Budding Prospects

Chapter 1

I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I’d known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn’t give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

Two years ago I was living alone. I woke alone, flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone. The universe had temporarily pulled in its boundaries, and I was learning to adjust to them. I was thirty-one. I sat at the lunch counter with men of fifty-one, sixty-one, eighty-one, slurped tomato-rice soup and watched the waitress. Sometimes I had dinner with friends, shot pool, went to the aquarium, danced to a pulsing Latino beat in close, atramental clubs; sometimes I felt like a bearded ascetic contemplating the stones of the desert.

On this particular night — it was in late February — I stayed in. I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record—Le Sacre du Printemps—caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame. I looked up from my book. Rain knocked at the windows like a smirking voyeur, small sounds reverberated through the house — the clank of the refrigerator closing down, the sigh of the heat starting up — the fire crackled ominously round a nail in a charred two-by-four. At that instant, as if on cue, the front buzzer sounded. It was after twelve. I gave the tube a rueful glance — zombies in white-face drifted across the screen, masticating bratwurstlike strings of human intestine — put down my book, cinched the terrycloth robe round my waist, and ambled to the head of the stairs. Insistent, the buzzer blatted again.

My apartment was a walkup on Fair Oaks, three blocks west of the Mission. The house was a Victorian, painted in six colors. I had four rooms, a deck, a hallway and a view. Before the intercom went dead, the signal had become so weak and static-jammed I wouldn’t have recognized my mother’s voice — or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins doing “I Put a Spell on You,” for that matter. I stood at the head of the stairway and pressed the door release, more curious than apprehensive, and watched three shadows dodge in out of the wet.

There was a flash of lightning, horns and violins shrieked and reshrieked the same tortured Slavic measure like a tocsin, they were coming up the stairs, thump-thump-thump. For one nasty moment I stepped back, cursing myself for so blindly buzzing them in — gray forms, strangers, junkies, Mexican confidence men — when I saw, with relief, that it was Vogelsang. “Felix,” he said.

“Hey,” I responded.

He had a girl in tow, her hair clipped short as an East German swimmer’s and bleached white. Behind her, three steps down, a guy in his late twenties, wearing rubbers and a yellow rain slicker that gave off a weird phosphorescent glow in the dull light of the hallway. All three of them looked as if they’d jumped off the Bay Bridge four or five times: noses dripping, hair plastered, water dribbling from collars and shoes. Vogelsang was grinning his deranged grin. “It’s been a while,” he said, clapping my shoulder.

It had been two months. Vogelsang lived in splendid isolation in the hills above Bolinas, making money nefariously, practicing various perversions, collecting power tools, wood carvings, barbers’ poles and cases of dry red wine from esoteric little vineyards like Goat’s Crouch and Sangre de Cristo. He also collected antique motorcycles, copper saucepans, espresso machines the size of church organs, sexless mannequins from the fifties (which he painted, lacquered and arranged round the house in lewd, arresting poses), bone-handled knives, Tahitian gill nets and a series of cramped somber oil paintings devoted to religious themes like the decapitation of John the Baptist or the algolagnic ecstasies of the flagellants. Every few weeks he would descend on San Francisco to prowl junk shops, cruise North Beach and attend sumptuous mate-swapping parties in Berkeley. Norman Mailer would have loved him.

At this juncture, he maneuvered the girl forward. I noticed that she was wearing a delicate silver ring through the flange of her right nostril, and that her toenails were painted black. “This is Aorta,” Vogelsang said. I labeled her instantly: sorority girl cum punk. She was probably from Pacific Heights and her real name was something like Jennifer Harris or Heather Mashberg. She gave me a hard look and held out her hand. Her hand was as wet and cold as something fished out of a pond. I ducked my head at her and sucked back the corners of my mouth.

“And this,” Vogelsang was saying, gesturing toward the slickered figure three steps down, “is Boyd Dowst, a friend of mine from Santa Rosa.”

The rain slicker seemed to erupt in response, and a big bony hand lunged over the top of the rail to grasp mine. I was staring into the face of a Yankee farmer, angular, big-eared, eyes the color of power-line insulators: “Now living in Sausalito,” he said, clawing at his dripping hair with his free hand. The other hand, the friendly one, was still pumping at mine as if he expected my fingertips to squirt milk or something.

I was barefoot, my bathrobe was dirty, the skipping record ripped at my nerves like a two-man saw. I invited them in.

Vogelsang strode into the living room, unzipped his sodden jacket and draped it across the back of a wooden chair, characteristically brisk and nervous in the way of a feral cat attuned to the faintest movements, the tiniest scratchings. He smelled of rain and something else too, something musky and primal. It was a minute before I realized what it was: he reeked of sex. When he’d arranged the jacket to his satisfaction, he turned to enlighten me on this and other matters, pausing only to produce a plastic vial of breath neutralizer and squeeze off two quick shots before launching into a monologue describing his recent acquisitions, touching on improvements to his property in Bolinas and the progress of his investments in the commodities market, and giving a lubricious play-by-play account of the urbane orgy he and the girl had attended earlier in the evening. He spoke, as he always did, with a peculiar mechanical diction, each word distinct and unslurred, as if he were a linguistics professor moderating a panel discussion on the future of the language.

I puttered round the apartment, half-listening, changing the record, lowering the volume on the TV, digging out an ashtray, four bottles of beer and a plastic envelope of pot. Vogelsang followed me, step for step, lecturing. Dowst and the girl sat on the couch. As soon as the pot hit the coffee table, Dowst snatched it up, opened the Baggie and sniffed it — breathed it rather, like a snorkeler coming up for air — made a disdainful face and tossed the bag back down as if it contained some unspeakable refuse on the order of dog turds or decomposing sparrow eggs. I caught this out of the corner of my eye as I was slipping Stravinsky back into his jacket.

“Boyd’s just finished up his Master’s degree at Yale,” Vogelsang said, easing down on the arm of the couch and taking a swig of beer for dramatic emphasis, “in botanical science.”

I pulled up a chair. “Congratulations,” I murmured, glancing at Dowst, and abruptly changed the subject — who wanted to hear about some overgrown preppie and his academic laurels? I’d been that route myself. I said something about the rain, then made a bad joke about the quality of the entertainment at Vogelsang’s party.

“You don’t understand,” Vogelsang persisted. “Botanical science: he can grow anything, anywhere.”

I nodded. The girl was looking at me as if I were a sandwich in the window of a delicatessen, and Dowst was squinting at a copy of Scientific American he’d dug out of the pile of newspapers on the floor. Muffled shrieks came from the TV. I glanced up to see the heroine trapped in a hallway made of flimsy plasterboard while the hairy arms of zombies — I marveled at their insatiability — punched through the walls to grab at her.

