Berkeley Noir

Eat Your Pheasant, Drink Your Wine by Shanthi Sekaran

Kensington

Henry Wheeler walks into the Inn Kensington looking for all the world like a man who’s just gotten laid. He wears a humid sort of smile and his arms dangle from his shoulders like sausage ropes. With him is a woman: younger, her long dark hair parted in the middle, her mouth set straight and firm. She leads him by the hand like a mother. He bumps into a square table, holds his hand up, and mumbles something, still smiling, still wrapped in the good love or slow sex or whatever has tugged him into this Friday morning. Shaila has spotted him, I can tell. Her chest tenses. Dread and longing course by on opposite tracks as our man Henry scoots into a booth, flips his hair back, squints, grins, and examines the hot sauce before him.

He takes a few seconds to spot us. His smile drops. The woman is talking and he tries to look at her, but his eyes dart back, again and again, to Shaila. At last, he gets up.

“Fuck,” Shaila whispers. “Fuck fuck.” He walks to the bathroom and Shaila gets up and follows.

They speak all at once. They stop. I can feel the pump of Shaila’s heart, the heat rising up her neck. They stand and look at each other, waiting.

“What are you doing here?” she finally asks.

“I need to come clean, Shaila.”

“Henry.”

“I need to.”

“No.”

“I won’t tell anyone you were involved—”

“No. You promised.”

“Cynthia says it’s breaking me. She said I need to get this off my conscience.”

“Cynthia.”

He points weakly to the booth.

Shaila shakes her head, faster and faster.

“Cynthia said if I just go to the police and tell them about the—”

“Cynthia,” she hisses. “Cynthia.”

“You’ll be fine, Shaila—”

“They’ll know, Henry! They’ll know I was there!”

Diners begin to turn to the noise. A manager stomps toward us. That’s when I leap from her pocket and run. They see me. They all see me. A lady screams. Feet everywhere, scraping chairs, mayhem. I escape through the door and scoot behind a telephone poll, my chest pounding.

Shaila finds me. The street is quiet again, but for a man standing in the café doorway, growling and cursing. “What were you doing?” she asks me.

“Creating a diversion.”

“You could have been killed!”

A rat’s heart, on average, beats four hundred times a minute. This sort of excitement is no good for me. My heart isn’t used to such things.

Henry Wheeler came into our lives the night Shaila found some chickens in a supermarket dumpster. On Telegraph Avenue, the surge of feet had calmed for the night. Only the odd clutch of sneakers passed by, all of them talking at once, none bothering to look down, none willing to part with a dollar bill or food still warm in restaurant doggie bags. I was fine. There’s always food for a rat on Telegraph. But from inside her jacket pocket, I could hear Shaila’s belly rumble.

I poked my head out. “Let’s find you something to eat,” I said. She looked down at me, her brown eyes glazed with hunger. The neon lights of the smoke shop lit her skin a pale blue. I tugged at her pocket. She rose on unsteady knees. If I could have carried her myself, I would have. If I could have brought her a feast, I would have. The best I could do was keep her moving.

The supermarket on Shattuck threw out its fresh food at ten p.m., and she’d learned to dive in, sift through the salad-bar detritus, and find the packaged foods. I had only to skim the surface of the trash heap to find a good plump tomato, a heel of stale bread, a few cheese cubes. She sifted and sighed and I nibbled. She gagged and cursed and I swallowed. Finally, she struck gold. “Look at this!” she called.

She held aloft a black plastic container. “Roasted chicken!” She pried open the lid, stood right in the dumpster, and tore at the meat with her nails. She held out a morsel for me, salty and fatty with some kind of red peppery paste rubbed into the skin.

“Look!” Shaila pointed. In the dumpster behind her sat four more packaged chickens.

She returned to Telegraph triumphant, a tower of chickens tucked into her elbow: “Motherfuckers! I bring you chickens!” A few men sat in a tight clutch and passed something around. You’d think they’d have jumped up for the food, but no one budged. It wasn’t food they were looking for.

One man did get up. I hadn’t seen him before. The shop lights gleamed off his hair as he lit a cigarette. He nodded at Shaila, plucked a chicken from her stack, and sank to the curb.

Never have I seen a human eat so fast. One minute the chicken was there, whole and plump and orange brown. The next, she was nothing but rib cage and ankles.

He looked at Shaila and she stared back. “Are you not hungry?” he asked.

“Who are you?” she replied.

He tore off the wishbone and held it out to her. “Henry Wheeler.”

She snatched it. “Why’re you out here?” she asked.

He blinked. “I don’t understand the question.”

The man was well dressed in a thick turtleneck and denim jacket. He had the sort of strong jaw and square chin that humans are known for. I don’t trust a strong jaw. I don’t trust a square chin.

From his belt he unhooked a metallic mug. “You want to know why I’m on the street?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you out here?”

“Stepdad.”

He nodded. “I hear that a lot. Out here.”

“Oh yeah? You talk to a lot of people? Out here?”

He picked at his front teeth.

“Who are you really?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve never seen you before, but you roll up today in your nice jeans and your jacket looking all clean, and you talk like you know what it’s like to be out here, but you don’t look like you know what it’s like. You look like you took a shower this morning.”

“Fucking stepdads,” was all he said. He reached up. She held out the wishbone. They both pulled. Shaila won.

He lit a fresh cigarette and we watched the ash grow until it dropped and scattered in a gray shower. “You sleeping out tonight?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s gonna be a cold one.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

He smiled and leaned back on his elbows. “Yeah.”

Shaila jumped to her feet and nearly sent me flying. She backed away and I could smell her alarm. “It’s making sense now,” she whispered. And yes, all at once, it was. The clothes, the shave, the jaw line. Henry Wheeler stood up.

She took her knife from her back pocket and held it out. “You’re a pimp.” He walked toward her. “Get the fuck away.” She jabbed her knife at the air. He stopped, raised both hands.

“I’m not a pimp,” he said. His hands dropped to his sides. “Do I look like a pimp?”

She kept her knife raised. “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the fuck you’re doing here.”

He raised his arms to the sky again. “I’m a grad student. Okay? I’m a grad student.”

“Fuck you,” she said, and we meant it.

Henry the grad student took us back to his apartment that night. We walked from Telegraph up through campus, its buildings lit from the ground like old monuments. We walked past the big clocktower as it chimed midnight. We got on a bus that took us high up into the hills, to a neighborhood of steeply sloped driveways and houses with fairy-tale turrets. I watched Shaila strip off her clothes and get in the shower. “Oh my god,” she said, letting the hot water flatten her hair to her shoulders in great black sheets. I scooted into an open cabinet and relieved myself. Henry lived in what he called an in-law. A house in which humans keep their elders.

What kept Shaila from running? Back to the group, back to what she knew? I’d like to say it was intuition — I know my own had settled. I didn’t like the man, but he didn’t have the predator in him. Most likely, it was the thought of one more night on Telegraph, waking at every footfall, fingers wrapped around her knife. She might have gone anywhere that night. She might have trusted anyone.

Out of the shower, Shaila stood before the mirror, gazing into it as the steam cleared. Droplets of water poured from her hair down her naked legs. I’m not sure what she was looking for when she slid a finger over her clavicle, traced circles over the round knob of her shoulder. I’d started to fall asleep in the warm womb of that room when we heard a knock on the door.

“Hey.” The grad student. “You all right in there?” A pause. “No drugs. Okay?”

Shaila did not answer. Slowly, she put on her old dirty clothes, covering that hot, clean skin with the filth of Telegraph Avenue.

When she opened the bathroom door again, Henry had gone. On the floor were a pair of soft gray pants and a plaid shirt, neatly folded. Shaila tore her old clothes off for the new. She scooped me up and placed me in her flannel chest pocket. Through its cloth I could feel the shower’s residual warmth, the small mountain of her nipple.

I stuck my head out. Henry had a real kitchen with a microwave and a bowl of apples on the counter. He had a kitchen table overtaken by a computer and stacks of paper. We sat on the sofa and watched him type frantically, as if he’d forgotten Shaila was there. A bus passed. Its headlights flashed through the window.

“Where are we?” she asked. He looked up, dazed. “What part of Berkeley is this?”

“Kensington. North. Way up.” He picked up a metal mug and sipped from it.

“What’s with you and that mug?” she asked.

He looked at it, shrugged. “It’s my travel mug. It’s no-spill. Insulated. It’s extremely expensive.”

Shaila scoffed.

He stood up then, but didn’t move from the table. “You won’t steal anything, will you?”

“If I wanted to steal something, I’d steal it.”

He stood by his computer, processing this.

“I won’t steal anything,” she said. “Asshole.”

He straightened some papers on his desk, tapped them, looked out the window, at this moonless void called Kensington. He was much less sure of himself, now that she was actually in his house.

He disappeared into a back room and came out with a stack of blankets. “The sofa’s yours.”

“Where’s your roommate?”

“I don’t have one.”

She looked at the bay window, the spacious living room, the hardwood floors.

“Rent control,” he said.

She peered out the window. “The main house? Is that rented out too?”

“The owner lives there. Skye.”

She considered this. “I wonder when she bought the place. It’s probably worth about a million now. Do you think she has a mortgage?”

“You ask a lot of questions about real estate.”

She shrugged. “Bay Area kid.”

Shaila made a bed on the sofa and turned to him. “Thank you,” she said. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know. You’re welcome.” He smiled. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Sleep well.” He turned and left.

“Wait!” she called.

“Yeah?”

“I have a knife. Touch me and I’ll kill you.”

“Okay.” His bedroom door clicked shut.

Shaila pulled open her pocket.

“Hey you,” she said.

“Hello.”

“You’d better stay hidden, my friend. Grad student doesn’t know about you.”

“I realize that.”

She stood up and searched the corners, tiptoed into the kitchen, and opened, silently, a cupboard under the sink. “What do you think?” I hopped from her pocket and poked my head into the cupboard. I could hear the scratch and scuttle of rodent life. Mice. I could smell them.

She sighed. “I know. It’s small. I’m sorry.”

“It seems cold,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“Okay. One night. In my pocket. And you’ll get up before sunrise and get into this cupboard before anyone sees you. Okay?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“You can get up that early?”

“Absolutely.”

I didn’t know how tired I was until Shaila lay down, grew still, and I could finally snuggle into the curve of her breast. Fatigue heaved me over its shoulder and I sank down and down, until it seemed I was upside down, eyes shut, the night somersaulting around me.

I first met Shaila at the Lothlorien co-op on the south side of campus. It had been a week since I’d left my home high in the rafters of a church. So far, no one had noticed me. You have to look down if you’re going to see me, and not a lot of people look down. I would have stayed there a good long while, I think, if I hadn’t met Shaila.

That particular afternoon, I had climbed atop the fridge. I hate heights. No. Hate is the wrong word. High places invoke nausea, dizziness, the hot breath of my own demise. But someone had left a cinnamon bun up there. I will do almost anything for a cinnamon bun.

I’d eaten my fill of the pastry, my gut wailing against its seams, when I heard Shaila enter. I glanced down and nearly fainted from the vertigo. I must have made a sound because she looked straight at me. She didn’t scream or whack at me with a broom. She gazed up for a very long time, her eyes squinting, nose twitching high in the air. Then she dragged a chair over, climbed onto it, and lifted me into her palm.

“Hi,” was all she said.

“Hi,” I answered.

“What’re you doing up there?” And I liked that she didn’t call me little buddy or little fella. She spoke to me like she respected me. “Are you a rat or a mouse?”

“I’m a rat.”

She nodded. “Not a bad place for a rat.” She stroked my head with one finger, just between my ears, and I fell relentlessly in love.

Shaila was brown like me but browner, human brown and so much bigger, with long black hair, tied that day into a swirl resembling the crown of a cinnamon bun. She slipped me into the front breast pocket of her jacket, a soft and dark home, redolent of rosemary. Eventually, I would chew a small slit in the fabric, a porthole to the world.

“I’m not supposed to be here either,” she whispered. She opened the fridge and from the blast of cold she grabbed a plastic container. As an afterthought, she leaped up and grabbed for the bun.

“Please don’t jump like that,” I called. “It’s very jarring for me.”

“I got you a little something too, Lothlorien.”

And now you know my name.

It was almost morning when I woke. Out on Telegraph, this was always the safest hour, when the street slept and cars were rare. In an hour or two, storefront grates would rattle open. Trucks would make their deliveries. Street vendors would set up card tables stacked with beaded necklaces and T-shirts.

Outside the window: a leafy vine, a lavender sky. Across the courtyard stood the main house, ivory-walled with a tiled roof, a majestic aloe plant beside its door. The fog had stayed away that morning, and the house bathed in sunlight.

I crawled from Shaila’s pocket to the kitchen. No feet to be seen. No grad student. In the living room, I found a small hole and slipped into it. I could see from there, at least. I would not spend this life in a cupboard.

Soon after, Henry shuffled into the kitchen and brewed some coffee. The smell did not wake Shaila. She’d learned on the street to sleep hard when she could. He poured his coffee into his metallic mug, gazed at Shaila’s sleeping form, and left. She and I would spend that day indoors, watching television and eating toast. The house was heat and light. I would never again feel her so at peace.

Henry came home in the late afternoon. At the sound of his key in the door, Shaila hissed and I ran for my hole. He bounded in, smiling wide, a stack of paper in his arms.

“Hey, honey,” she said flatly. “How was your day?”

He spread his papers over the dining table. “Decent. How was yours?”

They made dinner together, chatting easily, like roommates. I’d never seen Shaila like this: stepping lightly in bare feet, laughing and kicking him gently in the shins. Henry poured her a glass of wine, but stopped before he handed it over. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Old enough,” he said, and poured himself a glass.

They had finished dinner, two heaping plates of pasta with red sauce and meatballs, when Henry asked, “Can I interview you? Would you mind?” He flicked his hair from his eyes and grabbed a pencil and notebook. “I’d love a woman’s perspective.”

Shaila sat down at the kitchen table. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Softly, she spoke of leaving home, of finding her way from a town called Larkspur to her perch on Telegraph Avenue. She talked about the thrill of those first days that stretched as long and warm as a South Berkeley sidewalk — finding herself among people who sought no one’s approval but their own, who could live without the material frippery of the life she’d come from. She spoke of the Telegraph sidewalk and Telegraph sleeping bags, the Telegraph men and the Telegraph feet endlessly tromping by. At a certain point, Henry stopped writing and simply watched her. When a strand of hair fell to her face, he reached out and slid it back behind her ear. She stopped talking. His hand stayed there, cradling the high curve of her neck. Her mouth opened slightly, silently. He kissed her.

