drove through. She bought herself some sneakers and several pairs of drawstring pants. Her old clothes grew looser as the walks grew longer.

One night as they passed a bar, a man stopped in front of them. “Nice dog,” he said.

When he reached out to pat Mister’s head, Mister growled deep in his throat. He was leaning against Delly’s legs and Delly felt the vibration.

The man told her that he watched them walk by several times that week and would she like to stop for a drink? It was a Saturday night and Delly said sure, she’d just run back to put the dog in her apartment. When she got there, she took off the drawstring pants and threw on some of her Torrid clothes. Fitting more loosely now, the scoop neckline gapped and displayed even more rolling flesh than usual. She nodded her approval, then turned the television on for Mister.

She stayed at the bar for about two hours. The man who invited her eventually moved on, but she struck up conversation with another and then came home with a third. When she brought him to bed, she looked over his bare shoulder when she heard a deep whine. Mister, hackles raised, stood next to bed. She tried to wave him away, but he stayed, his whine going up and down several scales. The man hesitated for a moment, looking nervously at the dog, but when Delly said it would be okay, he got down to business, finished quickly, kissed her, said no to the wine, and left.

Delly lay there, stared at the ceiling, and used her vibrator. She wasn’t sure when Mister crawled on the bed, but suddenly, he was there and humping her leg. She pushed him away and he panted while she finished. Then she curled against him and they went to sleep.

****

She picked up other men. From the Internet, from bars, once from a grocery store. Each left. Delly began to cry afterward while she used her vibrator. Her clothes continued to fall loose and so she had to keep buying more and she was able to leave Lane Bryant and Torrid behind to shop in stores that carried XL’s and size 18’s. She had her hair cut and she wore it in a loose wave against her cheek. There wasn’t anything she could do about her teeth or her eyes, but she began practicing lowering her upper lip, to make her teeth look less big, and she also began to tilt her head in a way that she felt made her eyes look straighter.

But still the men left.

Mister kept standing next to the bed, whining. He never sat nor lay down. As soon as the men left, he scrambled up next to her and he licked her tears away as she used the vibrator. He kept trying to hump her leg and eventually, she just gave in, pushing him away when she was done. It was too hard to hold him off while she brought herself to orgasm; he was a big dog. He always lay close to her afterwards and his warmth and steady breathing made her feel better.

Then one night, he sat up while she was using the vibrator. He leaned forward and took a sniff and Delly jumped and pushed his head away. But then he licked the vibrator and his tongue traveled down to her. And he did it again.

Delly felt a jolt and she was stunned. She reached down and touched his head and he began to lick steadily. She removed the vibrator and opened her legs further. She stopped thinking. When she came, his steady rhythm maddening, never increasing, never slowing, the same lollop-lollop she heard him use at the water bowl, her mind splintered and scattered momentarily throughout the room.

Rolling away, gasping, she pressed her belly and her still throbbing crotch to the sheet. She felt the bed shift, then Mister’s nose pressed against her rear. He sniffed, then snorted. Both of his front legs appeared on either side of her neck, and he buried his muzzle in her hair. She knew what was going on before she felt his flanks beating against her.

She lay there for a minute, feeling his breath, feeling his heat. She was still damp. He wasn’t going anywhere. And every night, when she came home, he bounded to the door to meet her, his eyes overjoyed, his tail waving so strongly, she no longer had her cat figurines at tail-height in her apartment. His happiness sometimes led to destruction.

Slowly, she raised her hips until she was on her knees. She kept her upper body pressed against the bed. When she felt him enter her, she shuddered. He began to groan and growl. She learned that when she tired, she had only to roll onto her back and he would lick her refreshed. When she presented her hips, he mounted her again.

Eventually, Delly climbed out of bed and staggered to the kitchen. Ignoring her crystal wine glasses, saved especially for this occasion, she dumped the water out of Mister’s plastic dish and filled it with the refrigerated wine. They drank from it together, she on all fours, Mister’s tail stroking her bare thigh.

When they went to sleep that night, Delly’s knee knocked her vibrator off the bed and she heard it roll under the bedside table. She left it there.

****

Eventually, Delly’s mother stopped asking her about her lack of Saturday night dates. She laughed when Delly replaced her mailbox sign with “Mister and Mrs. Delilah Markham.” When her mother died, Delly took her inheritance and bought a nice house with a large yard out in the country. When the moving men came for her furniture, she found the old vibrator, still on the floor where the bedside table used to be. She left it for the future occupants. She bought a king-size bed and six lit curio cabinets for her cat figurines. She threw out the dog bed that Mister never used. She bought a new size 10 wardrobe and had oral surgery to fix her teeth. And she turned down men right and left. Yet, she never ever slept alone again.

He noticed how she watched him circle the plaza fountain. Her head tilted slightly skyward, as if she wanted him to think that she didn’t notice him at all. But he was aware of her glances. She took a drink when she looked. She peeked past the curve of her soda bottle.

He circled twice, hesitating when he was on her side of the fountain to bring the stub of a cigarette to his lips, his head raised over chattering students on their way to class. Smoke drifted from his mouth as he peered dumbly at the names stamped on distant buildings. He shook his head then circled the fountain again, patting the pockets of his jean jacket. A green messenger bag hung off his shoulder.

She watched breathlessly the third time he circled toward her, when he was holding it out in front of himself. She leaned forward on her bench to look, forgetting to be inconspicuous because he’d been swallowed into a crowd. He stepped clumsily in front of bicycles and edged between groups of women in conversation. Then he bent suddenly over to look at it and was obscured by bodies. It was a ring, he lifted it in the sunlight when he knew she was watching, a wedding band that held some foreign inscription, maybe, but looked familiar to anyone, in the thickness of the metal, in the way the silver glinted in the light.

He made his way to her then and grinned pathetically, searching the faces of others before picking her out—her, of course, because it couldn’t have happened any other way. She looked stunned when he smiled at her. She was braless under a sundress, hair hanging untied to her shoulders. The ring was between his fingers but he slid it into his jeans before speaking. Her eyes followed somewhat desperately as the band disappeared into his fob pocket.

“Excuse me,” he said. He pulled a digital camera from his messenger bag. “Do you mind if I take your picture?”

This is how it happened with Jessica Harding.

He told her to call him Aaron.

The sports bar waitress was named Kim Boettcher. She was a blonde and had a soft round stomach she liked to show off. She wore her jeans low on her hips. Aaron met her outside a grocery store, where her bank was. They were parked next to each other and she rapped on his window to complain after he took her photo. She was still wearing the apron she kept her tips in at work.

“You can’t do that,” Kim told him. She wanted to be a broadcast journalist and enlightened him on consent laws. Aaron was happy to listen.

She lived with a couple friends in a south Omaha duplex. It was a single-story house with four garage doors on the street side. Her room was in the back, with a washer and dryer in the closet. Aaron slept there for three days.

Kim lay face down while he massaged her with baby oil every morning, her eyes closed. When he put his weight on her body, Aaron could smell fryer grease in the sheets.

Lorna Chaplin flashed her cleavage over the orange formica counter when she rang up his total. Aaron was buying a microwavable Rueben and a Diet Pepsi. She worked at a filling station near the interstate in Ralston and had blond hair with dark freckles around her neck. She wore low rise stonewashed jeans without a belt. When Aaron looked at her midriff he noticed a thick pink scar across her navel. She said, “My eyes are up here.”

He came back the next night to ask her out to the burger and gyro place down the road.

She lived in a small white house not far from the filling station. It had been her parents’ house, the place she grew up in. All of the old furnishings were still there, worn sofas, porcelain knickknacks on the wall. There were small wooden cups that Lorna’s father made in his basement workshop when he was still alive. Her eyes pinched nearly closed when she smiled. It was a nice smile, one that made Aaron think that she’d been very pretty when she was in high school.

Aaron liked talking to Lorna about her life. He laughed at the way she spoke when nostalgic and teary, muttering “son of a bitch” through dry nicotine lips as something sad emerged from her memory.

She told him how most of her life was documented in the public record, in court cases and various judgments levied against her, in smarmy newspaper articles. There was a string of charges that ended with a conviction for transporting a minor across state lines—a fifteen-year-old boy listed in the record as N.S. And that’s what she called the boy too, when she told Aaron about it, even though N.S. would be close to thirty by then, a man off living somewhere, with a family probably. “I was pregnant by him when they picked us up,” Lorna admitted. “But I don’t have children of my own.”

Betsy Updike ran away across a parking lot when Aaron took her picture, holding her hands in front of her face. She was heavy and short and stomped when she ran. She wore horn-rimmed glasses. Aaron chased after to tell her he meant no harm. This was outside the Von Maur. It was a cold, breezy day.

“I love your hair,” he said. “That’s why I was shooting a photo of you.”

Betsy wore a green cardigan and had black hair that washed over her shoulders. She showed her teeth when she smiled.

When they got back to her house, Aaron brushed her hair and they watched movies she’d recorded on a cassette. He liked sitting behind her on the couch, his legs wrapped around hers, smelling the fruit of her shampoo. Betsy was a sweet girl. She was so eager to be loved that she nearly knocked Aaron over when they hugged.

He introduced himself to Carrie Rehbein at a karaoke bar by the freeway. She was from Ashland and had come to Omaha that day to go shopping with her sisters. She had green eyes and red hair, wore a tight yellow tee shirt under her coat and two small gold necklaces around her neck. Her engagement had been broken off the month before, just after Thanksgiving.

It was obvious that her sisters were the ones who really wanted Carrie to go home with Aaron. All of them drank tumblers of white wine.

The sisters sang raunchy lyrics they’d improvised until the DJ refused to let them go on again. They got Carrie too drunk to drive home and made Aaron promise he’d take care of her.

Carrie was nervous to be alone with him, once they were in his car. She turned and looked out the window, watching for her sisters as he drove her away.

The girl said, “My name’s Emily.”

She didn’t mind that Aaron hung his messenger bag on the stool next to her. In fact, she leaned over and talked to him while he did it, flashing the freckles of her chest. This was in a small town called Jackson.

Aaron fixed his eyes on different parts of her face while they drank. He was intense in this way. She tried turning away, but she couldn’t stop looking at him while he was looking at her, while he was smiling. It made Emily visibly nervous, half-smiling herself, her eyes swelling. His hand latched to her thigh and she let it stay there. He understood how these things worked.

“You know,” he said, “you’re kind of a pretty girl.”

“I doubt that,” she said, blushing.

“Would it be too much to take a photograph?”

“What do you mean? You and me take a picture together?”

“Of course,” Aaron said. He fingered the strap on his shoulder, ready to pull out his camera and snap a shot of her.

“You can’t take it here,” she objected. “Who in the world would want to be remembered like this?”

“Okay,” he said, slouching back into the stool. “But we’ll snap one later. Promise me that.”

“Sure,” she said, and then she laughed to herself. “We’ll drink a few Long Islands and then take some portraits for the Christmas card.”

She would apologize for saying this later, because all the other people in the bar laughed long and hard at how she’d put him down. She was sorry for it, even though he never quit smiling at her the whole time. He never let on if he was mad.

They were driving on the brick roads around town when she apologized. They circled the town square and the Jackson County Courthouse, its moss-covered spires. There was a slumping old lumber yard, stacks of boards and plywood housed in open, side-less buildings enclosed by chain-link fence. There were shops for farm goods, for implements, for rock candy and candles, for baby clothes. At the edge of town was a towering Co-Op silo, plaster white and ominous.

She suggested they stop.

“I live around here,” she said, and they went inside.

Aaron met Tamara Jones outside a liquor store in Omaha. It was just a come on. She walked out and Aaron took her picture. That’s how it started.

She kept a room in a boarding house and that’s where they went to drink. They had some beers and screwed. It wasn’t anything special.

Tamara sang along with the albums she played the whole time he was there. She only ever stood up to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, or to flip a record. She wailed disconsolate incantations, tilted at different keys, half-notes, trying to exorcise the slow undulations of her blues.

It really bothered Aaron the way she did it. Tamara Jones laid naked on her bed, swilling, singing, falling asleep.

Elisabeth Hindmarsh lived on the second floor of a partitioned Victorian in Lincoln. There was an inside stairway to get to her door. Aaron just walked in off the street but she didn’t care. It was after a party and he was going to help her finish the gin.

It was a tiny place, a living room, a kitchenette, a bathroom with black and white checker-board tile. Red paper lanterns hung on wires sheathed in cloth insulators. Elisabeth was thick-bodied, athletic, and her hair was dyed a bluish shade of black. She wore a dress over jeans to hide her porcine legs. Aaron was dressed like Charles Starkweather, a plain tee shirt tight over his weakling chest, blue jeans fitting loose on his skinny hips. He hoped his wispy blond mustache and brown felt hat made him look like the singer of a band.

Elisabeth was in the bathroom, peeing in that start and stop way people do when they don’t want to be heard, but Aaron talked to her from the adjacent room anyway, reciting the records in her collection that he approved of. She laughed at him when she returned.

“You know I wasn’t standing behind you anymore.”

Aaron was good at being laughed at, it didn’t bother him.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

It felt safe there, warm in a boozy way.

“Would you dance with me?” he asked, stepping into her space.

The LP was a live recording of Piaf. It was warped and scratchy, and Elisabeth blushed when it started playing. She was surprised that he’d picked her favorite.

The prolific London-born writer sits down with Ben to discuss his process, style, and latest collection, It’s Beginning To Hurt.

The award winning author discusses the influence and process behind American Salvage, anachronisms, and her days in the circus.

We left a day before my 17th birthday, just when the sun began pumping hazy orange light into a humid Friday morning. Mom was rushing from one room to another, making sure we didn’t forget any small toys or dishcloths, while Dad and I stuffed our sleeping bags into the U-Haul and Keith hunted for our cat. An hour later I sat behind the passenger seat, knees curled over a laptop case and one foot jacked high on a plastic container filled with Legos that I hadn’t seen since 7th grade. Keith was already dozing in the middle beside me, hands clutching an old color Gameboy and a 12-pack of Duracell AA’s; the other window seat was swamped in travel bags and pillows. The car felt smothering and I hadn’t even closed my door yet. I tried not to think about my friends, who’d probably sleep happily for the next four hours, and how Seth saying “God, that sucks” during a Brawl tournament doesn’t really constitute a goodbye. My thumb grazed over the keyboard of my cell phone as I glanced at the time. Not even 8:00.

My mother slipped in up front, clacking on her seatbelt and then turning to see how we were situated. Her brown eyes still seemed foggy from sleep. “Everyone comfortable?” She asked, smiling at Keith’s sleeping form. “Do you need me to take anything?”

As I leaned back against the headrest, I spotted the cat carrier sitting rather forlornly in her lap, our fat old calico squashed inside. It had taken Keith half an hour to corner her, stupid thing, but for a moment I understood what it must be like in there, inside a little box.

“No, mom. We got it.”

When Dad pulled away from the curb, I watched the house (it really wasn’t ours anymore, we’d been sleeping on the floor for a week now) fade behind us. No one saw us off – everyone had said their goodbyes last weekend at the party my uncle hosted – and if it wasn’t for the large U-Haul my father hooked to the tail of our gray sedan, our neighbors might have thought we were going out to breakfast and not moving to the other end of the East Coast. Not heading to Albany, Georgia; one thousand, two hundred and ninety two miles, twenty-one hours and twenty-two minutes away from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was late August, and I had not seen the beach once or shot a single game of hoops with my friends. I’d spent my summer packing dusty photo albums and my great-grandmother’s quilts into oversized cardboard boxes and donating old clothes to Good Will. Tossing a decade of childhood memories in the trash. Karen Sanders had helped with the yard sales at first, until the sun started staining the roads the color of Cherry Kool-Aid at night and the college kids made bonfires on the beach. Then she sorta smiled and shrugged, and stopped coming by.

The thought is bitter, even now. “When’re we stopping for breakfast?” I asked, and watched my Dad glance at the clock on the dashboard. “Once we’ve got a couple of hours under our belt,” he said, “around 10:30 or so, it’ll be more like brunch.” We’d be in Rhode Island by then. I shifted my feet and searched for my MP3 player, the Game-Boy was easy to pry from my brother’s loose hands. The car felt small and over-warm, and my legs were already cramping. Mom rolled down the window as I tucked in my earbuds, pressing herself toward her door like maybe it would open. The wind caught her dark hair and lifted it up like strands of a torn spider web. It was starting to gray, I’d never noticed before. The fading strands glinted like tinsel sticking out of a box. Her face reminded me of my old English teacher’s after a long day–deflated, like a patient who’d been leeched of energy instead of blood.

It felt strange, knowing we wouldn’t be returning to that blue house with the hydrangea bushes in the front yard and the oak deck. It had been in our family for generations. Mom said her grandfather had the house built when he and her grandmother first got married, and it was always passed down to the oldest child. It would’ve been mine, if we’d kept it. I remembered Grandma had filled the living room with family portraits and grave photographs of straight-backed ancestors in grayscale; men with thick, handlebar mustaches and women in high lace collars and pleated skirts. Mom hung pictures of lighthouses in the bathroom and spent six months remodeling the kitchen. My room had a skylight, and when I was younger I thought that sheet of glass was the only thing that kept the stars from flooding my room.

We’d had a trampoline in the backyard, one with a net around it so we could jump onto it off the deck. Mom said it was dangerous, but Dad let us do it as long as we stuck to regulation codes. At my party last year, on my 16th birthday, Karen Sanders jumped into the trampoline for the first time. She had long blonde hair that almost curled, and a body that was as lithe and slender as a cattail. Seth and I had to convince her to jump; she thought the drop was too far, that she’d hit dirt and break a bone. I jumped first to show her it was safe, and when she finally leaped her hair billowed behind her like a flag. She landed on her feet but her knees crumpled, and when she bounced her shirt flew up, showing a flat white stomach and the underside of a bra the color of a blue-raspberry Jolly Rancher. It branded into my mind. I was the only one who saw it. She was embarrassed and flustered but I said it was okay. My mouth dried and my palms got sweaty, like my body didn’t know what to do with its moisture, and I kept glancing around, making sure no one else had noticed. It felt like she’d shown me a treasure.

That was the night I asked her out. She’d smiled quick and bright, like the blink of a firefly, and said yes.

Around 10:00 Dad pulled the car into the narrow parking lot of a small town restaurant called Percy’s Place somewhere in Massachusetts. It was a squat white building with a yellow awning above a door with a red rooster on it. It looked very “local,” I decided. Karen Sanders liked to use that word a lot.

Dad had to park across three spots in the lot in order to fit the U-Haul. As we all disentangled ourselves from the car, stiff and slightly dazed, I realized my father had to let go of my mother’s hand in order to get out of the car. Had they been holding hands the whole ride, I wondered? At the going away party, my Uncle Rob and my mother didn’t speak. She was officially the guest of honor, but when Uncle Rob had my parents stand up he only talked about the house and about Dad’s job. He didn’t mention Mom once, but I had figured it was a mistake.

As we headed into the restaurant, Mom made sure to keep a window cracked open for the cat. Said the next time we stopped we’d have to let it out for a while. The inside of Percy’s was littered with checkered countertops and Norman Rockwell paintings, an attempt at folky that felt almost deceptive. Our hostess was pretty, probably in college, her lips dragging over her teeth in a wan smile that said she didn’t want to be up this early any more than I did. As soon as we’d settled onto our shifting laminated cushions she placed our menus on the table and hurried away.

“Well, this is a neat little place, isn’t it?” Mom glanced at the picture above our table as Dad slipped his hand back into hers. There was a boy and a girl on it, the general scraped-knee-and-pigtails variety that Rockwell usually painted. At the going away party, she’d sat at the table and let him get her food, which I thought was strange because Mom’s really particular about her food, and usually doesn’t let anyone touch it. I’d forgotten about that, I realized, but didn’t think much of it. I was starving, and the menu was a gift from heaven. I was convinced that the “Dapper Dan” breakfast special-eggs, bacon, pancakes, sausage, baked beans, homefries and toast-was named for me, and decided on it with no hesitation.

“Daniel, anything look appetizing to you?” I looked up from the menu and saw my mom’s teasing smile. I smiled back and nodded, tugging my cell out of my pocket to snap a picture of the menu.

Mom shot me the disapproving look that usually preceded an irritated reprimand. “Daniel,” she started, but the waitress arrived just then, settling four glasses of water down with a cheery “Hello!”

When the food arrived I snapped a quick picture of my plate and forwarded it to Seth. He would love it. None of us really spoke as we ate, we’d never been a family for table talk. My food was delicious, and any food was usually enough to keep me quiet. Keith had finished quickly and settled down with his Gameboy, occasionally asking the waitress for refills on his chocolate milk. My Mom and Dad poured over maps and paperwork, making sure we really had everything we needed.

In my back pocket, my cell phone stayed silent.

The weekend before we left, my uncle threw a party so our friends and family could ‘see us off.’ Friends, relatives and neighbors swarmed into his yard, eating hot dogs in white buns and drinking beer out of plastic cups and saying “We’ll miss you ” over and over again. “We’ll miss you, don’t forget to stay in touch.” No one mentioned that my mother and her brother did not once look at each other. After sunset Karen and I stole back to my house down the road and curled up together on the yellow grass where the trampoline had been to watch the sky turn black. “The Egyptians thought the sun died every night, and was reborn every morning.” She told me quietly, eyes on the purpling sky, watching the stars and planets glow faintly, before turning to me and saying in the same breath, “I think we should break up.”

Over fifty years ago, my great-grandfather had a blue house built for a family that didn’t yet exist. He did not know his granddaughter and her husband would single-handedly break the family solidarity. He did not know that she would sell that house after his death, nor did he know that his grandson-in-law would get a job transfer sending the family across the country, breaking the tradition of living close. He would have called them ungrateful, especially my mother. My mother, who set trash bags and boxes into the U-Haul with a mechanical delicacy, wearing blue jeans and a dull gray sweatshirt she normally reserved for days when she was so sick the only thing she could do was sprawl on the couch and down mugs of oolong tea, snuffling into tissues. It was somehow unnerving to see that shirt on while she was healthy.

One day, Keith dropped a swan figurine Mom and Dad got at their wedding. Dad spent twenty minutes making sure he’d swept up all the glass shards, and Keith sliced his palm and cried while Mom got the disinfectant.

“It wasn’t that important, anyway, don’t worry,” she said, but her eyes were already shiny and even Keith knew she was lying. Her grandfather would have chastised her for being so attached to an object. Her grandfather would have reminded her that family and people are more important than wedding gifts.

After we left the restaurant, we rarely stopped again. Dad had thought of visiting D.C. or New York to do some sightseeing, but with the U-Haul clinging to our bumper, the idea was too risky. Most of the day was spent playing “I Spy” games and dozing heavily. Mom said I slept through whole states, and each time I woke up it was in a nostalgic haze. I didn’t really care, Karen Sanders was in my thoughts either way. Was this what it felt like after you passed out or got wasted? I was never brave enough to try when my friends drank, I knew Mom would smell the alcohol on me and I didn’t want to see how she’d react. I wondered, though.

My head jerked back every time my thoughts wandered, and my brain clouded. My eyes landed dully on a square blue sign coming up on the right: Food, Rest Stop 12 ½ miles.

We were somewhere in West Virginia the last time I woke up, and Dad said we were almost at our hotel. Keith was going on about wanting to climb the cliffs on the side of the highway. The banded rocks rose on each side of us like folded layers of melted wax, lines of red and brown and yellow-white, the color of dirty egg yoke, all folded on top of each other. I remembered my geography teacher last year said stuff like that happened during earthquakes, when the rocks get hot enough to bend but don’t melt. Karen Sanders had told me it wouldn’t work out, that she didn’t want to attempt a long-distance relationship. My head fogged again and I leaned against the frame of the door.

When we reached the hotel Keith was out, hand still clenched around his Gameboy. I struggled my way out from under my pillow and jacket, eager to stretch, while Dad popped the trunk. My knees and back popped and my body lurched when I stood, protesting movement after being immobile for so long.

The hotel room was generic: a flat, matted carpet underneath a TV set and wardrobe, and two queen sized beds covered in comforters that crinkled when you sat on them. The bathroom was small and smelt strongly of Febreze citrus. Mom lay down on one of the beds, looking like she hadn’t seen a mattress in days. Dad tucked Keith into the opposite bed and settled beside her, silently rubbing her shoulder. I went to walk the cat.

Mom had bought one of those fancy cat leashes a while back, made the calico get used to the outside before we moved. Idly watching as the feline searched for a place sufficiently like her litter box, the leash loop securely around my wrist, it did not occur to me how strange a picture we probably made. It was dark, she could have easily been mistaken for a small dog.

The parking lot was almost completely empty, and our white U-Haul caught so much light I had to squint. I flicked through my phone, checking to see if I had missed a message during a rest stop. I hadn’t. I checked again.

The cat had finished, and was now chewing contentedly on grass that was growing near the sidewalk. I jerked the leash, and the cat snarled before heading back for the grass. With a sigh I reached down and scooped her up, fighting her claws.

The next morning we all trekked down to the continental breakfast, and I had just settled down with a glass of OJ and a bagel when she walked in the room. She was probably my age, if not a little older. A little on the shorter side, with a slim waist and wide hips. She smiled at me as we passed by, her eyes were the exact same blue as the walls of the old house. She was wearing a blue striped sweater that hung off her left shoulder, exposing a long expanse of uninterrupted smooth, freckled skin. She was wearing a strapless bra. The idea made me clutch at my cup of orange juice, splay my fingers out over the sweating glass in search of relief. I watched as she wandered the room, saving a table for her family before heading to the waffle maker. Earlier, I had decided against waffles, but now I scuttled back my chair, reconsidering.

We stood side by side, waiting for the timer to count down, when I realized how short she was. She barely came up to my shoulders. She leaned down to pull out her waffle and the lax shoulder of her sweater dipped forward like the bend of a horizontal curtain, revealing just enough skin to hint. I stopped breathing, just for a second. I wondered if her bra was blue, like her sweater. Like Karen’s bra that day she leapt onto the trampoline, or blue like her eyes. We didn’t speak, and when I came back to my seat I felt foolish.

“You alright?” My Mom asked. “Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

The night I asked Karen Sanders out, we were both lying on my trampoline long after my party had ended, her head nestled in the crux of my shoulder. She pointed out stars to me and the synthetic weave beneath us dipped and creaked whenever she moved her arm. Her dad studied astronomy as a hobby, she said, and she could name a lot of the constellations. She probably named half a dozen, but her heat struck me on one side, and the almost chill of an August night got me on the other, combined with the scent of her hair in my nose, I really wasn’t capable of rational thought. I laid there and listened, absently drawing circles on her stomach with my thumb, loving the warmth she radiated. In the end, I could only recognize the Big and Little Dippers, but I’d always sort of known those anyway.