Vogelsang set the beer down, fished the mouth spray from his pocket and treated himself to a single squeeze, the puff of soapy atomized liquid like a cloud of frozen breath on a cold morning. “I closed a deal on three hundred and ninety acres in Mendocino County today,” he said. “Remote as the moon, with a cabin on it.”

Dowst looked up from his reading. “And with year-round water.” I noticed that he hadn’t bothered to remove the rain slicker. It billowed round him like an aniline tent, a glistening yellow barber’s gown tucked in at the neck. He pawed ineffectually at a strand of wet hair that dangled alongside his nose, then went back to the magazine.

“That’s right,” Vogelsang added, “a creek and two separate springs.”

It was twelve-thirty. I’d heard The Rite of Spring, it was raining, I was tired. I wondered what Vogelsang was driving at. “Sounds nice,” I said.

“We’re going to start a summer camp.” He was smirking, as if this were the punch line of a subtly developed joke. Dowst chuckled appreciatively. The girl sat hunched over her untouched bottle of Moosehead lager and stared through the wall. I got up and switched on the radio.

There was the sudden hollow thumping of a distant bass drum, some machine-shop noises, and then a strange detached female voice pushing ice through the speakers:

The best things in life are free

But you can save them for the birds and bees,

Give me money, that’s what I want.^©

“Listen, Felix,” Vogelsang was saying, “how would you like to make half a million dollars, tax-free?”

I sat down again. All three of them were watching me now. “You’re joking,” I said.

“Dead serious.” Vogelsang was giving me his Charlie Manson stare. He used it when he wanted you to know he was dead serious.

“What,” I laughed, bending for my beer, “running a summer camp?”

“Cannabis sativa,” Dowst said, as softly as if he were revealing one of the secret names of God.

“We’re going to grow two thousand plants.” Vogelsang was studying the vial of breath neutralizer as if it were inscribed with the hieroglyphs of economic calculation, with cost-ratio tables and sliding scales for depreciation and uninsured loss. He looked up. “Figure half a pound per plant. One thousand pounds at sixteen hundred dollars a pound.” He raised the vial to his mouth, dropped his jaw in anticipation, then thought better of it. I said nothing. The plastic tube tapped at his pursed lips, mesmeric, lifting and falling to the pulse of the music. “I put up the capital and provide the land, Boyd comes in every few days to oversee the operation and you provide the labor. We split three ways.”

Suddenly I was wide awake, brain cells flashing like free-game lights in a pinball machine. Vogelsang didn’t make mistakes — I knew that. I knew, too, that he had a genius for making money, a genius of which I’d been beneficiary on two serendipitous occasions in the past. (The first time we went partners on a battered Victorian in the Haight, put out three thousand dollars on a twenty-thousand-dollar purchase price, refurbished the place for fifteen and sold it for a hundred. The second time he merely phoned, gave me the name of a broker, and told me to buy as much zirconium as I could. I had eight thousand dollars in the bank and I was out of work. I made more in a week than I’d made all year.) No: if Vogelsang was behind it, it would go. As certainly as Segovia had been born to finger a fretboard or Willie Mays to swing a bat, Vogelsang had been born to sow pennies and reap dollars. Thirty-three, and already independent of any visible means of support — he hadn’t held a job since I’d known him — he nosed out investments, traded in commodities both licit and illicit, bought and sold buildings and property and God knew what else — and all with the unshakable confidence and killing instinct of an apprentice Gould or Carnegie.

And his timing was exquisite, I had to admit that. He’d come to me at just the right moment, a year and a half after my divorce, a time when I was depressed and restless, a time when I was beginning to feel like a prisoner in solitary. Half a million dollars. It was as if the head of NASA had just asked me if I’d like to be the first man to walk on Mars. There were risks involved, sure, but that was what made the project so enticing — the frisson, the audacity, the monumental pissing in the face of society. Vogelsang wasn’t going to grow a hundred plants or a hundred and fifty, he wasn’t going to be content with fifteen or twenty thousand — no, he was going to grow marijuana like Reynolds grew tobacco. My blood was racing. When I looked up into the three faces intent on my own, I was already halfway there.

“I don’t know a thing about growing marijuana,” I said finally. Vogelsang was ready for this. “You don’t have to,” he said, lifting himself from the chair arm, “—that’s Boyd’s department.”

“But two thousand plants … can one person handle that sort of thing?”

“No way,” Dowst said, rustling his rain slicker.

“We figure you’ll need two full-time people to help out. Who they are and how you pay them is up to you. You could hire them on a straight salary, or split your five hundred into shares. But whatever, they’ve got to be willing to give up the next nine months of their lives, and above all they’ve got to be”—here he paused to come up with the right word—“discreet.”

Rain hit the roof like pennies from heaven, the icy voice on the radio was chanting Money, give me money,/Money, give me money.^© We were all standing, for some reason. Dowst and Vogelsang were grinning, the girl’s face had softened with what I took to be a sort of truculent amicability.

“How about your friend up in Tahoe,” Vogelsang said, as if he’d had a sudden inspiration (I realized at that instant he’d been playing me all along, like a street-corner salesman, a carnival barker making his pitch). “What’s his name …” (he knew it as well as I) “Cherniske?”

“Phil,” I said, half to myself. “Yeah, Phil,” as if I’d stumbled across the solution to a baffling puzzle.

Vogelsang took hold of my hand and pumped it in a congratulatory way, Dowst showing all his long gleaming teeth now, the girl fighting to keep the corners of her mouth from curling into a smile. I felt as if I’d just come back from sailing around the world or whipping the defending Wimbledon champ. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no, but already Vogelsang was lifting his half-empty Moosehead bottle and calling for a toast.

He had an arm round my shoulder, zombies disintegrated on the TV screen as heroes lobbed grenades at them, the cold voice chanted money in my ear, the smell of musk, of conception, of semen and the dark essence of the earth fired my nostrils, and then he flung up his hand, bottle clenched tight, like an evangelist called to witness: “To the summer camp!”

Chapter 2

There was nothing in my early upbringing to indicate a life of crime. I wasn’t beaten, orphaned or abandoned, I didn’t hang out on street corners with a cigarette in my mouth and a stiletto in my pocket, I wasn’t mentally disfigured from years in a reformatory or morally and physically sapped as a result of shooting smack on pigeon-shit-encrusted stoops in the ghetto. No: I was a child of the middle class, nurtured on Tiger’s Milk and TV dinners and Aureomycin until I towered over my parents like some big-footed freak of another species, like a cuckoo raised by sparrows. I knew algebra, appreciated Verdi, ate veal marsala, sushi and escargots, and selected a good bottle of wine. My record, if not spotless, was tainted only by the most venial infractions. There had been the usual traffic violations, an unfortunate incident on the steps of the Justice Department during one of the Washington marches, and a fine for carrying an open container on the streets of Lake George. But that was about it. Certainly, like any other solid citizen with inalienable rights, I broke laws regularly — purchasing and consuming controlled substances, driving at a steady sixty-five on freeways, fornicating in water beds and hot tubs, micturating in public, knowingly and willingly being in the presence of persons who, etc., etc. On the other hand, I didn’t litter, extort, burgle, batter, assault, rape or murder. At thirty-one, endowed with the cautiousness and conservatism of maturity, I could arguably consider myself, if not a pillar, then at least a flying buttress of bourgeois society.