They stood and he led her to his bedroom. The house smelled of something new, at once animal and familiar and deeply unsettling. I hopped onto the table, my stomach pumping, my head in a frenzy. I climbed atop a stack of paper and read. A title: “Anarchist Movements Among Northern Californian Homeless Populations.” I hunkered down and relieved myself. A trail of piss, a scatter of pellets. Eat your pheasant, drink your wine. Your days are numbered, bourgeois swine.

What is it to watch someone you love fall in love with someone else? I bore no illusions about Shaila. I knew who I was. I knew who she was. And yet, to watch her watch him. Her hand on his shoulder. To watch her lie, for hours sometimes, in a nest of blankets, her eyes locked on his, those turbulent pools fallen still, her tight stony shoulders grown soft. Run, Lothlorien, I told myself. Leave her here. She’s happy now. She doesn’t need you anymore.

But I couldn’t. I did find a tunnel from the in-law to the back garden, where I could sneak into the main house for bread and cookies and fruit. It was risky, moving out in the open like that, but I had little left to lose.

A few weeks later: a knock at the door. Henry emerged from his room in a kimono. I hadn’t seen Shaila for hours and hours. On the porch stood an old woman, her mop of hair, glasses. She held up a brown paper bag.

“Little fuckers!” she said. “I have a rat. Do you have a rat? I have a rat. I was putting away an old coat yesterday when I opened the door to a closet full of turds. Did you know about this?”

“Yeah. I found some droppings too.” Henry pressed the sleep from his eyes, ruffled his hair, and yawned.

She looked him up and down. “So you know that if you got one rat, you’ve got a colony. That’s what they say. One moves in and the rest follow.” She pointed to the ceiling. “Ever hear their little feet on the roof? Scraping sounds? That’s them. Little toenails.” She thrust the bag at him. “I brought you some poison and a trap.”

Shaila emerged from the bedroom wearing nothing but Henry’s shirt. She stood behind him. The old woman’s eyebrows jumped.

“Skye, this is Shaila. My girlfriend.”

Shaila raised a hand in a shy wave.

“Uh-huh,” Skye muttered. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Get that trap set, hear? PayDay bars. That’s what they say.” The woman left.

“Was that her?” Shaila asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Henry said, pulling a trap out of the bag. “Skye Wasserman. Ex-hippie. Beloved companion to Janis Joplin. Debtless owner of a million-dollar home.” He held the trap up. It was gray, with a thick metal U-bar. He reached into the bag again and pulled out a plastic parcel. “Rat poison,” he said, peering at the package. “Strychnine. Wow. How old is this stuff?”

“I doubt it’s legal,” Shaila said.

“Strychnine could kill a human.”

“Well, only a human dumb enough to eat strychnine.” She grinned. “Darwinism. Right?”

But Henry didn’t respond. He was staring through her, past her, into a flicker of possibility.

After we see Henry at the Inn Kensington, he won’t leave Shaila alone. His name flashes on her phone three, four times a day. Each time it does, I tell her not to answer. And each time, she answers. She picks up where she leaves off. Yelling. Crying. Pleading.

Here’s what Henry and Shaila were fighting about that morning in the diner. Here’s what could bring her world crashing down:

When Skye left, Henry set the trap and placed it in the corner of the living room. He didn’t have a PayDay bar, so he smeared some almond butter on the little tray. If he thought I’d fall for that nonsense, he was sorely mistaken. A rat doesn’t die in a trap unless he wants to.

Shaila ran a hand down Henry’s arm. She scanned the room for me, but I’d hidden myself well. She kissed his shoulder, pressed her face into his chest, and I knew. I was losing her completely.

Skye Wasserman came back the next afternoon. “Any luck with the trap?”

Henry opened the door wide. “Come in!” he said. “No luck yet. It should take a day or two.” He led Skye into the living room.

Shaila was there, wearing real clothes this time. “Can I offer you some tea?” Good Indian girl. She made her way to the kitchen before Skye could answer. “We only have green, I’m afraid,” she called.

“Green’s good,” Skye said, then turned to Henry. “She’s not living here, is she?”

“No, no.” They sat on the sofa. “Just... you know.” He grinned.

“Young love,” Skye said.

Henry’s laugh brought my vertigo back.

“How’s the dissertation coming along?”

Shaila emerged with a steaming mug. She sat next to Henry, wove her fingers through his. The two of them watched Skye Wasserman, millionaire hippie landlord, take her first sip of tea.

Skye slurped the last of her tea and slapped her knees. “Time for this old hag to shove off,” she said. “Leave you young lovers to it.”

“Let me walk you back, Skye,” Henry said. His hands shook as he stood.

I looked at Shaila, whose eyes darted from Henry to Skye, Skye to Henry.

“Well,” Skye said, placing a hand on Henry’s arm, “aren’t you a gentleman. Normally I’d say no, but today...” She held her hand up, turned it from side to side. “I’m not quite myself today.”

“Let’s get you to bed, Skye,” Henry said, his voice silken. “It’s probably something seasonal.”

Thirty minutes later, Henry returned. He stepped through the door, collapsed to his knees, and rolled into a ball.

Quietly, Shaila kneeled beside him. “You did it.”

He nodded into his knees and let out a moan.

“How did you do it?” she asked.

For the first time, I felt for him. He lay there for a long while, Shaila rubbing his back. He didn’t move. Shaila sat beside him with her hands on her knees. Minutes passed, Shaila on all fours now, her head hanging, her impatience flooding the room.

Finally, she reached out and grabbed him by the square chin. “Tell me how you did it, Henry.”

So Henry told her. Skye Wasserman had started fainting, collapsing, by the time they reached her living room. The poison was working, but he wanted to be sure. He said it three times. I just wanted to be sure, Shaila. We needed to be sure. So he took a throw pillow and pressed it to the old lady’s face until she stopped breathing, until her poisoned limbs stopped jerking, until her smothered screams fell silent.

“What do we do now?” Shaila asked. Henry looked up, eyes red and hollow. He wiped his nose with his sleeve.

Reader, they threw her in the bay.

Skye Wasserman had no children, no family. Henry had made sure of this. She’d fully paid off her home. She had no job, no one who would miss her. Hers was the classic tale of the wealthy old spinster, poisoned and smothered by a graduate student, his homeless girlfriend, and her undercover pet rat.

Shaila and Henry moved into the main house a few days later. They didn’t move any of their furniture. Even Henry’s clothes stayed in his closet. “We don’t want to raise suspicions,” he said. “Neighbors notice the strangest things.”

So Henry and Shaila played house. Shaila cooked dinners on a six-burner stove and Henry cleared up, loading the dishwasher, wiping down the granite countertops, sweeping a broom over Spanish tiles. Henry made coffee in the mornings — never tea. In the in-law, the rat trap with its almond butter grew dusty. I could hear mice in the walls still, and now and then I thought of joining them. But, well, me and high places.

I made myself comfortable in the in-law. Shaila got a job at Pegasus Books. “It feels good to be making my own money,” she said to me one day. “I’m doing it, Lothlorien. I can finally afford the Bay Area.” She smiled wide and real, like she believed what she was saying.

For a few months, we lived a good life. I’d spend the days roaming the Kensington hills, thick with succulents, with overhanging oaks and redwoods. I’d nestle into rocks that drank in the day’s warmth. In the evenings, I’d return to the in-law, watching the main house through my window. Some nights Shaila would stop in and see me. Some nights she would not. But soon — humans are such predictable creatures — the fighting began. Shaila’s cries drifted across the yard. Henry’s shouts were hard and cold as iron beams. Often he’d push her out their front door, Shaila reeling backward, catching herself on the patio railing.

When I think back, it’s hard to pinpoint when exactly the changes began. I can’t help but think it started a few weeks after the big move. (This is what Shaila called it, whenever she referred to the terrible death of Skye Wasserman. The big move.) Here was the first sign: I was alone one night in the in-law unit, asleep on the sofa. Through the silence of my midnight kitchen, I heard a scraping. And then a thunderous snap. It echoed through the empty house.

“It’s the trap,” I said aloud, to no one. I ran to the corner of the house and stopped. A screech, unmistakable.

A shift in the moonlight and there she was, a female mouse the color of dryer lint. Her head sat centimeters from the curl of almond butter, her neck nearly flattened beneath the U-bar. I hadn’t thought about the trap in months. The almond butter had fogged over with dust and I couldn’t have imagined another creature finding it. This one did. She was small. Her eyes, solid black, bulged from their sockets. The bar was supposed to flip and kill instantly, Henry had said. That’s what made the trap humane.

The mouse struggled, managed to drag the trap a few inches along the hardwood floor. And then she stopped. With each panting breath, her small body swelled and receded. At last, she sighed. Her eyes rolled up to look into mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

The mouse grew still, released a stream of urine. The yellow liquid trailed to the edge of a floorboard and ran in a rivulet along its seam.

Shaila came to me later that evening, her body shaking even before she saw the mouse. When she did see her, she cried out, picked me up, and held me to her cheek, where I could taste saltwater trails. “Lothlorien,” she whispered.

Henry burst through the door and I scurried into her pocket. “Fuck,” he said, crouching by the trap. “Well. Let’s get rid of it.” He turned to Shaila. “What’s the matter with you?”

From her pocket, I watched him fiddle with the U-bar, curse quietly, then pick up the trap, the mouse’s body drooping off its edge. At the outside garbage can, he threw them both in, trap and body together.

Shaila stayed in the in-law with me that evening. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said.

“Thank you for staying with me.”

She ran a finger between my ears. “I don’t know where he’s gone. He’s gone all the time now. I think he’s seeing someone else.” I rested a paw on her finger. “He can see whoever he wants,” she sighed. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not letting him go.”

I won’t ever understand humans.

A week later, Henry pushed Shaila out their door again. This time, he threw after her an assortment of her belongings — a few shirts she’d managed to buy over the months, a pair of jeans, a phone.

Shaila found me in the in-law. She cried in great racking sobs, on her knees, holding her stomach. She cried until she could barely breathe, and all I could do was watch, my paw on her foot.

Dusk turned to night. “Can we leave now?” I asked.

She picked up her phone and dialed. “Papa,” she said, “come get me? I want to come home.”

It’s been a year since we left Henry’s house. A good year. Shaila’s at Berkeley City College now. She wants to finish in three years and go for an MBA. She’s been back home, living with her parents. There was no stepdad. Only Mummy and Papa, mild-mannered doctors, bewildered and terrified by her absence, ecstatic to have her home. Mummy would quite happily send me to the sewers, but Shaila keeps me safe in a cage in her bedroom, slips me into her pocket whenever she leaves the house. I’ve been auditing her classes on the sly, absorbing what I can of macroeconomics and Tolstoy.

It’s a late Saturday afternoon. The mist has not burned off, but hangs low and heavy over the hills. Shaila and I are on a bus, winding up those old familiar streets. In the in-law, Henry waits.

“Hi!” He’s breathless and bright-eyed when he opens the door. I search behind him for the willowy form of the new woman, but she is nowhere. “We’re alone,” he says.

I can feel the sad heave of Shaila’s chest, the thump of her battered heart. Henry places a hand on her chin, lifts it, and they kiss.

But it’s only a kiss, as they say, and a few minutes later, Henry’s in the kitchen, filling the water kettle. I jump from Shaila’s pocket. “Lothlorien!” she hisses. I find my old hiding spot. In the distance, the kettle rumbles to a boil.

Henry is still determined to talk about the murder, at least with his therapist, and Shaila pleads for his silence. He’s already told his acupuncturist, he says, and Shaila shrieks and shoves him in the chest. With a single hand, he shoves her back and sends her tumbling off the sofa.

Then he gets up, moves to the kitchen, and fills Shaila’s mug with water and a tea bag. He pulls his own Extremely Expensive Travel Mug out of the cupboard, and fills that up as well.

“I plan to head to the police station today,” he says. “If I have to serve time, I’m okay with that. If they trace things back to you, well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for that.”

Shaila’s head sinks into her hands. She sits there, silent. I want to be with her.

Sometimes, an old rat gets a new idea. It seems, initially, like a very good idea, and eventually, like the only possible idea. As the tea steeps and the argument continues, this old rat climbs atop the fridge — the height is staggering, but I close my eyes and smell for what I need. And there it is. Still there, that old bag of poison.

Thank goodness for the precious materialism of the bourgeoisie. I rustle a strychnine pellet from the bag and drop it in his Extremely Expensive Travel Mug. He will die today, this man so adept at throwing away the bodies of women, this man so ready to ruin Shaila’s life.

I watch from my high perch, my nerves writhing. Henry takes the two mugs back to the sofa, and it occurs to me that he just might give Shaila his travel mug. The thought sends me squealing. He looks up, suddenly alert. Shaila pulls at his hand.

“Hey,” she says.

“I thought I heard something.” He takes her hand. “The thing is, Shaila, I’ve learned a lot about accountability. Cynthia — she’s taught me a lot. We’re in therapy together—”

“You’re in therapy? Together? You’ve been together how long?”

“Our relationship has been fast, yes. It’s been very intense. But it feels right.” His eyes shine with certainty as he picks up — I shudder with gratitude — his very own travel mug.

He drinks the tea down in a long, glorious slurp.

“Does she know about me?” Shaila asks.

“She does not.”

She should be relieved but instead she looks hurt.

“But she’ll stay with me if they put me away. She’s promised.” That’s when he peers into the mug. “Holy shit,” he says. He gasps and gags.

Shaila watches him. She doesn’t know.

“You put something in here,” he says. “What did you do?” He bends over and tries to vomit but can’t.

“What are you talking about?”

“You did this!” He lunges at her now, grabs her by the throat. I leap from the fridge, shrieking. Shaila lifts a boot and kicks him in the chest. He falls to the ground.

I run at him. I will tear him apart. He looks down, sees me, and squeals. He leaps onto the couch and scurries behind Shaila, who is holding her throat, gagging for air. “Run,” she croaks. And I do.

I am nowhere now. And everywhere. Isn’t that the rodent’s way?

“Look,” she says, her voice hoarse. I can no longer see her. “Give me your mug. I’ll drink it myself. There’s nothing in there.” I know the sound of Shaila sipping. That’s how well I know her. I hear that sound.

“Shaila,” Henry says. Rats know the rasp of death. We know it in our bones.

I step out of my hiding place and watch Henry, who looks so very sorry now.

“Shaila,” he says again, and collapses to the floor. Shaila gapes at him, picks up the travel mug, and drops it like it’s scalded her.