We left soon after breakfast without seeing the blue-topped girl again. I think I spent the whole day (outside of rest stops and one bridge we looked over at the South Carolina border) completely asleep. It was dark when I woke up again, and I figured we’d get to the new house in a couple of hours. Mom was driving now, the first time I’d seen her take the wheel this trip. The radio was spewing muted tunes of classic rock and garbled with Dad’s low, rumbling snores. I shifted slightly, readjusting my leg over the box of Legos and pulling off my headphones. The earbuds were giving me a headache. My right leg had gone numb up to my knee, and I shifted and tried to clench my toes. Outside the car the sky was as dark as the bottom of the ocean, and the stars seemed to swim as they reflected off the window. I craned my neck, trying to see over the car, catching the tail end of what might have been the Big Dipper. My breath came a little thicker, as if the night air had leaked through a window like water and flooded the car. Everything felt bigger, almost infinite. I could almost believe that the universe spanned billions of miles and that other galaxies existed somewhere. My brother’s head was sinking into my shoulder and my leg was still numb, and everything inside our sedan was warm and jumbled and close and I knew if I opened my door, I would fall out and maybe never land anywhere.

My thoughts wandered to Karen, with her slender waist and long hair, but the picture in my head came up with brown hair instead, and she was wearing a blue sweater pulled off one shoulder that I knew she didn’t own. All I could think was that Karen dumped me without even trying to make it work and Dad held Mom’s hand all day yesterday.

There was something significant in that I couldn’t place. I sucked in another breath, it felt like inhaling with a damp towel over my mouth. How different would things be in Georgia? We’d have to get a new license plate for the sedan. Somewhere down there was my new school, and I supposed if things turned out I would have new friends. We wouldn’t have winter like in New Hampshire.

For a moment, I opened my mouth and wanted to speak: Hey Mom, where are we?, but my voice had settled in my lungs. It was dark in the car, passing cars and the dashboard lights only dimly illuminating the front seats. The red bulb on the radio threw my mother’s face into relief, seeping into the creases around her eyes and catching her grays. Why had she wanted to move? I felt like I was seeing something important, something profound in my mother’s face at that moment, like the first time you recognize the way the wind feels wet before it storms. My lips closed. Instead of speaking, I pressed my face to the cool glass and kept my eyes open, focused on the yellow lights of passing cars. I would stay awake until we got to the house.

Thomas Matlack was Chief Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until 1997. He was the lead investor in the Art Technology Group, which reached $5 billion in market capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own venture firm from 1998 to 2010, before turning to writing. He is the founder of The Good Men Project.

___________________________

I happened to meet a major vendor of Verizon’s new FiOS effort at a dinner party the other night. He let me in on a dirty little secret: Pay-Per-View is driving the resurgence in the old Ma Bell. And it isn’t Bambi that’s doing it.

Verizon charges $4.99 for its new releases but $14.99 for porn. My buddy is involved in determining the capacity needed for different parts of the day, so he has studied peak load on the system in scientific detail. Guess what consumes over 90 percent of the bandwidth—Porn. Now for the truly stupid part: guys are spending $14.99 for a two-hour story of guy meets girl where they do all kinds of sick things together, but on average, the viewer of porn turns the show off after 18 minutes. Think about how many guys have to watch 18-minute segments to drive 90 percent of Verizon’s bandwidth and you begin to see why they are making money and why we have a problem.

I had this revelatory conversation after Tiger Woods but before Jesse James had been busted for screwing around. So I got to watch yet another national scandal unfold with these facts fresh in my mind. I spoke to another friend, who runs a major organization focused on sports and society, who just laughed at the outrage over Jesse messing with the tattoo girl when he’s married to America’s Sweetheart. “All the guys pointing fingers are just trying to keep the attention off themselves, as they slink off to the nearest strip club.”

I keep asking myself: Aren’t we sick of these stories? Do I really care about the status of Charlie Sheen’s recovery? What I do care a lot about is the state of the average American guy. And for him, I am pretty darned concerned.

John Edwards, Tiger, Jesse, and our obsession with their bad behavior, are a symptom of a much deeper problem that the Groundhog Day feel of the news should shake us all to consider, even if you aren’t privy to Verizon’s pay-per-view stats. Guys in our country are at a crossroads. We are not all cheats and drunks (though I was at one point), but most guys I know are pretty confused.

I’ve spent the last two years interviewing men of all walks of life: black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, urban, rural, famous, and the guy next door. I’ve talked to murderers locked up in Sing Sing and NFL Hall of Famers, stay-at-home dads and reporters on the ground in Baghdad, men who failed at marriage and those that succeeded, dads who lost children or struggled with them growing up, guys fighting for our country and those just trying to do the right thing.

In all those voices I heard one thing again and again: the struggle to stay true to themselves as men. Every guy I talked to who had made it through to some kind of peace of mind had hit a wall of some sort when they lost a wife, a buddy, a job, or got thrown out of the house. They woke to look in the mirror, knowing their world had changed forever. The way they had been limping along in life would no longer do. They had to dig deep to find themselves for real. They had to tell the truth about themselves and hold onto it.

The issue is, in part, cultural. Men in 2010—with more men unemployed than at any time in recent history—are supposed to be present fathers, intimate husbands, and still bring home the bacon. It’s like women 50 years ago. There is no way we can do it all. And yet we don’t like to talk about it. Most guys stay silent and compartmentalize. Men, especially when in pain, don’t like to talk about it. The last thing we want to do is end up on Oprah’s couch crying our eyes out.

So this is where that 18 minutes comes into play. It’s a way of coping, instead of actually talking about it. It takes little shame, and only accelerates the trap that too many guys fall into, thinking we are alone. All these guys doing the same idiotic things, thinking they are the only one.

At least in my case, success and public attention soon meant my public and my private personas would become widely divergent. I failed miserably as a father and a husband. I lied to myself and ultimately everyone I cared about. But you don’t have to be the CFO of a big company, as I was, or be Tiger Woods to compartmentalize as a guy. All of the men I have interviewed talked about it as the fundamental challenge—being the same person in every aspect of life.

As with Tiger, there is no excuse for Jesse’s behavior. The victims are the wives involved. But at the same time, I am rooting that they get better. Being a cheat isn’t a good time. It’s actually quite miserable.

Fourteen years later, I am sober and happily remarried. I hope that these guys get a clue. I also hope that as a country of men, we start talking more openly about the source of these problems rather than having to watch the train wreck happen again and again and again while the media feasts on yet another tragedy.

So guys, stop pointing the finger at the latest celebrity caught with his pants down. Stop suffering in silence and start talking about what is really going on, even if it isn’t pretty. Tell another guy. You might be surprised at how much he can relate to your pain. The 18 minutes isn’t going to solve a damn thing.

The doctors in Mexico City learned early not to cry. Sergio, a visiting surgery fellow in our Roosevelt Hospital residency training program, would describe the operations he’d performed in cemeteries without so much as a catch in his voice; and his eyes were dry when he talked about his fiancé being gunned down by riot police during a student demonstration. Though he was only thirty-two when Andrew and I met him, many of his friends were already dead.

Sergio had grown up in the hills outside of Cuernavaca in a villa with a pool bordered by red tiles where he swam every day from the time he was five. At eighteen he was offered a place on the Mexican Olympic Swim Team but chose to join a peasant rebellion instead. The only revolutionary among his three brothers and two sisters, Sergio had left home after antagonizing his father by announcing his intention to become a “barefoot doctor.” (Felipe Ruiz owned the biggest Mercedes dealership in Mexico and feared that his son’s activities would alienate his politically conservative clientele.) Sergio’s mother, a copper-haired Englishwoman born and raised on a farm in Surrey, was the horsy daughter of a French-Jewish millionaire and a devout Anglican Englishwoman who had once been a chambermaid. Alicia Ruiz had adapted well to her new life in Mexico; she simply transplanted her interest in horses to managing her large household staff, playing bridge, and overseeing charitable fundraisers. The Ruiz family took frequent holidays in Europe, visiting on occasion with Sergio’s millionaire Jewish grandfather in the south of France.

Sergio was short and brown-skinned with the quick movements of a jack rabbit. He was shy and wore round, thick-lens glasses with tortoise shell frames that made him look even more scholarly than he was. When he’d been a kid, he said, his teeth were so crooked that he hardly spoke to anyone at school because he was ashamed to open his mouth. His mother made him wear braces and take dancing lessons in the hope of socializing him. Every Wednesday, he and an awkward young girl from a neighboring estate were chauffeured to a dancing school run by a portly French woman in a purple long-sleeved gown with white lace wrist ruffles. Paola and Sergio sat in the back seat of the Mercedes like two cardboard dolls, not talking, each terrified of looking at the other, Sergio in black short pants and an Eton jacket that was too tight across his chest, and Paola in pink tulle and white gloves. Of course they fell madly in love and both went on to become medical students and revolutionaries together, until the day Paola got gunned down in Oaxaca.

Whenever Andrew was on-call, Sergio and I would share a bottle of wine in a funky bar habituated by down-and-outers a few blocks from the hospital in the dappled shadows under the West Side Highway trestle. It was a picturesque and sad place, a fitting backdrop to Sergio’s stories, and, on our off-hours, we soon became regulars. Andrew, whose tastes were more upscale, had joined us once or twice but always found a good excuse not to return afterward.

We were sitting at our usual table, half-heartedly watching a baseball game on the TV above the bar, when Sergio asked me to come down to Mexico City with him to work for “la revolucion”.

“This isn’t real,” I said, “I’m dreaming this conversation, this place . . .”

“I can’t believe I’m here myself,” Sergio gazed, as always, a little past my shoulder. It was his habit never to look me straight in the eye. We were both a little bit in love with each other but didn’t want to acknowledge it because I was married to Andrew.

“Did you always want to be a doctor . . . or did you ever want to be something else?” I asked to change the subject.

Bluntly, almost angrily, Sergio said, “A woodcarver once, when I was a kid.”

Then, instead of lifting his hand from the table and caressing his beautiful surgeon’s fingers, which was what I really wanted to do, I found myself promising to come to Mexico City and work for la revolucion.

“Good. We drink to that!” Sergio poured the last of the wine into our glasses.

I noticed that the bottle was slightly chipped at the mouth and that I was drunker than I thought and would probably be sorry tomorrow for what I had promised so cavalierly.

“We’ve been drinking ground glass,” I said, thinking, damn you, Sergio, and your social justice routine. Why don’t you just take me to your apartment and make love to me?

The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I thought I saw Rosie, a bulky singer of off-color ditties who’d taken a liking to us, expand and float toward the doorway.

“Rosie’s blotted out the sun,” I said dreamily.

“No,” said Sergio, “it’s someone else. Another Rosie.” Was he drunk too?

The conversation trickled off, giving way to the toot of fog horns on the Hudson. Now it was raining outside, though it had been a perfectly sunny day when we first sat down.

“God, Faye, do you realize what a momentous occasion this is?” Sergio grabbed my hand suddenly and shook it hard.

“Looks like Rosie’s going to serenade us,” I responded muzzily. Rosie had in fact approached the bar, placed one purple-veined elephant leg on the brass rail, and was preparing to launch one of her unsolicited performances.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sergio said, his glasses misting over in the now steamy bar.

“Where to?”

“The movies . . . anywhere . . .”

“What about Andrew?”

“Call him and tell him he must come too.”

“Hi, dearie, Rosie cawed at me as I passed her at the bar. And I recognized instantly what I could never have seen while dead sober: Rosie was a transvestite.

“Didn’t you know it all along?” Sergio asked as we were heading cross town toward the Lincoln Square multiplex in a Checker cab papered with stickers denouncing everything but Marine World in Florida.

“That Rosie was a man?”

“Yes.”

“No, damn it. I once even peed in the woman’s toilet with him standing in front of the mirror at the sink applying make-up.”

We both laughed.

* * * *

A month later I was on leave in Mexico City training as a demonstration marshal, studying crowd control, and helping Sergio organize the university’s medical faculty and students in a protest march against the imprisonment of a union leader named Vallejo. I didn’t know it then, but Sergio’s Mexico City demonstration, along with several others around the country, had been planned as a dry run before the Zapatista uprising. Not that knowing what was coming would have changed anything once Sergio had worked his revolutionary magic on me. We didn’t become lovers. I’d half hoped we would, but Sergio was too ethical for that. He slept on the sofa in the living room of the flat in the Pedregal we shared with an older American medical student named Margo who’d divorced her husband and left her two daughters with her mother in North Dakota, in order to attend, as she put it, the only medical school in the hemisphere that would have her. Margo had been an army nurse in the States before deciding to become a doctor. Her porcelain-white skin and baby blue eyes belied her tough anti-American persona, but she had yet to shed her military boot camp training. She’d moved in only two days before me but her side of our shared bedroom was already meticulously arranged when I arrived, everything in its proper place: medical books in sparsely occupied bookcases, spotless desk, personal items tucked out of sight in khaki rayon bags. Margo sat on the edge of her bed eyeing me suspiciously as I unpacked my hibiscus-flowered suitcase and stuffed my things into drawers in no particular order. Later, when we got to know each other better, she confessed that my “Hawaiian luggage and hick outfit” (a checked gingham pinafore and wooden clogs) that first day, had convinced her I was a CIA plant, and I told her I’d automatically a
ssumed that, being military, she was a lesbian—and we both had a good laugh because—-as events later proved–neither of us could have been more wrong.

Every day, we’d join Sergio and his radical friends in a Zona Rosa café called The Laughing Horse. We’d sit there for hours on tiny, cramped white wire chairs around dollhouse-sized tables, planning for the demonstration, arguing politics, stuffing ourselves with soggy guacamole and stale tostadas, and drinking too much Tequila.

It was at the Laughing Horse where I watched Sergio fall out of love with me and in love with Margo. A TV Soap star named Felix unsuccessfully tried convincing me to have an affair with him instead. Humberto, a penniless film director, finished cutting his documentary on the last days of Trotsky in Mexico, to which I had contributed most of my money, and our motley group celebrated the event by cramming into an ancient Volkswagen beetle and driving around the Paseo de Reforma honking the horn and shooting colored streamers out the windows. The documentary’s scriptwriter, and owner of the Volkswagen, got a flat tire and forced us to abandon the car right under the nose of a policeman with a head-bashing baton at his waist and a prominently displayed revolver strapped to his chest. Felix, the black-haired Soap star, had begun pawing in the direction of my breasts, muttering something about existential decisions. Margo, who had drunk too much tequila, pushed him off me, hissing into his face that he and all men were filo da puta. After which, threatening to kill himself, Felix lunged into the mad Mexico City traffic. Fortunately, Humberto snatched him out of the road just in time to avoid being run down by a door-less and windowless bus jammed with farm workers.

On the morning before the march, Sergio announced over a poached egg that he and Margo were going to be married. Margo was out taking an anatomy exam, it was drizzling lightly. I had just closed the door and returned from the hall after having paid the bread man. I placed two fresh rolls on the table in front of Sergio and stood watching him eat. Seeing him sitting there, in his crisp blue denim work shirt, vulnerable as only a man eating his poached egg can be, no longer buck-toothed and shy but still wearing thick-lens glasses and not looking me in the eye, made me want to cry.

“When’s the wedding?”

“Friday, at noon, in the City Hall.”

“Will you throw me out of the flat?”

“Pobrecita,” he said laughing.

“Well, I can’t live here with you and Margo. I’ll have to find a new place,” I said, turning to the stove.

“Of course not, you’ll stay here.”

“No, I can’t,” I said, hating myself for throwing money at Humberto in order to ingratiate myself with Sergio and guilty for no longer being in love with Andrew. I turned up the flame under the coffee pot then poured warmed milk halfway into a mug and waited.

Sergio buttered a roll and placed it on my plate. “You know, I used to sneak the best food from my mother’s pantry and bring it to the peasants who worked on our estate. By the time I was twelve I was an avowed enemy of the capitalist government in the United States, an urban guerrilla in my own country.”

The coffee pot hissed. I poured some into my mug, stirred in a spoonful of sugar, set the pot back on the stove, and sat down at the table. Through the curtain-less window, a sudden ray of sunlight pierced the smoggy drizzle illuminating the roll on my plate. “We’ll have good weather for the parade tomorrow,” I said.

As I’d predicted, the sky was blue and cloudless the next day. The air was clear, free of the usual stink of diesel fuel; there were no cars, no scooters, not even a city bus in sight. Everyone was in a holiday mood: even the policemen on their balky horses were laughing. Onlookers were already lining both sides of the Paseo de Reforma three rows deep behind the sawhorses when Margo and I arrived at the designated meeting point. Banners fastened to street lamps billowed lightly in the wind—-red, yellow, royal purple, and dragon green. Office workers leaning out the windows of their buildings signaled their solidarity with the gathering marchers by throwing handfuls of heart-shaped confetti. Sergio was up ahead, testing the sound system on the speakers’ platform that had been constructed in the Zocalo. As principal organizer of the event, he’d been responsible for obtaining a permit and, after bribing the appropriate municipal authorities, a promise of no police harassment.

Slipping on our white armbands and taking up our megaphones, Margo and I began organizing the demonstrators. We had drawn lots for marching partners earlier that morning, and I was greatly relieved not to have drawn horny Felix, but soft-spoken Humberto, who was gay, and whose stylish tweed and leather-patch-sleeved jacket, ever present pipe, and directorial confidence were far more reassuring. Humberto and I had just linked arms and were waiting for the signal to start marching when a low-flying police helicopter swooped down and buzzed the crowd.

“CIA, GO AWAY!” shouted a student in a brown corduroy suit, pumping his fists as he leapt from his cross-legged seat on the pavement behind the sawhorse. His companions immediately jumped to their feet and joined the chant. A young woman pretended to shoot the helicopter out of the sky with her thumb and forefinger: “CIA, GO AWAY! CIA, GO AWAY!” The helicopter was so close now that three men in civilian clothes could be seen peering out of the open door. Oblivious to the jeers of the crowd, two of them were waving enthusiastically.

A small ruckus exploded out of a side street. Word came that horses were being turned on a rowdy cluster of marchers. Together, Humberto and I hurried in that direction to confirm the report, which, it turned out, was only a rumor—but worrisome nonetheless, for, after all the initial gaiety, there was a definite whiff of paranoia coursing through the crowd. Fortunately the marching signal—-a white handkerchief tied to a pole being waved from across the street–prevented it from spreading. With arms locked, in rows extending fifteen across, the marchers surged ahead chanting “Free Vallejo!” The last and loudest line to join us, a phalanx of Labor Unionists, spewed from the side streets, leaving the monument start point deserted. Their hoarse cries demanding Vallejo’s release blended with ours, creating for one fleeting but exalted moment the unearthly harmony of a Gregorian chant.

Directly in front of me a woman pushed a toddler in a pram waving a Che Guevara paper flag. We were just approaching the first cross street when a man suddenly bolted from the sidelines and, aiming directly at the Che Guevara flag, pitched a tomato. Instinctively breaking ranks and pulling away from Humberto, I jumped in front of the child–and caught the splattering tomato’s juice and seeds in the chest. The woman with the pram marched on without acknowledging me; but the Unionists who had seen me take the hit were stomping and hollering their approval. Egged on by their cheers, I turned to face them, dipped my fingers into the mess and pretended to lick off the “blood” before rejoining Humberto in the line.

We encountered our first group of hecklers in front of the Hilton. Flashing my stained chest at them, I shouted “Cowards! Free Vallejo!”—which set the hecklers to booing and the Unionists to chanting even louder and drowning them out. Unaccountably buoyed by their battle cries, I could no longer distinguish friend from foe: the hecklers, the mustached policeman rocking back and forth on his horse alongside me, the woman pushing the pram, the girl with the defiantly bobbing blond pony tail, the fist-brandishing Unionists, the marching band now segueing into an incongruously rollicking version of Guantanamero; however, my moment of ecstatic oneness was interrupted when the music suddenly spiraled out of con
trol, panicked drum beats, short blasts from the tuba piercing the air like cannon fire, and now—unmistakably– human screams coming from the direction of the Zocalo.

Tearing through the seams of our carefully organized formations, the marchers in front of me were scattering. Raising the megaphone to my lips, I shouted for them to get back into line but no one heard me, or if they did, they were too intent on scrambling for safety to regroup. Humberto had grabbed my free hand and was pulling me forward. I dropped the megaphone and felt it crumple under my feet. The girl with the pony tail to the right of me was gone. The scruffy boy in sandals with her had fled too. The woman with the pram had abandoned it and, carrying the child in her arms, was seeking refuge among the dispersing onlookers behind the no longer existing sidelines where the no longer laughing mounted policemen and their frenzied whinnying horses were chasing down onlookers and demonstrators alike through a maze of bunting. Still holding hands, Humberto and I joined the blind scattering mob but were unable to move either forward or backward. Our efforts at threading a sideways path toward the curb were equally unsuccessful. From the Zocalo, clearly now, came the steady burst of gunfire.

Many of the musicians, too, had bolted and were now scattering through the streets. A beautiful black woman holding a trumpet high over her head pressed against me, her hair brushing my face. Tugging at my monitor’s armband, she screamed in English, “They’re shooting! They’ve opened fire at the Zocalo. They’re killing us!”

Flailing their truncheons, the mounted police plowed into the crowd. Still holding my hand, Humberto zigzagged back and forth trying to avoid them. A heavyset girl in a pink dress wasn’t as nimble and, having taken several blows to the neck and head, was bleeding. I reached out to help her but was blocked by a policeman wedging his horse between us. Leveling a barrage of curses and maneuvering the horse only inches from my face, he swung his truncheon first at the bleeding girl, then at me. The girl fell and Humberto dragged me away screaming. Weaving through the melee, he didn’t stop until we’d reached an eerily empty side street behind the Reforma. It was only after he’d propped me sagging against the wall of a cold stone building that he finally let go of my hand. The windows of a nearby shop, an elegant handbag boutique that had been looted, lay shattered on the sidewalk.

“Home, Humberto. Take me home, please,” I gasped, falling against his chest.

Miraculously, Sergio, unhurt, was in the flat when we arrived. His shirt was stained with blood, his thick-lens glasses were shattered but he was still wearing the frames. Margo, he said, had been slightly injured; it was her blood on his shirt. She was in the hospital but there was no need for me to venture out; he’d arranged with the emergency room doctor, a friend, to get her back to the flat in an ambulance—-maybe later, maybe tomorrow. He was leaving for Cuba right away. He might contact me. On the other hand, I was not to worry if I didn’t hear from him for a while. He was being monitored. Then, almost off-handedly, he added, “Andrew called. He said to get on the next flight out and come back home.” Standing for a moment in the doorway, Sergio flashed me the victory sign. “Good luck, Faye,” he said. Then he slipped out of my life as casually as he’d entered it.

* * * * *
Papua New Guinea
2004

I might have caught a glimpse of Sergio again three months later, on January 1st, while NAFTA was being celebrated in Mexico City, the same day the Zapatistas emerged from their jungle training centers and took control of five major towns in the state of Chiapas–where, ignoring Andrew’s tepid recall–I’d joined Medecins Sans Frontieres as a staff doctor. It could have been the thick-lens glasses worn by the serape-wrapped peasant in sandals running past our makeshift hospital tent; or that I needed to see him again, to thank him for teaching me how to serve. Maybe it wasn’t as noble as that, maybe I just needed to prove I was no longer an armchair revolutionary living vicariously through him. Whatever the reason, I can’t say for certain it was Sergio. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Not that it matters.

Just Kids
Patti Smith, Ecco, Jan. 2010
978-006-6211312, $27.00

Deeply personal and insightfully written, Patti Smith’s New York story delivers the emotional narrative that Bob Dylan’s Chronicles left readers wanting. Tracing the relationship between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids explores the thriving artistic community of New York in the 60’s and 70’s and paints a portrait of two eccentrics, two searchers, two creators, as they navigate their way through art, sickness and each other.

It is invigorating to read about the city forty years ago, where artistically, anything seemed possible and collaboration was abundant. Accounts of Smith and Mapplethorpe’s interactions with artists like Salvador Dali, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix are scattered throughout Just Kids. Smith recounts her and Mapplethorpe’s years at the famous Hotel Chelsea where they immersed themselves in poetry, theatre, music, and photography with some of the country’s most exciting minds: Smith writes a play with Sam Shepard, sings a song for Janis Joplin, discusses poetry with Alan Ginsberg.

Most compelling, however, is Smith’s depiction of her dearest friend Robert Mapplethorpe. With a tender candor she walks us through the enigmatic artist’s formative years as he grapples with demons, works ferociously, and strives for recognition. One learns how Mapplethorpe’s own conflicted sexuality and religious upbringing influenced his work and ultimately led him to choose photography as his medium.

Just Kids demonstrates why Smith is a great American storyteller, and the strength of her prose never lets us forget that she began as a poet. This is a book I urge any artist to read, if not to help us recapture the artistic energy of days past, then at least to celebrate it.

Purchase Just Kids here.

It began, to pick an arbitrary beginning, with a key that would not turn in a lock. I hauled my first load of bags and boxes into a Mass Ave complex, struggling through two heavy gates with my car against the curb. Up a slow, sweating elevator, and I gratefully dropped everything in the hallway, inserted the key, and turned – and nothing happened. A half-hour of phone calls later it came to light that the place for which I had signed a lease that morning would remain occupied by the current tenant for another month. Profuse apologies from the real estate agent, and for me a restless night in a hotel.

I got a new set of keys and a new one-bedroom, and when the second move was complete I struggled a twenty-five-dollar air conditioner into the window, threw on a fresh shirt and shorts from the sprawled-open suitcase, and sat uncomfortably on the air mattress, sinking to the floor. A chair and desk would have to come later. I knew no one in the city.

Afternoon light filled the window, and the question of the night awaited my response. I had no response and a to-do list that was empty. Louder than the birds and car-horns and air conditioner’s drone I heard the chaos that is in me, the thoughts that will not be centered.

The night approached: I could see it in the window. The world open before me and I open before a world that does not know me.

I made an acquaintance at the bar near Harvard Square. She was curious about what I was writing in my leatherbound journal between sips of a Boston ale.

Three days later she sent me a message and asked if I had plans for the weekend. And I had to give the sheepish response that everything had changed, that I was back in the safety and stasis of my hometown, writing from a familiar coffee house, compulsively checking my e-mail between job applications flung hopelessly out into the ether of inboxes. I no longer lived or worked in Boston; would not be back in the near future, so far as I knew.

How did it come to this? Well, it was a Thursday night, my second or third night in the city. And the real estate agent called to say that the lease for the new room was prepared, the old one was void, and I would need to come in the following morning to sign. Twelve months at eight hundred dollars a month. A good place, overlooking the edge of Harvard Yard. Walking distance to a first job at least as good as any other.

But I am not the sort to comfortably sign twelve-month leases, and I immediately saw my opening, a swiftly-closing emergency exit door. The chaos in my mind rose to a fever-pitch. Memories of other options believed in, pursued, and gone: paths opened and unwalked. Rosy dreams of teaching flashing past images of a businessman in a suit, walking off a plane into some foreign flag-lined airport with a full wallet and a copy of the Journal under his arm.