Still, two hours after Vogelsang had left, and despite a weariness that verged on narcolepsy and a steady blinding Niagara of a rainstorm, I was on my way to Lake Tahoe to take my first irretrievable steps into the lower depths.

At four a.m. I pulled into a truckstop and sat hunched over the counter on a cracked vinyl stool, spooned up grease and eggs, listened to moronic country-inflected yodeling from the jukebox, and drank eight cups of coffee that tasted of death and metal. The rain had stopped, and I watched myself in the dark, water-flecked window for a moment, my face lit by neon and the flashing lights of semis, and saw that my eyes glared and cheeks bristled with the look of criminality. Or tiredness. Then I left some money on the counter, stumbled out to my rust-spotted Toyota, and drove on up the hill to where dawn was flaring over South Tahoe.

I missed the turnoff for Cherniske’s place, everything uniform at this altitude, snow on the ground like a fungus, trees as alike as a forest of Dixon pencils. Without thinking, I swerved to cut a U-turn and was nearly annihilated by a California highway patrolman doing about ninety on urgent business. The thing that saved my life — and the patrolman’s — was the supersiren with which the CHP car was equipped, the sort of deadly, heart-seizing klaxon fire trucks use when approaching intersections. I was halfway through my illegal U-turn, horizontal to the flow of traffic and already obstructing an entire lane, oblivious to sirens, lights, the possibility of runaway logging trucks, when the klaxon slapped me like an angry hand. My foot went to the floor, tires squealed, brake drums clapped like cymbals, and the Toyota lurched to a halt as the CHP cruiser careened past the front bumper, inches to spare. As he passed, the patrolman gave me a quick sharp look of murderous intensity — a look that said, I would shoot you here, now, no questions asked, as automatically as I would shoot a rattlesnake or a junkyard rat, but for this appalling emergency that requires my dedication, bravery and expertise — and then he was gone, a pair of taillights skidding round a corner in the distance.

Mortified, I pulled the car round just in time to avoid the shrieking ambulance for which the cruiser had been running interference, humbly shifted gears, signaled, and swung onto the wet glistening blacktop road that snaked through the trees to Cherniske’s place. Almost instantly there was a thump, the wheel was jerked from my hand, and the car veered wildly for the shoulder and a clutch of nasty russet-barked pines. I’d been driving since I was sixteen and, groggy though I was, rose to the occasion, snatching the wheel back and regaining control without missing a beat. Calmly, almost clinically, I noted the cause of my minor emergency: there was a groove in the road. A deep insistent gash that seamed the right-hand lane like a furrow, as if some absentminded sodbuster had neglected to lift the plow blade while rumbling home on his tractor. I would have thought nothing more of it but for the fact that the groove seemed to be going in the same direction I was, turn for turn. I followed it down Alpine Way to the end, left on Lederhosen Lane, left again on Chalet Drive, and then, amazingly, into Phil’s driveway and right on up to the bumper of his sagging ’62 Cadillac.

Phil’s house — a two-story chalet/cabin/condo/duplex — was silent, the windows dark. It was seven a.m., and the early light had been absorbed in a low ceiling of ropy cloud the color of charcoal. I swung out of the car and examined Phil’s Cadillac: it was pitched forward like a crippled stegosaur, tail fins in the air, and the right front fender and a portion of the hood had been crumpled like tinfoil. Looking closer, I saw that not only was the tire gone on that side, but the brake drum and wheel as well. The car was resting on a sheared splinter of axle, from the apex of which the groove raveled out up the driveway, down the blacktop road, and out to the highway. The engine was still warm.

No one responded to my knock. This was no surprise: I hadn’t really expected a formal reception. At this hour, Phil and his assorted roommates would be entering the first leaden phase of deep sleep, having closed the bars in California and roamed the casinos of Stateline, Nevada, until dawn. The door was unlatched. I stepped in, sleeping bag under my arm, thinking to curl up on the couch, wake when they did, and put my proposition to Phil over breakfast. It was colder inside than out, and the place had a familiar subterranean smell to it — a smell of underwear and socks worn too long, of stale beer, primitive cooking and a species of mold that thrives under adverse conditions. The shades were drawn, but there was light enough to distinguish generic shapes: TV, armchair, couch, bicycle, lamp, log. I groped my way to the couch, unfurled the sleeping bag and sat down.

This was a mistake. As my buttocks made contact with flesh and bone rather than Herculon and Styrofoam and I began to intuit that the couch was already occupied, a quick lithe form jerked up to shove at my chest, rake my face and gasp a few emphatic obscenities. “Nooooooooo,” the voice — it was feminine — half rasped, half shrieked, “I’ve had enough. Now get off!" I found myself on the floor, muttering apologies. Then the light exploded in the room as if it had come on with a blast of noise, and I was staring up at a tableau vivant: the girl’s white naked arm poised at the lamp switch, her furious squinting eyes, high breasts, the lavender comforter slipped to her waist. “Who the hell are you?” she hissed.

“Felix,” I whispered, somehow feeling as if I were covering up the truth, “Phil’s friend.”

She glared at me as if she hadn’t heard. Her hair was a cracked fluff of peroxide blond, her eyes were green as glass marbles, she had no eyebrows. I watched her nipples harden in the cold. “I’m looking for Phil,” I said.

“Who?” The tone was barely under control, the upward swing of the interrogative a scarcely suppressed snarl. “Listen, mister”—drawing the comforter up under her armpits—“you better get your ass out of here or, or I’ll—“ She never finished the phrase, gesturing vaguely and then fumbling for a cigarette on the coffee table.

This is what an inept rapist must feel like, I thought. Or a cat burglar who catches the Mother Superior with her habit down. Despite myself, I found I had an erection. “Phil,” I repeated. “Phil Cherniske? The guy that rents this place?”

Suddenly the rage went out of her face. She looked up at me over her cigarette as she lit it, shook out the match and took a deep drag. Eyebrowless, she looked like Humpty-Dumpty or the Man in the Moon, too much pale unbroken space between eyes and hair. I watched her exhale a blue cloud of smoke. “Oh, Phil,” she said finally, wearily, as if she’d just experienced a revelation that hadn’t seemed worth the effort. “He’s in jail.”