When she sees me, she knows. “You. What did you do?” Her eyes grow wide.

I must hurry now. I run to the fridge, leap to the top, not even noticing the height, and I push the bag of strychnine to its edge.

She looks at it, looks at me, then holds her throat. “Oh god,” she says. She runs from the house.

“Wait!” I run out after her.

The ambulance finds Shaila rolled into a ball on the sidewalk. She’s managed to stumble half a block before falling to her knees. They load her onto a stretcher. They do not see me. “Lothlorien,” she gasps as they lift her aboard. But I’m too slow. The ambulance doors slam shut, and I have to let her go. It’s for the best, I think. A hospital is no place for a rat.

Eventually, they find Henry, dead on the floor of the in-law. A quiet graduate student, clothes in his closet, a typically bare fridge, an unfinished thesis, a clear suicide. Both houses are empty now. Even the mice are gone. Shaila will know to find me here, and so I wait among my hardwood floors, my Spanish tiles, my granite countertops.

But a rat needs a home. My homing instinct is strong, though I won’t go back to my family. Mine didn’t even bother naming me. I was standard issue Rattus norvegicus until the day I met Shaila. I left home because my family lived high up in the rafters of the church and I, with my vertigo, couldn’t move or think or breathe up there. It’s a wonder I managed to leave at all. It was my sister who led me, eyes closed, mouth clamped around her tail, from our rafter down a drainage pipe and onto safe ground. On the ground, I felt like myself, for maybe the first time. On the ground, I could move, I could run, I could leave.

Why do people leave the homes they know? Sometimes, simply to live.

Shaila is my home now. Without her, I am a refugee. Four hundred beats a minute, and I count every one. In the main house, I find a hole so dark and tight a human wouldn’t know it existed. It is my own penitential cave, in which I wait for her, in which I repeat to myself the only thought possible: She is alive. It was only a sip. Shaila will be back for me soon.

Every Man and Every Woman Is a Star by Nick Mamatas

Ho Chi Minh Park

My stalkers come in two flavors — communists and occultists. The former, despite the millions dead at their feet, are gormless fetishists. The latter, though theurgy is nothing but applied dishonesty, they are the dangerous ones. I know; in my time I was both a revolutionary socialist and a ritual magician. Then, after my mentor was murdered, I had to kill a few people, my own father included, in self-defense. I went to prison. I had some time to think. Some crackpot wrote a true crime book about me, entitled, Love Is the Law: Patricide, Power, and Perversion on Long Island. It was a best seller for a season, and well-creased mass market paperbacks can still be found in Moe’s, Pegasus, and the shadier sort of used bookstores beloved by the creeps who like to follow me around. There used to be some fan websites about me, on Geocities and Angelfire, with black backgrounds and fonts that dripped red. But I got old, moved to California, had a kid, and started a new life. Now only the hard-core remain.

I’ve found that the best defense is a good offense. I teach yoga, in the park. The aging Reds of Berkeley still call it Ho Chi Minh Park, but the occultists, who are middle-class squares and generally out-of-towners as well, know it as Willard. I lead a group through four basic asanas as described in “Liber E vel Exercitiorum.” If you threw a stick in this town and managed to miss a frozen yogurt shop, you’d hit a yoga studio, and one staffed by young lithe blondes with serious ponytails and welcoming smiles. There are only three reasons to come to my class instead — that it’s free, and it’s me, are the exoteric reasons.

One of my students attends faithfully, for the esoteric reason. She sweats, she grinds her teeth, every morning. Tense every muscle and be still. She gets off on that. When I finally asked her for her name — Lindsey — she nearly orgasmed on the spot, her white-girl dreadlocks shivering, thanks to the sheer attention I paid her.

It was just me and her the morning of the Hayward quake. Even the big redwoods in the northeast corner of the park started to sway, and the chain-link fences of the nearby tennis courts sang. Lindsey opened her eyes, let an undisciplined gasp escape. I glared at her. Stay still. A car roared up Hillegass Avenue, swaying more wildly than it needed to; the driver honked the horn as a telephone wire snapped and whipped the asphalt. The lawn chairs we used for our first asana, The God, tipped over as well.

“How long...?” Lindsey asked through gritted teeth. I found myself focusing on my Muladhara chakra, and imagined my coccyx sinking into the earth, a bone drill in black dirt. Lindsey couldn’t hold her posture anymore and fell over. A moment later, the quake subsided. Nothing but the sound of flapping wings, and then the creak and roar of falling branches, of people opening doors and shouting into the streets, and of sirens. The air smelled like ozone and sweat.

“Next position is—” I started to say, but a male-seeming groan stopped me. I didn’t turn my head, but Lindsey could see him.

“That guy was behind a tree...” she said. In Berkeley, in general, it is not at all unusual for some mentally marginal individual to spend all day hanging out in a copse of trees, but I already knew who he was. “We have to help him.”

“Is that our will?” I asked Lindsey. “Or just your will? Or is it his will that you end our session prematurely?”

“I also need to walk it off,” she replied, gingerly picking herself up.

“I do need help!” Heinrich said, a pile on the ground, pinned under a heavy-seeming branch. “I think my leg is broken!”

“A lot of people are going to need help,” I said as I assumed the thunderbolt position, left heel under my ass, arms over the knees. “Why chose the one who’s closest?”

Heinrich was one of Berkeley’s freelance revolutionaries. He was in his late forties, born too late for campus riots and the Free Speech Movement, but right on time for ninety-second punk rock songs about Reagan nuking the world and polyamorous tangles with patchouli-drenched sex-positive sex bunnies and occasionally their mothers. He was microfamous for a series of pamphlets attempting to rehabilitate Bukharin as an anarchist, but every four years he blinked and voted for the Democratic candidate for president. Heinrich was, of course, in love with me.

“Can you walk?” Lindsey asked him. Yoga had made her strong. She lifted the branch off Heinrich’s leg; he grunted hard, slid out from under it, and picked himself up. “I can,” he said. “I can stand anyway.”

“Walk yourself to Alta Bates before the ER fills up,” I said. “Maybe you have internal bleeding, or a concussion.”

“Don’t say that!” he hissed at me. I smiled. He was superstitious, or at least worried about the possibility that what I articulate in words might soon manifest in reality. I don’t believe in making things too easy for my stalkers.

“You’re a little old to be climbing trees, or playing the Peeping Tom,” Lindsey said. She moved away from Heinrich to reclaim her spot on the grass near me. Heinrich limped after her and announced that he was going to join the class, then tried to twist himself into the asana. It’s a difficult posture when one is in the best of health, and he’d clearly banged himself up.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Why... there was an earthquake just a minute ago? Don’t you want to go to your home and check for damage?” Heinrich asked.

“Don’t you?” Lindsey asked.

“He’s homeless,” I said. “Sheltered, probably with a storage unit, but homeless, probably for economic reasons that he recasts as political to his friends when he takes advantage of their showers and electrical outlets.” I pushed myself back into my position, mouth sealed shut, nostrils pulling air into me, then expelling it.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore...” said Heinrich. “But I heard something the other night that I thought you’d want to know.” I didn’t move. One shouldn’t even speak while holding an asana. Heinrich had already shattered Lindsey’s concentration. “It’s about Riley.”

Riley was his sole name, because he considered it more efficient to become world famous and win the Google Awareness Lottery than it was to keep his surname. Riley doesn’t need an introduction. What does need an introduction is why Heinrich would bring him up to me — Riley and my father had gone to college together, and there both of them got involved with magick. Riley became a millionaire, and my father became a drug addict who tried to kill — no, sacrifice — me to the spirit of capitalism. That was in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall crumbled. Now Riley’s a billionaire, and my father’s in the grave I put him in. Do you have one of those vocal-activated Internet of Things Assistants in your home? That’s thanks to Riley. He clearly conceptualized of the service as a type of familiar, but Alexa or some other disembodied voice that does your bidding isn’t your familiar, it is his. You just invited it into your home.

I still didn’t move. Let there be a void, I thought, and let Heinrich fill it with his voice.

“He’s building something in the hills,” he said. He gestured broadly to the west, toward the end of Derby Street and the beginning of the Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve. Another silence, another void.

Lindsey, the good girl, said, “He’s not building anything. He owns a company. Someone else is doing the actual work.” She looked to me for a nod of approval, but I didn’t grant her one.

“People have seen him out there,” Heinrich said.

Finally, I was driven to speak. “Have none of your friends anything better to do than follow around people more notorious than you are.” I stood up out of my stance. “Class is over. Do what thou wilt, comrades.” Then to Heinrich I added, “If you try to follow me, I’ll stab you.”

Heinrich smiled. Stalkers know their prey — he got me.

Home was a 1981 Dodge Sportsman RV I usually kept somewhere close to the park. The plates were fake. I had no license, registration, or insurance. Our toilet had long since given up the ghost, but the old Willard Pool building opens the showers twice a week, and the park itself has public restrooms. The public library — where my kid Pan did his schoolwork online under a false name — and the downtown YMCA supply the rest, so long as we stay healthy and climate change doesn’t bring snow to the Bay Area. We owned so little that there was nothing in the few cabinets to spill out onto the floor.

Like a lot of people around here, I’m off the grid. I’m also offline — no e-mail address, burner phones, no social media, no bank account. No health insurance or food stamps either. I’m just extremely lucky when it comes to, for example, scratch-off lottery tickets, and in attracting yoga students who insist on pressing money and prepaid gift cards into my hands. None of this is political; I’m no lifestyle anarchist or chemtrail-and-powerline kook.

I kept a low profile to stay off Riley’s radar. He was the one stalker I didn’t dare make it easy for.

“Hi, Dawn,” Pan said when I walked in. He was stretched out on the bench behind the table, his nose stuck in a volume of Lovecraft stories. A pimply little tween, with knobby knees and wrists, and everything he touched he smeared with a fine layer of grease. Sure, I love him. For a while there, I even loved his father, a Greek guy who flew me to Europe and hid me on his yiayia’s goat farm after I got out of prison. Pan was born on a kitchen table. We’re both used to cramped quarters.

“Panagiotis, let’s get the map and the pendulum. We’re moving.”

That brought him out of his book. “Where?”

“That’s what the pendulum is for.”

“What about... Will?”

I ignored that and got the full-page highway map of the United States and pendulum myself. I nudged his feet off the bench with my hip and took a seat, then spread the map across the table.

“Will this bucket of bolts even survive the freeways?” Pan asked. “How much gas money do we have? I have three books out from the library that I haven’t finished yet.”

“Berkeley does have an excellent library system,” I said. “Be quiet.”

I swung the pendulum over the map, muttering certain words and trying to clear my mind. Pan’s words — “The truck isn’t prepped for cold weather, or hot weather, or, or, or” — intruded, and interfered with the results. The pendulum settled over Berkeley, and when I tried again, it settled over the same spot, as if there were a magnet nailed to the underside of the table. “I suppose a move away from the Hayward Fault is in order...” Pan started to say, but then he just said, “Oh,” and looked at the dark shadow the pendulum cast upon the map.

We were staying here. I should have sent Pan with a few dollars to the CVS or something while I refocused and tried again, but I was nervous to let him out of my sight. Riley hadn’t attempted to contact me during the years I was in prison, or since my release, though I always expected he might reach out. There’s something about being unfathomably rich, so wealthy that “one-percenter” doesn’t cover it, that makes someone a very confident communicator. Not a week goes by in the Bay Area without some billionaire announcing that he wants to write the name of his app across the surface of the moon with a laser, or fund an endowed art history chair to generate new — isms to invest in, or give his favorite thoroughbred mare surgery sufficient to make her bipedal and thus more fuckable. And all this I heard about from people muttering at the supermarket, or glances at the headlines of discarded newspapers.

I had avoided the Internet since I got out of prison in 2004, to obscure myself from Riley, but he simply snuck up on my blind spot and took over. For a week, all the social conversation turned to Riley, and his project up in Claremont Canyon right above my neighborhood. At the Peace and Freedom meetings at Niebyl-Proctor, his name was a rare curse. Usually I stood in the back, by the door, my arms crossed, silent, and let the social democrats (old, white, eager to run for office) and the Maoists (younger than me, people of color, hoping we would finally just vote to arm ourselves and storm up Telegraph Avenue) argue it out. It being anything from whom to support in Syria — surely our good thoughts would tip the scales in the left direction — to the question of whether shopping at Amazon.com was ethical. It’s not.

Riley confused everyone. His companies had never had a profitable quarter, yet he was one of the ten richest men in the world. He marketed Rcoins, his own cryptocurrency, but human beings weren’t allowed to use them; the artificial intelligences he installed in homes instead traded them among themselves on virtual marketplaces. He was a capitalist who accumulated neither capital nor profits. He had no employees, but instead simply announced some idea or tweeted out some flowcharts, and other companies turned their efforts into realizing his fancies. Whatever Riley was doing, it wasn’t anything Marx had ever predicted would come to pass, not even in his weird and speculative Grundrisse notebooks. And thus, he was the topic of the next meeting.

That night, I was finally driven to speak. Pan, normally as bored as a kid in church at these meetings, whipped his head around and gaped at me. “It’s magic,” I said. Because I’d been silent for years, because I was white, because I have resting rage face, I wasn’t interrupted or scolded. Into the void, I spoke again. “Real magic.” I was tempted to roll up my sleeves and show off the unicursal hexagrams tattooed on my forearms, but I had their attention sufficiently already. “Applied psychology, heavy on symbolism, designed to alter our brain chemistries and social relationships. There’s a specter haunting capitalism, and it’s him. The question remains the same as it’s been since 1903 — what is to be done?”

It takes a lot in Berkeley to be looked upon as some sort of kook, and with this crowd it’s even more of a challenge, but somehow I was managing it. I soldiered on: “We all talk about social systems and how they overdeteremine society, and reality. That’s why nobody here has ever driven up to Seattle and fricked Jeff Bezos.” Someone giggled. “As in Alexander Berkman assassinating Henry Clay Frick,” I explained.

A general murmur of disagreement rose. I was losing them.

I spread my arms and bellowed, “Quiet!” The effect was like a prison guard turning off a television in the common area. A roomful of sullen, burning stares.

“Riley is having something built up in the hills,” I said, calm again. “That’s the rumor anyway.”

“Where did you hear this rumor!” an older woman snapped.

“Scuttlebutt,” I said. “Maybe it’s nothing. But we know we’re all discussing him because supposedly he has his thumb in some local pies.”