And the next day it was over. The sun rose over the Mass Pike, hovered forever over the upstate highways of New York, and died as I charged forward into Ontario. The caffeine kept falling off and I kept stopping to recharge, and I fought against the fatigue of a sixteen-hour drive. By the time Flint passed in the Michigan darkness all the hopes of being homeward had passed: I was exhausted and afraid, unemployed and in debt.

I had explained myself over and over to friends and family on the drive, which keeps one’s mind off the infinity of the road but just the same drains our word-exhausted reasons into dust. I had no money; I would have to empty two retirement accounts in a rock-bottom market and swallow the loss to cover the credit card I would soon fill again. God that I might find new work, closer to home.

I am back from Boston and have several homes and none. Other doors have opened and closed. Ladders I have climbed so proud to reach new heights of discontent. I stand and live in the unimagined neighborhoods of the world, I occupy the career-dreams of others, but my heart rages against all reason and I reliably run chasing after something else, no different really than the dogs that destroy the grass in a yard by chasing whatever opportunity happens by.

Cradled within his palm, slightly brighter in color than the pink of his skin, was a single pill. Roughly triangular in shape, and no larger than a child’s first tooth, the pill had cost him more than the equivalent of a year’s lease on his Volvo V70.

It was love itself.

He’d spent more than three weeks searching for it. He’d met with strangers in dark alleyways and the backs of booming clubs. He’d paid dearly for hints and clues. He’d made telephone calls to numbers with unknown area codes. He’d spoken passwords, and driven to isolated locations, and carried enough cash to make himself feel queasy. And now he had it.

Love itself.

A high percentage of dopamine and norepinephrine, to provoke the euphoria of first attraction. Androgens and estrogens for the heat of lust. Oxytocin and vasopressin to smooth the rush with the dreamy bliss of a long term relationship. A perfect chemical symphony.

He held it in his palm, gazing at it, but seeing Sophie instead. He saw her hair in its morning tangle, her eyes thick with sleep. He saw her in their shower, head bowed and arms crossed as if she were praying. He saw her at the other end of the dinner table, her eyes glimmering in the candle’s flicker. And he saw her as he’d seen her last, a month before, hanged from the banister, her neck stretched long, her bare feet dangling. She hadn’t left a note.

He put the pill in his mouth, and tried to swallow, but his tongue was dry, and the pill caught in his throat. He reached for the bottle, to wash it down. He raised the bottle up, and gulped hard, kept on gulping until the bottle was empty. Even after he’d forced the pill through, and the chemicals had started to do their work, he could feel where it had caught. He could feel it, and it brought the tears to his eyes.

“Teach me how to pray,” she says, and gets down on her knees. Becky Sims, a wispy, straw-haired freshman. Eyes blackened with mascara, a wash of rouge painted over blemished skin. You’ve only seen her once before, in the first meeting of your “Mystery of God” course. Now she kneels in front of you, barely a breath away, on the Persian rug that covers your office floor. The resource bookshelf looms at her back, all thick vertical tomes, and for a moment you feel as though the books are prison bars, and you’re trapped in a cell with the girl.

“I want to know the words,” she says, weaving her thin fingers together, holding her clasped hands in front of her chest. She turns those inky eyes toward you. The collar feels stiff at your throat; each cuff a cotton shackle. This isn’t the first time you’ve felt this way.

In seminary you shared a dorm with a ruddy faced boy from Boise: Patrick Brennan. Wistful and shy, the pink in his cheeks like a constant blush, Patrick looked to you for guidance during his first year. You quickly grew fond of him, and began taking him along for hikes through the wooded hills. Marching hither and yon, throwing your arms open to vistas and declaring “This is God’s glory,” you imagined yourself a great teacher. Finally after months of such excursions, you led Patrick to an icy spring, stripped off your clothes, and dove in. He stood ashore, trembling.

“Come in, Patrick. There’s nothing finer.”

Slowly, with eyes cast down at the earth in front of him, Patrick began to remove his clothes. His cardigan, his shirt (freezing up at each button, then willing himself onwards), his undershirt, his belt. When he’d gotten to his briefs, so pale white against the rosy hue of his delicate thighs, he darted a glance at you, and caught the angle of your stare. Face burning crimson, he re-dressed and retreated, leaving you feverish in the cold water. You’d been found out. The swirling current offered no cover from God’s rigid gaze, and Patrick never spoke to you again.

Now, so many years later, Becky Sims kneels before you. Her eyes are shut tight, her hands held together so fervently that white spreads from where her fingers touch. You can see the florid glow rising under her makeup, blooming upon her neck and upper chest. A heat builds in your own cheeks; you grow slightly dizzy; there is a prickling in your loins. This young girl before you, desperate for what you can give.

Before you know it you’re on your knees with the girl, gripping her hands in your hands, praying. A creature lives within all of us, it buries itself in the depths of our bodies, bound by muscle and bone. A creature that yearns for miracle light, but digs like a tick. You hold Becky’s tiny hands in your own moist grip, and say a prayer for her. You say a prayer for Patrick Brennan. You say a prayer for yourself.

I was reading a novel about every three or four days in the beginning and if I had any time between lessons I’d spend it at the Feltrinelli near the Scala. They had a good selection of American and English titles and as I bounced from stories as different as Endo’s The Sea and Poison to Coezee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I found that my tastes in literature were divided into two camps: the authors whose pessimistic vision of humanity presented me with disturbing moral questions and those who had a more “damn the torpedoes,” libertine approach to life.

Perhaps it was because I’d finally abandoned my schizophrenic mother to her own fate when I’d left the States. After years of taking care of her I thought that she could fend for herself, which, of course, wasn’t true. She would never be totally self-sufficient, but it was what I wanted to believe. I didn’t want to think about what I’d done, but like the characters in Endo’s novel, I’d been faced with a choice. Do I protect the weak or selfishly pursue my future as a writer in Europe? I chose the latter and so condemned my mother to years of living homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. At the time, no one else could have looked after her, or probably, for that matter, endured her often times extreme behavior, but I didn’t see that as an excuse. She was crazy, and I knew that she would never get better, but I hadn’t been there when she needed me and that was all that mattered in my mind.

To forget about this lack of self-sacrifice, or abnegazione as the Italians called it, I read Henry Miller and Bukowski. I also had copies of two of Ernest Hemingway’s earlier works, The Nick Adams Stories and The Snows of Kilimanjaro but those stories, in my opinion, didn’t have that “in your face” sexuality/escape quality that I was looking for. Which is ironic, when I think that Hemingway had already written The Garden of Eden in the 1950s and that his gender-bending tale of three lovers was certainly more radical than the rather traditional “man-on-woman” action that Miller and Bukowski were offering.

The anarchy and black humor of Bukowski’s Post Office said to me that while I hadn’t written anything that I could hold up and say “Hey, this is proof that I’m a writer!” my life was certainly as screwed up as Bukowski’s and I figured that that was a good start. A writer needed to experience life and then eventually write about it and if it turned out that I didn’t have any talent and that I would have done better to stay with my mother then I would cross that bridge when I came to it. In the meantime, I’d convinced myself that I was creating the raw material that I would later use in my “masterpieces.”

Yet, if Charles Bukowski assuaged my guilt and made me think that perhaps it was cool to live in a dump and do minimum wage work, Henry Miller’s novels were saying that there should literally be no limits to my head-long flight from responsibility. I was reading what he wrote about love, women and sex, and thinking that perhaps I could apply his particular recipe for happiness to my own life. His erotic prose fit in perfectly with the country that I was living in. The Italians were obsessed with beauty and especially female beauty. Scantily clad, seductive women were everywhere you looked. Gorgeous Mediterranean signorine with dark hair and light skin advertising black lace negligees in the Metro and on the trams that I rode to work. It was an endless parade of titillation and while Italian men seemed to take it in stride, for me it was something new.

Another novelty was the way that people looked at each other. Flirting was a national pastime in Italy and everywhere I went women were giving me stares that back home I would have interpreted as “strong interest.” Here, it was just a part of the scenery. You looked at them, they looked at you and usually it never went any further than that. It was a very traditional country and so long as you were aware of this, there was never any problem. My mistake was thinking that I could act like Mr. Miller and get away with it.

The more I read from the man who’d given us Sexus, Nexus and Plexus the more I became convinced that betrayal was the solution to my problems, although I didn’t think of my fantasies as betrayal. No, for me this wasn’t cheating on Patrizia, I was just playing the field, and how could it be wrong if she knew what I was reading and more or less what I was thinking?

It was all out in the open and while I know that some women can be tolerant of their men when they act like imbeciles, when I think back on what I was planning I’m amazed that she didn’t leave me. Subconsciously driven to recreate past events of betrayal and abandonment, it was almost as if I was trying to provoke a reaction in Patrizia when I kept bumping, purposely, into one of her girlfriends at the U2 concert in February, or when I would tell her that I was still receiving and sending letters to a college student I’d met in France the summer before. We hadn’t been together very long (about five months) and had it been me instead of her on the receiving end I’m sure that I would have called it quits.

The cherry on the cake, though, came when one of her school friends invited us over for dinner. Usually we either went out with a group of people or on our own and so when Patrizia asked me if I felt like going I said “sure”. I bought a bottle of Bonarda in the macelleria near our apartment before we left and armed with that we set out to find their apartment.

The building was on a dimly lit street, not too far from Corso Buenos Aires. It was old, but it had been recently restructured and we had to walk up three flights of stairs because there was no elevator. Following Patrizia with the bottle in my hand, I asked her again what her friend’s name was.

“Francesca,” she said, “and his is Ettore.”

At the top of the stairwell there was only one apartment and we knocked on the door.

“Avanti!” said someone from inside and walking in we were greeted by Ettore who gave Patrizia a kiss on the cheek before shaking my hand. He was about my height, 5’9”, and was wearing a pair of jeans and a heavy wool sweater. He didn’t speak much English but I knew enough Italian to be able to follow the conversation he was having with Patrizia. He wanted to know if we’d had any trouble finding the place and said that it was great that we could come and that finally he had a chance to meet us after all Francesca had been telling him.

Looking around I saw that their apartment was tiny. There was the combo living room/kitchen area where we were standing, a small bedroom to my right and an even smaller bathroom to the left of the entrance. Francesca worked at a travel agency and Ettore was a bank clerk, and I thought that like us they too were probably renting but later discovered that Ettore’s parents had bought him the place when he finished university.

Francesca had prepared stuzzichini (small antipasti with speck and other cold cuts) and then a fantastic spaghetti alla carbonara, followed by a roast, and finally a tiramisu for dessert. The dining table in the center of the room was set with candles and crystal wine glasses. I sat facing Ettore, while Patrizia was at the opposite end from Francesca. Our hostess was perhaps a bit taller than Patrizia and had thick, dark hair which grew down past her shoulders. She was certainly an attractive woman and what you noticed first about her were her eyes. They were lively and at the same time vulnerable. They were open to conversation and I could see why she and Patrizia got along. Behind the quick glances and the laughter there was a hint of melancholy and abandon, which I didn’t understand but which added to Francesca’s sensuality.

We opened up the bottle of Bonarda and when that was gone, another bottle from Valtellina that Ettore insisted that we try, a four-year-old Inferno. The dinner was excellent and when Ettore asked if I liked Italian cooking I told him what I told everyone, that it was second to none and that Italy was a great country and then, looking at his girlfriend, that the women were very beautiful. Francesca, whose cheeks were already rosy from the wine, turned a darker shade of red and asked me, after conferring with her boyfriend, if I wanted to see some photographs.

“Just an album that we put together last year,” she explained, looking at Patrizia, “an art book of sorts,” and I was sure that they’d be the usual family vacation pics that Italians were always showing each other.

Instead, when she put the heavy leather album down on the dining table and opened it up to the first photo I was surprised to see her posing like a ‘50s pinup in nothing but a black lace bra and panties.

“It was my idea, but Ettore took the photos,” she told me and when I turned the page there was another woman, slim, blond and buxom, but who instead of black was wearing red. She, too, was striking a pose and the first image that came to mind was of Ettore, alone in a room with the two of them, clicking away as they pranced about him half naked. “Art, indeed!” I thought.

“That’s Eleanora,” said Francesca to Patrizia, “do you remember her from school?” Patrizia did and wasn’t impressed. She may have been getting bored or angry with me, but I wasn’t even looking at her. I was staring at the book and as I turned the pages I felt almost intimidated. It was as if Francesca had pegged me right from the start and was calling my bluff. As if she was challenging me not to be stimulated by what I had in my hands.

“Nice pictures,” I said, after a parting shot of Eleanora licking a lollipop in a sheer silk negligee.

“And we did the whole shoot in one hour” said Ettore.

“Truly remarkable.” I answered, as I pushed the album to the center of the table.

We didn’t stay much longer after that. It was getting late and we had a long ride home. We promised to see each other again and in the days that followed I kept thinking about Francesca and our meeting. I had memorized every detail of her from the photos and the dinner and almost imperceptibly, I’d started to think that I would have to see her again, but this time alone. The whole thing reminded me of Tropic of Capricorn, and of the women Miller would pick up in offices and parties, and at night when Patrizia and I were in bed and talking about what had happened during the day I’d sometimes mention the photos and my fantasies and how it was just like a Henry Miller novel and that perhaps I should take this to its “logical conclusion.”

We were both young and open-minded but I think that Patrizia didn’t throw me and my belongings out on the street when I got “logical” on her because she didn’t take everything I said that seriously. It was one thing to be theoretically in favor of “free-love,” quite another to practice it. She liked me and wanted our relationship to work and probably believed that I was just spouting off and that eventually I’d calm down and forget about Mr. Miller and his ideas. But the more I thought about Francesca the more obsessed I became with my desire to be as free and unhindered as Henry Miller was. Was it or was it not the land of amore? To me it was and so I decided to pay Francesca a visit. I remember that I actually told Patrizia that I was going and that amazingly enough she didn’t stop me. Perhaps after all my emotional acrobatics she’d reached her limit and had written me off as a hopeless case. I don’t think that she was very happy, but in my obsessive state I took her acquiescence as a green light.

Had I bothered to think about it I would have noticed that my behavior had more in common with Hemingway’s than with Henry Miller’s. Like Ernest, I was addicted to the idea of being in love, to the crazy euphoria of the first days and weeks and the way it made you feel, not to the realities of a long-term relationship. I believed like the author of A Farewell To Arms in the supremacy of romantic love, and while Hemingway once said that if you loved a woman then you should marry her, he never remained faithful to any of them for long. He married four times and his second wife, Pauline, was actually a good friend of his first wife, Hadley. On average his interest in any of his wives or lovers lasted about three years. After that, he’d start to look for someone new. He always felt guilty about his betrayals but that never stopped him from doing what he had to do. As he had one of his female characters in To Have and Have Not explain it, men couldn’t help but be the way they were. Women certainly preferred companions they could trust and who were faithful but men weren’t built that way:

“They want someone new or someone younger, or someone that they shouldn’t have, or someone that looks like someone else. Or if you’re dark they want a blonde. Or if you’re a blonde they go for a redhead. Or if you’re a redhead then it’s something else. A Jewish girl … (or) Chinese or Lesbians or goodness knows what … The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him the quicker he gets tired of you.”

For me, though, my biggest worry on the tram to Francesca’s house wasn’t any species-wide tendency towards infidelity but that Francesca wouldn’t be there. I had imagined this encounter with her so many times but had never factored in the possibility that she might have gone out. I didn’t have her number and standing in front of her building I almost decided to give it up and go home. Luckily, when I finally pressed the button on the intercom, she answered. I quickly told her who I was and said that I wanted to see her. She must have been sleeping because she asked me if I could wait ten minutes while she put something on.

I walked to the end of the block and back a few times and when ten minutes had passed I climbed the stairs to her apartment. Once inside, she told me that unfortunately Ettore was at work, but that if I didn’t mind just talking with her we could have a coffee together. She then asked why I’d come and I made up some excuse about being in between lessons and with time to kill. I would have had to teach at two but I’d canceled everything that afternoon in anticipation of my great exploit.

She, however, was not playing her part. She may have believed me when I’d told her that I was just passing through, but any credibility that I might have had ceased to exist the moment I asked if I could see the photo album again.

“No,” she told me, that wouldn’t be possible. They only showed it to friends on special occasions and, besides, I’d already seen it once. Why in the world would I want to look at it again?

I then tried to steer her into the bedroom, but she wouldn’t budge from the kitchen. The door was open and I could have a look at the bed, if I felt like it, but she had to do the laundry.

“Put on a record,” she suggested, as I sat on the edge of their bed. There was a stereo on the floor and a jazz collection next to it, but I wasn’t in the mood for music. I’d come to try on my new identity as a literary Don Giovanni only to discover that the suit didn’t fit and that Francesca was way ahead of me. The bubble of my free-love obsession had been popped, but just to prove that there’s no end to humiliation once it’s begun, she decided to call her boyfriend and tell him that I was there. She wanted to see if he could make it home for lunch, because, “che bella sorpresa,” I had showed up at their door and it would be lovely if the three of us could eat together again. Ettore, though, wouldn’t be back ‘til four. He had work to do, and when I said to Francesca that I really should be leaving, she begged me to stay until her boyfriend came home. I told her that I couldn’t and when she insisted I finally understood that I hadn’t been wrong the night of our dinner. She was interested in me, but only so long as Ettore was there. They were offering me the chance to make my “dreams” become reality, to live another chapter from Tropic of Capricorn, but by then I’d flunked my first test as a Henry Miller apprentice. My ego had been justly bruised and I’d been forced to admit (if only for a moment) that who I was and what I wanted to be were not at all the same.

At the breakfast table, Grace sits eating instant oatmeal she warmed in the microwave all by herself. The fake peach scent makes her stomach turn a little, but this is the only thing she knows how to fix and her mother—Diane—isn’t around to prepare anything for her, again. Her father, Frank, is in the shower, weeping and telling himself he needs to stop. He’s got to get to work, got to earn money to pay for things someone convinced him and his family they need or want. But first he must take his daughter to school so she doesn’t have to catch the bus. That was his promise last night. Grace said she couldn’t sleep, and he told her she could crawl into her mother’s empty spot in their bed.

Grace had been lying on the floor beside her parents’ bed, pressing her hand over her mouth to not make noise as she cried, but he heard her. A parent knows his child’s cry, and if Diane had been the one to get up and check when Gracie was just an infant wailing in the middle of the night, his turn is now. He held her little hand and they slept. Grace, no longer an infant, eight years old, will grow up to look like her mother, which will break Frank’s heart over and over again.

But this morning Diane is across town, in a hotel room where the television is bolted down and the toilet runs all night. She watches morning talk shows and tilts a glass bottle into her cup of hotel-lobby coffee. She watches the smiles on the television screen and fights the voice inside that says good mothers don’t leave their children, like she did last night. They don’t watch their husbands drive off with their babies in the back seat. But maybe this will be better. She swirls the contents of her coffee cup. Maybe now she won’t have to anticipate when a husband needs her to stop talking or start talking or when a child needs her to be firm or to coddle. She won’t have to look at that always-frightened look on Gracie’s face, like she never knows when Diane is going to screw up again. She walks through the halls during parent-teacher conferences, pulling on the strap of her purse for some sort of support and people still stare at her, she thinks: What has she ever done to these people? And what business of theirs is it how she lives?

Back in the kitchen, Frank pats Grace’s still-wet head, “Be sure to dry your hair. It’s chilly out. I don’t want you catching cold.” These are the sorts of things her mother would say if she were here. He and Grace haven’t talked about it: the heavy quiet in the house this morning. They won’t talk about it either, not in the way they need to.

Grace can still feel the warm spot from her father’s hand on the top of her head. When she was younger, she always loved it when he would brush her hair after she got out of the tub. He gripped the brush by the head, not the handle, and started at the ends of her hair, running his other hand along her hair behind the brush. He was always so gentle—he dreamed once that he pulled too hard and she came away in chunks of scalp, then pieces of bone, then nothing at all—that was what safety felt like to Grace. She brushes her own hair now; she’s too big for her father to do it for her. She will most likely remember her father brushing her hair, though. She will put it in the corner of her head with other things, like getting into a warm car on a chilly fall day, or the way her mother kisses her forehead to feel for a fever. Some things she won’t want to remember, like the veins in the backs of her mother’s hands. Those blocky hands with their square-tipped fingers. And the way they sometimes shake when she concentrates.

Diane’s hands tremble only slightly as she smokes her day’s first cigarette, even though she has rented a non-smoking room. This is one of the simple things she is supposed to be grateful for: that first cigarette and cup of coffee. But instead, the filter flutters to her lips in a way that is unsatisfying. She should eat something. What if she’s not just hungry and this hand thing is a sign of something else? Diane’s mother died when she was very young, but she has an idea of what she inherited: a tendency toward self-cutting and suicidal thoughts. Was this what it was like for her mother, Diane thinks, did her mother feel this persecuted? Do most people?

She should call in sick to work. Her head hurts and she craves greasy biscuits and gravy. She will miss out on one day’s pay. But it shouldn’t make too much difference in the paycheck; they should still be able to buy groceries. For skipping out, Frank will probably call her irresponsible once again. Last night he was yelling at her, accusing her of being defective. (He was only trying to tell her she’s sick, that she needs help.) Whatever it was he was saying, all she could think to tell him was, “I thought you loved me.”

Last night as the two of them stood there on their friends’ porch—they’d gone over for dinner and drinks, maybe a little cards after, but she just kept drinking—each could see the other’s breath. He tried to get her to come home, it was time to come home, and Grace—she sat in the warming van with the radio turned up and her eyes clamped shut—just wanted her mother in the car with her, just wanted her home with them, just wanted them to be a family and for that to be good enough.

But Diane heard him say she was sick, heard, “You’re not a good mother,” though that may not be what he really said. Still, that’s what she heard. And that’s why she promised—the word seems improper now—she promised to leave him. Them. Out loud she said she would leave when she was damn good and ready. Inwardly, though, she was imagining him staying up all night waiting for her to come home. He was too proud to come get her, and he would just fall asleep while he waited. He would realize how great she was and how lucky he should consider himself since she even chose to date him in the first place and then said yes when he asked her to marry him. He’d plan his apology and then he would treat her good for once, ask her her opinion of him and how much she thinks he’s worth. Or she’d sneak in and crawl in bed with Grace and let him know who she trusted more until he begged her to come back.

When she was ready to leave, Diane called a cab and the driver asked where she was headed. Maybe she was still a little drunk. Maybe that was just an excuse. Maybe she wanted, just once, to see what life would have been like without any of them. For years she secretly wondered how things might be different if she hadn’t gone to the grocery store the day she met Frank.

He’d come running out behind her as she dug through her too-big purse to find her keys. “Ma’am, miss?” He changed his mind about what to call her as soon as she looked up at him. It was her hair. She wore it back in a bun at the nape of her neck, lending her a matronly look. He thrust a sack in her direction. “You left these,” he said, peeking into the bag. Generic orange juice and bread and a box of adult diapers. No, they were not hers, actually. He had mistaken her bun for that of some other old lady’s, and they laughed about it there in the parking lot. That was how it started, and now she was in a cab that reminded her of rotten potatoes and the driver asked her again where she wanted to go. She leaned her head against the cool window and allowed her breath to fog it over.

“Motel Six. That’s cheap, right?”

The cabbie peeked at her through the rearview mirror. He considered asking her if she was okay—it was his nature to be concerned—but he thought better of it. If this lady wanted to go somewhere and cry herself to sleep or numb herself into oblivion, that was none of his business. His business was to avoid traffic, not ask questions, and hope for a big tip. As a consolation, he took her to the second-cheapest hotel in town, on account it was less likely to have bedbugs.

But before the cabbie took this sad and lonely woman into consideration last night, Grace peeked out of the window of the van at her parents, at all that angry breath. They were yelling. He pointed to the van. Grace should not have been born, she knew. Her existence threw off an equilibrium established well before she showed up. She was the wrongness. She’ll probably end up being the one thing they’ve done right together, but little girls don’t know these sorts of things, and she’ll carry the guilt of that night with her. Grace’s guilt will manifest itself in an ever-so-slight tremor of the hands. Maybe she’ll think about why that is. Maybe she’ll remember where she’s seen that before and wonder what on earth her mother must have been going through.

Frank got into the van and tried not to slam the door. Gracie was already crying.

“Daddy?” was all she could say between sobs.

He sighed, shook his head. He put on his seatbelt and put the van in reverse. He looked over his shoulder to back out, and his baby had snot bubbling out of her nose. She knew it was there, but her hands were too cold to wipe it away.

“It’s okay, baby. Mom’s coming home later.” As he pulled out of the driveway, he would not look back at his wife, who he knew still stood on the porch, crying tears that weren’t from just drinking. He was tired. He was tired of all of it. He’d asked her, like he had so many times before, what to do to make her happy. She didn’t know, she said, talk to her. So he told her what he could remember—what he worried about—but that didn’t help, either. He wasn’t the deep, passionate, brooding man she thought she married. So she drank, and it made him tired. He had to be up early in the morning, so he’d said, “Fine,” and left her there on the porch.

He would go home, and she could leave whenever she wanted. She could come home or not. It was her choice. It was always her choice. Maybe they’d do better without her. Bring some stability to their lives.

She was surprised by how easily it happened this time. She stood on the steps a moment for lack of anything else to do. She was hurt and proud and scared and lonely, but she was also giddy in a way that felt inappropriate. She couldn’t yet label her giddiness as that chance to make decisions for her, and kept her feet where they were to think about it.

Grace cried most of the way home, and when they got there, her father carried her—he hadn’t picked her up in a while and now he remembered why—into the house and sat her down, groaning as he did so, talking about how heavy she is and how big she’s gotten, trying to make her laugh.

“We’ll have to put a brick on your head to keep you from growing.” He smiled weakly at her.

She was not amused. “Dad.”

“Okay, maybe not. Listen, I want to talk to you about—”

“When’s Mom coming home?”

And here Frank blinked rapidly several times and looked over his shoulder at the front door. He hadn’t cried in front of his daughter before and she was already terrified enough. He was pretty sure she didn’t need to see this, too. He cleared his throat several times, blinked some more, and sniffed loudly.

“I don’t know, sweetie. When she’s ready, I guess.”

Grace nodded. She wanted hard and fast answers: How would she get home? When—to the minute—would she arrive? Why did she leave? The sooner she knew for sure, the sooner she could fix it and begin focusing on something else. She will probably become a woman who wastes no time with mourning. She will make lists. She will work to cross items off her list, but that’s it. There will be no wallowing.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Mom.” Her voice was quiet. “And why she’s mad.”

If she had been there listening to her daughter explain—this little bit was all that counted for explanation from Grace—how she was sorry she ruined her parents’ lives, Diane would have wrapped her baby in her arms and rocked her. And Diane would reassure her that her life—their lives—were richer because of Grace, and that they’d figure it out together.

But Frank simply reverted to the honesty that befell him when he didn’t know what else to say.

“I don’t know what to do about your mother,” he said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Do I still have to go to school tomorrow?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Do I have to ride the bus?”

“Tell you what.” He stood and offered his hand as he led her to her bedroom. “I’ll take you. How’s that?”