Phil and I had been close all our lives. Our parents had been friends before we were born, we’d attended the same elementary and secondary schools, had quit separate colleges in the same year. Phil went west, I stayed in New York. I got married, went back to school, dropped out, found a job selling life insurance to pensioners with trembling hands and hated myself for it. Phil made a brief splash in L.A. (Pasadena, actually) as Phil Yonkers, sculpteur primitif. He roamed junkyards with the avidity and determination of a housewife at a Macy’s white sale, collecting fascinating slabs of rusted iron, discarded airplane wings, scalloped fenders, anvils, stoves, washing machines, useless but intrinsically edifying cogs, springs and engine parts from obsolete heavy machinery. These he would weld together in random configurations, hose down to encourage oxidation, and offer for sale.

I remember a brochure he once sent me in advertisement of his first (and last) show. The cover featured a poorly reproduced photo of the artist (the sagging pompadour, pointed nose, emaciated frame and wandering eye) grinning in the lee of a gargantuan iron monster that dripped oil like saliva and seemed to be composed around the gap-toothed shovel of an earthmover and a set of pistons frozen at descending intervals. The text indicated that the piece was titled Madonna and Child, and compared the artist to Herms, Smith and Keinholz. Unfortunately, the show had to be canceled the afternoon it opened, owing to irremediable structural damage to the building that housed the gallery. The immense, crushing weight of Phil’s pieces, combined with the exuberance of his friends and acquaintances — who turned the sedate, champagne-sipping gathering into a foot-stomping celebration of rock and roll and the sculptor’s muse — fractured several floor joists and collapsed a section of the foundation. Phil did manage to sell one piece — three table saws welded together beneath a corona of conjoined lug wrenches molded in the shape of a butterfly’s wings — to a retired tool-and-die maker from Boyle Heights. Then he went into the restaurant business.

The restaurant business, as far as I can see, harbors a greater assortment of misfits, bon vivants, congenital crazies and food, drug, and alcohol abusers than any other méeAtier, with the possible exception of the medical. Phil, disappointed in his effort to combine artistic expression and pecuniary reward, was only too willing to give himself up to the pharmaceutical oblivion of the world of waiters and plongeurs. He stood before a blazing grill at a steak house in Boulder, washed dishes at a Himalayan restaurant in Montpelier, tended bar in Maui, Park City and Aspen, bisected oysters on Bourbon Street. For a time, like most restaurant people, he attained restaurant nirvana, opening his own place. He borrowed money from his parents, his friends, relatives whose existence he’d forgotten, went partners with a savvy Greek in his mid-fifties, opened an impeccable haute-cuisine eatery in the suburbs of Sacramento, and went broke in nine months. Bad location, he said, but he later confided to me that the savvy Greek had been skimming money off the top. When I came to town that early morning with the proposition Vogelsang had made me, Phil was employed as a dishwasher at the Tahoe Teriyaki and, as I learned from the girl on the couch, temporarily incarcerated.

I blinked at her two or three times. My eyes felt as if they were bleeding. I staggered to my feet, dragging the sleeping bag like the corpse of a dead enemy, fumbled my way out the door, across the blackened and pissed-over snow, and back into the Toyota. Ten minutes later I pulled into the courthouse lot where the Eldorado County Sheriff’s Department maintained its drunk tank and holding facility.

If the stereotypical desk sergeant is loose of jowl, corpulent, balding and noncommunicative, the man I encountered at the Sheriff’s Department didn’t break any new ground. A cardboard container of coffee steamed on the counter before him, his eyes were as puffed as a prizefighter’s, and his loose jowls were reddened with a thousand tiny nicks and abrasions that gave evidence of a recent and clumsy shave with one of the new, ultramodern, reclining-head skin-whittlers reinvented by Gillette, Bic and the rest each month. I wear a beard myself.

“Excuse me, officer,” I said. “I’d like to put up bail for someone you might be holding here.” I felt like Raskolnikov in Myshkin’s office, born guilty, guilty in perpetuity, guilty of everything from not honoring and obeying my parents to adolescent masturbation and stealing cigars to the larger and more heinous crimes of adulthood. I wanted to blurt it all out, confess in spate, be shriven and forgiven. Uniforms did that to me.

The desk sergeant said nothing.

I repeated myself, with a slight variation, and began to think wildly of all the possible permutations of this simple communication I might have to sift through until I hit the right one — the combination that would set clicking the tumblers of the policeman’s speech centers — when I hit on revealing the name of the incarceree after whom I was inquiring. “Cherniske,” I said. “Philip T.”

Still nothing. The man was immovable, emotionless, a jade Buddha serenely contemplating some quintessential episode of a TV police show, perhaps one in which a mild-mannered desk sergeant is moved to heroics by the sick and sad state of society, leaping out from behind his deceptive mask of lethargy to pound drunks, pleaders, crooks and loophole-manipulating lawyers back into the dirt where they belonged. I tried again, this time making it a question: “Phil Cherniske? Brought in this morning? Public intoxication?”

The thick neck swiveled like a lazy susan, the blue beads of the eyes hesitated on me with a look of hatred or impassivity — I couldn’t tell which — and continued past me to focus on an object over my left shoulder. The officer’s next motion was almost magical, so abrupt and yet so conservative of energy: his chins compressed briefly and then relaxed. I looked over my shoulder to a wooden bench flanked by a battered water cooler and a forlorn flag. “You want me to wait over there?” I said, my voice unnaturally loud, as if in compensation for his rigorous silence.

I watched his eyes for the answer, in the way one watches the eyes of a stroke victim for life. They squeezed shut, slowly, tenderly, then flashed open again — he could have been a dragon disturbed in its sleep — before drifting down to contemplate the steam rising from the cup. I turned, obsequiously dodging leather-booted, black-jacketed, hip-slung patrolmen, who stomped and jangled across the scuffed linoleum floor, and started for the bench. Halfway there, pausing to maneuver around a fleshy colossus who stood yawning and scratching before the water cooler, I was suddenly arrested by a summons at my back, a croak really, like some barely breathed disclosure of the oracle. “Sixty-five dollars,” the voice whispered.

I gave him three twenties and a five. As the crisp folded bills passed between us, I felt we’d attained some sort of brotherhood, a moment of truth and accord, and I took advantage of it to ask the sergeant if he could possibly tell me when the prisoner might be released. His eyes were glass. Five fat fingers lay on the bills like dead things. When I saw that no answer was forthcoming, I wheeled round, irritated, and blundered into an officer dressed in the uniform of the California Highway Patrol, replete with mirror shades, Wehrmacht boots and outsized gunbelt.

“Oh — excuse me,” I gasped, regaining my balance and letting the final vowel trail off in a little bleat of urbane laughter meant not only to implicate him in a shared responsibility for our collision and the foibles of the human condition in general, but to assure him that it had been purely accidental and that, just as he would think no more of it, neither would I. I was grinning like an idiot. He was not grinning. The shades in fact seemed to draw his eyes together into a single horrific Cyclopean mask that rendered the rest of his face expressionless. He stood there a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, then tore off the sunglasses. “You,” he snarled.