“I heard it caused the earthquake the other week,” the woman said. “Whatever he’s doing up there.” Now she was the one who lost the audience. There are earthquakes all the time... We’re due for an even bigger one... came the mutters. No, she might be right, I saw on YouTube...

“I propose comrades who enjoy hiking make a concerted effort to find out what, if anything, might be under construction up there,” I said.

Heinrich, who had been facilitating the meeting, smiled widely enough that I could see his tobacco road teeth from across the room. “Of course you realize, comrade,” he said to me, gleefully, “that generally speaking, anyone who volunteers an idea also volunteers her labor to organize the intervention. Do you enjoy hiking? You’ve been attending our meetings for months, and your child has probably eaten his weight in cookies from the refreshment table during that time, but in truth we know very little about you.” He was just excited to talk down to me, to lord his tiny influence over me.

“Some of you do,” I said. A few men, only men of course, glanced at the floor or became suddenly interested in the paperbacks on the shelf closest to their seats. “But no, I’m from Lawn Guyland,” I amped up my old accent. “I’m not much for hiking. But if there is something in the hills, and if our class enemy is involved, and if we can do something, we should do something. Someone has to do something. Praxis, not just theory.”

“There you have it then,” said Heinrich. “Not much for hiking.” The conversation resumed without me, and Riley was just another abstraction for leftists to tinker with. I waved for Pan and we slid out the door. Someone snorted the word “praxis” as we left.

In the morning, when I awoke, Pan was gone. I went to the park to teach my class and told Lindsey that my son had vanished in the night. She was distraught on my behalf, and peppered me with questions. Had he been bullied at school or seemed worried? What happened last night? When had I last seen him? I made her be silent and put her through the asanas, willing her to focus and tense with a glare and serene quiet.

We attracted a crowd again. Heinrich and several of the hangers-on from the previous night’s meeting. Now they were ready to help. Not the best start, but a start. I created a void, and they filled it. Lindsey broke down and told them what had happened. They decided to ask me for a picture of Pan, and to leaflet the area. If there’s one thing leftists are still good at it, its wheatpasting flyers onto lampposts. I let them think it was their idea, and I let them stew while I performed my four asanas.

The reality is that Crowley had poisoned these asanas. Traditionally, seated yoga is meant to be performed with a certain lightness. The stretches are slow, tantalizing. The practitioner is to be comfortable, to let the muscles settle upon the bones. Crowley practiced maximum tension, absolute silence, the cultivation of pain. And he practiced in the nude, of course, as did his acolytes. Perhaps he just got off on watching men and women grimace and sweat on his command, or maybe his kink was the pain he forced himself to endure.

I was ready for the pain too. It took less than a day for the narrative to unfurl as I’d wanted it to. I was offline, but Pan had an official identity for his online school, and he had a library card. One of the books he’d checked out recently was Love Is the Law, and from there it was easy enough to determine that I was Dawn Seliger, the third most famous criminal from Long Island after Amy Fischer and Ricky Kasso. I told the police everything I knew — that after we had attended a political meeting where I recommended a search of the Berkeley Hills to settle some local rumors, we went to the RV where we sleep. I even let them inside, so they could see two beds made up. The loft bed was for me, the couch for Panagiotis.

“He must have left during the night,” I explained. They didn’t bother to run my plates, because I filled the voids of their minds with my narrative. An excitable boy, lost in the woods. That’s the important thing. Find the boy, save the boy, be good men, be heroes for a change, not just the armed servants of the bourgeois state.

One benefit of an RV was that I was able to evade most news media just by driving to another neighborhood. The police, of course, could track me easily and impound my home, so I drove south, into Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. The OPD and BPD tend to cooperate when their own asses are on the line — protests and riots — but when it’s just some missing kid, or another piece-of-shit mobile home parked under an overpass, Oakland will let Berkeley hang 100 percent of the time.

I moved my class to the little greenway behind the Claremont DMV and practiced alone for one morning and afternoon, squeezing out sweat and anxiety. Then I headed back to Berkeley. All of Telegraph Avenue was flyered, and the storefronts along College Avenue, which were usually far too tony to allow a mere missing child to interfere with trade, featured Pan’s face. It just made sense — an impressionable kid deciding to do what his neglectful mother wanted him to do, so long as it sounded like an adventure.

That night, the moon was new and I walked back into Berkeley, and saw dozens of small lights dotting the dark hills. Real flashlights, lanterns, and of course, given the town, endless numbers of lights from smartphones. They were looking for him, ten thousand twinkling fireflies. No, fireflies are a Long Island thing — there hasn’t been one in Berkeley for forty million years. They were all tiny stars.

Lindsey found me on the third day, and joined class in silence, as she had been trained to. But perhaps I wasn’t so good a yogi after all, because when we stood upon one leg in the third posture, the ibis, she started talking.

“Your forefinger is supposed to be on your lips,” I said. “To remind you.”

“I just feel so bad about your kid, up there, alone. Pan-pan-panna...” she said.

“Panagiotis,” I responded. “But people call him Pan for the obvious reason.”

“What does it mean?”

If I didn’t talk, she would think something was seriously wrong with me, and perhaps even go to the police. I kept my position, and spoke though my finger was pressed to my lips. “Panagiotis means all-sainted. Having to do with Mary, the Mother of God. And Pan, well Pan is the goat god. The lord of wild spaces, cliffs, and, you know, panic. The name suggests companionship.”

“Huh.” Lindsey wobbled on the one leg on which she was standing.

“Pan was the only god who died,” I told her.

Then she was quiet, as she was supposed to be.

“A sailor, passing the island of Paxoi, heard a voice calling out to him, that said, When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.”

She was silent still, and quivering.

“Palodes cannot be found on any map,” I continued. “Probably it has since been consumed by the sea. But the sailor arrived there, and the port city fell to grief. The old gods were dying, a new one was born. It was terrifying, worse than any panic the goat man had stirred up when he yet lived.” Another temblor passed under us, an aftershock from the quake of earlier in the week, but we stayed erect, one foot up, for a long time, and our muscles burned. Without her even knowing it, Lindsey got what she wanted — an example of real magic.

Finally, I had earned Riley’s attention. Sending Pan to search the hills alone, and having him “get lost,” did it. A black Mercedes had parked itself behind my RV, and I do mean parked itself, as it was a self-driving car, with the legally mandated warning stripes and signage across the doors and bumpers. The doors were unlocked, so I slipped inside and waited. I hadn’t really driven more than a few blocks since Long Island. Prison, a few weeks begging for couch space, then a couple years in Greece, then California, staying on the couches or in the beds of comrades with a squalling infant. The windows were tinted, the trip fairly long, and the radio disabled, but the car still the nicest thing I’d been in for a very long time.

We stopped at what I guessed was either a quickly purchased or a quickly built home — it was all windows, and jutted out of the side of the hill on stilts — north of Berkeley, near Tilden Park. The car must have made some lazy spiral through town, or had sketched a magic circle with its route, or perhaps Riley’s techno-familiars weren’t as good as all that after all. He was waiting for me at the end of a long driveway, and greeted me with a smile and a wave, as if I had his dinner order in my lap.

Riley didn’t say hello to me, but instead shared one of his bromides: “There are no political solutions, only technological ones. All the rest is propaganda.”

“Solutions to what?” I asked.

“Come inside,” he said.

Riley was an old man now. I guess my father would have been nearly eighty as well. Riley had managed to stay slim, and held himself with the casually erect posture of a tai chi master. His right arm, which had been struck by a car right after my last conversation with him in 1989, was still withered and bent. Despite the weather, he wore a turtleneck. I’d marked his neck during that same conversation, with a punch from my trusty punk rock — girl spiked ring. In the popular imagination, Riley’s interest in voice-commanded objects and household artificial intelligence had stemmed from his disability, but I knew that wasn’t the case.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator crushed some fruit and poured a pair of drinks, but we had to fetch the glasses ourselves and bring them to the table.

“I found your son,” he said.

“What’s your big project?” I asked.

“Don’t you care about your son?”

“Of course I do.”

“Don’t you care whether he’s alive?” Riley said. It wasn’t really a question. “Did prison harden you, or were you always truly the psychopath that hack author of Love Is the Law made you out to be?”

“Pan’s alive,” I said. “I would know if he wasn’t. Did he find you?”

“Yes...” Riley’s lips tried to twist into a snicker, but he straightened them. “He found the project anyway, and the crew.”

“He’s a good boy,” I said. “He knows every inch of those hiking trails, and isn’t afraid to leave them. He’s half mountain goat, I swear. What are you doing up there?”

“It’s a solution to the Bay Area’s housing crisis,” Riley answered.

I laughed. “What, an earthquake machine atop the Hayward Fault or something? The first house that would collapse would be this one!” I stomped on the floor for emphasis. The place really had been slapped together out of ticky-tacky, like the old song says.

Riley just peered at me. His eyes were... friendly. “Your son is alive, but he’s not well.”

“You hurt him.” That wasn’t a question.

“I wasn’t even there,” Riley said. “He got injured. My contractors found him. He had a certain book with him, and the on-site medic got his blood type, so I got a call. I’m a libertarian. I don’t believe in aggression. No force, no fraud. I would never personally hurt a child.”

“You’re building an earthquake machine, so spare me the rhetoric about who you’d hurt,” I said. “Where is Pan?”

“It’s not an earthquake machine.” Riley’s voice was tinted with sudden impatience. “It’s an earthquake futures machine.”

“You’re going to predict earthquakes, months in advance.”

“In order to make strategic real estate purchases, and investments in publicly held insurance companies, yes,” Riley said. “Once we solve this problem, we can broadcast the real risks of continuing to live in the Bay Area, and that should bring down prices, except for black-swan events — quakes eight and over, which of course will reduce supply and thus raise the prices. But now we’ll be able to predict such events far in advance. Real estate can be a hedge, not a speculative investment.”

I sipped my drink. My throat was suddenly very dry. “That sounds like the sort of technology people would want to seize for the greater good. Nationalize it, make the code open source. We’ll build in the safest places, firm up the buildings and infrastructure in the vulnerable areas, make sure everyone is protected.”

Riley laughed. “You think the government wants such a thing? Think of all the money it would cost them to make the Bay Area, or any place, safe from quakes. The government can’t even handle hurricanes, and those roll up out of the Gulf of Mexico like clockwork. We need a free-market solution.”

“I don’t mean the bourgeois government, Riley, Jesus Christ. Where’s Panagiotis?”

“The car will take you to him, if you want.”

“Why are you doing all this?” I asked. “Why did you bring me here, why are we even having this conversation?”

“I always wanted to thank you for killing your father,” Riley said. His tone was bland. “I’ve wanted to thank you for a long time.” He held out his arms, like he wanted a hug. “Golden Dawn Seliger!”

“Well rehearsed,” I said. “How do I know you’re not going to send the car off a cliff if I get into it, or just have it run over Pan with me in it, to frame me?”

“I don’t believe in—”

“Force or fraud, yeah yeah.”

“What I mean is that there’s no need for me to do any such thing, as I’ve already won. Thanks to you, really. Once your father was out of the way, I was able to truly cultivate an understanding of magick. It made me what I am. Your example made me what I am. Every man and every woman is a star, and you’ve been my guiding light for a long time.”

“Ever since I managed to get away from you.” I looked pointedly at his arm, at his turtleneck.

“Yes, but now there’s no reason to chase you. I’m everywhere. Even if you don’t own a cell phone, everyone you encounter does, and if you talk to them, I hear it. You ever step in front of a security camera, or enter someone’s house, or pass through an automatic door, I’m there with you. I told you, I’ve won. Take the car, collect your son. If you’re smart, you’ll send him to school and he can make something of himself. That’s better than whatever you were planning to make of him.”

“A god,” I said. “Thanks for the juice, Riley.”

“It’s matched to your metabolism. Yoga suits you. You’ve slimmed down. Looks good. Are you the local occult MILF?”

“Don’t neg me, bro,” I said, and he laughed.

In the car, I slid into the driver’s seat. The mechanisms were strong; you weren’t supposed to be able to wrestle the steering wheel away from the AI, or press the pedals against the will of the machine. But I had spent years practicing my asanas, tensing and flexing my muscles, exercising my tendons. It’s isometrics, powered by will. I sank into the seat, lowered my chakra, put my hands on the wheel, and gripped with all my strength.

Driving the car was like trying to navigate the RV with the emergency brake on, but I did it. I could feel where the car wanted to turn, and assert my will. It was a long crawl through winding hills, but at least there was no chance of coincidentally-on-purpose heading off a cliff. Of course, Riley was actively monitoring my route; he knew everything about me, like a proper stalker, except for my thoughts.

I was telling the truth when I said to Riley that I’d know if Pan were dead. My lie was one of omission — I knew Pan was dead. I felt it when I’d told Lindsey the story from Plutarch. I hadn’t even meant to; it had just come out of me. My True Will.

I let the car leave the road and take a recently carved dirt path into the hills. The Mercedes had been modified for rugged terrain, and I let it do most of the work. The car took the long way around, down through Siesta Valley, then back north on a route parallel to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, until I was back in South Berkeley, and Claremont Canyon. In the woods I could see the search parties at it again, those little lights, but they were unnecessary.

The car’s headlamps illuminated Pan’s body. He was laid out on a blue tarp, his flesh white as bone, horse flies and night birds evacuating in the glare. There was a neat hole in the middle of his forehead, an open third eye. The engine idled, the passenger-side door unlocked, and I had to scootch across both seats to step outside.

My poor son.

My poor dead god. A sacrifice I made, of a god, not to a god.

Of course Riley didn’t do it. He just hired someone and gave him the order to shoot whoever came close. Property rights. That it was a child, my child, was just one of those coincidences that any occultist will tell you do not exist. There are no coincidences. And I was there now, to be found by the search parties and their smartphones, the insane and abusive mother who killed her own child. And they’d only be half wrong. There was probably a gun nearby, with my fingerprints lifted from my old arrest records, artfully decorating the grip.

The machine stood next to Pan’s body, like an obelisk. It was a bit like a cell phone tower in appearance, definitely a sensor of some sort, and not an “earthquake machine.”

I, however, was an earthquake machine. And after long practice, I was immune to pain. I kneeled before my son, and sat into the thunderbolt asana. I tensed every muscle in my body, forced my Muladhara chakra down into my coccyx and deep into the hill, deeper than Riley’s futures machine had been sunk, and focused my will, calling out to the restive Hayward Fault.

And O, she answered me.