She nodded. “A compromise.”

Frank lay in his bed and Grace in hers, though neither really slept. She knows too much, he thought. She will always know too much. She hugged her stuffed cow, but that wasn’t enough, so she hugged her pillow and cried a wet spot into it.

From down the hall he heard her sniffing and rolled over. For fifteen years he had fantasized about having a bed to himself once again. He could sprawl and kick and roll and tuck and un-tuck and scratch and do whatever he wanted and there was no one to sigh heavily in the dark to let him know in her own way that she was also annoyed with the situation. Nobody to poke him in the ribs or jab him with her elbow or hold his nose to make him stop snoring. God, how he hated when she did that.

But then again, on mornings when they could peacefully sleep in, she snuggled up to him and pressed her body against his. Fifteen years together and he still loved the way Diane felt next to him in the morning. She threw an arm around him and as she breathed in, her stomach billowed and pressed against his back. Those, he thought, were their most intimate moments, and they very well may have been. He held still for as long as his bladder would allow on those days, just trying to keep her there for a little longer.

So many times he felt like she was just trying to escape him, her life, who they’d become.

And she was gone now. Her place in the bed sagged next to him. He felt as if he was falling up into space, as if the very earth shuddered to be rid of him. He reached out a hand and placed it in the empty spot where his wife should have been. The sheets were cold. This was not what he had wanted.

Down the hall, Grace’s breathing slowed. She fell asleep just as across town her mother paid the driver, then entered the hotel lobby. She checked into her room and blinked in the fluorescent lighting of the bathroom. She didn’t look at her face. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to think. She peed first and held her head in her hands. It felt too heavy for her neck. She stayed that way, replaying the night until the nausea overcame her. Diane kneeled in front of the toilet to vomit. Grace awoke in the middle of the night.

Grace was supposed to remember something. When she was frightened and confused in the night, she crawled into her parents’ bedroom to sleep on the floor beside their bed. She had to be quiet, otherwise they’d wake up and send her back to her own room—she was too big to do this anymore. She lay on her back on her mother’s side of the bed, attempting to steady her breath. She listened to see if she was making any noise.

The only breathing in the room was her father’s heavy wheeze. Then she remembered her mother. She began crying again. Frank’s breathing grew quieter as he listened to her try to stifle the noise she made. He called her name and she sat up. In the darkness he could barely make out the top of her head as it appeared just above the edge of the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I can’t sleep. Can I get in bed with you?”

“Okay, but you have to go to sleep.” He pulled back the covers and fluffed his wife’s pillow.

She wanted him to hold her and rock her and to tell her he would fix it, but instead she reached across the middle of the bed and took his hand. That was enough to allow them both to fall heavily to sleep.

This morning her eyes burn from all the crying. She rubs them and rubs them with the backs of her knuckles as she sits in the front seat on her way to school.

“Something wrong with your eyes?” Frank let her sit in the front to help her feel better. It sort of worked.

“Can’t keep ‘em open.” It’s not that she wants to stay home today, but going to school seems disrespectful.

“Yeah, crying will do that to you. I’d share my coffee, but you wouldn’t like it.” He sips from his travel mug and they say nothing else until they arrive at the school, when he says goodbye and watches his little stranger trudge into the building.

Instead of going to work, Diane goes for a walk. The air is crisp, but the sun is out and she is warm under her coat. She’s a receptionist, so she doesn’t get to move around a lot. The walking is nice. She used to worry about getting fat and ugly, about being unattractive to her husband, who never seemed to gain anything except bags under his eyes. Each year, her pants have grown tighter and tighter across her thighs and through the seat. At first she stopped eating lunch and dinner and took walks on her lunch breaks. When she wasn’t losing anything and Frank said she was cranky all the time, she gave up. Now she just buys bigger clothes every other season.

She tucks her nose into the collar of her coat and checks the traffic before crossing the street. Maybe she should change jobs. Try physical labor. She would love to work in a greenhouse planting and weeding and doing whatever they do. That work is probably only seasonal, though. She’s got a daughter to think about.

But she’s not thinking about leaving yet. They’ve been through versions of this in the past, and it will probably take her several attempts before she gets it right, before she can leave for good. Each time there will be a big scene and mean things will most likely be said, and each time it will be her fault. As she passes the windows of a strip-mall, her reflection looks lumpy and disheveled. This is not what she meant to happen last night. She has a husband. He’s a good man, and God knows he puts up with the stuff she puts him through. Granted, he could be a little more vocal, a little more involved, but she still considers herself one of the lucky ones. And for some reason, she’s still so unhappy.

She is thinking about change. She’ll change her job, maybe her hair. She should go on a diet again, cut back on her drinking a little.

The day wears on and she makes lists: talk to Grace about sex, tell Grace she is beautiful, compliment Frank more, give Frank more space, make quality time for family. They pile in her head only as ideas, not as plans. It is this lack of foresight that keeps her from understanding that she will never be happy as long as she continues this way. But she won’t make plans for change. She can’t think about that now.

Grace can’t concentrate in school. She keeps seeing her parents fighting and can’t shake the feeling that maybe her mother is lying hurt in a ditch. Her mother is gone and she’s not coming back, and it’s all her father’s fault. But her instincts aren’t true yet. It will be a few years before Grace shrinks from her mother’s hug for the first time since she can remember. Maybe she saw this coming, and she felt the first hints of it when she was eight, trying to read along with Mrs. Clark, who sometimes skipped sentences and whole paragraphs as she read Little House on the Prairie. Out loud, she wants to say, the world is not right.

At lunch, she picks at a tray of chicken and dumplings—her favorite. No one has asked why she doesn’t eat or why she doesn’t want to play or why she doesn’t want to do group work. Grace has always been shy and has assumed people don’t like her. Why would they bother to ask? This is something she’s going to have to face alone.

They are all alone. While he stocks shelves at the sporting goods store, Frank feels as if he might be the last man alive. He remembers that episode of The Twilight Zone where the man emerges from the fallout shelter to find he’s the sole survivor and he can read all the books he wants, but then he steps on his glasses. Frank’s glasses have been stepped on.

“Guy should’ve just killed himself,” Frank mutters as he pulls boxes of golf balls to the front of the shelf. He checks his watch. He’s been here for five hours now. He and Grace didn’t say anything about him picking her up from school, too. With his luck, she expects him to and he won’t do it simply because they didn’t agree about it. Then he’ll be one of those parents.

He pushes a dolly back toward the stock room and it gets stuck on a piece of floor stripping. He shouldn’t say “those parents.” Diane walked out of the grocery store once when Grace was still at the cash register playing with the bagging station. Grace noticed they were separated before Diane did and went running and screaming out to the parking lot. Diane called him at work to tell him the story. She sounded pretty rough over the phone. He spent five minutes just telling her to calm down. It happens. People leave their kids. They leave their families.

Frank wonders what it would be like if he’d been the one to leave. He’s thought about it before. Just take a couple hundred from the bank and go. Then maybe Diane would have to straighten out—take care of the kid. Frank pushes through the swinging doors of the store room, leading with the dolly. He’d miss her. He’d miss them both. But what if he were dead?

He wouldn’t want them to feel bad if he killed himself. Frank drops off his equipment and heads to the bathroom. He’s got to sit down. Really think. His knees are killing him. He hates this job, but it pays well enough. There’s insurance. They’d get some money if he died on the job. He wonders how to kill himself and not make it look like a suicide. Where to find a hit man?

He pictures the girls coming home to find him. He’s all bloody and probably crapped himself. Diane sees a hand peeking from behind the couch and automatically knows he’s dead, only she freaks out and doesn’t have the sense to shield Grace from seeing. And she’s scarred for life while her mother just keeps drinking until there’s no more liver left. Diane is mean to Grace and Grace resents her for it, even after Diane dies too young in a too-painful death and it’s all Frank’s fault.

He washes his hands and chuckles a little. He’s really thinking this? He smiles and cries some. A co-worker enters the bathroom and sees Frank.

“You okay, man?”

Frank just dries his hands and walks out of the bathroom to call the school. He’ll be picking up his daughter today.

When Grace climbs automatically into the front seat of her father’s car, she hugs and kisses him and lets the tears go right there in the parking lot, and she doesn’t care who can see.

Frank hates this. “Oh, baby, don’t cry.”

“But it feels better when I do.” She whispers these words to keep from sobbing them, so he can understand what she says.

“Okay.” He pulls out of the driveway and heads home.

“Dad, I didn’t say anything to anybody all day. I have to tell you. If Mom’s hurt. . . . I want her back. I want her to be home when we get there.”

“I can’t guarantee anything.”

“I know. But I’m just saying.” She’s being honest, and he appreciates that. It doesn’t happen much, but when it does, he feels like he knows her better.

When they get home, Diane is there, waiting. Vodka is supposed to be odorless; it was just a sip. The television is on Jeopardy and she is smoking at the coffee table when Grace enters.

“Mom!”

“Hi, Gracie.” It’s a whisper into the girl’s ear. As always, Diane watches out for the cherry on her cigarette when her daughter is in her arms. She hears Frank enter. “Come sit,” she says to him. Now, everybody is crying. She sits Grace between herself and Frank and they all sit there sniffing for a long moment.

“First I want to say I’m sorry about the way I acted last night.” No one speaks during Diane’s pause. It’s a familiar line. “I didn’t go to work today, but I did do a lot of thinking. Frank,” she says. He is expecting her to leave. She might give this speech again and again, and each time, he will probably expect her to actually leave for good, just as he always has. That is, until she ever really goes; by then he might not believe it’s happening. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay and make things right.”

“Me too,” he says, but she doesn’t understand he was thinking about leaving them, too.

“I’ve got all kinds of ideas that I want to talk to you about. But first I want to say I love you, and I’m sorry. I’d like for us to sit down and discuss our plans.”

They will order a pizza and Diane will do all the talking. She’ll mention family game night and date night and dinners and extra-curricular activities. Grace will be moved to hope by the tone of her mother’s voice. Frank will become worried that he’s never going to have any more free time, and Diane will panic once she realizes they expect her to be the one to organize and initiate all these things.

If Diane finally leaves, she might rent a little green apartment above a garage. A new job working for the state in social work service would finally bring her some satisfaction. She’d miss her family, but she would be grateful they were hers. She could go for walks in her spare time, and because the thinking would allow her to calm down, she might not need as many drinks.

Though Grace would become estranged from her mother, she and Frank might be brought closer. He might even begin to think he knows her. He would become deeply depressed if Diane left. He would stay single for the rest of his life. Grace, on the other hand, would probably go through man after man, trying to find one who seems right. She wouldn’t recognize that “right” would mean just like her father. But she’d continue through them coldly, crossing their names off her list.

But for now, they sit side-by-side on the couch, watching Jeopardy, holding hands, and not knowing the questions to the answers the program gives.

Part 2

22 June 2002, 3pm
Hot sunshine awakens me. On the pop art print across from where I lie, Lichtenstein’s little dots diffuse into solid color, only to sharpen when I focus. I rise from bed, light a cigarette, and play some music. From my bedside coffee pot, I pour leftover, lukewarm java into a dirty mug, and down it in three gulps. After the first chorus of the Mp3 playing, I turn it up and sing along: So you made me come/then you sent me away/like a messenger bird/so I circled the earth/blown away in the wind/but I always return/with some new little song/some sad story to tell/of a brief love affair/with a girl I compared/to you and she failed.

On opposing walls, collaged celebrities face off – doctors and scientists stare down lyricists and guitarists. In this conflict, my sympathies shift continuously. One day I want to heal the world, and the next I want to rock it. Despite these aspirations, I spend far too many hours at a fake-smile minimum-wage service job. But I’m hosting a homecoming party for Trevor tonight, so I’m off today and tomorrow.

Even before the Internet economy collapsed, Trevor was serious about web design and serious about money-laundering, but never serious about e-commerce. He was content making enough pages to clean up his finances and pad his portfolio, but we never recruited clients. After the NASDAQ implosion there were no clients to recruit, and I had to find work I couldn’t do wearing boxers in my bedroom.

When the song and the smoke end, I grab a guitar and head out to the screened front porch to play in the sun. Outside, rays slip between a maple and a pine in the yard, shining on the couch facing the house. I sit in this spotlight and fingerpick with two digits bandaged from workplace nicks. The rising roar of an approaching motorcycle brings me to my feet.

It couldn’t be Lyle – last I heard he was still cruising down the eastern seaboard. But sure enough, the Kawasaki he calls his ‘Cow’ rolls up our driveway. Sitting back down, I lay my guitar on a torn cushion as hiking boots knock a path through the slamming screen door of the porch. Lyle flops onto the corduroy loveseat, setting his patched knapsack and ancient football helmet on the hardwood floor.

“What’re you doing here?” I ask, lighting up a smoke, “Thought you’d still be able to see the Atlantic today.”

Lyle’s goofy smile spreads over a ratty drifter’s beard. “I checked my E-mail someplace in Maine, got your message about the party for Trevor, and I decided to come home a week early,” Lyle replies.

Because he was home-schooled on a commune in rural Newaygo County, Lyle and his siblings speak their own dialect. They use z instead of s and remove alveolar flaps in favor of diphthongs, so “city” is a homophone for “see,” and “decided” becomes “de-sie-ed.” They also have some bizarre verb forms. “Your e-mail remound me that Trevor was gone. We both left at the end of last term, but sometimes I still forget he’s not coming back.”

Then Trevor trots up the steps and onto the porch, gently closing the door behind him. Sometimes, because of his outsized charisma, I forget how small my best friend is – that his head ends at my neck. In the last six weeks, only his wardrobe has changed – he wears the studied casual attire of a surfer out of water. “Paul. Lyle. Lyle! Thought you were driving to that island.”

Lyle says he came back for the homecoming party.

“Rad,” Trevor affirms, then proclaims, “I’m home,” and in one fluid motion removes his shirt.

Trevor has a few habits that take some getting used to – how he walks around the house in pants, pecs, and a six pack, and how he climbs the walls. While somehow scaling a stone pillar that holds up the screened porch, he talks of climbing Yosemite, then asks Lyle how his drifting went.

“Good, good,” Lyle says, “Once you get past Quebec, the QEW ends, and there’s nothing for, like, five hundred miles. Only gravel and markers that say ‘You just crossed the Fee-first parallel,’ ‘You just crossed the Fee-second parallel.’ ‘Course I brought gas, strapped it on, but I had to buy another plas-sick tank. Otherwise I never would’ve made it to the ferry – y’ know, to earn the patch.”

“And how are all things Melanie?” I inquire. Lyle has been infatuated with Melanie since he met her in the fall of 2000. In the summer of 2001, she visited a Newfie friend and brought home a patch for him. The two-dollar speck of blue, embroidered cloth launched a month-long quest. Lyle insisted that wearing this gift would remain hypocritical until he visited the island himself.

“Fine. How are things with Chloe?” Lyle asks. I sigh, stamp out my cig, and shake my head. Trevor climbs down to discard my littered butt while I ask what route Lyle took home. While he speaks of the Atlantic’s edge and Ohio cops, I pick up my instrument and strum.

Seeing the guitar, Trevor asks me when I replaced the one that’s still missing. “Didn’t,” I say, “This is Chloe’s.” He asks to hear something new, so I play and sing. A day without Chloe’s/like a day without food/possible supposing/I don’t care about my mood/or instincts opposing/the lifestyle of a man who’d/for some reason chosen/to faithfully fast and brood/without Chloe. I finish, and he tells me he loves it, asks if she’s heard it. I nod, and light a Marlboro. He asks what she thought of it. “She told me I was the only guy she’d ever met who wrote songs that were good.”

“Oh, I get it – she strokes your ego. Chloe’s super-picky about music, but she likes your shit. That must feel good.” This is how Trevor and I talk about women, analyzing relationships in the vernacular of pop psychology. We become therapists practicing on each other. Using a hodgepodge of techniques, we analyze our behavior in terms of cognition, biology, and sociology. But in the end, our discussions always progress from and digress into musings about specific women. We talk the sun up, babbling psychology and citing song lyrics. At least, we used to – till Trevor went to California, left an aching in my heart.

20 April 2001, three am
A little over a year ago, Trevor and I had our wildest session. By three o’clock in the morning, I was two pots full of coffee, cramming for a nine o’clock Friday exam, but too wired to concentrate. Shooting repeated glances at my bed, I caught the celebrity headshots vibrating on my walls.

I kept scribbling scraps of songs in the margins of my notes – here a clever line, there a chord progression. Throwing my hands up, I decided to get the words out of my system. A few months before, after a brutal argument with my father about my musical aspirations, I had sworn off songwriting to focus on medicine. During my creative abstinence, focus sharpened for the first couple months. But by spring break, the build- up of unwritten lines weighed on me. I’d gone from writing a song a week to a song a semester; it only made sense that the work would be overlong. When I finally took a break to write during that day’s smallest hours, I couldn’t stop myself from crafting an epic. Sixteen verses I wrote, about a girl who’s all but irrelevant now.

I finished at six. The pull of the bed was strong, but I broke from its gravity. I knew if I slept, I wouldn’t wake in time for my exam, but I was crashing and needed a fresh face to talk me through the next few hours. A knock brought Lyle to his door but he shook his head and shut me out before I could say a thing. Frank had passed out only a few hours before, and needed to sleep off a post-exam celebration hangover.

Walking into Trevor’s room, I pleaded for a favor: “I need somebody to keep me going till my nine o’clock.” Trevor grunted, agreed, and grunted again as he climbed out of bed. “Meet me on the porch in fifteen,” I requested. My Marlboro was half-gone when Trevor stepped through the thick oak door. Behind the westward screen, a moon and two streetlights shone the same pastel orange. I looked up while stepping to the sidewalk and spied dippers through branches with buds I couldn’t see in the dark.

“Wait, where’re we going?” asked Trevor, rubbing blue eyes with a thumb and forefinger. I suggested we eat breakfast at the Sherman, deep into Roosevelt City, some miles inland from the college neighborhood of East Roosevelt. “’K,” he said, “I’m driving.”

We climbed into a clean SUV bought with dirty money. The bass of a folksy song boomed too loud for the genre playing. Ooh, get me away from here. I’m dying/Sing me a song to set me free/Nobody writes them like they used to/So I guess it may as well be me.

Walking into the all-night diner, we spotted and sat at a table in the back corner. Next to us, two middle-aged women gabbed too loudly for the hour. They looked like two pieces from a set of Russian dolls – same wide face and brown ball of a hairdo, same round yet solid body, except one was slimmer than the other. Round spoke soft quips while Rounder’s laugh rolled. I could barely make out my inner monologue over their banter.

The diner was a two-man operation before dawn. A methodical, twitching short-order cook never turned away from his griddle, even when there was nothing to grill. Our waitress had rose-vine tattoo sleeves on arms too built for her slight body. “What you having?” she asked both Trevor and me. Her repetition was broken-record precise. He got grapefruit juice and a side of Greektown hash – potatoes with a pile of vegetables heaped with feta cheese. For me – bacon, pancakes, and coffee.

“Chekhov said an obscure artist is like a gambling addict without money: All risk and no reward, or something like that,” I started, and lit a Marlboro, ashing on the floor. “It’s risking time like money, I’ve got none to spend. Words keep me up nights, steal hours from work and sleep. So I stop, say I’m going to focus on Russian or physics or psych, or the fact that somehow I’ve got to get into Med School, but the songs don’t stop, and I still wake up humming melodies, ignore my notes to slant rhymes in lectures. Songs are my obsession, writing’s the compulsion, and burnout’s the only cure.”

“You’re way too insightful to give up Psych – and you know I love your songs. It’s all about balance, y’ know? I mean, dude, don’t write a song every day, but don’t spend every hour working either. Like I always say, work less but harder; write less but better. And chill – dude, you must chill – enough to be cool, without getting all cold. Always remember, I love you, Frank loves you, Lyle loves you, even your parents love you – when your not trying to be a rock star.” An arm, all working muscles and flowery tattoos, slapped a check on our table and receded before I could tell who it belonged to. With his last sip of juice, Trevor stood and picked up the check before I could object. “You got your stuff with you?” he asked. I did, it was in the car. We got our bags and left his SUV to head east, up Liberty.

“So you know how I was saying the sub-striate pathways responsible for blind- sight could be construed as an unconscious mind?” I began, and Trevor nodded, his bleached dreadlocks bobbing. “Well, get this,” I go on. “The other day I’m walking by Dover Drugs, and it just comes to me: maybe it’s chemistry of the synapse, y’ know, neurotransmitters – maybe the biology of the brain is the unconscious Freud was looking for… Dopamine as Id, Seritonin as Ego, Norepinephrine as Superego – that kind of thing…” And we were off again, two future scientists talking in tangents and waking up the sun.

20 April 2002, three pm
A year later, I stood in our front yard begging Trevor not to leap off our roof. The album playing had ended – the only sound was a daredevil’s crowd murmuring in anticipation. He must have heard me over the crowd chanting ‘Jump!” because he made eye contact and shook his head. Frank handed the mailman a half cup of beer. The carrier gulped it down, and shouted “C’mon, little guy – you can do it.” Trevor nodded and flew. Stretching the center of our trampoline almost to the ground, he did a gymnast’s flip, bounced off onto the grass, and stuck the landing with arms to the sky. The few dozen at our graduation barbecue cheered. “Who is he?” Chloe turned to me and asked.

“Y’ know, Trevor,” I told her, “My best friend.” She rolled her eyes and crossed the yard to chat with the stuntman. The mailman congratulated Trevor and continued on his route. I went inside and put on the White Stripes, Chloe’s favorite, but only before the Lego video for “Fell in Love With a Girl.”

I recalled three conversations: all with Trevor, all about Chloe. I’d insisted that the closer I came to friendship with her, the further I’d felt from a relationship. He’d insisted that, while Chloe was rad, she stood five foot nine, four inches taller than him, and that difference too great for her to be worth his pursuit. Yet a few minutes into his longest conversation with her, Trevor was already brushing a stray amber strand from Chloe’s face.

Deciding to eavesdrop, I walked within a few feet of the pair and spoke with Trevor’s Little Brother. Every Saturday afternoon, Trevor used to spend several hours hanging out with a special-needs eighteen-year-old named Ishmael. That weekend, the kid got to attend his first college party. After gathering that Trevor and Chloe were only swapping lab job war stories, I asked Ishmael if he was having fun. “Yeah,” he beamed, “Lots of girls. She’s pretty,” he said, his crooked hand pointing straight at my friend. I introduced Ishmael to Chloe. “You’re pretty,” he gushed.

Chloe thanked him for the compliment and excused herself to fetch a second plastic cup of Oberon, summer ale rare and prized beyond Michigan. Trevor followed her and they resumed their shoptalk. I wanted to interrupt with a story of rat beheading, the real meat of Trevor’s job, but I never got in his way when it came to women, quite simply because I couldn’t. Taking a sip of coffee from my mug, I gave Ishmael some advice: “Chloe doesn’t take physical compliments well. She likes it better when you acknowledge her accomplishments. Tell her that her coffee’s great, her fashion sense is razor-acute – that kind of thing.”

Ishmael chuckled. “Ok, cool,” he agreed, then asked: “Jump on the trampoline?” I nodded, and we bounced for a while. At the peak of my arcs through air, I saw clips through the porch screen – Chloe and Trevor, all laughing teeth and grazing touches. Before too long, Big Brother saw Little Brother playing and left the porch to play along. Chloe followed, and seconds later the four of us were careening around like lotto balls. After a few jumps, I timed my landings to sap energy from Trevor’s bounces. During the third such theft, I flew so high I left the tramp for the knee-buckling ground. “Hey, watch where you’re going, you sloppy drunk!” Frank slurred at me, for big laughs.

I picked up my coffee mug, stood up, and remembered I’d left my guitar on the porch. For a graduation present, I had written a song about each of my housemates: “Trevor majors in hugging and snuggling/Frank’s double major is EECS and drugging/Lyle’s doctorate is in weird anecdotes/class never ends – don’t forget to take notes.” At the barbecue, I had performed on the steps of our house for attentive friends. After singing, I had set my instrument on the porch’s tattered couch and run outside to watch Trevor jump off the roof.

But when the screen slammed behind me, I saw no guitar. Figuring some guy borrowed it to amuse himself or impress a girl, I swept through an entirely familiar crowd and every room in the house. I didn’t find my ancient, pristine Silvertone acoustic with lowered action and a customized pickup. “Have you seen my guitar?” I asked, then begged, then pleaded, going through until everyone had answered more than once. Everyone said no, not since I had played. Everyone except Chloe, Trevor, and Ishmael, I should say – they jumped, oblivious all the while.

Dejected, I sank into a shadowy Lay-Z-Boy in the back of the living room. While chaining cigarettes like Christmas popcorn, I waited for someone to take notice and pity me. Seven smokes later, Lyle and Sara walked in and scolded me for sulking.

“You’re not allowed to be a sad bastard at your gradation party,” Sara sniped. I reminded her that I wasn’t graduating for another year – the party was for my housemates. “Just save the act for your bedroom mirror and come have some fun,” she urged me.

As we stepped back into daylight, Lyle reassured me, promised we’d find the instrument: “There’s no way anybody could’ve grabbed it from the porch when we know everyone here.” For the first time, it occurred to me that someone might have taken it while everyone was watching Trevor jump. The first thing I saw when I got outside was my best friend with a bicep arcing up and around Chloe, while she ripped on the Strokes to the chagrin of Frank. The thought of theft made me want to trade porcelain mug for plastic cup, be drunk enough to forget the whole mess. It only took a beer and a half for me to get wasted.

I don’t really like drinking and I like being drunk even less. I’ve always been the one sober friend of a bunch of party kids – holding girls’ hair and driving boys home. I suppose I could be codependent – addicted to helping the addicted – but that word is like ‘love:’ it’s been used so often to describe so many different feelings that it’s all but meaningless. I go out to people-watch and meet girls, I tell myself.

One of my favorite jokes was to follow a flaky move with, ‘Sorry, I’m totally trashed.’ The next several hours were a blur of me repeating that catch phrase to anyone who would listen. I must have said those three words plus a contraction a couple dozen times.

By eleven I was back to where I started – sulking in my Lay-Z-Boy. I hadn’t had a drink since seven –and that was only a small splash of Bailey’s in my beloved java. When Chloe stepped through the front door, her full lips were stretched into a sheepish smile. She didn’t stop laughing to herself till she hit the lights in the room where I sat and saw me. “Have you seen Trevor?” she asked before checking my expression. After I murmured something about my friend taking Ishmael home, she noticed my thick, frowning eyebrows.

“God, what’s wrong?” – with the face of someone whose puppy just got injured.

“Somebody stole my guitar,” I muttered.

“What?” – with the face of someone who’s broke but still hit-up for change.

“Somebody stole my guitar,” I enunciated.

“I know. I heard the first time. You’re sure?” – with the face of someone still hoping a fact is a joke.

“Almost positive – combed the house, asked everyone about it more than once.” She reminded me that I had forgotten to ask Trevor and her. “Didn’t want to interrupt anything,” I spat. She asked what that meant. “Sorry I’m taking this out on you.”