“Me?” The smile had gone sick on my face. I recognized him in that instant, the guilt I’d felt on entering the station house infesting me like a cancer, my mind racing through the minuscule store of legal knowledge I’d accumulated under duress in the past, thinking moving violation, his word against mine, judicium parium aut leges terrae.

All for naught. He threw me against the wall in an explosion of shoulders and arms and began to shout in my face. “What in Christ’s name do you want here?” he spat, his voice breaking on the expletive. The room had gone silent. All the others — big, beefy local cops — looked up from their coffee and clipboards and took an involuntary step or two toward us, like a defensive backfield converging on the ball carrier.

I began to offer an explanation when my antagonist bellowed for me to shut up. His hands pressed my elbows to the wall. He was breathing hard, his upper lip was wet and his eyes shone with the fierce fanatical glow of righteousness one recognized in the eyes of Muslim zealots. A black plastic plate over his shirt pocket identified him as Officer Jerpbak.

There in the police station, up against the wall, physical harm and worse shouting me in the face, I found a moment to indulge myself in the luxury of philosophy, to acknowledge my debt to empiricism, causality and John Locke. A mere eight hours ago I’d been padding round the apartment in my bathrobe, listening to the rain and Stravinsky preparatory to turning in. All was right with the world. And then the Grail, in the form of half a million dollars, sashayed through the room and I ducked out into the rain, inserted the key in the ignition of my Toyota, welcomed the answering shriek of the enervated engine, and drove here, to Tahoe, where I had managed to make an enemy of the most desperate and lawless sort — a cop — simply because I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly I felt indescribably weary. “Get your fucking hands off me,” I said.

Officer Jerpbak responded by spinning me around like an Indian club and slamming me back into the wall in the classic shakedown position. “Spread ’em,” he snarled, patting me down with all the finesse of a middleweight working out with the body bag. He gave elaborate consideration to the genital area, all the while breathing obscenities over my shoulder. “You fuck,” he whispered, his voice trembling at the breaking point. “You stupid-ass dildo motherfucker: you nearly killed me out there, you know that? Huh? Huh?” His breathing was furious, incendiary: I could hear the hardened snot rattling in his nostrils. All I wanted at that moment was to swell to Laestrygonian proportions and murder him, pound the other beefeaters to hamburger, set fire to the station house and go home to bed. Instead, I listened to the harsh jangle of handcuffs and relaxed under his grip.

“You know who was in that ambulance?” he demanded, leaning into me with one broad hand while he fumbled with the other for the cuffs. “Huh? Huh?” It was a quiz, that’s what it was. Twenty questions. Hit the jackpot and win two free tickets to the Martial Arts Exposition. “Merv Griffin, that’s who, shit-head. Merv Griffin.” There was reverence in his voice — he could have been naming the Pope’s mother or the winner of the Miss America Pageant — reverence, and outrage. “The man took twenty-two stitches in his thumb — he could of bled to death.” Suddenly he was shouting again. “You hear me? Huh? Huh?”

My hands were torn from the wall and forced behind me, there was the cold bite of the cuffs, the furious breathing, and then, just when things had begun to look grim, the soft restrained tones of a second voice, deus ex machina: “John, John, take it easy.” I looked over my shoulder. Officer Raab had joined us. He had a head the size of a beachball, crimson face, white hair. His voice was as soothing and softly modulated as a shrink’s. “John,” he repeated, “the man hasn’t done anything. He’s here to bail somebody out is all.”

Jerpbak wheeled round on him. “I don’t give a shit.” There was a whining edge to his voice, the young hothead reluctantly deferring to a higher authority, and I realized in that instant that Jerpbak was no older than I. It was a jolt. I could have submitted to a middle-aged cop — an Officer Raab or the mute desk sergeant — could have rationalized the father figure’s need to assert himself and all that, but with a coeval like Jerpbak the experience was humiliating, deeply shameful. A whole series of childhood episodes suddenly flooded my mind. I saw every physical confrontation in a flash, tallied up the wins and losses, counted the times I’d backed down, conjured the faces of the class bullies and extortionists as if they were snapshots in a riffled deck. No older than I. I jerked my neck at Officer Raab. “You don’t get these cuffs off in two seconds, I’ll sue everybody in this place for false arrest, and, and”—I was so wrought up I nearly sobbed the word—“brutality.”

Officer Raab had a soft puffy hand on Officer Jerpbak’s upper arm. They’d moved off a pace, and the older man was whispering in the younger’s ear like a lover. I watched Jerpbak: he looked like a cobra having his hood stroked. When I opened my mouth, Raab glanced at me as if I were a bit of offal — talking offal, something of a curiosity perhaps, but for all that worth no more than a cursory glance — and then moved off across the room and down a pitted corridor, Jerpbak in tow.

I was left standing in the middle of the room, hands manacled behind my back. Every cop in the place was staring at me. After a moment’s hesitation, a wizened little deputy crossed the room, released the cuffs and told me in a quiet voice to wait on the bench. I was exhausted, confused, furious. I eased down on the bench, breathing in gasps, adrenaline bubbling in my veins like grease in a deep fryer. Two minutes later I was snoring.

I was awakened by a pressure on my arm and a voice repeating my name. It was Phil. He looked as if he’d just emerged from the third tier of an opium den, his eyes drooping, shirt torn, hair wedged to one side of his head, and he was smiling the fragile smile of a man with a terminal headache. “Shit!” he said, breaking into a grin, and then he repeated himself six or seven times, alternating the exclamation and my name like a cheerleader trying to rouse a stand of lethargic fans. I blinked twice. There were pins and needles in my feet. All the fearsome G-forces of the spinning planet tugged at me as I rose wearily to exchange the backslapping hug we’d used in greeting ever since we saw Beau Geste together at the age of fourteen. “Kid,” I said. Then we stood there looking at each other for a moment, both of us grinning now, until Phil said he didn’t know what I was doing in Tahoe but that I couldn’t have come at a better time and did I happen to have another sixty-five dollars on me.

I did. I’d stuffed some bills in my wallet as I left San Francisco — a hundred and sixty dollars or so. Sixty-five and sixty-five was one-thirty, I was thinking as I reached for my wallet. That left me nothing to eat on and an expired Shell card for gas. I asked him what he needed it for.

Phil was rubbing his temples. He looked up at me out of bloodshot eyes and let the air whistle through his teeth. “For Gesh.”

“Who?”

“Gesh. He’s the new roommate. They’ve still got him back there,” indicating the rear of the building, “and I’d have to wait till the bank opens before I could bail him out. Crazy Eddie we’re going to have to take up a collection for.”