Still Life, Reviving by Kimn Neilson

Ocean View

I have loved leaving things behind: lovers, cities, jobs. Leaving before the end of things, the nasty part, the annoying part. I just bought a computer, my first. You tap the track pad with two fingers and a little box comes up. You can tap “back” with one finger and it returns to the previous page. Back, back, back, though what I liked to do was skip forward, forward, forward.

But then something lies in wait for you, doesn’t it? Life itself taps back, back, back; time itself wheels around and bites you.

Hired for a weird job, that’s how I met you.

I came into town too broke for a room so I slept behind a building on the campus that first night. Next night I was drinking one long beer at a place called Marvell’s, sitting at the bar reading — it was Giles Goat-Boy — and you spilled my beer and apologized a little too much and bought me another and then two more and at the end of the night I was in your bed in a rooming house down the street and had a particularly unspecific bit of work for the next day.

In the morning you bought me eggs and toast at the Cecil — it just closed only last month — and we drank lattes and I began to feel situated. I relaxed a little. There you go. See? I go back, back, back, and I can trace exactly where it went the wrong way, where it went, as they say, down.

We walked around the corner and got into your beat-up truck with a Six-Pac on the back. I noticed the gun rack sans guns running behind our heads. The truck was old but the interior was clean — no wrappers, old coffee cups, not even dust or dirt. I felt even more keenly how stinky I must be getting — well, that night I’d have money for a laundromat.

The work was at the marina, you said, simple stuff. Shifting boxes, cleaning. Ever work around boats? I’d done a little trawling in Alaska, like everybody, and before that stewarded on a cruise ship, but that was like waiting tables. Besides, I got fired and put off at the next port, hence Alaska, hence the trawler.

You listened and nodded and turned on the radio. We rolled down University Avenue and onto the road leading past boatyards and bait shops, then fancy restaurants at the end of the pier. It was your basic winter morning, nothing spectacular, but even so, the water glittered as the sun rose, the air smelled different, the wind was sharper, all giving me the feeling things were shifting forward, forward, forward...

You told me to stay in the truck while you opened the gate and checked the boat. Coming back a few minutes later you said that the owner’s selling and needs to move his stuff off and clean the boat. That’s it. But really clean — I thought you meant oil the woodwork, polish the chrome, but you brought out disinfectant, rubber gloves, scrubbers.

The hold was jammed with boxes. We began by pulling some out, then you were down in there handing them to me. These weren’t boxes picked up behind the liquor store. Not large, maybe a foot square of super-sturdy cardboard and all about equal weight. When they were all out on deck the boat looked like a sandcastle moving gently with the tide. You went to the truck and brought back a dolly; as I stacked the boxes on the dock you ran them back to the truck. It probably wasn’t two hours gone when we were done.

You handed me a hundred dollars in twenties and told me to start scrubbing — every inch. The boat needed to be pristine for the new owners. You’d be back in a few hours with another hundred but if I finished before you were back just lock up the boat — it was a simple Yale lock on an iron bar — and meet back at the rooming house.

A kiss and you were gone.

I should have been a scholar, that’s what my folks thought. For the only child of two professors, it was obviously the path for me. I did seem to drift into university towns a lot. I understood how they operated, always cheap food joints, cheap beer, places to hang out, places to wash up, plenty of books, bookstores, cafés. I no longer really looked like a student, but I looked exactly like those people who had graduated and never moved on. Why leave when everything that made life easy was all around you?

My life wasn’t exactly easy but it seemed to be the way I needed it to be. My parents died in their sixties, a few years apart. After that, feeling no ties to our hometown, I never went back. I wasn’t happy but I wasn’t particularly unhappy either and I’ll tell you, I think that’s how a lot of people feel and it’s probably enough. I would have been happy/unhappy enough to just keep riding around America but you arranged for me to get nailed down pretty permanently here in good old Berkeley.

I’m a good worker, in a shallow, time-sensitive sort of way. A few days, clear instructions, decent money — no problem. I can do stupid work well for a short period of time. The longest I stayed on a job was also one of the filthiest — digging worms in a bank of a river in Kansas. On yet another college campus, I was sitting on some steps in their main plaza when I saw a young woman carrying a stack of buckets, just a few buckets too high for her to manage. I caught them on the way down and helped her into the biology building with them, after which she asked me if I needed work and how did I feel about mud and bugs?

The pay wasn’t that good but I liked her and she respected me and didn’t pry. We dug worms, she sorted out the ones she needed for her study, and we put the rest back. We did this for a month. Then her funds ran out, we shook hands, and I headed west.

I spent the next few hours scrubbing that boat down and the whole time it nagged at me that I was waiting for you to come back. It would have been fine for you to give me the whole two hundred dollars and say see you in a few days, but here’s what I hate: feeling stuck somewhere while waiting on someone else’s plans. I was going to do the work then leave, as you’d said, whether you showed up or not, and I told myself to let go of worrying about the money, let go of meeting up again with you, and yet, it hovered — the money, you — as I moved from cabin to deck, a little sick from the constant smell of the disinfectant, only a little better on deck, but definitely feeling worse and worse about being trapped into this day on the boat, even though I had right at the beginning, as always, decided not to allow myself to be trapped.

So there I was, in my innocent state, worrying about an illusory entrapment. By then it was close to noon. A late-middle-aged man in tennies and a polo shirt let himself through the dock gate and as he walked by he said hi and asked if that was my boat. I told him I was just cleaning it for the owner and he nodded and kept going, boarding a boat near the end of the dock. I heard him say something — maybe there’d been someone on his boat waiting? — but ten minutes later it was cop cars and sirens coming down that road and I didn’t wait to see but dropped the scrubber, grabbed my coat and pack, and ran. I’d seen a scrabbly park just a little south of the restaurants and I headed there.

I noticed I still had the rubber gloves on. I pulled them off still running and dropped them in a trash can at the back of the last restaurant. Once in the bushes I changed from my sky-blue T-shirt into one that was a washed-out gray, and I put on my sunglasses and a baseball cap. The shore curved a little and I could see cops spilling out of their cars and onto the dock and talking with the man in the polo shirt, who was pointing at the boat I’d been on, and right then the coroner’s van pulled up and I was off, coming finally to a frontage road and then San Pablo Avenue where I caught a bus to downtown Oakland, knowing that somewhere down there was a Greyhound bus station. I had a hundred dollars in my pocket and I knew how to get out of town.

I hadn’t realized how 1984 things were already getting. I mean now, apparently, you can’t go a block without CCTV grabbing a shot of you. Back then it was much spottier, but not spotty enough: dockside, first restaurant, second restaurant, liquor store where I got on the crosstown bus — all had me on their radar. I was sitting in the Greyhound station when they arrested me.

I was left to stew in a decrepit interview room. Boredom and tension fought over me. After a few hours there was a scrambling in the hall outside the door and two big detectives burst in and deposited themselves opposite me. They introduced themselves as Doran and Peake, and Doran, the bigger of the two, started in. You know we have the gloves, right? With perfect prints on the inside, you know? We have all kinds of pictures of you. So you might want to tell us exactly what happened and maybe we can work something out with the DA...

So I told them. I didn’t protect you and it didn’t help me one bit. Something (someone) had blocked off the camera for a couple of hours that morning on the dock, so all they had was me and Polo Shirt, who turned out to be a retired judge. They had witnesses for you and me at the bar, but we didn’t see anyone at your rooming house and you’d paid them in cash up front and left with no forwarding address. They got prints from your room — of dozens of people. It seems they didn’t waste much time and money trying to track those people down and none of the prints matched up with the few they had from the boat. The part of the boat I hadn’t gotten to yet had some brain matter belonging to the body that had worked itself loose from its weights and bobbed up next to the judge’s boat. Their only question was what was my connection to the victim and motive for the crime?

Mine too, about you. And I’ve had fifteen years to think about it. Because I wouldn’t tell them what they wanted, I got fifteen years to life; because I was a model prisoner, I got released at the first parole hearing, with the stipulation that I remain in Alameda County and out of trouble and in touch with my parole officer for the next five years.

So here I am, stuck in Berkeley, though it’s a wide heaven after prison, and all I want to do is go out looking for you. This is my fantasy: I find you and I go to the police and they still have those fingerprints on file and I let them take it from there. Or, I find you and do the thing I just spent fifteen years paying for.

Or I could let it go. In prison I taught myself to do internally what I’d been doing outside: drop it, move on. Forward, forward, forward. I read a lot of books, I kept to myself. I wrote one letter — to the Kansas grad student studying worms — but it turned out that she and the grad student she’d married — another worm specialist — had been killed in a tornado while on a worm expedition. Her mother was kind enough to write me back.

So I keep to myself, I do stupid jobs well, I live in a rented room. I saved enough money to buy a used computer and pay a guy living here to teach me how to use it, and now, my friend, I’m tracking you down.

Shallow and Deep by Jason S. Ridler

Downtown Berkeley

“Worried you were gone, bro.”

We’d circled North Berkeley BART once, like friends who didn’t want to go home. Because this is what the market wants. Not tomes analyzing the realpolitik in Stalin’s Russia. Or the butchery of the Gulag in gold mining. Or anything else from my fields.

“Need fresh shots. Nothing fuzzy. Clear. A hundred. I can make anything work, but a hundred is best. Gives me variety to play with, allows for redundancy. Video good if you can scratch it.”

The homeless bundle shook. Slip-on sandals and black-bottomed white socks, it nestled like a dust bunny on the outer rotunda of the station, desiccated mouth twitching beneath a yellow Warriors shirt. We descended the stairs to a parking lot we didn’t use, Ford bikes with punctured tires stationed to our left.

“Variety is good. But just the face.”

My next class was eight a.m., if Bernie showed.

5Chan snorted, then spat phlegm on the windshield of a red Prius. “The body is useless to the client.”

A gaggle of passengers scurried out of the station with intentional steps and a panoply of uniforms: suits, skirts, bike shorts, designer jeans with custom rips, and everyone’s perfume and cologne long liquidated.

“Meet in two weeks here on Saturday. Old e-mails are dead. Got it?”

I nodded. 5Chan liked me timid, quiet, and listening. Made him feel in control. And it bought me work and information.

5Chan lit up an immaculately rolled joint and took his time dragging in smoke. Hoodie, limited-edition Purple Rain concert shirt before his time by a decade, Chucks, and well-cultivated and shiny beard that smelled of pine. Berkeley trash, but “computers” got him leveled up. He had never offered me a hit.

“Two grand. More coming if you stick. No more vanishing acts. You are my golden egg, Koba. How the fuck do you do it?”

I shrugged, because it was rhetorical.

The smoke flittered out of his mouth as he spoke. “My dad was a grocer. Worked at Andronico’s for years. Said that there was only two things that people always need. Bread and caskets. But he was wrong. Lust, bro. That’s our bread and casket.”

I just wanted the assignment, not a lesson, I had prep. We turned left.

“I saw it coming,” His eyes narrowed, an oracle revealing wisdom to a plebe. “People are tired of fake. Silicon tits and Kardashian ass outside their paygrade. They want to fuck their neighbor, their boss, the UCB slut at Trader Joe’s who thinks they’re a cuck, their mom, their grandma. That’s the escape, Koba. Slap the ex-girlfriend’s face on a porn star, then watch her gangbanged and double-stuffed until she’s sucking come between ten guys’ toes and calling them daddy. That’s the dream. That’s the future, Koba. And we’re the kings in Berkeley. Say, you ever want one for yourself, you let me know.”

I smiled. “Can’t afford our rates.”

He wheezed, holding the joint at his lips. “No doubt. No doubt. Okay, back to work.”

He gave me the target, then went his own way.

Walking down Delaware, I steadied my breathing while the sun flared my skin.

I knew her. But we hadn’t met.

Sonja was a Republican. Former track star who hurt her knee and switched to teaching. She was recently promoted up and into the position of bulldog between teachers and parents. We’d never met face to face, but she’d given a tour around the school’s cubicles once. Busty blonde, high voice, pink heels, with a lime sundress and bubbly affect that assured the parents walking the grounds that the teachers here were first-rate. “We even have PhDs in biology, history, and more. So Ainsley is getting the best.” The mother mentioned her daughter had an intensive cross-country running schedule. “That’s great! Where do you run?”

“My old school, and Aquatic Park.”

“Me too! Maybe we can be run buddies.”

Aquatic Park. Not far from me. Hell. This was almost too easy.

I pressed the crooked gate to the back entrance of my illegal in-law. My monitor shone blue in the dark, casting shadows from book towers onto the furniture of my old life. Love seat. Futon. Books. Mail about debt.

One job. Two grand. Fifty-Seven Hours of Teaching.

Thucydides warned about immediate and long-term causes for landmark events. Empires don’t fall because someone dies. Wars don’t start because an emperor is shot while on tour. The Soviet Union didn’t crumble because Reagan was chosen by God to defeat the Evil Empire.

Beside my futon was my camera bag.

I checked the BP website.

I checked my student report.

An hour after that report, I’d found 5Chan’s emergency e-mail. My message? Can shoot.

Ducks hustled for an upper-class family’s artisanal crumbs from Acme Bread on a patch of exposed pathway that ran beside the lagoon. A chunk of property that was grassy, with a parking lot for early-morning stoners and kayakers. A sax player sat on the only bench, a cut tree stump keeping him shining bright as he ran scales through game-show themes: Wheel of Fortune, The Price Is Right, and Jeopardy! before he trailed off.

I shuffled in beige, exhausted from another useless night on Indeed. I sat beneath the tree, adjusting the lens of my geriatric Canon, and then assumed the position of a bored thirtysomething taking in nature’s splendor because he didn’t get laid the night before. Cars rumbled behind me to find empty spots to smoke up. Behind us all, Amtrak blew its way the hell out of Berkeley. My warm-up was shooting the parade of Aquatic Park:

— One unicycle teen with handlebar mustache.

— One forty-year-old white woman in black with full makeup who pushed a five-hundred-dollar covered stroller holding a Chihuahua who eyed all with the indifference of Molotov.

— One black man and a Latina in red exercise gear, weights tied to their ankles, lapping the old man in the gray tracksuit who was almost as overweight as me.

— Gaggle of stoner chicks in black and too much purple eye shadow and band T-shirts, shambling and laughing and speaking like texts.

— A gray homeless fortysomething in long sleeves who smelled like sun-bleached urine, pulling a trolley of corporate beer cans with craft labels and Coke bottles.

Ten burning minutes later, the bouncing blonde emerged from behind the red cabin that rents three-wheeled bikes to the disabled. Sonja: fit but chubby, unable or unwilling to kill her freshman fifteen. A white-and-blue Stanford shirt and pink trunks. No sunglasses (5Chan would be ecstatic).