“Yeah you are. Why? Wait, no – I don’t want to know. Listen, I’ll give you my guitar – I can barely play Cat Power on it anyway, and you know how easy her songs are. Just get up. Everybody’s going to the Grant Street block party. You’re coming, and I’m going to cheer you up – by any means necessary.” I followed her like a twelve-year-old hound – droopy-eyed and slow but faithful.

Sara was waiting on the front porch with a cigarette burning, rolling her eyes. Parties and winos scrolled by as we walked. I skulked along a half-step behind. Somehow we found Lyle, Frank, and Trevor in the teeming mass clogging the road of the bash. By midnight a dozen trashed assholes were trying to flip an eighties-model Ford Taurus. After a half-hour effort, they’d barely tipped the car. Chloe left in disgust. Sara mused that the attempted riot was a symbol for partying in Roosevelt – no matter how hard we tried, we didn’t have the heart to get as wild as the other university kids. At a state school they would have burned the car and a couch. Here at Dover, Frank gave the rioters a mechanics lesson in car-flipping, which was largely ignored. Trevor couldn’t stop laughing.

At both ends of the block red, white, and blue flashed. Maglite beams cut through the crowd, and the flocks scattered. Somehow, I ended up walking home with Trevor after our flight. We plodded southeast down Cherokee. After a block or two, Trevor spoke with me for the first time since early afternoon. “God, at our party today, for some reason I just wanted to make out with Chloe. So bad, dude, so bad.”

“I know, she’s great,” I sighed. “Why’d you think I write songs about her?”

“Yeah. It’s just, I’ve seen her before – y’ know, like, once or twice – and she’s cute, I guess. But today she had this spark, passion, whatever – it just made me want her.” I shot him a stare that should have hurt him. “But, y’ know, nothing happened, of course.”

A pause. “Someone stole my guitar,” I reported. We stopped and Trevor hugged me. His concerned embrace sent insects through my skin. I’ve never met anyone better at casual comfort, but the last thing I wanted was for him to touch me. Trevor felt enough of my exceptional awkwardness to keep quiet the rest of the walk back to our house. He always seemed sensitive.

23 June 2002, twelve am
Our party rages. Orientation children pack the kitchen, staring at our kegs as if they’re too good too be true – a few hours ago Lyle and Frank handed out fliers in South Quad. In addition, two-fifths of the summer’s homeless population is in the house. On our stereo, Michigan’s own Iggy Pop screams “I got a lust for life!” I stand in a kitchen corner, catching up with Trevor, smoking a Marlboro Red, sipping tap water from a glass milk bottle. “So, honestly, what was the deal with you and Chloe?”

Trevor laughs, stops to say, “Funny you ask.” He laughs again and spills it: “I went over to her place tonight and said ‘Sorry.’”

“For what?” I sneer. A Pillsbury Doughboy too baffled to be anything but an incoming student splashes beer on our feet and moves on without apologizing.

“Babies, they look like babies,” Trevor quips with a winning grin. Through our speakers, Dust Brothers-era Beck blasts a guitar-string noose lyric. My best friend segues again: “This song’s great. I love it when he’s like ‘Saving all your food stamps and burning down the trailer park.’ That was my life in Fruiton. Sometimes I forget that shit – being a broke-ass kid playing in underwear between the doublewides.” Surveying him from head to toe, I figure that what he wears now – designer jeans, Italian wingtips, Swiss timepiece, and tailored t-shirt – is worth a few dozen pills.

“But Chloe, Trevor, Chloe,” I remind him, and we’re making progress again.

“Nothing happened,” he confesses, “You know that. Wanted her till she wanted me, then didn’t want her anymore. Still, after the chase, I just ignored her, avoided her, for a couple weeks – till I left in May.” Sara and Chloe burst into the kitchen as Trevor finishes under his breath: “It was a dick move, so I said sorry.” After the tiny dancer ends his sentence, he darts out of the kitchen.

Chloe bounds across the room, throws an arm around me, and hangs off my shoulder like a dress shirt. “I love this tie,” she flatters, tugging at it, “It’s so… so… wooly.” I nod, and question Sara with glances and shrugs.

“You should go Avril ,” Sara suggests. She slides open the tie, pops open my button-down and there I am with a tie around a t-shirt. Usually Sara can hold her booze as well as a Kegerator. Back home in Roosevelt Shores, she held hair for a group of girls who drank spiced rum by the pint. Now miles in from our rolling lakefront suburb, she holds hair for girls with higher SATs and lower tolerances than her hometown crew. Yet tonight even Sara’s tipsy.

I’ve already drunk a half-cup, and that’s plenty for one evening. But I’m besotted with Chloe, who’s quite the sot tonight. “This is the best outfit ever,” she observes. “Guys love the tube top, girls love the hair fountain.” On her crown, she’s pulled her tarnished blond bob into a miniature pony tail that spills up and over its rubber band. She continues: “At first I thought this beer tasted like a litter box, but now it’s just water.” With each sip, she tips closer to me, and I feel sleazy for loving it. “Oh, Talking Heads are playing! Let’s dance, guys.”

Chloe drags Sara and me along the first few steps to the living room. After David Byrne is done bellowing “Wild, Wild Life,” the Beastie Boys and Q-Tip rap “Get it Together.” The tune is only a few beats in before Frank and Lyle beg Trevor to break. He plays it off, thrice declining before he can’t ignore the circle forming around him.

Dropping and pushing off, he bounces up, right hand down, then left, then right again. Popping and locking bare arms, his feet slide underneath as if he were riding an airport walkway. Falling to the ground and curling up his limbs, he spins like a beetle on its back. Pulling his frame perpendicular to the hardwood floor, he finishes the dance with a head-spin and a handspring. Gaping and cheering, the crowd calls for more, but Trevor disappears into the back-patting throng.

Trevor’s circle closes to dance away the song. When “Just Like Heaven,” comes on, however, the couple dozen on the floor clear out. Only Chloe, Frank and I remain. Dancing in the base of a tall bay window, my smallest housemate flails in time. Chloe pulls my tie as a puppeteer strings along a dancing marionette, says “I want this.” For an instant I fool myself into believing she could ever want me. Then I forget my delusions as an adolescent shakes off a wet dream with a celebrity and know she means the tie and only the tie. Taking it off, I loop it around her neck, and we do our best to keep up with the beat. Next, the Jackson 5 funk up “I Want You Back.” Leave it to little Michael to fill a living room within a minute.

Sara and Trevor join Frank to groove on a windowsill of our big old Arts and Crafts style house. A meter from me, Lyle’s dancing to a different drummer. I wonder when we’ll all be in one room again and look at Chloe to ask. My hazels catch her blues, and she’s stilled. Chloe’s eyes close as she tips toward me. I glance at the bay window. While Trevor watches us, Sara points at me. Frank steps down after she whispers into his ear. When I look straight ahead, Chloe’s face is the closest it’s ever been. I give her a peck and scurry outside to smoke.

A group of gawkers brave the drizzle to watch lightning scar the sky. Thunder has been shaking the house for hours, but the earth’s barely damp. I take out a Red and think of a loving candle and wish my room didn’t smell like wax and Boone’s Farm. My eyes leak, but the sky breaks open and falls in sheets, disguising sentimentality. I take my first drag and notice Frank beside me, scratching his non-smoking hand on rock-hardened hair. “You know what’s worse than loving someone who doesn’t like you? Loving someone who only likes you,” he shares. Lyle and Sara gallop through a screen slam into the rain.

After a white flash, Lyle lectures as usual, relating a directionless anecdote: “Heat makes the air electric. Riding my Cow home at dawn, I had this red See sky behind me, the See of Toronto – brightening sky; I chased night. I knew there was going be a storm tonight, y’ know? ‘Buckets of Rain.’ We’ll need “Shell-er from the Storm.” How’s Chloe?” he asked. I shrugged, so my friend continued with the Dylan lyrics: “If you could only go back to when God and her were born…”

After a sky crash, Sara clarifies as usual, relating a thoughtful paragraph: “Just remember, Paul – ‘dance floor kisses don’t count.’ Chloe’s words matter way more to you than yours do to her. She kissed you to make sure you guys were friends. Why d’ you think she hates Trevor? She didn’t get her friendship make-out session, so how could she know if he liked her? I know she said ‘I love you’ – somehow you already told me that twice tonight – but she tells me that almost every day. Kissing means she just wants to be friends.”

“Yeah, Chloe doesn’t like herself enough to love anybody,” I say, and start to sing: “‘Cause everybody knows/she’s a Femme Fatale/The things she does to me/She’s such a little tease/See the way she walks/Hear the way she talks.’”

“Ok, no. Stop. Tomorrow’s parties never come. Stop.” Sara begs, and removes her mesh truck-stop hat to squeeze it onto my head. “She’s not a femme fatale – she’s not gonna kill anyone. You’re just in a relationship with her while she isn’t in a relationship with you. That’s all.” A pause as we put out cigarettes. “God,” Sara giggles, “my hat’s already as big as it gets, and it still won’t fit.”

“I’ve got a big fucking head,” I say, and laughter rolls. My friends couldn’t agree more. “No,” I insist as my foot goes further down my throat, “I mean, it’s really big. I have to get custom hats – eight and three-quarters,” but my details only turn chuckles into cackles.

Calling from our roof, I hear an old friend. I beg Trevor not to jump off onto a slippery trampoline, but he ignores the plea: “C’mon up to the roof – you can really see the storm up here!” My friends and I climb the stairs to join Trevor and Chloe above the earthly stars of a city asleep. Little more than silhouettes to the students below, seven lightning rods stand on the rain-slicked roof.

I was nine years old when I killed the boy, pushing the knife between the soft bones of his chest with both my hands. I pulled it out slowly, not realizing at first the finality of what I’d done. “What’s your name, boy?” I whispered.

He had been playing in the woods behind the motel, just beyond the barbecue grills and picnic benches, out of sight from the pool where both our mothers lay sunbathing with their heads tilted up and eyes closed against the heat. They had no interest in us.

“Go on, find something to do for a little while,” my mother had said. I was nine after all, no longer in need of constant attention.

I had been the one who had begged for this one last weekend out of the city as a family before my sister’s wedding. Because then everything would change.

“I want to go to the farm,” I’d said to my father, who like me was tired of looking at table settings and bridesmaid dresses. “You promised we’d go someday. I want to see where you grew up.”

And so, on the Thursday before school started, we went — a four-hour drive out of the city and onto two-lane back roads.

My mother’s indignation at being dragged away from bridge games and deviled eggs was reason enough to keep away from her. My father had left us on our own for the afternoon to visit old friends. My sister, twelve years older, was in our room with the home decorating guides and bride’s magazines her mother-in-law-to-be had given her. She had drawn the chain across the door, so even though I had my own key there was no getting in.

I had gone around to the back of the motel, where there was a battered swing set, a picnic area and a thicket of trees. That was where I saw him.

He was younger than I and slight, with straight hair like mine, but darker and cut very short. I thought that if I had been a boy I might look like that.

At first, I really just wanted to touch his hair. He had a stick in his hand and was poking at the blackberry vines, their tough, thorny canes twisted around the surrounding bushes.

“You won’t be able to cut those vines with that stick,” I informed him.

“It’s not a stick,” he said, holding it up in the air. “It’s a light saber.”

“But it doesn’t have any lights on it.”

“You just can’t see them,” he said, turning back to the vines, which were thick with fruit.

He must have been pulling off berries and eating them — his hands and lips were streaked with red.

I thought for a moment. It was so still where we were, no one else around and no one to see us. “I have a real light saber in my room. Would you like to see?”

He looked at me, then, gauging whether he could trust me, “Sure. Go get it. I’ll wait.”

I ran back to the pool, slipping out of my sandals before I reached the pavement so I could sneak up behind my mother’s lounge and take her key from the table beside her. When I left the enclosure, I went back to the end of the parking lot. I looked to the boy, relieved to see him still occupied with the berries, pulling a couple off a vine and chewing as he thwacked the stick against the bushes and tables, calling out to foes only he could see.

My parents’ room had a kitchenette and I’d seen the knife there that morning, short and thin, with a sharp tip and fine edge. I rolled it up in the newspaper, centering it across one of the corners the way the florist rolled up the flowers when my father and I went to get my mother’s weekly bouquet of peonies and mondo grass or, for special occasions, white roses and snapdragons. I left the knife in the tall grass outside the pool gate while I snuck the key back onto the table.

The boy, still where I’d left him, pawed at the dirt with his sneaker and shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That’s no real light saber. That’s just a roll of paper.” Already he had started back toward the motel, slashing the stick from side to side. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

“No, wait,” I said. “I wrapped it up so that no one but you would see. Come here, I’ll show you.”

I moved off a little, so that I was standing by the thickest of the trees. It was easy to maneuver so that the boy was leaning against it while I carefully unwound the newspaper, hoping the anticipation would keep him distracted and silent. I could feel the cool weight of the haft as I let the newspaper fall away and lifted the knife high above both our heads, his eyes following it until the very last moment.

When my father found me, I had the boy’s stick, using it to make overlapping circles in the dirt. He turned my bloodied arms this way and that, looking for the wound.

“Did you do something, Anna?” he said, agitation rising in his voice. “Show me what you did.”

I pointed to where the picnic tables were.

“Wait here,” he said as he started to walk past the tables, stopping for a moment a little farther on, then turning and walking swiftly back.

He pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything, just grabbed the stick out of my hand and took me hard by the elbow. There was a spigot at the back of the motel, and he pulled me over to it. The water was icy enough to make me gasp. But he held my arms under, rubbing with his hands until my skin looked pale again, albeit chafed from his determination. When he was done he stepped back and looked me over from head to foot, his countenance locked in such concentration that I feared even my breathing would be an interruption.

My blouse was a deep rose with small orange and pink flowers — the small red flecks barely showed, but he told me I’d have to give it to him later, after I’d changed for dinner. For now, he said I should just ball it up and put it in a pillowcase as soon as I’d undressed. “Go on now. Don’t talk to anyone. Tell your mother that I forgot something in town and will be back soon.”

I’d started to skip away when he called me back. He bent down and scratched up a fistful of dirt, then rubbed it onto my hair, blouse and capris with both hands. “Tell your mother that you fell, that you need a good hair wash too.”

My mother had gone upstairs and changed into a bright yellow and white sundress. I could see her through the window as I walked past her room. She was standing in front of the mirror putting her earrings on while swaying to the music from the television set. I knocked on the door to my room and waited until my sister opened it. She immediately stuck out her hand, “Oh no you don’t. Not looking like that. What happened to you?”

“I fell,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, sure now that it was the boy’s blood she’d seen.

“You fell? Not likely. Looks like you rolled. You’re not coming in here. Go knock on Mom’s door. You need a shower. I’ll bring you something to wear.”

“And a pillowcase,” I said, before realizing it.

“A pillowcase?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me ready to pounce, to pick apart any reason I might offer. I rocked anxiously from foot to foot. “Dad said to. He said to put my clothes into a pillowcase because they’re so dirty. He doesn’t want them mixed up with yours.”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything. Just go.”

My father still hadn’t come back. It was another hour before he did. I had on a new dress, bought just for the weekend, and I twirled around slowly for him. But he did not seem to notice me. He just looked at my mother as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. He had a bag of groceries and a six-pack.

“Arthur, what’s all this? You don’t think I’m going to cook dinner here I hope,” my mother jabbed.

“Nope.”

“I hope not.”

“Thought I’d try one of those grills in the back. You know the restaurants around here aren’t any good. Anna, do you have your muddy clothes? Let’s get them into the trunk.”

He twisted the cap off one of the beers and carried the grocery bag out with him. I followed. But we didn’t go to the car. When we got to the foot of the stairs he stuck the pillowcase with my clothes inside into the grocery bag and shooed me away. “Go help your mother with the plates and things,” he said. “We’ll eat at one of the picnic tables. Tell your sister I said to help too.”

Instead of going right upstairs, I watched him as he settled the food on one of the tables. He shoveled some charcoal into the bottom of the grill, sprinkled it with lighter fluid, and threw in a match. I didn’t see that pillowcase again.

Even as we were eating, we could hear voices out in the parking lot. Cars came and went. A woman sat by the pool, crying with a towel around her shoulders. Later, when we started up the stairs, we saw people moving through the woods, their flashlights like fireflies filling the warm night. Every so often a man shouted a name I couldn’t quite make out over the air conditioning. At one point, I heard a siren and started to tremble, fearing they had found him. But the siren passed.

In the morning, I heard my parents talking in low, urgent voices outside the door to my room. It was my father who knocked, and my sister who answered. “Your mother wants to get going back now,” he said. “A little boy disappeared here yesterday, and it has her spooked. So get your things together and be quick about it.”

He looked tired, as if he’d been out there too, one of the men searching the woods.

“What about breakfast?” my sister asked. “It’s so early.”

“We’ll stop once we get on the road,” my father said.

Instead, we stopped in town. My father told us to wait in the car and crossed the street to the police station.

“Oh, I could tell you stories about your father and his brothers,” my mother said. “How on Saturday night the town police would round up half the boys in town. They’d have them sleep off their poor judgment in the jail cells so they wouldn’t get into any real trouble. Everyone looked out for everyone else then. Those boys are probably running things here now.”

After a while my mother got out of the car and bought us all sodas. We had the windows open, the breeze just cool enough to keep us comfortable. My sister and I played hangman and tic-tac-toe over and over. My mother closed her eyes and leaned back on the headrest, as if she were still at the pool.

When he finally came back, my father didn’t offer any explanation, just slid onto his seat, started the engine and pulled carefully into the light weekend traffic. “Too bad about that boy,” he said. “The way these woods are, they don’t think they’ll ever find him.”

It began with a growing sensation in the lacrimal sac. The boy’s name was Daniel Ledbetter. His peers called him Bed Wetter—not due to any actual or even perceived incontinence on his part, simply because of the sound of the words. Nonetheless, the teasing of the children caused him heaviness of heart, as well as stomachaches, migraines, a recurring and violent revenge fantasy, and a muttering tic.

After some years of this treatment Daniel’s tears became lupine. The wolves were microscopic, dogpaddling in his superior and inferior canals and exiting through the lacrimal ducts like the ramp at the end of a waterslide. Those that survived being wiped from his reddening cheeks began to grow, forming tiny packs in the plush carpet. It was a difficult life for the wolves, but still many persevered. When they grew large enough to be visible to the human eye, they stayed hidden in the back of the pantry behind a long-forgotten box of falafel mix. They fed on a box of dried beef bouillon for protein. They bit a hole in a large water jug, stopping it up with hair and sucking at it when they needed hydration.

Eventually, they were fully grown, the size of field mice. Only four of them had managed to live through the endless trials of being a tiny wolf born from the tears of a 9-year old boy, and they made themselves known to Daniel, declaring their allegiance to him in the best lupine pantomime they could manage.

Daniel kept them hidden for a few weeks, feeding them bugs and grubworms. Then one day, he brought them to school in a shoebox with holes poked in the top. Telling the teacher he had something to show the class, he opened the box and the wolves burst out, rampaging through the class, biting several children on the ankles and making them cry. The teacher seemed frozen in confusion. Daniel called the wolves back. He knelt down, and they pounced back into the box in his arms. Daniel laughed.

Everyone remained stunned and left him alone the rest of the day, which he found quite satisfying. Later that evening, his mother entered his bedroom, round and ubiquitous, with her hair piled in a bun the size and color of a Louisiana yam. She had spoken to his teacher on the phone, something about him bringing wild animals into the school.

He showed her. The wolves were sleeping, curled up together like finger puppets in a fist. She said he shouldn’t bring the wolves to school anymore. But Daniel ignored her.

He kept the wolves with him everywhere he went. They snuggled into bed with him at night, and they leapt into their shoebox first thing in the morning. At school, nobody called him “Bed Wetter” or even spoke with him for that matter.

Then came a day when the wolves began to feel the walls of time collapsing in. Their life spans were coming to a close and soon their species would be extinct. Their own conception having been immaculate, they instinctively knew that the traditional mammalian methods of progeneration would not apply, and weren’t even sure which of them were male or female, if they had any sex at all. And so they devised a plan, though it was repugnant to them all at first, to torment their benefactor, to collect and harvest as many of his tears as possible in hopes that the miracle would repeat itself. Then, perhaps, they could take charge of their own destiny and the destiny of their race.

Nipping at Daniel’s toes and ankles made him irritated and angry, but no tears came forth. Next, they tried ignoring him, and instead of curling into bed with him at night, they curled up in his shoes in the closet. Instead of waking him up with a lick on the nose, they let the alarm clock wake him. Instead of loyally taking to the shoebox when he got ready for school, they hid under his bed.

Nevertheless, the boy was stoic and dry as a stone. In the absence of affection from the wolves, he returned to long forgotten playthings—the television, the internet, the Nintendo Wii. He was beginning to grow bored with the miniature wolves, and they in turn were growing weary of their service to him. The wolves began to suffer from a stifling malaise, which then metastasized into exhaustion.

But beneath that malaise and exhaustion, deep inside of each of them, a single photon of light yearned to be released, and, in due time, it was released. In the middle of the night, the boy was stirred awake by a growing light that soon filled the room, consuming him.

Plimpton Prize winning author Benjamin Percy talks to Ben Evans about life, writing and his upcoming novel, The Wilding.

It began at the carnival.

Those magic nights, the whole of St. Greg’s parish there, all strolling
over from the bungalows and two flats and apartments all mix matched
throughout the neighborhood. There were the games, the shouts of the
carnies, the swirling thunder of the Tilt-A-Whirl, lights flashing,
pulsing, the colors of yellow and red and green and blue exploding like
fireworks against the walls of the church, the old nunnery, the high
school and grammar school that encircled it all like a towering red brick
fortress. The carnival set on top the school parking lot, the exits were
the alley to the east near the priest’s house, the tunnel through the
school that led out onto Bryn Mawr and the opening between the church and
nunnery, the noise trapped and echoed with booms that bounced from wall
to wall. And there was the crying joy of the children and the wild in
their eyes and the running and no knowledge of anything else.

Joe was nine years old, he was hanging out near the beer tent with some
kids from the block. His big brother Lil Pete was in the beer tent
drinking with the other hoods, something he’d been doing for years, the
priests too scared to throw the young guys out. Lil Pete was the tallest
of them, his shoulders set close and only his profile revealed the large
potbelly. They were somewhere between greasers, cholos and jocks. Some
wore shirts with sports logos or sweats pants and dago T’s, some wore
Dickies, some with buzzed heads, others with slicked back hair and the
sides almost shaved, their voices rose and fell in that squeaky Chicago
slang. Gold was new to that summer and it shone on their fingers, wrists
and necks. They were a dying breed, the great white flight was taking
their numbers and the neighborhood was changing.

“Aye Joey C’mere,” Lil Pete yelled with a wave of his hairy knuckled hand as he stood near an older woman and a kid Joe’s age.

“Hey did you ever meet Brian?” Lil Pete asked.

Joe shook his head no.

“Well, he’s Mickey’s nephew,” Lil Pete said nodding towards where a
stoutly built young man stood with a round buzzed head, his face flexing
as he spoke to the hood next to him so that he looked like a pit bull. Joe recognized him, it was a hard face to forget.

Joe looked at the kid in front of him, Brian. He was like a mini Mickey,
his hair in a short buzz cut, same pit bull face but softer. He wore old graying Adidas shoes with thick blue laces that made Joe wonder if he was very poor.

“Well shake hands or somethin’, Jesus,” Lil Pete said as his features
scrunched up in distaste.

“What’s up,” they both said looking down.

Joe noticed a thick gold bracelet on Brian’s wrist.

“Nice gold,” Joe said.

“Thanks,” Brian said looking at the tips of Joe’s Air Jordans. “Nice rope. I got one like dat at home.”

“Well, you two go play,” Lil Pete said brushing his hand through his trimmed goatee and mustache as he turned away. “And stay out of trouble you little shit,” he said as they both smiled.

They made quick friends and soon they were laughing and playing with the
other kids, white, black and Mexican kids, dipping and dodging through
the maze of grown ups.

The gunshot was abrupt, and in the masses of people, no one knew what
direction it had come from. Joe saw it though, the fire through the
barrel, and he watched Lil Pete run and jump the fence in the direction
of the tall skinny Syrian kid who held the pistol to his leg, the barrel
smoking slightly. The confusion continued as the Syrian began sprinting
down the alley. Lil Pete gave chase with Mickey close behind him. Joe and Brian followed the older boys. They ran down the alley and turned right, and Joe could hear the wild laughter coming from Lil Pete and Mickey. He glanced at Brian, his brows arched, eyes bulging and darting wildly in their sockets as gravity seemed to turn Joe’s stomach into a helium filled balloon. Joe ran as hard as he could but the older guys pulled away from Brian and him slightly as they turned at the T in the alley, their shoes clapping the pavement as Joe’s Nikes slipped and ground on the light dusting of dirt and small pebbles that littered the cracked cement.

Joe could see them running across Ashland and through the Jewel Parking
lot. Joe and Brian crossed Ashland, Joe’s heart pounding in his ears. He
could see through the parking lot as the Syrian guy ran into the front
door of the pharmacy on the corner across from the 7/11, Pete and Mickey
close behind him, still roaring with laughter. As Joe got close to the
pharmacy, he heard the screams from inside, but no shot. A few moments
later, Pete and Mickey emerged from the drug store. There was a bulge in
Pete’s waistband and as they jogged out of the place still laughing, his
shirt raised up above his belt and Joe saw the wooden pistol handle. They
had not seen the boys who’d ducked into a nearby doorway.

There was still the screaming inside, it was a woman’s voice and it was
the only voice that could be heard, there was a sort of panting between
each scream. Joe listened as he hid there in the doorway next to the
pharmacy, Brian beside him, their chests heaving. After Lil Pete and
Mickey were gone, Joe and Brian entered the drug store. The woman still
screamed, it was loud and rang in his ears. Joe and Brian walked towards
it, both trembling; Joe saw the red puddle on the floor as it slowly grew
like a shadow across the white and black tiles. He walked closer to the
puddle’s edge where he saw the young man not moving, eyes still open as
blood oozed from his head, his frizzy black hair wet with it. The woman
still screaming, was crumbled on the ground with the phone in her hand as she
shook terribly. Joe looked at her in silence and the boys walked out of
the store as others came running to its front door.

The boys walked towards home in the quiet, their heads hung, there was
the weight of it all around them. The air was thick, the carnival roared
on in the distance, the sound of the children’s joyous screams rose
and fell. The boys walked down Clark Street to Hollywood where the yellow
sign of the corner store glowed stale and flickering, they stood there a
while.

“You think dey’re gonna get caught-up?”

“Naw, ain’t nobody gonna rat dem out.”

“Shit… he was dead wadn’t he.”

Brian didn’t answer. They walked down and crossed Ashland with the sirens
floating in the air. Brian went his way and Joe went home. He went up to
his room and sat on his bed a while in the dark, the orange yellow of the
streetlight seeping in through the window. After the others had gone to
sleep, he went downstairs to the TV room where he watched the reports of
the murder.