Crazy Eddie was the third roommate. He’d been behind the wheel when the road had insidiously narrowed and the triangular sign with the insistent arrow had sprung up in front of the bumper. Crazy Eddie flattened the sign and then took out three or four of the steel posts behind it before the right front wheel of Phil’s Cadillac sheared off and the car spun to a halt. All three of them had been drinking and eating Quaaludes, and their judgment was gone. They pulled themselves out of the car to assess the damage and saw that they had annihilated the guardrail of a narrow bridge somewhere off the main road. Black trees stared down at them. Water hummed under the bridge. Crazy Eddie expressed his regrets to Phil and offered his condolences with regard to the condition of the car. Phil asked him if he knew how to get home. Eddie applied in the affirmative, and they stumbled back into the car. Then he revved the engine and lurched out into the far lane, trailing sparks. The police followed the furrow to Phil’s house, arrested Phil in the act of urinating against a tree, dragged the comatose Gesh from the back seat, and proceeded into the house, where they peeled Crazy Eddie from the girl on the couch and booked him for DWI and leaving the scene of an accident. Bail was fifteen hundred dollars.

“I see what you mean,” I said, referring to Eddie’s dilemma, counted out the sixty-five dollars and watched Phil re-count it for the mute desk sergeant. Ten minutes later Gesh staggered down the pitted hallway, an officer at his side. He was wearing a watch cap, a reindeer sweater and a drooping khaki overcoat the Salvation Army might have rejected.

A roomful of cops, stenographers, fingerprint filers, minor functionaries and shackled suspects watched Phil introduce us. I saw cheekbones cut like slashes, unfocused eyes, a stubble of beard. The overcoat concealed a big man, two hundred pounds or more. There were nicotine stains on his teeth and one of his eyebrows was divided by a white scar. I nodded, made a stab at a smile. Gesh was unsteady. He fell back on one heel, covered himself by grabbing my hand in a bleary soul shake, and murmured, “Aces, man.”

Outside, it was snowing. Dry white pellets sifting down with a hiss. We tramped silently across the white expanse of the parking lot, the wind in our faces, a line of smeared footprints snaking out behind us and climbing the steps of the stationhouse in mute incrimination. Gesh jerked open the door of the Toyota and pitched headlong into the back seat. He was asleep by the time I cleared the snow from the windshield and thumped in beside Phil. My stomach was sour, my head ached. I wondered what in God’s name I was doing in a snowstorm in Lake Tahoe at eight-thirty in the morning.

I glanced at Phil. He was grinning at me, his wandering eye so far out of alignment it could have been orbiting the socket. Then he began to laugh, a braying gasping high-pitched shriek that choked on each breath only to come back all the stronger on the next. I couldn’t help myself. Delirium, hunger, sleep-deprivation: whatever triggered it, suddenly I was laughing along with him. Roaring. Beating the steering wheel, throwing my head back, struggling for control and then looking at Phil and collapsing all over again. This was hilarious — the snow, the parked car, the police — all of it. “Phil,” I gasped, my voice cracking with the absurdity of what I was about to say, “Phil, listen, how would you like”—I broke off, laughter nagging like a cough, the sheer silliness of it—“how would you like to make a quarter of a million dollars?”

Chapter 3

She stood at the door, looking through us, incongruous in an apron that featured a pair of chipmunks brandishing oversized carving knives and the slogan Why dontcba come up and see us sometime? Woodwork gleamed behind her, dried flowers threw shadows like teeth against the wall. I smiled. No response. We’d heard the music from the road the instant we stepped out of the car. Now, in the open doorway, it was an assault, loud enough to ionize gases, impair hearing, score the lining of the brain. There was an aggressive smell of cookery, too — garlic sizzling in olive oil — that constricted my throat and poked like a finger at my gut. It was drizzling. Cold. Aorta looked down at her feet, then up at my face and away again. “Hello,” she said.

Phil and Gesh shuffled behind me like a pair of thugs. Somehow, somewhere, Phil had dug up a khaki overcoat identical to Gesh’s — double-breasted, pleated, belted, and encrusted with stainless-steel loops and couplings that flashed like badges — and they were both wearing fishing hats with the brims pulled low. Aorta stepped back, Gesh paused to grind out his cigarette in the upturned palm of a headless mannequin outside the door, and then we were in.

The door closed with a heavy, airtight thump, like the door of a bank vault, and we found ourselves in a narrow hallway crowded with hunting trophies. Teeth, horns, nostrils. More dead flowers. Dumb-staring eyes. Javelinas drew back their lips to expose tusks the color of tobacco, mule deer thrust out their antlers, a wizened black creature I didn’t recognize seemed to be devouring itself in a frozen tumult of tooth and claw. “Well,” I said pointlessly. The music raged, the smell of food tore at our stomachs. I shouted out introductions, my companions ducked their heads distractedly, Aorta stifled a smile — was she naturally fractious or merely shy? — and then turned to lead us down a series of hallways and a flight of stairs to the lower level of the lodge she shared with Vogelsang.

She left us in what had once been the ballroom — big floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of treetops and ocean — and disappeared through a swinging door at the far end of the room. I caught a glimpse of Vogelsang, in chef’s hat and apron, standing over a stove as the door swung back on itself. Phil dropped into the sofa as if he’d been shot, and Gesh strode directly to the amplifier and cut the volume. The silence was thunderous. One minute a desperate ragged voice had been raging in my ears over the amplifed thump of tribal drums, and in the next I could detect the smallest sounds: a spoon rotated in a pot, the hiss of a gas burner. As if in compensation, the cooking smells seemed to intensify, tempering the atmosphere like a mother’s touch.

The room was huge, vaulted like a cathedral, and literally encrusted with the objects of Vogelsang’s collecting mania, as cluttered and baroque as a hall in the Museum of Natural History. Which is not to say that each article didn’t have its precise place or that a single piece was displayed to disadvantage. The Tahitian gill nets were suspended from the ceiling, softening the effect of the open beams, a gleaming espresso machine climbed the wall like an instrument of torture, knives and guns were arranged symmetrically on hooks over the fireplace, the oil paintings — richly framed and fastidiously hung — occupied a nook over a party of mannequins and stuffed badgers in coats and T-shirts grouped round a table in the corner. There was a long dining table in one section of the room, a TV and stereo cubicle in another, a museum display case containing pottery shards and fossilized human bones just to the left of the kitchen door. You could spend a week poking through it all and still have another eight rooms to tour.

“Hey,” Gesh was saying, “did you see this?” Phil got up to join him and whistle in appreciation; I laughed. He was standing over one of Vogelsang’s taxidermic triumphs, a pair of bobcats doing the lindy, claws entwined, knees bent, heads thrown back in Dionysian ecstasy. Beside them, a cakewalking salmon leaped into a lampshade, the soft-white bulb protruding from its mouth like an egg in a comedy routine.