I focused. Then I shot her face a hundred times, tracking her, then switched from photo to video.

“You.”

I released the trigger.

Bernie stood above me. Again. Baggy striped sweater. Elbows angular. Brown trousers and terra-cotta clogs. I kept his preferred pronoun in mind.

“Morning.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Relaxing. You?”

“I always walk the park. I never see you.”

I nodded. “Guess I’m like a ghost outside the school.”

Bernie stinkfaced. “You do photography?”

“Sometimes.”

Bernie had three emotions: rage, indifference, and excitement if we were talking about the manga and anime that he liked. Bernie’s eyes tracked Sonja and mooned, countenance starved.

The next move would dictate my future. So I said nothing.

Bernie blinked. “5Chan?”

I exhaled and smiled.

Bernie did not. “No way.”

I shrugged. Sonja had already run the exposed patch and into the thicket of shadows made by Aquatic Park’s winding corridor of trees.

“You can’t tell.”

I put my camera down. Still recording.

“You can’t say anything. I’ll tell them you sent them to me.”

Bernie was smart but scared and talking dumb. No one made him spend two grand of his parents’ cash for pictures of teachers he wanted to fuck.

I had him. Better than a black eye he refused to give me. I stood. Bernie backed up. Leaves cut shallows of light across his sweating face. “I’m sorry you won’t be in my class anymore, Bernie. I was looking forward to your paper on the Pink Triangles as victims of the Holocaust.”

“Huh?”

“We made good progress.” I took a step back. “Hope you can find a teacher who understands you and your interests, Bernie.”

Tiny fists shook so hard I expected them to leak red and white.

“I think that’s what I do best. Understand students. Help them get what they want and I get paid for it.”

I tapped the camera, next to the red light.

Bernie recoiled, then stopped. “I don’t get it.”

I hit pause. “I’d love to be a photographer full-time. I’m really good. Especially faces.” I sighed. “But not enough money in it, so I have to keep teaching. Wish I had more clients. Until then I may have to keep teaching. Including you.”

Bernie’s face scrunched.

“Take care, Bernie. Enjoy what you see in the park.”

“Dude, I told you. I fucking told you.” Ashby BART was a concrete bunker that could have probably taken a non-nuke ICBM hit. 5Chan and I walked the perimeter, him in the lead, puffing vape in my face. “We’re blowing up. I got so many orders I may need to hire more shooters.”

I shrugged. “Might increase the risk.”

“Shit. You’re right. Dude, we are going to clear close to fifty K this quarter if you can do what you do.”

I smiled.

“My work is sick and getting sicker. This last one was like sticking your weird lesbian aunt into a slasher flick and vine. I almost kept a copy. Almost.”

I nodded.

“Damn, bro. Say something! You’re making enough to have one of your own. Hell, I’m feeling magnanimous. I’ll do a freebie. Just name it.”

Never saw any of the finished work. What 5Chan did with the carousel of other people’s fantasies. Bank teller. Bus driver. Clerks in designer women’s dress shops. Lots of waitresses, bartenders, and other service personnel. Nurse. Hygenist. Teachers. So many teachers. Weekends in Walnut Creek, Concord, and San Leandro at gyms, outside yoga classes, and in downtown Berkeley near the theaters. And that awful parking lot at Trader Joe’s.

“Really?”

5Chan held in his vape stream, then let it out his nose. “Name it.”

“The one you made for the client who wanted Sonja Tempest.”

He ssssss’d. “Can’t do it, bro. That’s the 5Chan guarantee: one-of-a-kind work for one-of-a-kind clients.”

“You said name it.” I shrugged.

He huffed a laugh. “Okay, okay. Just this once. Because we are on the cusp of a renaissance. But don’t judge, okay? We’re all entitled to our fucked-up shit.”

I pushed the USB inside the port. The screen went black before Microsoft Silverlight read the file and readied it. No credits, just a fade.

There was Sonja. Sorta.

Alone on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, arms braced on the black mattress. Dirty-blond now. The outfit was official. Pencil skirt and caramel stockings. Black heels and purple blouse. But fuck if that wasn’t Sonja’s face.

“Hey there,” she said in a voice twenty years and packs of Luckys older. “I know that right now, things are hard.” She unbuttoned her blouse. “And it seems like there’s no escape. And you’re so alone.” My gut sank. “You’re different. So different there’s no one you can talk to.” Sonja caressed the space between DD breasts held back by a frayed black bra. “But there is someone who likes you. Who thinks about you all the time.” Sonja bit her lip. “So I want you to watch this when you feel like no one notices you. No one cares. No one sees.” Sonja pulled her legs open. Her cock was red and throbbing. “But I do. You make me want to touch myself. You make me want you. You make me do this... I know this is what you want, and I can’t help it. You make me do it! I don’t... have... a choice!”

Boy Toy by Jim Nisbet

Yacht Harbor

Captain Ron Tagus was pairing a whiskey with a weather check when his phone rang. He glanced at its display: 2:35 a.m. Blocked. He finished the pour, turned down the VHF, and took the call. “What’s up, boss?”

“We’re going out.”

“Sure.” Captain Ron glanced over his shoulder at a calendar tacked to the bulkhead behind him. “What day?” He set down the bottle and drew the flat stub of a carpenter’s pencil out of the folded brim of his watch cap.

“Tonight.”

He moved the tip of the pencil to a square labeled Monday. “What time?”

“What time is it now?”

“Two thirty-six.”

“Let’s shoot for three fifteen.”

The faceted lead of the knife-sharpened pencil hovered above the empty square. “That’s not tonight. That’s this morning.”

“Your circadian hair-splitting is of no interest to me at the moment.” That was the boss’s carefree vocabulary all right, but the tone was off. Brittle, like.

Ron turned away from the calendar. “Regan—”

“Under sail,” the boss added.

Captain Ron glanced at the darkened porthole that topped the whiskey bottle like the dot on a letter i. “There will be a little weather.”

“All the better.”

Pause. Ron asked her where she was.

“On the bridge.”

“How fast are you going?”

“A hundred and three.”

He believed her. “Hey.”

“Hey what?”

“You okay?”

“Just peachy.” She hung up.

Before reverting to its matrix of icons, the display informed him that the call from Blocked had lasted fifty-three seconds. Captain Ron dropped the phone into a gimbaled cup holder and chased it with the pencil. On the bulkhead behind the settee on the other side of the chart table hung a handsome analog barometer, an antique with a six-inch bezel of tarnished brass. Its arrow pointed almost straight up, and Captain Ron could easily discern its reading of 29.3 inches of mercury. He slid off the settee to administer the glass two taps of a fingernail, and the needle dropped a single mensuration, to 29.2. It had been falling all day, creeping counterclockwise over the lovely italic script of the word Change inked onto the card covering the instrument’s face, leaving the telltale behind at 30.1. For a couple of days, Stella, the common name around the waterfront for the female version of NOAa’s weather-reading robot, and Stanley, her male counterpart, had been predicting a blow, with winds hooting into the thirties bringing one to two inches of rain. A typical winter storm. The cube of ice capsized in the dram of whiskey. A gust tugged at the trucks. A standing wave rippled through the lengths of the paired staysail halyards, taut along the mizzen, so that they clattered up and down the mast like a little girl running from one end to the other of a hardwood floor in her mother’s shoes. The elevating pitch of crescendoing whistles and whirring shrieks, peculiar to a couple of acres of masts and rigging as a rising wind combs through them, virtually encouraged windward vessels to crush their fenders between hull and dock, and the lines of leeward vessels to stretch their snubbers, so that the otherwise deserted marina was phantomic with sound. We won’t even take the cover off the main, thought Ron, as he took up the glass of whiskey. Boy Toy could certainly be sailed under a reefed mainsail; but as she went short sail, being a ketch, she handled much better under a foresail with mizzen and no main at all, a suite commonly known as jib and jigger. We’ll motor out of the harbor, of course, a series of tight zigzags, and once out we’ll stay out. After the low pressure has made its way down the coast we’ll come home, and not until. It’ll remain a little rough in front of the breakwater, shoal as it is there, but we’ll be coming back by daylight. He glanced at a light-blue line that undulated across the calendar week — by daylight and on the flood. Altogether, the makings of an excellent excursion. He downed the whiskey at a go, tossed the ice cube into the sink, parked the empty glass next to it, and set about stowing anything that wasn’t nailed down.

If it takes time to rig a sloop, with its single mast, it takes approximately twice as long to rig a ketch, with its two. Tonight the timing would be about the same as the latter because, despite leaving the main furled, he wanted to switch out the jib. After little debate he went with the No. 4, which was 80 percent of the foretriangle, instead of the spitfire, at 35 percent the smallest sail aboard. A spitfire would be flown only in the most extreme conditions, to keep headway on the vessel sufficient to maintain steerage, a situation in which, so long as Captain Ron had been in charge, Boy Toy had never found herself. Ron rigged the mizzen first, a simple matter of removing the canvas cover and shackling the halyard to the head of the sail. Dropping the rolled cover down the companionway as he moved to the bow, he unrove the sheets from the clew of the No. 2 jib, moved the sheet leads forward to a mark on each genoa track, and unbent the 125. Despite the rising wind and because of a big motor cruiser called Pay Dirt, three stories high and seventy feet long, to windward, whose bulk blanketed the dock between her majesty and Boy Toy, he managed to fold the 125 into its bag without spending the rest of the night keeping both on the dock and out of the drink. He was reboarding with the sail bag when a chirp of tires alerted him to a car, and he looked up in time to see a pair of headlights swivel off Spinnaker Way into the parking lot. This would be a Jaguar roadster, green as a pool table, with two leather seats, many horsepower, and, inevitably, its top down. The roadster’s brakes locked up and it skidded to a stop in its reserved parking place. Bits of gravel tumbled down the riprap to the water, just in front of the Jaguar’s front bumper. A little hasty.

The sky had darkened considerably, leaving no stars visible, and the north wind that had chauffeured the storm down the coast now backed southwest. At perhaps twenty knots the wind made quite a racket as it foraged through the huddled shipping, on the prowl for the unbattened, the unstayed, the carelessly lashed. Even as Ron made this observation, an improperly secured roller furler aboard Cohiba, a sixty-five-foot sloop with an eighty-foot mast docked on the other side of the marina, unspooled the better part of its charge in less time than it takes to tell it, leaving a thousand square feet of high-tech fabric thundering to leeward, sheets aflail.

That’s an easy ten or twelve grand worth of trouble, thought Ron. The spreaders will tear that sail to shreds if somebody doesn’t soon get it under control; dangerous, too, even in broad daylight. It’s hard to comprehend how much power a big sail like that has until you get launched off a boat by one. Meanwhile, back on Boy Toy, there would be no such thing as raising the No. 4 dockside in order to double check the positioning of the sheet leads. Not in this wind. Captain Ron backed down the companionway ladder, dragging the sail bag after him. He gathered up the mizzen cover in passing, and as he backed along the cabin sole with his arms full of textile, he caught a glimpse, through the chart table porthole, of a pair of open-toed stiletto heels, red with a pedicure to match, and heard them overhead as they boarded the boat. When Captain Ron came out of the forward locker bearing the No. 4, Regan Ellis was standing at the chart table, half turned away from him, downing a shot of whiskey, after which she promptly poured another. The neck of the whiskey bottle made a little tintinnabulation against the rim of the glass, for her hands were trembling. Feeling the skipper’s presence, however, Regan pulled herself together. But she didn’t greet him, nor did she meet his eye. Okay, thought Captain Ron, we’ve had a rough night at the office. I’ll just go about my business. To get himself and the sail through the narrowest point in the saloon, he backed around her, turning as he went, so that he and the sail bag swiveled from facing forward to facing starboard to facing aft.

Despite his determination to manage otherwise, their eyes met, and Captain Ron could draw only one conclusion: tonight, a woman he knew for her remarkable self-possession was a mess. “What’s up?”

No answer.

“You seem...” What’s the word? Upset? Pissed off? Disconcerted?

Regan refocused a thousand-yard stare onto Ron’s face, mere inches in front of hers. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her eyes, which were of a green that the roadster could only hope to rival, liquified. She clutched the glass to her sternum. She shook her head.

Captain Ron dropped the sail bag and embraced her. He didn’t know what else to do. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke. The glass smelled of whiskey. A shudder passed through her. Captain Ron realized that, beneath the knee-length faux-ermine coat, his boss might not have any clothes on.

After a full minute she pulled back far enough to place the empty glass against his own sternum, but not so far as to break the embrace. She watched her fingernail, lacquered to match the shoes, trace the rim of the glass. “I’m not going to cry,” she told the glass.

“If you can’t cry on your own boat,” replied Captain Ron, “where can you cry?”

She pursed her lips at the evident truth of this, but made no reply. A gust thrummed the stays. Boy Toy rolled to the limit of her snubbers and rebounded.

Captain Ron raised his eyes toward the overhead. “If this keeps up we’ll be sailing right here at the dock. We won’t have to go—”

“We’re going out,” she interrupted, still addressing the whiskey glass. “Are you ready?”

Captain Ron nodded toward the sail bag, on the sole abaft him. “Need to bend on the small jib. Then we’ll see if we can get out of here without holing somebody’s million-dollar yacht.”

“I’ve got insurance,” she whispered. And added, “The bastards.” Regan turned out of Ron’s arms and finished the drink. She placed the empty glass in the galley sink, and at last she looked at him in the eye. “I’ll change clothes, and we’ll be off.”

That is one good-looking woman, Captain Ron reflected, not for the first time, who pays me to take her sailing.

The hint of a smile crept over her lips. “That’s right.”

“Which part?”

She smiled only a little more.

“All of them.”

“Dress for weather.” Ron hefted the sail bag and pushed it ahead of him, out the companionway.