And that was the birth of Pistol Pete.

The above is an excerpt from Bill Hillmann’s upcoming novel The Last White Hood. The book is an autobiographical fictive work about a family living in the racially diverse neighborhood of Edgewater in the North Side of Chicago.

Against the glow of a calm fire the young boy and his father ate their cooked lamb quietly within the dark confines of their hovel high on the Meccan hillside. They had just finished their evening prayers and were both famished from a day of trading trinkets in the city bazaar for whatever they could get for them. Every so often a cold wind swept through the home and fanned the fire they enjoyed, its warm light dancing and casting misshapen shadows across the dirt floor of the room. While picking at his lamb meat, the young boy gazed into the fire as he had done so many times before, wondering which parts of the kindling the flames would excite next. His father broke him out of this trance by warning him that he shouldn’t gaze for so long into mysteries that he couldn’t for the life of him understand at such a young age. The son heeded his father’s advice that evening and finished whatever meat remained at the center of the thali. When the father finished the rest of the lamb, he boiled a tin kettle of strong black coffee, and both of them sat in silence for a time, sipping on the dark, bitter brew.

“Tomorrow,” said the father, “I will not accompany you to the bazaar. You are quickly becoming a young man, and you will have to go by yourself.”

An awkward warmth seeped into the heart of the boy, as going to the bazaar alone would only result in being bested by the other, more experienced traders. These traders would undoubtedly be much more aggressive and predatory in their tactics than he could ever be. His eyes widened and searched his father for any excuse he could give for not sending him into the fray alone, but the old man offered none, and so it was decided that evening that he would venture from the hillside into the heart of the Meccan capital and hope that he brought home at least some of his self-respect. The father, sensing that his son was frightened by this decision, finished what remained of his charred coffee and rummaged through his burlap sack of goods that warmed by the fire.

He pulled out a small package from the sack. It was wrapped in waxy brown paper and stitched up tight by strong thread. His father peeled off the packaging to reveal a soft turquoise cloth that had been neatly folded within. He passed it to the boy who was instantly charmed and fascinated by its beauty, its edges embroidered in geometric shapes of gold and the center of the cloth stitched in the patterns of the most careful Arabic calligraphy that read, “there is no God but the One.” The cloth smelled of aged saffron, and a chalky dust layered its weave. Even though it was made from cotton, it felt like the finest of silks and was too fragile to hold for very long. The father returned it to the hollow of the wrapping and handed the package to him.

“I know we don’t talk about it much,” said the father, “but when your mother wandered the streets of the city, both hungry and cold from the desert winds, she found me in the bazaar and implored me to serve as your guardian, as she didn’t have any food to feed you. You were too young to remember, as you were just a small baby then, and when your mother gave you to me, I wrapped you in this very same cloth that I’m giving you now. I’ve kept the cloth from you, because I thought that when you became of age, you could sell it and start a new life for yourself.”

The boy gazed at it with wide, bewildered eyes. He felt comforted and secure holding it, as though it were the only security he had left, now that his father had ordered him into the bazaar.

“The indulgences we sell aren’t getting us very far, you and I. No one is buying them, and when we do sell them, we are getting half of what we originally paid. The meat tonight was the last of our rations. There is no more, and our supplies are running low. You will have to fetch a high price for the cloth. Otherwise, you’ll go hungry, which is why I’m suggesting we separate for a time.”

The boy never realized it would come to this. For most of his life he had been following his father through the few bazaars in and around the twin cities of Mecca and Medina. Trading was a skill he never possessed, and he had always assumed his father would carry him until he himself grew old and tired. He never expected their time together to end so soon. He somehow expected his father to nurture and care for him without the realities of hunger getting in the way. They always did without, and it was fine for a time, but apparently things had to change.

He didn’t want to weep in front of him, as he thought his father would respect him less for doing so. Traders, after all, had to be very keen and wary of such emotions. It was a disadvantage to have them. One becomes vulnerable that way. He suppressed his tears and remained stoic. He was helped by the charisma of the fire, its flames licking what remained of the few desert branches it fed from. A sweet, mellow smoke filled the small hovel, the fire devouring the wood with a slow and steady exactitude that seemed to harness a greater, more divine force. Even after spreading his blankets down for sleep, the boy continued to watch the glowing crimson embers of the fire burn, until the flames themselves were overcome by the darkness of the hovel. He fell asleep quickly thereafter, his father snoring lightly beside him.

On the next morning, his father bid him farewell by placing his hand upon his head and muttering a short prayer. He did his best to hide his tears then, and while he couldn’t understand what the prayer meant, he assumed that it would somehow protect him from whatever turbulence and anxiety the action in the bazaar would bring.

“You should not sell it for anything less than ten rials,” said his father of the cloth. “You have to be firm and insist on that price. Otherwise, you will have been cheated. Do you understand?”

The boy repeated his instructions until his father was satisfied. When he opened the door of the hovel, a brilliant, white sunshine flooded his vision, and an intense heat seeped into the pores of his skin. At first the sunlight blinded him, but after wrapping his head in white cloth, he adjusted to the climate and made his way down a rock-strewn trail that led into the center of the city. He tread silently on the jagged rubble and debris that littered the trail, and when others from neighboring villages joined him after a good hour of methodical walking, he made sure to look tough and remain both silent and cautious. He kept his eyes peeled to the ground and tucked the package securely into the twine that kept his garments in place. And while no one talked to him directly, he was aware of the calculating whispers of those on the road who commented on his poor dress and child-like appearance.

“He will certainly be taken advantage of,” he heard one of these voices say.

As the trail grew more crowded, these voices all seemed to be whispering the same in unison. Even the most remote of their palaver somehow related directly to him, and as the trail gave way to a paved road at the base of the hillside, the dry desert dirt that swirled in the wind had also swept away whatever fragments of confidence he had started the day with. Yet he kept silent and strong with his eyes fixed forward and the package at his waist snug and secure against his body.

The paved road quickly transformed into a small village with a kebab stand and a general store. One story shacks, both sagging and sullen, soon succumbed to marble mosques, outdoor restaurants, and two-story buildings that were sturdy and white-washed, their lacquered wooden shutters protecting its inhabitants from the blare of intense sunlight and road-dust that burned in the air. The road pinched into a narrow lane where a car or two buzzed through the procession like strange insects. These lanes were soon joined by other roadways and side streets that fed into the dazzling network of the metropolis. The mosques, filled to the hilt with believers keeling below tall, white domes, were both high and august, and the ongoing din of conversation that seemed to engage every pedestrian cleared the air of the same guarded silence that stalked him on the hillside. The odor of cooking meat and mild incense made him hungry and a little tired, but he knew he had to continue towards the bazaar and save these luxuries for after he had fetched the highest price for the cloth.

As he approached the bazaar, he discerned its canopy of white canvas tents rippling in the hot breeze. He heard the rough din of the shouting matches between the toughest of traders and the most uncompromising of customers. The traffic on the roadway festooned into a carnival of color. Stalls on the both sides of the street sold hand-woven rugs from Iran, leather jackets and accessories from Pakistan, gold-threaded robes from North Africa, and Chinese textiles that were rolled onto heavy cardboard tubing and stood erect, like rainbows, behind colorful salespeople and their equally illustrious buyers who yelled out their best offers. Pushcart vendors sold skewered meats and kebabs, and buyers wore their best garments in what amounted to a parade of Arab fashion. Collapsible awnings that swung out from the storefronts hid the street from the sun, and as soon as the heat became too much, large white tents shaded most of the haggling, negotiating, and sudden bursts of emotional reasoning that distinguished this volcanic oasis from other towns and villages outside of the city.

Usually the boy quietly followed his father down these crowded side streets, but now that he was alone, the bazaar had a much different feel to it. He sensed that beneath the bazaar’s spectrum of colors, expensive imported products, and hoarse shouts of traders haggling over prices, there was an invisible darkness in which the real elements of hunger and desire lay buried beneath a cosmetic surface. He had always known of this predatory darkness, or at least he had sensed it on visits with his father, but it was his father who usually confronted it while the boy watched from a safe distance. His father had often hoped that he would be able to manage this darkness one day – to make trading more of a sport than the fulfillment of predatory hunger and zero-sum conflicts – but now that he was alone, he was rife with timidity and soon lost some of his father’s skills. He could only stay tough and hope that no one cheated him or goaded him into selling the cloth below its set value.

From a distance he eyed the activities of one particular stall that lined the street. Apparently, the trader and his stubborn customer were arguing over the price of what seemed to be a thin silver bracelet that was clearly meant for a young woman’s wrist. The heavy-set customer soon ended these negotiations when the trader refused to sell it to him at the price he wanted, and the boy thought it the perfect time to approach this frustrated customer with the cloth he carried. He moved in cautiously behind him and tugged on his trousers. The man then turned to face him, and the boy gasped at what he saw.

This was no ordinary man. He wore a blood-red turban, heavy gold earrings, and an embroidered vest that hid a tan-collared work shirt beneath it. His skin was thick, red, and robust, a handlebar moustache gracing his upper lip, and his teeth were like heavy white blocks in his mouth. A long, deep scar cut into one of his ruddy cheeks, and emblazoned on his arm was what appeared to be a military insignia of sorts. The boy also noticed braided gold epaulets on his shoulders, distinguishing him as some sort of authority in the city or a high government official. He looked perturbed by the intrusion, but before he could swat him away with his heavy, brick-like hands, the boy quickly tore through the stitching that held the package at his waist together and unfurled the brilliant turquoise cloth that had been with him all along.

The official, awestruck by the cloth’s inescapable beauty, examined its fine thread and fingered the heavy gold embroidery at its edges and center. Apparently he had never seen such a cloth before and decided that it was a gift that rivaled the thin bracelet he tried to buy earlier. The official’s hard, cold scowl suddenly transformed into a seductive smile, the white blocks of his teeth glowing like polished marble, his frustration waning, and a subtle twinkle in his eyes restoring whatever strategies had failed him earlier. He licked his lips and breathed in a heavy gust of hot, desert air, as though a dead beast had been brought back to life.

“How much do you want for this worthless thing?” asked the official.

“What price do you propose?” asked the boy.

“Why this is nothing but the handkerchief of a peasant. I’ve seen this a million times before. It can’t be worth anything more than five rials.”

The boy, however, knew a little better than that.

“This is a very special cloth that dates back many generations. It is a magic cloth and will bring comfort to whoever owns it. I’ll be willing to sell it for ten rials, nothing less.”

“Why you insolent little monkey,” thundered the official, “do you know who I am? How dare you insult me with your offer. Ten rials for a filthy scrap of cloth? I can easily buy such filth elsewhere for far cheaper than that. But I tell you what – since I am an official of high distinction around these parts, you and I can make a deal that will give you even more benefit than the price of that silly little thing you have there.

“Do you see these honors on my chest? I am a man who is well-respected by the powers that control this unwieldy city, and if you sold that thing to me for, let’s say, seven rials, why I’d connect you with some of the most powerful people in the kingdom.

“Imagine yourself working your way up through the chain of civic command, only to prosper with the knowledge and skill that comes with shrewd politics and honorable governance. This entire city is controlled and maintained by some of the wealthiest men in the world. Not only will you intimately know the powerful statesmen who enforce our daily laws and customs, but you will have a chance to harness the power your downtrodden peasantry has sought after for so long. Imagine inspecting a line of troops or attending banquets with world-renowned dignitaries from all over the world, or having the satisfaction of crushing a rebellion with the wave of your hand.

“I’m offering you a chance at the reigns of power, my friend – an opportunity, if you will, to be a part of the political class that rules all of Arabia. Wherever you go, you’d be treated with the highest respect. People will respect you, fear you, and love you for the power you wield. The food will always be plentiful and your peasant masses will revere you as their long-lost messiah. Can you imagine the power of that? Can you imagine what a man you’d be? For seven rials you can have all of that. Just lower your price, and this city will open up to you.”

By this time visions of grandeur had broken the seals of his imagination. The boy could think of no other life better than that of a man who had the power to control and maintain the vast complexities of the city. The offer struck a deep chord within him, as heavy silver thalis, thick with moist and tender meats, simmered in the juices of his mind. He could also see himself in regal dress, talking politics with the Sultan himself, or trading jokes with the commanders of vast armies, all of this under the high dome of a luxurious palace he calls home. He even imagined himself exercising his fierce power over the migrants who whispered things about him on the trail that morning, and how he would somehow force them to their knees in worship of the power he had achieved. They would never whisper bad things about him again.

All of this came into clear focus, and just before he gave his consent to the official, who stood there smiling and twirling the ends of his moustache, a bright blade of sunlight broke through the open sides of the tent and illuminated the gold embroidery stitched into the cloth. The refracting light snapped him out of his vague imaginings, and he quickly recalled his father’s instructions. He tore himself away from these superb visions of power and summoned the same rigor and toughness that he carried down the hillside with him.

“Ten rials only,” said the boy finally. “Nothing more.”

The smile of the towering official above him soon tightened, and his angry, threatening scowl returned. His cheeks filled with scorching hot blood, and the twinkle in his eyes shot back a sharp darkness that would have immediately cut him to bits had he not stepped a few paces back from him.

“Why you dirty little rodent, do you know what the penalties are for conning a city official? I’ll throw you in prison for the time you’ve wasted me. Come here, you filthy rat – ”

The official tried to grab hold of the boy, but since he was a few paces away from him already, his heavy hands could only grab his shirt, which immediately tore as the boy stumbled back and ran into the thickest part of the bazaar. His small frame served him well as he weaved among the torsos of wandering pedestrians, the official behind him yelling vulgarities in the middle of the road and stomping his feet in heated madness. The boy then fled the bazaar and finally found rest on the outskirts of the marketplace, his heart beating beyond his chest and his panic and alarm at almost being thrown in prison subsiding into fatigue.

After his panic passed, he was left with nothing but utter disappointment for ruining an otherwise glorious future. Luckily he still had the cloth, as he thought he had lost it during his escape. By this time, though, the cloth had lost its smoothness and was wrinkled and manhandled in his fist. He unfurled the cloth and tried to smooth the threads back into shape. It was just then that a slim man in a white, seer-sucker suit and wide-brimmed safari hat emerged from the chaos of the tents and smiled at him graciously.

“Hey, boy, what have you got there?” asked the man.

A renewed confidence lifted the boy from the doldrums. He displayed the full beauty of the turquoise cloth for this man who grazed his manicured fingertips against its fine cotton fibers and translated the Arabic calligraphy at its center with a small, leather-bound book he had been carrying.

“Hmmm, ‘there is no God but the One.’ Very interesting indeed,” mumbled the man while translating the calligraphy.

His broken Arabic accent pegged him instantly as a traveler from a land far away. The boy had rarely seen a suit of such high quality on anyone in the bazaar before, and his pale white skin, pink lips, and azure eyes suggested a noble upbringing and a class membership rarely seen in these humble parts of the city. The man’s wavy blonde hair was something he had never seen on anyone before. The boy took a liking to his suave and courteous manners as well as his peculiar speech, which made his Arabic sound more romantic and complex. His language was fluid and less guttural, as though a date tree was lodged in his throat. The musky odor of his cologne also added to this portrait of a middle-aged tycoon who would never chase after him like the brutish government official had. There was something awkwardly civilized about his overall demeanor, and his first confrontation with this new brand of civility calmed his anxieties and allowed him to feature the cloth more boldly against his body.

“Yes, I see, that’s quite a cloth you have there. How much are willing to part with it?”

“Ten rials only,” the boy sputtered.

The traveler poked at his chin and thought about the offer in a relaxed pose reserved, it seemed, for wealthy men. He swept his hand through his sun-bleached scalp and ruminated on the offer for what seemed like several minutes. The boy thought he had finally made the sale and imagined himself immediately rushing to the nearest kebab stand, a ten-rial bill in his fist, chewing on thick slices of sweetness cut from large logs of lamb-meat warming against electric burners. His mouth watered, and his empty stomach growled in pain from imagining the meat smothered in yogurt and then eaten with a warm, buttery flat bread. But just when he thought he’d eat again, the traveler stumbled upon an idea that made his eyes widen with excitement.

“I tell you what,” said the traveler, plucking an ivory-colored business card from his wallet, “I work for an import/export firm in London. It’s one of the largest trading firms in the world. We have offices in twenty countries, from Europe and the Americas, all the way to India and into the jungles of Asia. Our stock has been rated one of the best by the wealthiest investment houses in all of Great Britain.”

He also pulled from his wallet what appeared to be an ornamented paper that had the same gritty texture of a rial note he once held.

“Do you see this?” asked the traveler, waving the paper in front of him. “This is a one-pound note, and it is worth at least ten times the value of the cloth you have there. Ten times! Can you believe it? If you sell me the cloth for no more than eight rials, I will get your papers from the British embassy nearby, and you can leave this desert wasteland and come work for me. I can show you how to profit from goods like these by buying them extraordinarily cheap and selling them to well-to-do clients who will buy this same trash in bulk for very high prices. In other words, what are common items for peasants here in the kingdom are all exotic luxury items for the upper class in the civilized West, and if you work for me, I guarantee that you will make a small fortune in your first few years.

“Imagine leaving this squalor behind and traveling the world, staying in five-star resorts instead, and returning from your travels to a city mansion in South Ken, eating as much chicken curry as you bloody-well please. You can then invest your small fortune wisely, and when you’re old enough, have children of your own and send them to the finest schools on the continent. They can then go on to become doctors, lawyers, or businessmen after finishing university.

“You can have a family is what I’m saying, and a prosperous one at that. You’d avoid the cycles of poverty that are crippling your race of people and gain your freedom from all of this slavery such a poverty imposes on you, but only if you agree to sell the cloth to me at eight rials, nothing more. Just think of it – eight measly rials, and you can change your stars – alter your destiny is what I’m trying to tell you. You’d never be hungry or left wanting again!”

The traveler handed him the one-pound note, and the boy rubbed its coarse texture between his thumb and forefinger. He gazed at the crowned head of the woman on the face of it and was enraptured by the small watermarks that proudly displayed a royal crest or seal of sorts from the faraway country the man had traveled from. The single line of gold thread stitched into the note was probably worth more than the value of the cloth alone, its radiance easily dwarfing that of the cloth that he was now willing to part with. Visions of dressing up in fancy suits clouded what little of his trading acumen remained. He imagined having piles and piles of these one-pound notes, and he would buy what he truly wanted – a ticket out of Arabia on an ocean-liner. He had seen pictures of these vast, floating cities pasted to crumbling city walls, and who really needed this poverty, he asked. His mansion in South Ken would rival the most exquisite palaces of the Arab princes, and there was much more to follow, if only he dumped this cloth and followed the traveler to the life of his dreams.

Suddenly a muezzin from high atop the minarets of one of the local mosques called the believers to prayer, and even though his voice was smooth and enchanting, the muezzin’s song broke him from his visions. He soon remembered how much money he needed to get for the cloth, and to his own amazement and horror, he sputtered out again, “ten rials only,” and stood firm and resolute on this final offer.

The traveler quickly snatched the one-pound note from his fingertips and returned both the note and the business card to his wallet.

“I just can’t understand you people,” said the traveler, shaking his head and talking to himself in his own foreign tongue. “I’m giving you the opportunity of a lifetime, and you deny that for some cheap and ugly cloth? It makes me wonder sometimes why the poor usually stay where they are in life. It’s not like we don’t offer them opportunity, because we offer it to them every day. It’s just that they’re either too lazy to work for it or too stupid to know when they see it. And then they complain that the government is not taking care of them. I mean, who do you think bought those clothes on your back anyway? It’s people like me who are taxed to the hilt so that you can afford to lie around all day and live off of our charity. And meanwhile blackies of your kind come over by the boat-loads and expect to live side-by-side with us and marry into our families by doing nothing but begging and stealing and sleeping all day in those gypsy caravans that serve as your only contribution to our society. Savages, the lot of you. You can’t even learn how to read and write, and then we open our borders up all over Europe. God, maybe Hitler’s right.”

The boy, of course, couldn’t understand a word he said, but by the look on his face, the traveler was clearly angry with him. Luckily, he didn’t threaten him like the official had, and he sighed in relief as the traveler finished his rant and headed towards another part of the bazaar. Nevertheless, the boy still experienced a deep sadness over the loss, as he could have made a good and prosperous life for himself in a much different part of the world. Life didn’t have to be so difficult, he thought, as the muezzin’s chants ended and the believers along the walls of the over-crowded mosque bended at their knees and offered prayers. He longed to take full part in these rituals too, but alas, he didn’t know how to read and so never learned what the holy book said about, what seemed to be, a very punishing existence. Yet these punishments didn’t last for very long, as a sweet, perfumed incense wafted through to the perimeter of the bazaar from a black tent that stood far apart from the traders’ stalls.

He knew from earlier travels with his father that he should avoid this one particular tent. Actually, his father had forbidden him from going near it, but he never gave a clear reason as to why. The incense happened to be so seductive that it carried him to the tent’s opening that flapped against the breeze. An alluring ghazal played on a small transistor radio from within, and he also heard several young women giggling playfully. He remembered that this was where stressed-out traders came to “unwind” after their hectic working hours.

He thought himself too young to enter, but his genuine curiosity for what had been forbidden, along with the mélange of the powerful incense, seductive ghazals, and girlish laughter pushed him through the opening with his turquoise cloth flung conspicuously over his shoulder. He looked like an emissary from another province of the kingdom or an important diplomat for one of the crowned princes. When he stepped inside, however, he couldn’t believe what he saw.

His cautious footfalls tiptoed on soft Persian rugs that cooled his blistered feet. A gust of cold air from within the tent subdued the heat from outside. From every corner of the room large, plush pillows were assembled like heavenly beds upon fluffy clouds. A couple of tired traders lounged on these oversized pillows and smoked from large, heavy hookah pipes that stood like statues next to them. Their bloodshot eyes, billowing clouds of smoke, and slow movements showed that they were clearly under the influence of some strange medicine that seemed to carry them into faraway worlds. But what astonished the boy the most was the dozen or so dancing women in the middle of the room wearing next to nothing at all. They wore jeweled lingerie and their faces were veiled by transparent pink chiffon. He tried to hide within one of the folds of the tent, as watching the display was a bit too much for his surging hormones, but before he could leave safely, the women heard his footsteps, and suddenly all eyes were upon him, as he was caught in the spotlight of their feminine gaze. After a moment or two of silent bewilderment, the girls broke into the same girlish laughter he had heard outside.

The boy blushed crimson red and hurried to find the exit. The madam of the establishment, however, floated near from the other side of the room and blocked his attempt to flee.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here? A young boy snooping in my parlor?”

Her stubby, jeweled hands held him by the shoulders, and she grinned mischievously, as though wanting something from him.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk – a very naughty boy,” she announced. “What shall we do with him, girls?”

A bunch of them giggled again, and one of them cheered, “let’s give him a bath!”

Another said, “let’s see him dance, front and center!”

And a third said, “let’s give him a rubdown. The poor thing looks like he’s tired and lost.”

Another round of giggling followed these deliberations.

One of the hoary traders in the corner took a long toke from his hookah pipe and cynically declared, “If only I were young again.”

It all seemed a little too fantastic for the boy, who was both excited and also very afraid. He didn’t know where these interjections would lead and feared that he would never return to his father again, as the old madam sells him into the services of North African tribesmen or some other terrible fate that only this giggling gang of gypsies could devise.

A large wart on the madam’s cheek, as well as her jagged, ash-stained teeth, pigeon-holed her as the brains behind this particular operation. He would have much rather fallen into the laps of the soft warm bodies dancing happily in the center of the room than be held by the collar by the brutish madam. To his benefit, the girls begged that he be allowed to stay for a while. The madam, however, had other intentions. The boy followed her eyes to where the turquoise cloth hung from his shoulder. The madam stared into the depth of its color, and while rubbing the soft, fragile thread, her grin turned into a warm smile. She unhooked her hand from the back of his neck and bid him a fond welcome.

“Why don’t you stay with us a while,” she said, leading him to the women who now danced to the music uninhibitedly. She clapped her hands sharply and said, “Sasha, come here at once.”

From the middle of their writhing circle emerged a woman whose long black hair flowed to her waist and whose silky fair skin had been slicked with fragrant oils. She wore a light make-up that accentuated her natural beauty and a wet lip-gloss that moistened her full, ruby-red lips. She glittered as she walked, and the pink transparent veil was the only scrap of clothing covering her voluptuousness. Naturally, the boy couldn’t pull his eyes away from her abundant chest, jeweled navel, and long, meandering legs that seemed more wholesome to him than the thick butter-cream his father fed him as a child. He was immediately overwhelmed by this, the most beautiful woman in the room, her hazel eyes begging him to come closer and rescue her from all of this insanity.

“Not so fast,” said the madam, her pudgy hands holding him in place. “First, you must give me something for her. How much would you give to spend the evening with my best girl?”

“I don’t have any money,” answered the boy, as the rest of the girls gasped in dismay.

“No money, eh? Well, maybe we can come to some other arrangement.”

“I’d like that very much, madam,” said the boy.

After all, he had the love of his life right there before him, and he promised himself that he would run away with her far beyond the kingdom’s borders. They could finally live in peace, and even though they didn’t have any money, he would find a way to take care of her and honor, respect, and obey her wishes for the rest of his days.

The woman in front of him smiled coyly. She too seemed to be enamored of him, and he quickly turned to the cloth that hung from his shoulder. He recalled his father’s instructions but would have rather given the worthless scrap of cloth away for a one-time shot at escaping the oppression of the city with the girl of his dreams by his side. In the city he would always be disadvantaged and lame, oppressed and sickly, dirty and impoverished. This woman would wash away these titles of despair and keep him fulfilled and happy in their mutual love. His eyes connected with hers, and they both knew it was right and just and wholesome and divine that they should belong to each other for the rest of their lives. But then a blast of warm desert wind blew through the tent’s opening, taking the turquoise cloth that sat on his shoulder with it. The cloth unfurled in the gust of wind, and all of the women gasped at its aquamarine beauty floating in the air. It settled gracefully on the carpeted floor between the woman and the boy. The woman he had fallen for lost her focus and gazed in amazement at the wondrous cloth. It then seemed to absorb all of her attentions, and as soon as she looked away, the boy regained his composure and grabbed the cloth from the floor. His confidence and toughness returned, and he said in a forceful tone, “ten rials only, madam.”

The madam yanked him by the collar and shoved him out the tent’s opening.

“Get out, you little thief, and don’t come here again, or I swear, by God, I’ll have your throat cut wide open! No one insults my best girl that way! No one!”

The boy found himself on the outside of the tent accosted and maimed by the murderous light, his body supine on the jagged rubble that scraped his backside. He searched for the cloth and found it crumpled and dirty beneath his back. A sharp pain struck his body, and for a while he just lay there in the dirt, his eyes squinting into the blinding white sky. He picked himself up slowly, and just before retreating to the hills, he caught a glimpse of the woman who had captured his heart. She had since crumbled to her knees in the center of the tent, her hands covering her face and her Ledaen body shaking with sad and broken tears.