Gesh was trying his index finger against the incisor of one of the bobcats when the kitchen door heaved open and Vogelsang burst into the room, grinning wide. “Welcome, welcome,” he said, pumping my hand, clapping Phil on the back, and hesitating ever so slightly before reaching for Gesh’s hand. Vogelsang had discarded the white hat and apron, and was wearing a T-shirt that announced: I’M OK, YOU’RE OK. There was a moment of confusion over the handshake — Vogelsang coming straight on for the businessman’s handclasp, Gesh cocking his wrist for the soul shake — and then Vogelsang was asking us what we’d like, cocktail, beer, pot, sherry, mulled cider, a nice dry not-too-tart zinfandel he’d come across at a little vineyard in Sonoma County?

Gesh asked him what kind of beer he had and Vogelsang listed six or seven imported brands. “Yeah, that sounds good,” Gesh said, sinking into the sofa and raising a work boot to the coffee table, “beer.”

Vogelsang was a little edgy — I could tell by his diction, which got ever more precise, sprinkled with “I shall”s and “pardon me”s, as if he were trying out for the role of Prince Charles in a made-for-TV movie of the future monarch’s lovelife. He was out of the room and back in an instant with our drinks — Phil and I had asked for scotch — and a tray of antipasto. “We’re having Italian tonight,” he said. “I hope you fellows don’t mind. I make my own pasta, and I’ve been simmering the sauce since I turned out this morning.”

I couldn’t help grinning: he was amazing. Entrepreneur, culturato, expert mechanic, carpenter and electrician, collector non-pareil — and gourmet chef to boot. We murmured our assent, the congenial guests. “Sounds great,” Phil said.

There was a silence. Vogelsang was twisting a wineglass in his hands. Perched on the arm of the sofa, he looked like a bird of prey, his nose hooked like an accipiter’s, the blond hair cropped close as feathers. Phil and Gesh were sunk into the couch like cephalopods washed up on the beach. Vogelsang’s tone was different now, terser, more businesslike. “So you fellows know all the details, correct?” He looked at me. I nodded.

Gesh stirred and pushed himself up with a grunt, as if it required a herculean effort, took a long swallow of beer, and then looked Vogelsang in the eye. “No,” he said, something obstinate and combative creeping into his voice, “why don’t you tell us about it?”

For the past week and a half Phil had been occupying the spare bedroom at Fair Oaks, and Gesh had been sleeping on the couch in the living room. It had taken them a single day to wrap up their affairs in Tahoe (Phil phoned the Tahoe Teriyaki, shouted “I quit” at the bewildered busboy who picked up the phone and then hung up, having forgotten to identify himself; Gesh simply failed to show up for his bartending job). The Cadillac was chalked up as a loss, the girl on the couch — her name was Nelda — was given responsibility for the chalet/cabin/condo/duplex, the landlord was berated and abused via telephone, and close friends were lied to (the official story was that Phil and Gesh were moving to San Francisco to work with me in the remodeling trade). It was rumored that Crazy Eddie’s mother was wiring bail money, so Phil felt he could rest easy on that score, and he closed out his bank account with a check for $32.14. “Well,” he said with a grin after he’d hung up on the landlord, “the only thing now is to pack up all of this shit,” gesturing at the mounds of arcane artifacts that littered the floor like the leavings of an aboriginal tribe, “and hit the road.”

We strapped Phil’s skis to the top of the Toyota, along with three or four cardboard boxes of key belongings and priceless mementoes, like the lacquered conch shell he’d brought back from Miami Beach and the history reports he’d been saving since the ninth grade. He lashed his mattress to the boxes, which were in turn lashed to the skis, which were fixed to the Toyota’s roof by means of a frayed bit of clothesline snaked through the windows and granny-knotted at the level of the driver’s forehead. His record collection, acetylene torch, and guitar took up the entire back seat. Gesh was easier. His worldly possessions amounted to two Safeway bags stuffed with odd bits of clothing — chiefly dirty underwear, judging from the top layer — and a box of paperback books.

When we had it all together it was nearly dark. The mattress-it was a new king-sized sleep-eze deluxe special model and Phil couldn’t bring himself to part with it — sagged over the rear window and mushroomed out from the top of the car like a pulpy carapace. I asked Phil if he was sure the rope would hold. “This?” he said, cinching a limp strand of clothesline to the radio antenna. “Are you kidding? You could take this thing through a hurricane and then drive coast to coast and back again.” He patted the mattress. “No: this baby isn’t going anywhere.”

As we were crossing the Bay Bridge four and a half hours later, a sudden gust lifted the mattress off the roof and deposited it beneath the wheels of a semi loaded with ball bearings. When it broke loose it took a box of mementoes with it, slamming at the roof of the car like an angry fist and then tearing back with a heart-seizing rumble and a rush of wind. “What was that?” Phil gasped, jerking awake.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to account for the sudden visibility through the rear window. “I think we lost something.”

Gesh’s voice was flat and emotionless. He could have been a radio commentator noting a minuscule change in hog futures. “Your mattress,” he said.

We stopped in the inside lane. Trucks shrieked by with a suck of wind, tires hissed like death, the hair beat crazily at our heads. I could barely catch my breath, each truck tearing the oxygen from my lungs like an explosion. The mattress had already been flattened along three-quarters of its length. Phil made several feints to rush out and nab it, but the traffic was mindless. Sixty miles an hour: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The bridge swayed with the thunder of the big semis. There was a stink of diesel fuel, gull shit, the dead man’s tide. We shrugged our shoulders and eased back into the car.

For the next nine days we divided our time equally between making preparations for our move to the country (Phil purchased an imitation Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew the size of an auger, Gesh washed his underwear, and I bought six snakebite kits) and deliberating over how we would spend our respective shares of the profits accruing from the summer camp. Gesh was going to reserve the first ten thousand of his $166,666.66 for a blowout at the carnival in Rio, then invest the balance in a thirty-five-foot sloop and cruise the Caribbean with dusky-skinned women, eating lobster and pompano. Phil was going to pay off his debts and maybe open another restaurant — a New Orleans-style fish house with a tile floor, teak booths and big lazy overhead fans. I was worried about taxes. I figured I could buy another neglected Victorian and clandestinely pump cash into it while simultaneously writing off the cost of labor and materials. At any rate, we all agreed that we were sick to death of scrambling for a living and that here was our chance to set ourselves up for life.

“I’m tired of busting my ass for somebody else,” Phil said, as if he’d been accused of liking it, “and then being so depressed I’ve got to spend every nickel I make on cocktails and tranquilizers.”

Gesh grunted his assent. My eyes burned with indignation over the wrongs and inequities Phil had suffered — not to mention the wrongs and inequities I’d suffered myself. “I know what you mean,” I said. We were sitting around the living room, idle and impatient, and we were profoundly drunk.

Society was rotten to the core, I said. It was dog eat dog and every man for himself. I was fed up with academics, real-estate agents and carpenters alike. You gave them everything — heart and soul and sweat — and they gave you nothing in return, not even the satisfaction of a job well done.

Phil said he knew exactly how I felt.