The wind brought with it the unmistakable smell of rain as it raked through the harbor in search of mischief, which latter, aboard Boy Toy, amounted to having carried over the leeward rail the working or forward ends of both jib sheets, left unattended on deck, along with what standing length could follow until the stopper knots halted the chicanery at the after-cars, just forward of the cockpit, which is why they’re called stopper knots. No big deal, although, as Ron soon realized, the ebb, falling strongly under the wind, had carried the lines beneath the boat, port to starboard. He had to walk the cordage forward, then aft and back again, hauling all the while, before he could tease the lines free of some object or other, beneath the rippling opaque brine, and drag them back aboard in a braided tangle, itself remarkable in that a braid is usually accomplished with three or more strands, proving yet again the adage, not confined to matters maritime, that if something can go wrong, it will. Hanging onto the cloth of the No. 4 while he bent its luff to the forestay presented another small challenge. A heavy weather sail is made of stouter stuff, and is respectively stiff, but that doesn’t mean it won’t blow overboard in a heartbeat of inattention. He used one of the sopping sheets to belay the bulk of the jib to the port bow cleat while he sorted clew from head and tack in the dark, then bent on everything in its proper order, the tack to the foot of the forestay, the head to the halyard’s venerable bronze pelican shackle, each with a sennit he’d rove himself, and in between clapped the piston hanks to the forestay, throats port to starboard, in their proper order.

The sail’s empty bag he kept aboard by kneeling on it. After a quick trip aft to drop the sail bag down the companionway and retrieve forty feet of half-inch line, back forward he rove a chain knot about jib and forestay, belaying the line to the starboard bow cleat, so the sail wouldn’t blow overboard on the way out of the harbor, yet at the proper moment he could raise it out of the slipknots of the chain with a reasonable amount of control. And now, as he deployed a variation on the bowline called a sylvain knot to reave the working ends of both sheets to the clew, an all-too-familiar sound rent the air, and before Captain Ron could so much as bring it to bear, the tip of an upper spreader had speared the big jib aboard Cohiba and the sail simultaneously ripped up to its tack and straight down to its boltrope, midway along its foot, opening as it were a vertical geologic fissure with a sound that most closely resembled that of eighty feet of one-hundred-dollar bills glued nose-to-tail being ripped down the middle one end to the other, only louder. The commotion of whipping sheets and streaming Kevlar gave Cohiba the appearance of flying to windward, a revenant ship. Maybe by the time we get back, Captain Ron reflected, observing Nature’s profligate spree, maybe they’ll have that mess under control.

Regan came topside in full foul-weather regalia — bibbed Gore-Tex overalls, cuffs velcroed over sea boots, hooded jacket with gasketed sleeves, watch cap, fingerless gloves, a personal flotation device, or pfd, that would inflate at the tug of a lanyard or upon contact with seawater, with a built-in harness, a tether — which reminded Captain Ron that he’d be well-advised to jump below and don similar gear. Engine started, they performed practiced maneuvers to get underway, Regan handling dock lines and fenders with Captain Ron on helm and throttle, for it is not at all uncommon to encounter a capful of wind in this or any other marina on the San Francisco Bay. Blanketed by the considerable mass of Pay Dirt, they poked Boy Toy’s bow into the fairway, got her headed up into the wind, and powered out. The water was very shoal at the entrance, and the chop was considerable, but, decisive on the throttle, they made the two quick turns, one to port, the next to starboard, and cleared the spuming breakwater without incident, leaving the structure’s “continuous quick” flashing green light to starboard. The shriek of spars and rigging and the flogging of the ruined jib quickly faded, replaced by the salubrious cough of the diesel, wind in their own rigging, whitecaps slapping and thumping the windward topsides.

After she’d stowed the three fenders, Regan took a seat on the starboard locker, opposite the skipper, just as Boy Toy lifted her bow and set it down with a crash. A gout of solid water engulfed the foredeck and streamed aft, port and starboard of house and cockpit, until it sluiced over the after-combing or drained away through the scuppers. Regan closed the companionway hatch and tore free the Velcro collar that covered most of her face. “I feel better already.”

“I can’t hear you!” Ron shouted above the din.

“I feel better already!” she shouted back.

They motored west, quartering the weather in order to get some sea room between themselves and the Berkeley Pier, the ruin of which extends west-southwest almost three miles into the bay, coming ashore not three hundred yards south of the marina entrance. With the breeze on port they’d be fine; still, it was dark out there, and rough, and along the entire length of the pier there’s but a single light, at its far end, flashing red every four seconds.

After ten minutes, Ron gave the helm to Regan. “Keep her nose into the wind and enough rpms to keep steerage on her. Let the mizzen luff, so she won’t start sailing before we’re ready.”

Regan steered the bow into the wind, the gooseneck over her head rattling as Ron untied and hoisted the sail, its leach clattering. He made fast the halyard, hardened downhaul and outhaul, dropped the sail ties into the starboard locker, and scuttled forward. At the bow, though it was wet work, everything went as planned. Leaving the raised No. 4 with the breeze evenly streaming both sides, Captain Ron collected the forty-foot line and regained the cockpit.

“Okay,” he yelled, coiling the length of rope, “let’s go sailing!”

One foot on the wheel, Regan hardened the mizzen sheet. Ron took three turns around the starboard winch and hardened the jib sheet. Regan let Boy Toy fall off until the boat abruptly heeled as both sails took the wind and fell silent.

“Okay,” pronounced Captain Ron, “kill the iron wind.”

Regan put the drive in neutral, pulled the choke, and the diesel died with a plaintive tweet. She turned off the key and a silence arose that consisted entirely of the noises made by a wooden boat under sail. Water purled along Boy Toy’s hull, the odd gout lifted over the port bow, spray descended upon the foul-weather gear worn by the occupants of the cockpit. Below deck, a chimney in a gimbaled lamp tilted to touch its brass bail, the whiskey glass inched across the stainless-steel basin to the low side of the galley sink, a screwdriver appeared, as if out of nowhere, to roll around on the cabin sole.

On deck, the working sheet creaked on the winch drum as Captain Ron eased it a bit. “Ease the mizzen, please.”

Regan made the correction and the starboard rail came up out of the teeming brine.

Satisfied with the state of things, sheets made fast, Captain Ron joined Regan on the port side, their backs to the wind. “Where we going?” he asked, bracing both feet against the mizzen.

“I’m just glad to be going,” Regan replied. “I’ll leave the details to you.”

Ron considered this. “There’s four knots of ebb, but with a breeze like this we can go just about anywhere.”

“Your call,” she reiterated.

“The southwesterly makes for refreshing points of sail,” Ron observed, which is true. Prevailing winds on San Francisco Bay blow out of the northwest. “We’ve got another hour of ebb. Let’s reach over to Angel Island, tack, and have another reach behind Alcatraz. Before we get to San Francisco we’ll tack again and have a throughly entertaining beat west. Close aboard Fisherman’s Wharf or Aquatic Park we’ll throw in a northwesterly bias and have ourselves a lovely beam reach toward some point between the middle of the bridge and Point Cavallo.” With a glance at the compass he faced the wind, turning his head until the breeze blew evenly over the tips of his ears. “Maybe even a broad reach.”

“Either way, it sounds wet,” Regan pointed out.

“Wet on deck for sure, salt and fresh water both. By the time we close the bridge the tide will have turned and it’ll be blowing like stink and raining too. We’ll get as far west and north as we can before we fall off, and then we’ll be running dead downwind right up Raccoon Strait. A sleigh ride. If we play our cards right we won’t have to touch a string. A little work on the helm, though. With just the two sails we should make six or seven knots over the bottom. If we have to jibe in thirty knots of wind it’ll be nothing but fun, if nobody gets killed, and by the time it’s over you won’t even remember who you are anymore, let alone why you lost your mind and bought a boat.”

Regan almost smiled. “I can’t wait.”

“At the far end of Raccoon Strait we’ll leave Buff Point to port and have a leisurely half-hour cruise in the lee of Tiburon Peninsula, till we drop the hook in Paradise Cove, which will be protected in this weather. We’ll have a drink, eat some breakfast, and take turns napping and standing watch. Dawn’s at six o’clock, sunrise is an hour later, though today we may not see the actual entity. We’ll still have a bit of the flood midmorning and plenty of wind to go home on. If the entrance to the harbor is all cut up, we can go sailing again till things settle down. Altogether we’ll have more fun tonight than most people have in a lifetime. What do you think?”

“Let’s go.”

Regan drove until, not half an hour and three nautical miles later, about a mile east of Angel Island, they tacked, and Captain Ron took the helm. Close-hauled on starboard with the port rail under, they bucked their way south-southeast, to the leeward of Point Blunt and Alcatraz, heading straight for the lights of San Francisco with the waning ebb nudging them westward. Wind over tide is what the sailors call it, wind going one way and tide the other; it can make for wet sailing, which some people think of as fun, delivered in a small enough dose.

There was no shipping, large or small, there wasn’t a light on the bay that wasn’t stationary — the light on Alcatraz, for example. They had the bay to themselves, a stout ship underfoot, and all the time in the world, early on a stormy Monday morning.

“It really is hard to credit,” Regan marveled as they closed on the city. “Six million people in the Bay Area, and only two of them are on the water. What’s the world coming to?”

“No good end,” muttered Captain Ron. He fanned one hand and passed it over the view, east to west, from the lights of the Oakland container port, along the illuminated span of the Bay Bridge, to Treasure Island, the ferry building, two or three of the tallest buildings on the West Coast, Coit Tower, Fisherman’s Wharf, Fort Mason, the dark stretch of Crissy Field, Fort Point, all the way to the yellow nebulae of the sulphur lights that flank the six lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge, four miles west. “Although,” he added, “from this perspective you’d like to believe that some good might come of it after all.”

After another half hour of steady sailing Ron said, “Ready about?”

Regan took up the lazy sheet. “Ready.”

“Helm’s alee.”

And as they tacked, the rain arrived with great force, obliterating much of the view. By means of short, close-hauled tacks, they worked their way west along the city front, visibility limited but reasonable. The tide donated about fifteen minutes of slack to their progress, but they were taking both wind and rain on the nose.

About halfway between Aquatic Park and Fort Mason they tacked into a long beam reach, bearing midway between the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge and the inland blur of Sausalito.

Now they had rain coming aboard in sheets. Both sailors sat on the port locker, their backs to the weather.

“I forgot to figure this in!” Ron yelled above the racket, watching a continuous cataract of fresh water, captured by the spread of the mizzen, plummet from the clew onto his knees, and thence into the cockpit.

“You’re fired!” Regan yelled back.

“It looks like Bridal Veil Falls!”

“You’re rehired!”

A roller came along to lift Boy Toy, then shrug her off, as she fell into the trough behind, deep enough to lose the wind and appreciably slacken the sails.

“That might have been the biggest swell I’ve ever seen inside the Gate,” said Ron, as he corrected the helm. The darkness turned a shade darker. “Look to port.”

The lights on the Golden Gate Bridge were nowhere to be seen.

Regan realized that she was looking at a wall of water. “Yikes!”

“Just about perfect!” yelled Ron, correcting the helm as the next swell lifted the sails into the wind.

The mizzen cataract appeared to redouble its effort to fill the cockpit. Regan thrashed her boots in the rainwater as if she were on a stationary bicycle. “Perfect!”

When Boy Toy topped the next swell and Ron saw where they were: “Okay, boss, prepare to fall off under gale conditions.”

“Prepare to fall off under gale conditions. What’s that mean?”

“It’s time for you to take the helm.”

Regan looked at him.

“Come on,” Ron said. “Switch positions with me.”

He scooted forward on the port cushion and Regan jumped aft to take his place.

“We’re going to fall off the wind,” Ron shouted, “into a broad reach, maybe even a dead run! It’s not a jibe, nor do we want it to be, but it will feel like one. As we top the next roller, ease the helm over as we ease the sheets. Otherwise she’ll want to stay on her current point of sail. When were done we’ll still be on port, but with the breeze over the port quarter.” He slashed the edge of his hand at the new vector, to starboard. “In the course of this maneuver, not only will the skipper be steering, she will also be easing the mizzen.” Ron freed the mizzen sheet, led it under the away horn of its cleat, and handed Regan the standing part. “Try not to burn a stripe through the palm of your glove.”

A gust heeled the vessel. Regan held the helm. The starboard rail dipped under, but Boy Toy heeled no further.

Ron moved to the starboard side. “I’ll be slacking the jib.” He bounced his hand off the standing part of the working sheet, between the cleat and the winch, sufficiently taut that it might have passed for a stick of wood. “Keep your sail to leeward of a right angle to the wind, keep the bow to weather.” He unwrapped the working sheet until its standing part passed but once under the away horn of the cleat, as it passed from his gloved hand to the winch. “Ready?”

“Ready!”

As the next eastbound roller lifted the boat: “Fall off!”

Regan eased the helm to starboard as both of them eased sheets. The swell carried Boy Toy eastward as the bow fell away from the wind.

“Feel it?” yelled Ron.

“Yes!” she replied.

“Ease sheets. Ease the helm. Ease sheets. Center the helm. Ease, ease, steady as she goes...”

Now, wind over her port quarter, Boy Toy was seething straight for the half-mile gap between the Belvedere Peninsula and the western tip of Angel Island, the entrance to Raccoon Strait, surfing the swells as they passed under her, having smoothly affected a course change of some seventy-five degrees in thirty knots of wind.

“Steady as she goes, boss!” exclaimed Ron. “Make fast. Nice!”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” Regan said. “Skipper,” she added, and they high-fived a couple of sodden gloves beneath the mizzen boom.

Ron lifted his eyes for a thoughtful gaze at the main truck, rainwater running over his face. “We should do this more often!”

“Yes!” Regan shouted back.

A swell passed beneath the hull. Regan corrected to port. The jib slacked as Boy Toy settled into the trough. Regan corrected to starboard. Again, a following swell lifted Boy Toy into the wind. Regan corrected to port. Both sails filled with a crack, and the starboard sheet parted. The bow veered to port. Regan threw her weight onto the wheel. “I can’t hold her!” she yelled amid the racket of the flailing jib.

“Don’t try!” Ron seized the mizzen sheet. “Give her her head!”

Regan let the rim of the wheel spin. As the Boy Toy swung to port, broadside to gale and sea, Ron hardened the sheet so that the mizzen pushed the stern to leeward. The next swell turned Boy Toy broadside to the wind, and she might have broached. But Ron eased the mizzen as she rose so that, though yawing downwind and into the trough between swells, she had only her hull and but a little sail area to present to the wind as the next swell lifted her. She climbed the following swell and, on top, more or less righted, Ron hardened the sheet so that the mizzen carried Boy Toy’s stern into the lee.

Worked thus, two or three swells later, the vessel lay bow to windward, stern by the lee, both jib and mizzen flogging like guns firing at will, the entire operation slowly driven backward by wind and turning tide.

“Now what?” Except that she had to shout to be heard, Regan put the query in an entirely reasonable tone.

“I need to go forward and get that sail under control,” Ron shouted back, “before it destroys itself.”