Soon the sun began to set beneath the tops of the burnt mountains, and shadows slowly crept out from under the sharp rocks and scattered pieces of brittle wood that pockmarked his slow climb to his father’s hovel. Along the road other traders walked gloomily among debris that signaled the end of the metropolis and the beginning of a hilly wasteland that stretched for thousands of miles in all directions. These were the people who had failed, who lost money, who got the short end of the stick. The boy had walked this trail at this particular time of day countless times before, usually with his father leading the way. This time of day had been reserved for the beggars, the downtrodden, the indigent, the woebegone, and the unrighteous. These were the freaks, the lepers, and the deformed walking in loose procession to their squalid shacks on the hillside. This somber march of humped backs, hacking coughs, and blistered feet soon thinned out as the sun’s power lost its edge to the twilight. The darkness enshrouded his mood, which vacillated from burning anger to frigid depression, and now he had to face his father who would probably shut him out of the same hovel he grew up in.

He fought the urge to lash out at the immortal God who had stolen his bountiful future from him, but he quieted the beast stirring within him and understood that the light would never extinguish from the stars hanging above him. He thought that perhaps, one day, he could carve out a simple life for himself in the mountains – a poor, nomadic life, yes – but an existence nonetheless. He had little idea what he’d do, but at least this simple one seemed possible. His thoughts then returned to his father who would ultimately be disappointed with the son he had raised. Both his father’s natural skills and hard work built the humble abode on the hill, and although it was only a meager hovel, filled with failures and disappointments in every corner, it still remained a proud tribute to a poor man’s labor. Yet he knew himself an adopted son, a bastard of the bazaar, and while he carefully studied every nuance of negotiation, he soon realized from somewhere deep within him that he would never be as successful as his father was. His father, and his forefathers before him, carried such talents through their line – talents, he suddenly discovered, that he never had. He again stifled his urge to cry, and when he finally entered the hovel in the darkness, a small fire suppressed his tears and gradually warmed his bones.

His father was bowing his head in prayer in the corner of the hovel when he arrived. His father stopped what he was doing and quickly attended to him. The boy could no longer contain his emotions, and, trader or not, he had no choice but to let his tears loose before the man he admired most. The old man dropped to his knees and embraced his son more strongly than ever before. The boy spilled warm tears on his shoulders, and he too couldn’t help but weep.

“You have come back to me,” said the father, “But why?”

The boy loosened his fingers, and the turquoise cloth he had clutched so tightly fell to the ground. Even though it was caked in dirt, its thread still held together, as though it were some sort of small miracle.

“My son, there is something I must tell you. There is no reason to cry.”

“But I couldn’t sell the cloth,” cried the boy. “I tried, and I tried, but I couldn’t sell it.”

The old man held him close and wiped away his tears with the edges of the fabric.

“When I was a young boy,” he said, “my father gave me this same cloth, and your great-grandfather before him. From somewhere within the origins of our family line this cloth has been handed down through the generations. My ancestors were very skilled and experienced traders. They were great at what they did, but you see, not one of them was ever able to sell this cloth. We all had to make it through the same torment, and now that this day has come, I know in my heart that you are truly my own son. I know now that you were born to me, and I shall never leave you again, I swear it.

“So come, dry your tears and gather your things. Tomorrow morning we shall leave this place of sadness and head into the desert, towards a land where we can live in peace and prosper like our ancestors once did. We will leave the cursed place, and I swear, I will never leave you again.”

Author T.C. Boyle sits down with Ben Evans to discuss his life, his craft and his latest novel, The Women.

Michael Andreoni

Harry watched the truck roll up in front of the slip, wondering why there were three inside instead of two. It was supposed to be just William and Dan this morning and he squinted against the headlights into the cab to see who was sandwiched between them. He’d never seen the guy before, so he turned his back on the truck and got on with hosing down the cockpit, blasting shrouds of moonlit webs into the scuppers along with their frantic creators, the water gurgling faintly as it swept them into the river.

William hadn’t mentioned bringing anyone else in his voice-mail and Harry fought a quick surge of irritation at being left out of the loop. There were enough details to consider at 5:00 a.m. in preparation for fishing offshore without the added unknown of a new guy. He surveyed the clean deck of the boat in the dimness as a stiff breeze stirred up the cottonwoods on the riverbank. They whispered nasty things about the strong east wind that had blown in overnight, taunting him with the promise of a good pounding in the stiff chop which always accompanied it.

William’s voice carried on the wind, directing Dan to unload the truck. Harry coiled the hose and waited onboard, watching Dan hand gear down off the steel bed to the stranger, who placed it on the wet grass. Waiting for them, annoyed with the wind, and William, he considered telling them all to go home.

“Harry, it’s too damn early.” William dropped a cooler on the dock beside the boat and sat on it, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t know why I bothered going to bed.”

“You’re getting awfully soft in your old age, Willy.” Harry waved him off the cooler and swung it over the side of the boat into the cockpit, sliding it astern to the usual spot against the transom. “I told you it’s been an early bite since the water warmed up.”

The dock shook, announcing Dan’s arrival, stranger in tow, laden with gear.

“Mornin’. You get bait?”

“I got it.” Harry eyed the new guy, who was checking out the boat. Clad in shorts and golf shirt, he looked out of place alongside the heavily dressed men, clearly unprepared for late spring fishing on Lake Erie. The new guy nodded and smiled at him, but Harry, not yet ready for pleasantries from strangers, grabbed a bag from Dan’s hands and bent down to stuff it into a storage compartment. Straightening, he stared a hard question at the largest man on the dock.

William swung his bulk ponderously into the cockpit, pulled a bag of ice from the cooler and dumped it into the fish box. He gestured in the general direction of the dock.

“That’s my brother-in-law, Gary. They just moved up from St. Louis last week. Thought we could show him what the Great Lakes are all about.”

“You should have called, William. You happen to hear the wind singing in the trees? We’ll have five and six footers out there today. Too rough for a rookie.”

William, his head in the bait-well, grunted as he screwed the aerator in. “Perfect day for him to learn. After today everything’ll be easy.” He stuck his head up and glared at Dan. “You gonna stand there? Lock the truck and get on the boat.”

Dan trotted up the dock, leaving Gary standing alongside the boat. Tall and lean, the rookie moved toward the rail as though to climb down into the cockpit, then hesitated. He stepped back, looking down uncertainly on the two men rushing about at mysterious tasks under the waning moon.

Harry stripped old line from a reel and wished, not for the first time, for someone else to fish with. It was so like William to spring this on him at the last minute, simply assuming that he, and everyone else, would go along. He’d fished on Harry’s boat nearly five years with such an easy presumption of command that most of the dock crowd were surprised to discover that the Frank G. was Harry’s. He’d let himself become accustomed to it, as well as William’s equally confident proclamations on most topics, happy enough to have someone able and willing to kick in some serious money toward running the boat. High fuel prices and the effects of several years of hard times made a well-heeled fishing partner a necessary, if regrettable, arrangement.

William reigned over a venerable family-owned company, part of a small minority in the state who had become more affluent in recent years even as much of rust-belt Michigan suffered a steady decline. He affected the innocent surprise of well-insulated old money at Harry’s tales of tough times at the automotive supplier he worked for, of longstanding accounts lost and nothing new coming in. His sympathy amounted to quoting cheerfully from the columns of conservative pundits, joining them in chortling over the decline of unions and the lowering of wages.

“It’s time for this state to wake up and recognize that entrepreneurs like me should be running the show, Harry,” began his favorite blessing on the end of a day of sport, delivered ex cathedra from the cockpit bench, surrounded by worshipful throngs of empty beer cans. Chugging back to the dock, the always pliable Dan cleaning the days catch, the afternoon sun would inflame William into a sweaty, two-hundred-eighty pound healer of the State’s economic problems.

“First of all, business owners must be exempt from taxes and minimum wage laws so we can create wealth. Then we cut out all that money wasted on those lazy bastards on welfare and make the working class actually do some work. That should be obvious to everyone except a few old lefties still teaching at Bleeding Heart U. Let ’em fondle their JFK memorabilia and eat cat food for dinner, I say.

“The new order is people like me who invest in the future and drive the economy. The higher my profit, the more I expand and the more people I employ. And what’s good for me is good for state and country.”

Red-tinged eyes would chase Harry, who had given up arguing years ago, around the deck as he pretended to be engrossed in mopping up fish slime, before alighting on a more sympathetic audience.

“That’s right, William,” Dan would chime with perfect pitch over the guttural counterpoint of crunching bones and tearing skin as he wielded the filet knife. A balding, unremarkable little man, he was at least smart enough to know where his interest lay. William’s general manager during business hours and all around dogs-body for the remainder of the planets rotation, he could generally be counted on to give the proper amen to holy doctrine. His great talent was a chameleon-like ability to shift allegiances almost instantly in accordance with his employer’s whims. An earnest friend to all until William’s disapproving cough quivered his constantly extended antennae, friendship would then be quickly withdrawn from anyone whom master had judged unworthy. A genial rapprochement might be offered a day, or a year later—if William signaled that proper restitution had been made.

There was no getting around his privileged status on the Frank G. this morning though, as at William’s curt request he’d chipped in part of the days fuel cost. Harry regarded both men as a form of penance for his inability to surmount a gradual financial malaise, as year by year his salary was frozen, then reduced, along with cuts to his health care and retirement. Today’s indignity of the new guy invited onboard without so much as a courtesy call was simply additional proof that he’d been judged and found wanting by the new world order, or whoever ran things these days.

After four brutal years of recession he was conscious of suffering an almost biblical punishment of reduced circumstances, with the prospect that what he endured was merely a taste of the future. As though his very own little apocalypse waited, heralded not by fire, or another forty day deluge, but William and Dan preaching at him from the cockpit of his boat– and he’d have to smile and applaud.

He looked at the new guy, still waiting patiently on the dock. William had brought him, and without William sharing the expense of the boat he’d probably have to sell it… if anyone was buying these days.

“Well… welcome aboard, Gary.” He pointed at a bench near the helm. “Have a seat while I get us into the river and then we’ll talk.”

Gary dropped lightly onto the deck and took his place without a word, pressing long legs against the seat as he slid behind piles of equipment. He took in William and Dan’s well-rehearsed choreography of bringing up fishing rods from storage lockers in the cramped cabin, inspecting rigging and setting the rods in the holders around the cockpit. He watched Harry scramble onto the bow to undo the last mooring line and then slip back behind the wheel to ease the boat out of the slip downriver, idling through the no-wake zone toward the lake.

The docks receded slowly into darkness and he smiled to hear ducks calling good morning as they paddled unseen along the shore, caught the silvered flash of small fish breaking the surface next to the boat. He looked up quickly as Harry swiveled the helm chair toward him, round face shadowy under the reddish glow of the running lights.

“So what’s it like being William’s brother-in-law?”

Gary smiled at him. “Weather and fishing are safe topics. We don’t agree on much else but he’s real easy to get along with if you stick with that. ‘Course, we had five hundred miles between us ‘til just recently— that helped.”

“I’ll bet.” Harry returned the smile briefly, looking at Gary’s shirt. “Look… down in the cabin you’ll find a waterproof jacket and pants.” He smiled again, looking down at Gary’s long legs. “You may find the pants a bit short, but you’re going to need something when we get out on the lake or you’ll have hypothermia. It’s a warm day ashore, but we’ll be taking some forty-five, forty-eight degree water over the bow while we’re running and a lot of spray when we’re trolling down in the wave troughs.”

Gary stood up. “I appreciate it.”

“One other thing. While you’re down there check out the life jackets hanging on the wall. No reflection on you Gary– I’d say the same if you were a Navy SEAL– but I may ask you to put one on if we start getting knocked around.”

“Got it.” He started for the cabin just as William came in from the cockpit.

“You two done sniffing asses yet? Let’s go fishing!”

“Just getting him something to wear. Shit… you started already?” Harry looked at the helm clock as the scent of beer floated on the air. It was ten to six.

“Damn right. Gotta show Gary how we do it up here.”

William looked down into the cabin, watched Gary pull on heavy pants and coat. “Harry give you the facts of life?”

Harry heard his laughing reply. “It’s not a big deal if I have to wear a life jacket.”

“Christ, not that.” William looked disgustedly at Harry while shifting his weight aside to allow Gary to step back up from the cabin.

Harry turned away from both men and stared through the window at the peachy-orange glow on the horizon.

“What Harry should have told you is this boat runs on gasoline, not gratitude. You’re my guest today but if you come back, Harry needs your help in the form of a contribution. And just so you know, ten bucks doesn’t get it done with a hundred eighty gallon tank to fill.”

Prickly heat crept over Harry’s cheeks, down his neck. He continued to stare out the window, despising William for the heavy-handed solicitation, but even more ashamed for allowing it to happen. He didn’t want anyone passing the hat so he could run the boat, though he knew he’d take any money offered freely. He certainly didn’t want William strong-arming anyone for him in that disgusting televangelist style.

He snuck a glance and Gary was looking right at him, his face neutral, betraying no surprise or distaste, studying him as the Frank G. approached the river mouth.

Lake Erie was showing her teeth against the lashing east wind, masticating the shoreline on both sides of the river into muddy froth under sharply cresting white-tipped rollers. Harry spared the cockpit a quick look as the boat plowed into the waves, checking that everything was tied down. William and Dan were leaning forward on the bench seats, ready to absorb the pounding with their legs. William took large gulps of beer to prevent any from slopping out of the can. He grinned at Harry, raising the can in a salute to… what? Harry didn’t know. Maybe the goddess dedicated to keeping fat, drunk assholes from falling out of boats.

Gary was carefully emulating the other two, his feet braced against the canting deck. He gripped a rail with one hand and Harry saw that the knuckles were white under the pressure. He wasn’t looking sick though, in fact he was gazing excitedly at the heaving lake as the first waves broke over the bow and ran over the cabin top, drenching the cockpit. Still dry for the moment at the helm, Harry grinned as Gary shook the cold water off just like an old-timer. He looked to be a fast learner and might do all right if he continued like this, shaking it off, ready for anything as they slammed through ten miles of rough water, out to the fishing grounds.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

“These aren’t salmon, William, or even sheepheads. These are walleye. They’re not going to pop the bait hard and tear off a hundred yards of line. You’ve got to watch closely—you know that.”

Harry landed another fish from William’s side of the boat, the shiny green and brown skin already turning pale from dragging along unnoticed after it hit the bait. He tossed it into the box and held out another rod for William to check. Dan watched the port-side baits, with William supposedly keeping an eye to starboard as the Frank G. trolled slowly through the swells, crisscrossing over the school of fish marked on the sonar screen. William was also supposed to be showing Gary what to do while Harry steered the boat, but he hadn’t shown much enthusiasm for anything except drinking, and now, sullen faced, stood up very slowly and took the rod from Harry.

“…told Gary to watch… got to learn…,” he muttered.

Harry looked at him closely, and then at Dan—and he was watching William as well, an anxious frown pinching his face. Harry flipped the cooler lid open and counted eight empties partially submerged in the ice-water slurry. He slammed the lid down and rounded on William.

“Jesus-Fucking-Christ-Almighty, it’s not even ten o’clock! What the hell’s the matter with you?” Harry’s hand circled the boat, taking in Dan and Gary. “Nobody’s even cracked one yet and you’re shit-faced.”

William reeled in line and didn’t answer.

Dan pointed toward the helm, motioning for Harry and Gary to follow him, and they crowded around the wheel, holding on to whatever was handy as the boat pitched and rolled.

“Go easy on him. He had a bad night.”

“Bullshit. Anybody drunk this early on my boat, in rough weather, better have more then a bad night for an excuse.”

Harry stared at Dan until the man, who was completely William’s creature, looked away, checked that William was still busy in the cockpit and bent his head conspiratorially toward them.

“He and Donna had a big fight and he spent the night at my house.”

Harry shrugged, “So, they’re always at each others throats. What’s it this time? She catch him fucking the maid… what’s her name… Rosa?”

A faint smile teased the corners of Dan’s mouth. “Not the maid.”

Harry looked at Gary, simultaneous grins split their faces. “Well come on man, spill it,” Harry exhorted.

A quick look toward the cockpit, and Dan leaned in again. “Well, you know Darlene at Bob’s Bait?” Dan looked into Harry’s incredulous eyes, nodded.

Harry simply laughed, just laughed. He didn’t care if William heard, he didn’t care about gas money, or sharing expenses, or anything at the moment.

He looked at Gary, who wore a puzzled smile, and that got him laughing again. Finally, he took pity on him.

“You haven’t been there yet, Gary, but there’s about a dozen bait shops on the highway near the marina all selling the same stuff. Well, a few years ago, Bob’s Bait decided to cut out the competition by getting rid of their male help and hiring pretty, twenty-something girls. They put them in short shorts and halter tops – and business went through the roof. Everybody calls them “The Minnow Girls” because that’s what they do all day long; dip minnows into your pail. They make pretty good money considering almost everyone around here’s laid off.

“Of course, William calls them “bait whores” and says it’s a good enough job for people too poor and stupid for college. Which is why this is so delicious.”

Gary laughed. “And Darlene is a minnow girl?”

“You betcha. But what I don’t understand,” Harry asked, turning back to Dan, “I can see what’s in it for old Willy-boy, but what’s Darlene get out of it? I mean, he’s got money, but look at the guy. And she’d have to listen to his divine right of kings shit.”

They looked out in the cockpit, and William was once again seated on the bench, gut jutting impressively astern, improving himself with another cold one.

Having crossed the line of no return in revealing master’s secret, Dan giggled maliciously. “It seems that Darlene wants to be a chef and William told her he’d pay for a two year course at the community college. Then, last week, they had an argument about something and he told her to forget it – he wouldn’t pay for anything.

“So she’s real pissed, right? So last night she calls the house and Donna answers, and Darlene tells her the whole story, every little detail. It must have been a great fight. He was pounding on my door around two o’clock yelling about a divorce. He sacked out in our spare bedroom for a couple hours ’till we had to get up and meet you at the dock.”

Harry found the rest of the morning much improved. Gary took William’s place watching the baits and he was a natural, spotting the hits almost as quickly as Harry. The fish bit steadily until by early afternoon they’d caught their limit and began stowing rods and equipment for the run back to the marina. William kept to his seat, probably guessing from the frequent grins shared among the others that his secret was out. He scowled, but said nothing when Harry removed the cooler from his close proximity and carted it down into the cabin.

Gary took over the helm under Harry’s guidance, the boat running beautifully now that the wind was behind them, pushing them lightly up and over the foaming wave crests. The big lake displayed her finery for them as if to apologize for the punishing ride earlier, showing off diving cormorants and swooping gulls, sinuous water snakes and stalking herons, all hunting for fish dazed by the pounding waves.

The day had turned out better then Harry expected, and the best of it was a peculiar silence in the cockpit. No boozy orations marred the peaceful sibilance of water rushing along the hull today, or confident prescriptions for curing the State’s economic ills. Not a day for regal pronouncements and fractured logic after all, but curving waves, arcing fish, circling birds. He felt it keenly again, as he hadn’t in years, the magic power of the lake thrumming into him from somewhere beyond the leaping bow, and watching Gary guide the boat his first time into the home channel, an exultation wrought by wind and water on his face, knew he felt it too.

Dan, with Gary as able assistant, tied off the mooring lines at the dock and Gary began stacking gear as Harry handed it to him, working around William, who still kept to his seat, staring at the deck. Dan pulled out the box containing cleaning knives and approached the fish box.

“Wait up Dan,” Harry spoke in a low voice. He turned to William, “Since you weren’t worth a rat’s ass out there today, you think you could possibly clean some fish without gutting yourself?”

“That’s his job,” William growled, jabbing a thumb at Dan, looking hard and mean at Harry.

“I’ve got another job for him right now so get crackin’, buddy.” The “buddy” was discretely vicious and Harry enjoyed it immensely, smiling sweetly against William’s dangerous mien.

Dan offered the knife box to his boss. It remained between them a long moment before William snatched it from his hands.

They watched him hoist the fish box onto the dock, carry it ashore to the cleaning station. His face was flushed with rage, weather and drink.

“So what’s this job?” Dan asked tensely. He was looking more regretful every second, like he’d rather run after boss-man and apologize then anything else. There’d be retribution for telling them about Darlene—William would see to that.

Harry dug around in the cooler. “Well, if Willy-boy left us anything your job is to drink one with Gary and me.”

He handed beers around, they popped the tops, Gary and Dan watching him, waiting.

He smiled at them. “I want to welcome the new guy. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see you Gary, but you did great out there today. You’re welcome back anytime and…” Harry looked toward the fish cleaning station, “don’t worry about what you were told about gas money. You can fish for free.”

“I’ve never experienced anything like those waves; running the boat through them was awesome,” Gary recounted solemnly. “I’ll go again whenever you say.”

He grinned widely, “And I’ll pay my way, so just take the money and don’t argue.”

“I won’t put up a fuss,” Harry laughed.

He raised his beer in a salute, “We’re also drinking to Darlene, Minnow Girl extraordinaire, who with one phone call deflated an eighth of a ton of pomposity. She showed me I’ve been a fool to let William walk all over me. I don’t know if she’ll be a chef, but I hope she gets whatever she wants because she beat hell out of a guy who had every advantage—money, position, experience.”

He looked at Dan, “Maybe something in that for you too. Gentlemen… Darlene.”

They drank up and went about their tasks, loading the truck and cleaning up. Harry began mopping the cockpit, actually enjoying it without William yammering at him. The wind still bent the cottonwoods, no longer threatening, but a crooning breath of the summer to come. Warm days spent floating on sparkling water, sea gulls battling one another to beg for scraps as they bobbed around the boat in gentle swells. He’d show Gary the sweet disposition of the lake and he’d love it, just as he’d loved her raw, lashing power.

He was still working on the cockpit when they came down the dock to say their good-byes. William was already in the truck, not speaking to anyone, and Harry was glad he wouldn’t be riding with them. Old Willy-boy would be prickly for a while after today, though Harry wouldn’t have missed it, whatever came of it. A chastened William, all in all, might be an improvement.

“All loaded up?”

“Yeah.” Dan looked back at the truck as he laid a freezer bag full of Harry’s share of fish fillets on the dock. “We better get going. He’s not exactly in the best mood.”

“I hear you. Well, great trip guys. Got our limit, didn’t break the boat and made it back alive. I’m planning on next Saturday if you can make it.”

“I’m in,” Gary said. “Just let me know what time.”

Dan grimaced at the truck. “I’ll have to see which way the winds’ blowing, Harry.”

“You know,” Harry offered, “You can come by yourself. You work for the guy; you’re not his servant.”

“It’s not that simple. You know what he’s like.”

“It is that simple, Dan. He’s been acting like God-damned royalty for too long. We don’t have any hereditary aristocracy in this country, but we’re ass deep in company Chairmen and CEOs.

“You get a guy like William running around unchecked and Christ; he’s as dangerous to us as a mad King. Darlene knocked him off his throne for all of us, believe me.”

Dan shook his head. “I don’t see it that way. William has a lot of influence. If he fires me I’ll have to move out of state to find a job.”

Harry opened his mouth, but Gary cut in. “He’s not gonna fire you. I been around him off and on for fifteen years and I never saw him embarrassed before, but he’s embarrassed now. William almost always gets his way except this time he didn’t—and we all know about it. He’ll probably treat you even worse then usual for a while but I figure you’re used to that.”

Gary looked at Harry. “It’s always a good thing for guys like us when somebody like William gets cut down a peg or two.”

“I don’t know,” Dan muttered, staring down at his feet. “you don’t work for him.”

Harry couldn’t resist: “It will be all right, Dan. “You can always threaten him with Darlene if he gets too high and mighty. Tell him she’s pregnant and you’ll have to tell Donna if he doesn’t tone his shit down.”

Gary laughed, Dan didn’t.

“Ha ha. Screw you, Harry.”

“See ya.”

He leaned on the mop, watching William drive them away until the truck was almost out of sight before finishing the cockpit, smiling at the clean deck, the carefully stowed gear. The Frank G. was once again ready to entertain, royals and commoners alike.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

Seven-year-old Conall eyed the apple on the window ledge with savage desire. It looked wonderful, as big as his hand, yellow and red, only the one small brown spot on it. The saliva collected in his mouth, and he swallowed hard. He knew he shouldn’t, he had a tender conscience, but it had been a long time since last night’s meager potatoes, and his big sister had back-handed him out of the shanty when he’d begged for a crust to stave off the pains in his arms and legs, the pains of a body trying to grow with nothing to grow on. The ache in his belly gnawed at him.

Looking around furtively to see if anyone was about, he reached up with sudden decision and snatched the prize, thrusting it into the bosom of his threadbare shirt as he lit out for the woods beyond the village as fast as his bare feet would carry him.

Panting from the exertion – though no one had pursued him, or even seen him, as far as he could tell – Conall sank down in his favorite hiding place, a space among the late-summer blackberries, long since picked clean by him, but still good for concealment.

He pulled out his treasure and polished it carefully on the cleanest spot on his dirty sleeve, making it shine, making it last, enjoying the feel of the soft peel under his fingers. Finally, when he could stand it no more, he bit down on it, taking the smallest of bites, carefully cupping his hand to catch the stray drops of juice. He closed his eyes in concentration: he had become adept at memorizing the taste of food, learning it by heart, so to speak. In this way he could fill up the long hours of no nourishment with the echo of the taste.

Conall could eat whole meals in his mind – if he’d had the taste in his mouth once, he knew it. When his mother had been alive, there had been honey once…he still remembered the taste of her milk.

The smell of the apple was almost overwhelming to his senses. He stored it up, along with the smooth texture of the peel, and the taste of it (tart), contrasted with the mealy consistency of the flesh, and its relative sweetness…

He had finished his feast, core and all, and was licking filthy fingers, when he heard the cry from the copse.

It was a baby wailing, down by the spring in the rocks. His hunger assuaged, Conall was curious, though wary, and crept quietly around the copse he secretly called the Loney (because it was so silent there, never a bird had he heard by that spring), and hid in some bushes, watching and listening.

On the flat rock by the spring, a woman was sitting. She looked old to Conall, though he knew she was young, Maggie from the shebeen, hard-mouthed, thin as a rail, with her infant in her lap. The baby was crying because she’d pulled the teat – thin and hard, like the rest of her – out of its mouth. Its tiny arms flailed, grasping, trying to catch hold of her blouse, wanting to root again for the food it sought, but she pushed it angrily away.

Conall knew this baby. While the bigger boys had stared at Maggie as she nursed, Conall had stared at the baby, its little face with the big blue eyes staring back at him. He had offered it his finger, and it had sucked at it greedily. Conall had smiled a rare smile at the squirming thing, thinking of his little brother – the one who had died with his mam, the winter gone. Conall watched Maggie and the baby now, wondering why she had come so far to sit here alone. Not afraid of her, he started to come out of hiding, to greet her, ask to hold the infant.