Regan regarded the scene at the bow. In the streaming dark, it looked as if the shadows, lines, and shapes of the inanimate world had come alive to conduct a knockdown brawl, with appropriate sound effects, strafed by tracers of rain as the works flailed in and out of the red and green of the running lights. The flogging canvas, fore and aft, sounded like a regiment of enraged taiko drummers.

“Let’s start the engine!” Regan shouted.

“I thought you wanted to go sailing!” Ron shouted back.

Regan looked at him.

“Besides, that’s three grand worth of sail up there.” Before she could dismiss the financial angle, Ron said, “Let’s try something else first. If it doesn’t work, we’ll start the engine.”

Regan nodded. “At your orders, skipper.”

“We’re in irons. Understood?”

“Irons it is.”

“We want to bring the bow to port. Once she’s on a starboard tack, I’ll take a line forward, reave a new starboard sheet, and we’ll be good to go.”

“But how do we get out of irons without a foresail or the engine?”

Ron pointed. “We bowse the mizzen boom to port. The breeze will push the stern to starboard. As soon as the wind comes over the starboard side, we sheet both sails to port and Bob’s your salty uncle.”

“Heading right back where we came from,” Regan pointed out, casting an eye into the darkness.

It struck Ron that back where they’d come from was the last place Regan Ellis wanted to go. “We’ll make a U-turn soon enough!” Ron shouted above the din. “With this fresh breeze we have all the boat control in the world!”

When Regan smiled, raindrops pelted her teeth like bird shot. Fresh breeze indeed.

“Take three wraps on the port winch and get the slack out of the sheet.”

“Done...”

“Where’s the goddamn winch handle?” The winch handle wasn’t in its holster, low down on the forward side of the mizzen mast.

They felt around in a couple of inches of brine until Regan found it under a tangle of wet lines. Handing the crank to Ron, she belayed the tail of the port jib sheet around the away horn of a cockpit cleat, so as to pass the better part of the load to the boat’s superstructure rather than her own, to prevent the sail flogging the sheet forward.

Meanwhile, Ron retrieved a four-part bosun’s tackle from the rope locker. He clapped one block to a loop of line midway along the mizzen boom, the other to a dock-line cleat abaft the cabin, and led the purchase across the cockpit to starboard, took three wraps around the starboard winch, and inserted the sprocket of the winch handle. “Ready, boss?”

“At your orders, skipper.”

Ron hove away on the tackle, forcing the mizzen sail to port, against the gale. As the rattling sail took the wind, the pressure pushed the stern of Boy Toy to starboard, which had the effect of turning the bow through the eye of the wind. Air began to flow over the starboard side The foot of the No. 4 cracked over the foredeck, starboard to port, its clew trailing a twenty-foot spiral of wounded sheet.

“Sheet home!” ordered the skipper. “Lively, now!”

Regan hardened the port sheet. If the jib had wrapped the forestay in the interim, it would have been a different story. But the stalled sail shivered to leeward until the fabric took the wind and ceased its flogging, and Boy Toy cracked into a starboard reach. Ron released the tail of the bosun’s tackle and hardened the mizzen until its boom lay just a little to port of the centerline of the boat. And all went silent, excepting the maelstrom, as Boy Toy galloped through wind and tide and the teeming dark with a phosphorescent bone in her teeth, her new course nearly parallel to the span of the Golden Gate Bridge, whose lights cast an ochre pall high into the mist, not two miles west of their position.

“It worked!” shouted Regan. “It worked!”

“Dang,” said Ron, as if no one were more surprised than he.

“I haven’t had this much fun,” Regan replied, clinging to the wheel, foulie hood and drenched hair streaming to leeward, “since I totaled my first Jaguar.”

“Touch the wood,” Ron cautioned, tapping three fingers to his own head. “We don’t want to be walking home tonight.”

Regan touched three fingertips to the mizzen mast. “Consider it touched, captain!”

More work lay ahead. Gripping the helm, Regan lodged her feet in the corners afforded by port and starboard lockers where they met the cockpit sole, while Ron cranked in the jib until its high clew hovered above the forward deck, where he might get to it without hanging over the side. This pointed Boy Toy as close to the wind as she would sail, and it was correspondingly rough.

He jumped to the starboard side and, drawing aft what was left of the parted sheet, discovered the cause of the failure. “Look at this.”

“It’s been cut...”

Ron described retrieving the two sheets after they’d blown over the side at the dock. “It must have fouled some piece of junk on the bottom.” Rather than throw the rope end over the side in disgust, he properly hanked it.

He was stowing the coil when Regan said, “Both sheets were fouled together?”

Ron gave this a thought, then crossed to the low side and eyed the working sheet. After the winch, he found no sign of damage to the line. Forward of the winch, the line was taut as a length of chain. He ran a hand along the sheet as far forward as he could, and there it was. Perpendicular to the length of the line, an incision cut perhaps a third into its diameter. It felt like an open wound. Under the present load, it couldn’t last.

Ron rummaged the rope locker for a length of synthetic line that, though a mere quarter-inch in diameter, featured an extremely high breaking strength. He joined the ends with a Zeppelin bend, forming what’s often called a strap or choker — a loop. Clipping his tether to the genoa track, he crawled forward alongside the house and, despite his outboard half occasionally dipping in and out of the passing stream, rove a lateral tension knot, so-called, in this case, a klemheist, about the sheet forward of the incision. Backing to the cockpit, he took a turn about a free cleat, threw in a trucker’s hitch, bowsed down the doubled quarter-inch as hard as he could, and made it fast.

“If she goes,” Ron said, “this will hold it.” Since Ron Tagus was in charge of Boy Toy, each rope in the locker had a piece of tape on one end with its length inked onto it. By the light of the binnacle he selected a pair of lines. “Now I go forward, see...”

As he spoke, the sea walloped the starboard topside, just forward of the chain plates, lifted five or six feet above the bow, and collapsed onto the foredeck. Six inches of brine sluiced along the windward cockpit combing.

“You’re going to the bow in this shit?” Regan frankly asked.

“You just keep that steady hand on the helm,” Ron said, throwing a stopper knot into a line, “and I’ll be fine.”

“One hand for you,” Regan shouted pedantically, “one hand for the boat! Little old me would be hard put to get you back tonight!” She dipped a finger in the remaining inch of water, beyond the combing. “Fifty-three degrees and all that.”

“It’s not complicated. You hold this course. I jump forward and bend on a new sheet. Which reminds me.” He touched the breast of his pfd. “Knife.”

“To cut away the old sheet?” Regan realized. “Because the knot will be too wet to capsize.”

“Too wet and too slow. Then, new sheet rove, I come aft, and we tack.”

“After which you take a new sheet forward on the port side and we do it all over again.”

“Except for the tack.” Ron pointed at the jury rig. “After the port sheet has been switched out, we fall off into right back where we started.”

“Bob’s your salty uncle.”

“Indeed,” Ron muttered as he crawled over the starboard locker.

“One hand for you,” Regan shouted, “one hand for the boat!”

She perched on the locker with one seaboot hooked into a lower spoke of the helm and a hand atop it. Boy Toy was bucking, wind and tide on her nose, and plenty of water coming aboard, but she needed to be close-hauled so the rigger could access the clew of the jib. Any other point of sail and the clew would be hanging out over open water. Ron crawled forward on his belly, leading the new line through the after and forward turning blocks, clipping, unclipping, and reclipping his tether as he went, and keeping a weather eye. Only once did a sea lift and pin him to the side of the house, but by then he had reached the main shrouds and had plenty to hang onto. It was wet work and progress was slow, made slower by the awkwardness of working in gloves, and the pitching of Boy Toy, which afforded Ron the odd moment of near weightlessness. Gradually he disappeared into the teeming gloom, only to reappear in the lurid green of the starboard running light, to disappear again as he crawled and skidded past the mast, forward of the house, until, arriving beneath the clew of the sail, he was diagonally across the boat from Regan and lost to her sight. Five or six extra feet of sheet passed forward through her gloved hand, then stopped. She considered locking the helm, in case another hand was needed, but Boy Toy couldn’t be asked to hold a steady course in these conditions by herself. And two people in trouble would do no good at all. Even as Regan had this thought, the forward half of Boy Toy sailed over an invisible hollow in the water, then dropped in with a crash and buried her nose. A wall of water backed the jib despite the high bias of its foot, throwing the bow to starboard. But with a little help from the helm, Boy Toy labored up and the sail took the wind on starboard. A foot of brine coursed along three sides of the house, past and into the cockpit.

Legs athwart and both hands on the wheel, Regan’s leeward boot filled with seawater. After a long time Ron reappeared and rolled over the starboard combing onto the locker, his watch cap missing, his hair, though short, plastered to his skull, the cuffs and collar of his foul-weather gear leaking seawater.

“Ready to tack!” he yelled, flat on his back. “What’s so goddamn funny?”

Regan, simply thrilled to see him again, shook her head, rainwater streaming down her face. “I haven’t had this much fun,” she shouted, “since I totaled my second Jaguar!”

The sea smacked the starboard topside abaft the main chain plates, lifted a human’s height above the combing, and crashed onto the house. As water coursed over the companionway hatch and into the cockpit, Regan freed the winch handle from the port-side winch. “Ready about?”

“Wait! Switch sides!”

They did so. Regan took the winch handle, sat to starboard, and disentangled the new sheet from the lines on the cockpit sole.

“Take the helm!” Ron shouted, and she did so. He clipped to the genoa track and crawled forward to the conjoined jury rig. “Ready about!”

“Helm’s alee!” Keeping an eye on the little Turk’s head rove onto the rim of the helm, which marked its centerline, Regan rolled the wheel fifty degrees to starboard.

Boy Toy responded immediately and turned her bow through the eye of the wind. The mizzen boom clanged over. The jib backed with a smack.

Ron hacked the port sheet forward of the klemheist knot and the working end shot ahead, into the darkness. “Jib’s away!”

Regan hauled the slack of the starboard sheet till she met some resistance, took three turns about the winch, belayed the after end of the rope under the away horn of the cleat, and inserted the winch handle. Ron appeared in the cockpit to center the helm. Cranking the winch, she made fast.

“Okay,” Ron shouted, “close-hauled on port! Good job! Sit to the high side!”

As Regan sat to port and took the helm, Captain Ron unhanked the second length of line, threw in a stopper knot, took a deep breath, and clambered to the port side. “Steady as she goes, boss.”

“Aye aye, captain.” Ron disappeared up the port side of the vessel, now the high and windward side, clipping and reaving and crawling and holding on and achieving weightlessness as he went.

Regan fed the new line into the block on the after car. Ron reappeared in the lurid red of the port running light, crawled across the foredeck, into the glare of the green starboard light, then hauled himself up the shrouds, his seaboots braced against one corner of the house and the lower turnbuckles, in and out of water up to his knees, one hand lifting a knife into the night. This point of sail was much like the previous one, rough and wet. Boy Toy pitched through waves and swells, bucking both wind and tide. A wave smacked the port topside and lifted perhaps ten feet above the deck, its underside rendered as ruby as the throat of a giant trout, before neatly dividing itself about the shrouds and collapsing across the foredeck, seething along the decks and the roof of the house with the sound of big surf eagerly coming ashore.

Athwart the helm, feet planted wide, Regan’s other boot filled with seawater. Above all the noise she couldn’t hear Ron grunt as he crawled back along the port side of the house in the dark, clipping, holding on, unclipping, as he came one or two feet at a time. Arriving at the cockpit, he clipped to the turnbuckle at the foot of the forward mizzen shroud and rolled over the port combing onto locker, streaming brine.

“I’m blowed,” he croaked, scrubbing the palm of a sopping glove over his glistening face. “Son of a bitch.” He pushed himself into a sitting position and took the helm with one hand and the mizzen sheet with the other. “Ready to fall off?”

Regan freed the working sheet, leaving the standing part captured under the away horn of the cleat. “Ready!”

Choosing his moment, Ron eased the helm to leeward as they both eased sheets. It felt as if Boy Toy were pivoting about her righting moment, and soon enough, she was creaming along on a broad reach, making for the green and red lights that mark the entrance to Raccoon Strait, with rain, wind, and tide at her back.

Ron belayed the mizzen sheet and sagged against the port shrouds, one foot working a spoke of the wheel, breathing heavily. “Time for a whiskey, boss.”

Without a word, Regan slid back the hatch and dropped below, to quickly reappear bearing two glasses half filled with whiskey. She stood on the companionway steps, and they touched glasses.

“Cheated death again,” Ron said, as he downed half his drink. Adding, “More or less,” he quickly finished the other half.

Regan watched him without tasting her own drink. “Hey.”

“Hey what?”

“What happened to your eye?”

Ron flattened the fingers of his free hand over his left eye, then looked at them with his right eye. Regan waited. Ron made a correction to the helm with his foot.

“That parted sheet was whipping around like a snake on amphetamines. I could hear it but I couldn’t see it. As I climbed up the shrouds I figured I’d keep my back to the wind, plus or minus the odd ton of brine boarding the vessel. I was just getting the blade inside the loop when goddamn if the bitter end didn’t come from dead aft and pop me in the eye like it was born to the task.” Ron circled his empty glass. “What are the chances?”

Regan frowned. “Wait a minute. You were cutting away the parted sheet? Are you telling me this happened on your first trip forward?”

“Correct.” Ron angled his good eye. “You gonna use that drink?”

They traded glasses.

Ron downed his second drink at one go. “You’d think it would help a little,” he scolded the empty.

“Can you see out of it?”

“No.”

“Let me—”

Ron peered forward.

“Hey.” She touched his cheek.

Ron turned to face her. “The lens is gone,” he said. “Not that I’m an expert.”

A band of rain swept the boat, southwest to northeast, blown horizontal by the wind. Regan looked north past Ron and toward the lights of Sausalito. She looked south toward the lights of San Francisco. Far to the east, obscured as they were by a vast density of airborne water, she could barely see the lights of Berkeley. Making landfall in the present conditions was out of the question. However they worked it, they were hours if not an entire day from any sort of medical attention.

“What are we going to do?”

Captain Ron shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Goddammit,” she said softly.

“One eye for the boat,” he said, “one eye for me.”

An hour later they dropped the hook in the quiet shelter of Paradise Cove. Fourteen hours after that, just after sunset, Boy Toy tied up in the Berkeley Marina. A month later, Boy Toy was rechristened as Sedna, an Inuit goddess of the sea. Not quite one year after the events related here, Sedna headed out the Golden Gate and took a left. Less than a day later, a big winter storm roared down the coast.

Neither the ship nor her crew was seen again in Berkeley.