He stopped dead when he saw what was in her hand, glinting silver in the shaft of noonday sunlight filtering through the trees. His stifled cry was drowned out by the screaming of the baby as Maggie raised her hand…Conall’s mind stopped.

Relief flooded over him when he saw the Tinker Woman, the one who had come through the village a month ago, she with her bangles and twinkling eyes, step into the copse from the other side. He saw her speak to Maggie, saw her offer money for the baby, a silver coin that she held in her hand, a silver coin she would give for the life, saw Maggie give the Tinker Woman the baby, glad to get rid of the burden, saw the Tinker Woman take the baby, safe in her arms, saw the flash of the silver coin as it flew through the air, heard the baby’s cry stilled, heard the swish of the Tinker Woman’s long skirt as she turned through the trees…

There was no Tinker Woman, Conall saw through a lens of tears. The flash was the flash of the knife that cut off the infant’s cry, the swish that of Maggie’s skirts as she fled, dropping the silent bundle of rags to the ground as she ran hard from that place.

Then the place was quiet again, except for the splashing of the spring as it bubbled from the rock. His lower lip trembling, Conall stepped out into the copse and stared dully down at the dead thing.

The baby’s arms were spread in death, stretched out still as if in supplication for the comfort that would never come again in this world. Conall looked at the eyes, once so bright, now dulled over. They would turn from blue to green now, he knew. He heaved a sigh, and choked out a sob. Touching the slack face, he felt the sticky fluid at the temple. He put his fingers to his mouth, and tasted the salt blood.

Suddenly, Conall grabbed a sharp stick and began digging franctically at the soft ground near the spring. Then, when that wasn’t fast enough, he went down on all fours, clawing at the ground, casting the dirt behind him like a dog. The effort made the pains in his limbs come back, but he was past caring. He dug until he reckoned the hole deep enough, and then sat back on his haunches, panting.

He laid the tiny bundle in the hole he’d made, and fetched water from the spring, making the sign of the cross on its forehead, because he didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure, that Maggie had had it baptized. He said a Hail Mary and then filled in the makeshift grave. For want of a marker he placed a small cairn of stones, topping it with a spray of dark pink hedge flowers. He said another prayer, hoping his mother could hear – maybe she had room for another little one where she was.

Afterwards, Conall washed his hands in the spring, and drank deep – the weeping had left him parched.

The waters of the spring were as sweet as ever. But Conall’s heart was bitter as he made his way out of the Loney, the hunger in his belly forgotten for a greater hunger in his heart.

Ryan McCarl

I hadn’t been listening, and Charles looked at me searchingly as he finished his monologue: “And anyway, with the markets this crowded, there’s more cash floating around than there is demand – so we’re looking into alternative investments pretty heavily. Distressed debt, art, that sort of thing. And so here I am. What will you be doing down here?”

“Starting over,” I said. “Goldman hired me this spring, and over the summer I worked and trained in New York, and now I’ll be analyzing Japanese stocks for them. Based out of Tokyo with plenty of travel.” And I explained that I was just getting back into the field after a five-year hiatus.

“You’ve done it all,” he said, “and you are free – I have a wife and three kids, a home in upstate New York. And you, you just up and went.”

Yes, I just up and went. I can take some comfort in that. I am independent, solitary, anonymous, a man-upon-the-earth, a wanderer who answered the call to adventure and rejected the comforts of home. Alone and free against the madness of great cities.

…

I watched the plane window and waited for the appearance of coastline, but we remained shrouded in clouds even as we began our descent into Narita. Narita Kokusai Kuukou, I thought, and tried to shift my thoughts into Japanese. My heart was excited, and I waited in expectant watch. Charles continued his sound sleep in the seat beside me. I remembered how it had been at seventeen, my first time abroad and in Japan: the sun rose, Japan appeared, and I watched the apparition of the foggy coast and the first farms and houses with a girl in my arms – who knew we had twenty minutes until landing and then would never kiss or fool beneath an airplane blanket again, but we didn’t care and were focused on the moment. They don’t make moments like that anymore, not at thirty.

We landed and I walked into the new chapter of my life.

At customs: “Passport, please.” I handed it over and said something, and a raised eyebrow: Japanese OK? OK, I affirmed. He doubled his talking-speed to test me, and I said I was coming to work, here are my papers, staying initially with a friend in Tokyo until I find my own room. Tokyo where? Asagaya. Luggage? Carry-on only.

I moved quickly through the airport, still familiar in recognition if not recall. My eyes darted across the signs and my feet moved, thoughts suspended, and I smiled and bowed slightly to the workers and felt happy to be alive. And after changing money I arrived at the Narita Express, the train to the city center, and had time to buy an umbrella and pretzels before boarding.

As I waited, a conductor’s voice announced: several lines out of Shinjuku Station are closed, there is a typhoon approaching Tokyo. I’ve never seen a typhoon and look around the train-car, half-expecting to see my own excitement, or anything else, on the Japanese faces around me – but no one has turned their eyes from their newspapers.

The train leaves the station and is buffeted by rain. I open my journal and begin to write: This is my life made anew, this is my renaissance. I can go anywhere, do anything, and the cities of the world await me. And first, I’ll see Reiko – Reiko is meeting me at the station. I can’t wait to see her, it has been eight years and still she lives in Asagaya and will again meet me at Shinjuku Station. She is my window to this world, and I am ungrateful and a poor correspondent: she sent letters, and I responded months or years later.

We have to keep living, though the sets and actors change: such has been my attitude as long as I can remember, and it is difficult to keep in touch. Yes, the senior year of high school when she was an exchange student, and all those evenings we spent together speeding around West Michigan with her wearing my sweatshirts – and I sat on the dewy grass and cried when her plane lifted from the runway and slipped into the open sky, and didn’t see her again for four years – and then we had two weeks in Japan, with cigarettes in pubs, and dinners with actors and guitar-playing in parks – but then I was in New York, and no time to write. And then I met Rachel, and old memories tied to women faded and were lost for a time.

The train crossed rivers and the lights of love-motels and convenience stores began to appear in the window, and for a long time I sat and tapped a pen on the paper of my wide-open journal, and rain streaked the city as we burrowed further and further and the buildings began to grow beyond my sight. A red dot moved surely across an electronic screen and indicated our approach.

…

I arrived at Shinjuku Station, and my breath caught as I stepped onto the platform; everywhere the homebound remnants of a Friday night were moving to and from their trains. Lights – that is the image of Tokyo that burns into your mind, the childlike amazement that you never outgrow. The lights never go out in Tokyo. May they be a landing-strip that points my way to a home and happiness, and perhaps love. So many roads, grids of light – Again and again the paths branch, but no road is mine. Not this time, there is reason to believe that this year will be better than the last.

I paced and paced the station and was lost inside it, and was pleased to have to ask directions and loosen my throat; I feared, as always, that over the years my Japanese had packed up and went in protest against my failure to study and keep up with correspondence. I was pointed to a row of payphones, fumbled with the piece of paper, and called – the bright tone three times, and then a voice: Moshi moshi, Hello. And it was back, my speech and my memories. So many memories, inseparable from the language in which I lived them.

“Hey! It has been a long time–”

“A long time, a long time. Too long.”

“I have no idea where I am. Near the south entrance, the sign says – where are you?”

“Stay put, I’ll be right there.”

And in fact she was there, almost the same as always, and dressed in a raindrenched coat she ran forward and hugged me, and warmness flooded over me and I closed my eyes. And then opened them, and found that I was being inconsiderate – there was another there as well, a man. And my momentary heaven went suddenly cold, and unvoiced and unadmitted hopes rose suddenly to the surface and fled. But I blinked and admonished myself, and the vacuum was quickly filled with light and friendship.

We talked and I was led down a long hallway and up an escalator, and tried to take in the noise and the faces as we talked. Some moments are unembraceably large, but they too pass, almost unnoticed.

…

It is August, and some weeks since I started my job. I’ve found a rhythm: the train into the city, a day of work interrupted only by a lunch-hour of reading and writing, and then back to my tiny flat: an entryway with stove and sink, an adjacent closet-sized bathroom, and the two-mat room beyond that tripled as living room, bedroom, and office. Far better this way than last time I lived alone, in Manhattan – all that empty space, the tall ceilings where no heat could reach, the open floors where I paced. Here I need only rotate, pivot on a point, to find the things I need, and the space is full and not empty.

As every evening, I am exhausted and my eyelids are heavy, and I hurriedly drink a bottle of water and tie my running shoes, hoping to catch the final hour of day. I close the door behind me and stretch for a moment on the concrete balcony before bounding down the steps to the courtyard. The landlady was there – we had never met – and she stared at me in evident shock. I saw myself as she must see me: the first non-Japanese to ever set foot in this compound in Asagaya, far from the Irish Pubs of Shinjuku and the tourist marches of Harajuku and the Meiji Shrine, ten minutes’ walk from a minor station on a minor line of the rail system, a part of Tokyo never mentioned in guidebooks, nonexistent to the foreign mind. There I am – lost? An intruder?

I bowed and explained that I lived upstairs and was pleased to meet her, and there would be no trouble and I apologize for the surprise. And while she stood agape I slipped through the gate, and opened my stride quickly as I began the newly-familiar route. Now circling around bicyclers, now huddling against a wall to allow a car to pass along the narrow street. Past the cemetery, with traditional music playing softly from speakers mounted on the streetlamps. It’s comforting, the music, I had said; it’s annoying, Reiko had replied.

To my right the sun was setting. I ran, and ran, and with the passage of time my sense of alienation – the stares of the landlady and so many others, the universal assumption of strangers that we must communicate with grunts and points, began to relax and slip from me, and with it the accumulated stresses of my day in the office. Of late I’ve managed to resist my fears about work, about whether I am doing the right thing and fulfilling my potential, using what gifts I’ve been given. I treat such doubts as unwelcome, puddles to be jumped over. The flicker of a doubt, and I turn away.

And so with my doubts about Rachel: they arise, the could-have-beens, and I close my eyes and hold on to my grain of faith in the future. Freedom, I think; hard work; success. The surest path to happiness is the single-minded pursuit of accomplishment – I repeat that prayer to myself. Anxiety rises in me, cropping up at uncontrollable instances, but I wait for the day’s end and the run that awaits me. When I run, all of this is left behind, and for forty blessed minutes I am a being-in-the-world, entirely present, and my breath maps the heartbeat of eternity.

…

A Saturday morning, and I am walking the streets of Shibuya, taking pictures. I reach an intersection and turn each way, and follow whichever has the most activity. No destination, a traveler and his camera. Two months since I arrived, and still I have a sense of wonder and awe at my surroundings, and at the fact that somehow I among my people am the one who was selected for this life and its rapid changes of scene. I take hundreds of pictures, seeing the beautiful and new everywhere I turn.

With time I find myself returning to a familiar place, the third-floor Starbucks overlooking Shibuya Station. I sit on a barstool by the window, and below the lights of six intersections change at once and from all directions people wash into the open road, moving and scattering before another change and the cars and motorcycles replace them.

I think upon these things with music in my ear and my pen upon the paper, a stack of books advertising my interests before me. On either side are couples and groups: German girls on vacation, Japanese in school-uniforms, Americans consulting a Lonely Planet guide. Lonely planet, indeed. Again the lights change, again a mass of limbs and faces, an instant of emptiness and then the cars.

Reiko has turned out to be far busier than I had hoped – with her family, with her work. It has been two weeks since I saw her, since she and Kentaro had me over for a sashimi dinner. My coworkers remain distant: the Americans are utterly separate from their surroundings and make no effort to adjust, and the Japanese are submerged in their work at work and their home at home, and seem reluctant to admit me to their familiar company. I am part of neither world.

The major disadvantage separating now and the past is the introduction of distance. Before, alone in New York or Chicago or Ann Arbor, on long walks or during long silences I could pick up my phone and call home – my grandparents or parents, brother or sister. Now I must go to an international phone-booth, choose one among a row of pexiglass boxes to sit in, neither home nor in the city. It can’t be done on the move; elsewhere I could be, in a sense, with my family and also a part of the movement around me. Now such calls feel like a retreat, a giving-up in the face of what is difficult.

This is a dangerous line of thought, to be sure, and particularly so when one is in the midst of a major city, an undifferentiated mass of people, when who we are is lost in the noise and anonymity. And soon enough my thoughts, as always in these moods, turn to Rachel, the one who got away, the drug I cannot quit and the idol no creed can save me from worshipping.

It is true, as others have reminded me, that things were never perfect and were in fact deeply flawed, but this is reason and reason fails me. I look upon that time and remember fragments, no bird’s-eye view; fragments, in particular the tightness of embraces, my face in her hair and mouth upon her neck, the jigsaw fit of our hands which seemed cut from the human cloth by God himself. The elevator kisses and the reading-aloud of books, the reunions after time apart. My mind made of her a home on earth, a shelter against the elements. I struggle to remember the failures and the disappointments, to retain a balanced view, but reason fails me and is no guardrail against the abyss of loss.

…

One weekend morning in the fall I went to Kyoto by Shinkansen, the bullet-train. And I tried to focus on the characters of the Soseki novel open before me, tracing their vertical march along the page, but we were passing mountains and rivers. Finally I submitted, put the book away, and opened my journal. Again I was traveling, and the sense of adventure overcame my doubts. Japan in the window – Japan! And so on when I reached Kyoto Station, and the light of the early afternoon was bursting through the curving beams of the ceiling.

The day passed, and I found myself at Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. And there stood I between the temple and the gate, and the sky was reflected in the lily-filled pool beneath the bridge. All was much as I had left it a decade ago, on my last trip to Kyoto. Here I am, one and the same – and with me, my solitude. And the ever-present companion of my solitude: the face of a love lost, a face losing the immediacy of a recent memory and taking on instead the outlines of an idea, an unrealized dream. Enough time has passed that I can no longer recall her scent; I must travel with open sinuses and hope to chance upon it again, if it exists outside of her.

This place is unspeakably beautiful – remember that, focus on it. There is only now, this moment: and yet this moment contains all those that have gone before, and I am the story of my past. Kyoto – the temples, the mountains, the bridges over rivers, the shops and the Kansai dialect – it is beautiful, as was Bergen, as was Pisa. But the space between I and this place is not empty, nor free of troubles. There is no blank space left upon which to scrawl youthful dreams of mobility and cities and women. And there is ever a distance between here and where I wish to be.

…

February 14^th, and the days were at last beginning to lengthen. Soon the day would arrive when I could leave the office and walk beneath the still-alive sun to the station. It has been a long winter: my eyes forced open every morning by an alarm, and then the lying still and seeing the dullness of the street-lamp in the space between the blinds. And knowing I must not be still, I must rise and take my place among the moving millions. At the end of the day, again, it is dark – and though, as before, I spend my lunch hour scouring novels and poems for meaning, looking up regularly to smile at a woman who passes, still the whiteness of the walls substitutes for the day, and when I leave at six night has fallen upon the city. Thus my winter: save for lunch, a life lived under artificial light.

It was an anxious morning, and I struggled to focus and keep my mind in the cells of the spreadsheet. The markets are quiet but my mind is awake and roaring. Again: there sits the fact of aloneness, and the fact of a love that is lost. The fact gapes naked before me, and I clench my mouth and look away, anywhere away. The undertow of office-noise leaves a film of disgust upon my tongue, and with driest eyes I cannot convince my lips to smile. The conversations are terse and I am gone before anyone can ask – to the bathroom, on a striding walk about the trading floor, to the window in the corner overlooking the haze and endless buildings.

Eleven came, and I moved quickly to the elevator. Early, but not inexcusably so. I could take it no more and had to leave – the charts and lines were leaping from the monitors and blurring in my eyes. I requested the ground, and the elevator began to fall and the screen flashed its neon ads. I was sick with myself, and knew in my heart what was coming. I felt what I was to do before I did it, the thought grew in my unconscious, and the sickness of guilt arose with bile in my throat.

Anxiety: more than fear. Fear has an object, something to which it can point and therefore embrace. Fear can be faced with courage. Anxiety is another thing altogether, for it has no object and is something faceless that will never meet your gaze and be stared down. Anxiety is directed toward the non-object, the nothing, the zero that waits between lines of text and threatens to rise and swallow everything. What nothing? The nothing that, perhaps, I am; the might-have-been; the hours passing while I write this, the nothing of failure, the nothing into which our minds spin myths and gods to fill the great gaps between the stars, the space between a man and woman where love may take up residence, and then leave and again be nothing.

I knew what I was to do, and hated myself for it. And I hate myself for it to this day. Vainly the arguments rose in my mind: this is a new life, a life began anew at thirty, a break with the past and the future remade. A ray, a ray. There is no time for these old sadnesses. Life passes, winter passes and soon it will be spring.

Nevertheless, I walked with downcast eyes two blocks to McDonald’s, grabbed a fistful of napkins and a pen, and wrote:

It’s Valentine’s Day, and almost a year since you left. And even longer than a year, considering that love exists only until the moment that one or the other person for a moment ceases to believe, and the bubble pops – or even entertains the notion: I could be alone, I could be with another, the future is not yet written. One day in the aftermath of an argument you looked with fresh eyes upon another, and thought: I could be his, and problems x, y, and z would go away. And then you were lost.

Our belief in each other was absolute. Within weeks we fell in love – do you remember? We agreed to fully give ourselves to each other, to push off from shore and allow the oars to sink beside our boat. There can be no love without a leap of faith. But we are human beings and not God, and time can turn our hearts elsewhere and make us forget the feelings that brought us to where we are.

It is only human to build our houses upon the shifting sand of another’s love. The lesson of Gatsby: we found the rock of our world securely on a fairy’s wing, we attach our eternal dreams to another’s perishable breath, and it cannot be otherwise. God wears no human skin, and the comfort of religion is a cold comfort, an over-the-counter salve upon bursting wounds. God is love and love has gone. The God-shaped hole in my life is a love-shaped hole, and I peer into those depths and see us walking in tandem, hand-in-hand, or standing close and smiling upon a bridge against the river and the city while strangers take our happy picture, and the same picture so many times over four long years.

I am ashamed to be writing this after so much time has passed. But I’ve forgotten nothing and moved no further forward, and even as the linear trail of time charges into the future, my heart will not follow in its blazing wake, and stands stubborn and immobile where we left it a year ago this April.

I do not wish to disturb you – no, that isn’t true. Once, once, you would stay up late and read my writing, and you understood, and it stirred something in you. Writing that does not touch ripples upon the flatness of our comfort is not worth the page it occupies. I am ashamed and made into a beggar tugging upon your coat, but the things in our hearts will manifest themselves whether we wish them to or not, and these are things that must be written, it could be no other way.

Love always.

And I shuddered and closed the folds of the napkin-stack before I had to suffer again to look upon my sickness. And I dumped the tray of food-wrappings into the trash, and the flap flapped and creaked and I walked quickly through the revolving door and spun upon the city, and the coldness of February closed unto my skin. Walking, I affixed with trembling hands a few international stamps upon the envelope and dropped it in a postbox, and moved quickly away. Hot tears came upon my eyes, and I felt the deepest depths of shame.

The sky trembled behind buildings, Tokyo went about its business, and I burned and burned as I entered again the Goldman building and tapped my name-stained ID card against the watchful glass.

…

I check the mailbox, expecting emptiness; but no, a letter from Greg. Greg, a college roommate and now psychologist in Chicago. I had explained in my last letter my fears: that things are going well, that money is rolling in and my accounts are something to write home about for the first time in my life, that the job is satisfactory and I am in demand for my Japanese, but that I remain alone and cannot shake the feeling that my moment has passed, that I have seen the climax of my life and watched it pass.

And when I go off, evenings, into the neon districts of Shinjuku or Shibuya, to no end less innocent than a coffee and books, the temptations of the side-streets claw at me, the crowds blur together into waves and waves that beat upon my shore, I am superfluous and no one would know if I left tomorrow for Seoul or Budapest, and there would be no mail to forward to my new address.

I remain alone: and these thoughts are accompanied by other, yet sadder thoughts. Where is she? I see her name everywhere: Reiko, Ray Charles, reach, ray, lay, latch. In Japan the ls become rs, and the painful reminders are doubled. And her hair, her shape, a movement, but never she herself. I wrote all this in a letter to Greg, and said: it has been over a year, and I am afraid. Will I always carry these regrets? I once believed with all my heart that she and I were literally made for each other, our souls separated by the gods and our search for the other half was the engine of all our wandering and accomplishments. Our meeting could not have been otherwise. A part of the lex eterna, written in the stars. As in Plato’s Symposium: two halves, each aching for the other and unaware that the other walks and breathes across a lake, an ocean, a crowded room or street. And some lucky pairs find each other. But Plato had no word on what happens to those who find each other and then separate again.

I said all this, and this was his reply: First, it is understandable. A year isn’t such a long time. And second, what is happening is that you have not fully metabolized the experience. You experience what happened with Rachel as a tragedy, and there is no redemption at the end of the story. You loved her with all your heart, and she left – and the curtain falls, the end, and the moviegoers wait pissed off and disbelieving while the credits roll and no good comes of it all. Remember when we saw No Country For Old Men in college? We waited for something good to happen, something to make us believe in humanity again – and it never came. All well and good for a movie. But in life you want a happy ending.

…

After all, I am a solitary man. In my earphones, in fact, is a lonely song. I am given to moments of self-pity, as now: looking out the train window at the flashing, wire-laden Tokyo streets, music too loud. I allow my eyes to see the city as a blur, and I am a rock in the middle of the rapids – and as this moment goes, so goes my life, a scream followed by silence, and the doubting of whether one in fact heard anything at all.

The guitars pick none-too-gently at the defenses I’ve struggled to erect around my heart. Loneliness and solitude are no synonyms, but the line between them has always been fine. I look upon the crowded station at Yoyogi: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough.

And just then the doors of the train-car opened, and more kids in their uniforms and salarymen in their suits crowded on. And then: a woman. American, but no tourist – alone and dressed in a suit. With long, brown hair, and brown eyes which she proceeded to turn upon me. And my reverie passed as quickly as it had begun, and I came back to life. Smiled, turned away, and after a moment removed my headphones. There must be that intervening moment between the connection and the opening; it must appear as though each were its own, independent event.

There she stood, beautiful. And I willed my voice to speak, confidence to rise up through my body. And fiercely I thought, and trembled, and then the next station was announced and she turned decisively for the door – and left, wholly unaware of the emptiness behind her. I watched her leave, and looked at my hands, and replaced the headphones.

There was no time, after all, there had been no real window, no opportunity-.

My fingertip moved and chose the saddest song I know, and I could not will it to do otherwise: You belong with me, not swallowed in the sea. You belong with me, not swallowed in the sea.

…

Spring began to arrive, and letters. My articles and poems were being accepted quickly and reliably for the first time in my life – I’d been given a steady stream of creativity in this difficult year, and the things I wrote were thought to be worth reading. And on today’s run the air felt lighter, and I ran faster and longer than I had in weeks. Everyone on the boardwalk was a competitor, a singlet from races past, and I was flying past them, full of life and fire.

And my thoughts turned again to the future, and I knew my mistakes in my heart of hearts.

For too long I have wandered, and my feet are weary. The hills of Michigan rise to the surface of my mind; and the high school track beneath stadium lights, with my sister waving cardboard signs emblazoned proudly with my name; and the first appearances of my words in the hometown paper; and the evenings with my grandfather on the pier at Grand Haven, photographing the ever-new setting of the sun upon the lake; and that old house for sale in Fruitport, nine acres with a barn, shrouded by trees.

Ryan McCarl

In a hurry, always, I stuffed the last piece of the daily in the trash and ran to catch the next train, whenever it may come. I felt the floorboards shake a bit, and crescendo, and finally the train shot across the platform and stopped sharply to pile us on. Clothes stuck heavily to our bodies and we were short of breath. It was the Northern Indiana commuter train, not the train I usually boarded, but it would stop, I assumed, at my station.

I rolled the coming night over in my mind: first, home, stopping to check the free box outside the bookstore. I would shower and then hurry to the laundromat, grab a sandwich, iron my suit and shirts, speed into bed, and still my caffeinated heart long enough to trick myself into sleep, for the next day of work would be an important one and I would need seven hours.

So it was to go, and though never quite satisfactory, this is my life. But we don’t plan on making mistakes, or getting on the wrong train and speeding off in wrong directions. I was, of course, on the wrong train, the conductor informed me: headed fast toward Gary, Michigan City, and South Bend. I pleaded with her to make an emergency stop, and as she explained there was nothing she could do for legal reasons and so forth, the appropriate stop, and my plans, blew by the westward window of the train.

Sometime between eighteen and twenty I had decided, after too many frustrated minutes in traffic and lines, that I would breathe and live also in minutes I do not own; I would somehow squeeze life out of the compressed hours that pass unnoticed as we wait for moments of action.

Waiting itself, I decided, is a skill. Passing time anyone can do, and I am far too proficient at it, and think casually across years in both directions. Time passes well enough on its own without my urging. But waiting – who, in our time, can wait? Financiers finger Blackberries with eager eyes until the morrow’s opening bell; sleepless mothers lie watchful for the children to come home; lonely men walk in shadows a block or two off the main drag, needing appetizers while they wait for love.

So I nodded, swallowed. Scenting embarrassment, the passengers in the seats around me, newspapers opened, counterclocked their iPod wheels to better eavesdrop on the scene. I thanked the conductor for her kindness and asked for advice; get off at 130th, she said, and wait. The northbound should come in an hour and a half.

130th came quickly and I stepped off the train with less resolution than usual, for once uncertain of where in ten minutes I would be, and why. The platform was new, aluminum, efficient; the sound of weary homebound shoes, and I alone (I felt) had no particular place to be, no dinner on the table.

But the station door was unlocked, though six in the evening had passed. And there was a piece of home in the simple café lazily closing inside. I sat at the bar, hearth and altar of the lonely, and ordered a tea. I loosened my tie, and the boneweary woman eyed me with suspicion and said she’d be closing in twenty minutes.

Then I looked at my phone and scrolled through the names. For some, the distance between us could be measured by days and stops on the line, for others years and compass-points – but I knew better than to linger long, and put the phone away.

There was no business especially urgent about any call I might have made, and it was in the area of dinnertime. And anyway, to pace until reminded of some matter that cannot be put off, some call that must be made – that may make the time pass. But it is not waiting. Waiting is a direct, head-on, stubborn standing up to gnawing despairs and longings of all sorts. Waiting is strong, monastic, manly – and it, damn it, was what I would do.

So I waited, writing without direction in my notebook. No events to analyze but the setting of the summer sun, red and heavy behind an industrial haze. Nothing but nonsense to fill the page: quick notes with bullet points, as I prefer when my life has stepped outside its narrative structure.

I waited. Slowly, slowly, the noise in my mind began to quiet and the first hints of satisfaction and rest settled in. And, when I could say so and mean it – after much waiting indeed – I wrote that I was pleased to have taken the wrong train, pleased that no laundry was done and that I would wear these socks again next day, and not a person but I would know.