Gesh was perched on the windowsill, staring into his glass. After a moment he raised his head. “Society sucks,” he said with real vehemence, and then waved his hand in disgust. “That happy hippie crap.” I knew what he was driving at. The whole hippie ethic — beads, beards, brotherhood, the community of man — it had all been bullshit, a subterfuge to keep us from realizing that there were no jobs, the economy was in trouble and the resources of the world going up in smoke. And we’d bought it, lived it, invented it. For all those years.

His laugh was bitter. We were older now, he said, and wiser. We knew what counted: money. Money, and nothing else.

It was late afternoon, the day before we were to dine at Vogelsang’s, work out the last-minute details and then head up to the summer camp. I felt good. I felt ready. As ready as I had ever been for anything in my life. For six months I’d been idle, living off what I’d made from my last remodeling job (the housing market had closed up like a fist) and the pittance they gave me at the community college for teaching a summer course in freshman English, sinking lower into the pit of inactivity, self-denigration and loneliness. Now, sitting there in the glow of anticipation, the moment rich and immediate, Phil and his friend at my side like supporters at a pep rally, I felt purged of all that. Sunlight suffused the room like a dream of kings, Bruce Springsteen was singing about the Promised Land, we were drinking gimlets from a pitcher. I looked out over the rooftops of the city and pictured a fleet of ships lying at anchor, masts stepped and washed in golden light, and I felt like Coronado, like CortéeAs, gazing on the vessels that would take them across the flashing seas and into the vestibule of the treasury of the gods.

“Saltimbocca alla romana,” Vogelsang announced, backing through the door with a platter in each hand. “With steamed asparagus, and homemade pasta on the side.”

The table was littered with the remains of the first four courses, with beer bottles and fiascos of wine. After the antipasto, Vogelsang had served a dish of agnolotti, a brodo di pesce and caponata. About halfway through the soupcourse, Dowst joined us, bobbing into the room in blazer and button-down shirt, apologizing for his lateness and showing us a mouthful of gleaming equine teeth. We were eating so hard we barely noticed him.

When the meat had gone round, I tore a hunk of bread from the fresh-baked loaf and made a joke — in dialect, with Chico Marx flourishes — about the “unafortunate congregation of our-a late associates at-a the Appalachian lodge-a.” Phil laughed. “This is more like the last supper,” he said. No one else cracked a smile. There was a silence, broken only by the moist rhetoric of mastication and the ring of silverware. Finally Phil looked up and said: “Good stuff, Vogelsang. It jumps in your mouth.”

Vogelsang said he knew the chefs at Vanessi’s and Little Joe’s personally, and that he’d been invited into the kitchen on several occasions. He was eating a minuscule portion himself — no more than a single bite of each dish — and supplementing it with what looked like soggy cornflakes. “You’re not eating?” I said.

“Oh, God.” Vogelsang looked offended. “This stuff is much too rich for me.” He was eating a mixture of dried flaked fish and pine nuts. The saltimbocca stuck in my throat.

“Listen, Herb,” Gesh broke in, “why don’t you fill us in on the house and all — you know, what sort of thing we can expect up there.” The silence that fell over the table was absolute: no fork clattered, no lip smacked or tooth champed. Vogelsang’s Christian name was Herbert, but no one called him by his Christian name, not even his mother. He was known as Vogelsang, pure and simple. One of his girlfriends — I can’t recall her name — began calling him “Vogie” after the three of us had sat through a double bill of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. The next time I saw him he was alone.

Gesh’s words sank into the silence, absorbed like the butter that oozed into the hot bread before him. Gesh knew perfectly well that our benefactor hated to be addressed as Herb or Herbert or any other variant of his given name — I’d specifically warned him against it — and Vogelsang knew that Gesh was trying to provoke him. But if Vogelsang was anything, he was imperturbable. I’d never seen him angry, had never seen him display any emotion whatever, for that matter. To be angry, frightened, happy, moved, was a weakness, a loss of control — and Vogelsang never lost control. “Certainly,” he said, flashing Gesh a smile, “what do you want to know?”

Gesh was tearing at his veal with knife and fork, talking through the wedge of it stuffed inside his cheek. “Well, shit,” he said, “I mean we’re going to be living out there in the asshole of nowhere for the next nine months while you’re chewing the fat down at Vanessi’s — I want to know what kind of shape the place is in, does it have running water and electricity and all that?”

“Oh, yes,” Vogelsang said, reaching for his fish flakes, “yes, it has all the essentials.”

“You’ve got a generator for electricity,” Dowst said. “Runs off an old Briggs and Stratton engine. The water comes from a big redwood holding tank just up the hill from the cabin.”

“The place is perfectly adequate,” Vogelsang said. “With a little work it could be really cozy.” Aorta was sitting beside him. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled — she actually smiled — before looking down into her wineglass. I watched a piece of veal disappear between her black lips, then turned my attention back to Vogelsang. “It used to be a hunting lodge back in the twenties,” he was saying. “Great view, you’ve got a hilltop overgrown with fir and oak and madrone. There’s even a couple of redwoods.”

I could see the place. Or rather I could see the cabin we’d rented each summer when I was a kid. It was in Vermont, by the side of a lake. There was the smell of pinesap and wet leaves, the close comforting feel of tree trunks grown so thick your eyes couldn’t penetrate a hundred feet. In the morning, loons cried like lost souls and tanagers whistled outside the window. I remembered sitting around the stone fireplace at night, sunburned and happy, playing hearts with my father. This was going to be all right, I thought. Soothing. Rustic. An adventure. When I tuned back into the conversation, Dowst was talking about worm castings and the need for soil preparation. “The drainage stinks up there,” he was saying, “too heavy a clay content. So what you’ve got to do is create your own environment for each plant — a sand-mulch mixture for drainage and root expression, and the worm castings for nitrogen …”

Later, over espresso and millefoglie, the lights turned low and Vogelsang’s museum fading into the shadows, we got down to business. The cabin, the supplies, the equipment, the seeds, the eight-dollar per diem Vogelsang would front Gesh, Phil and me each week above and beyond our share of the final profits, the disposal of the mature plants (Vogelsang had a connection who would buy all we could produce, cash up front, no questions asked) — all this was easy. It was Gesh who asked for clarification of the one point that had crouched in all our minds like a stalking beast: “What if we get busted?”

Vogelsang handled it with perfect sangfroid. “I know nothing about you. I’d bought the land as an investment, and was surprised to hear that anyone was on it, shocked and stunned that illicit activities were taking place there. Under the table, of course, I pay all legal fees.”

Dowst had come alive at the mention of the verboten word. “First offense,” he said, sipping at his coffee. “No one’s going to jail — a fine and probation, that’s all.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought 1 saw his hand quaver as he set the cup down.

Gesh looked angry — he opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it. Aorta was expressionless. Across the table from me Phil eased back in his chair, the effects of the scotch and wine evident in the skew of his bad eye. He was already in his new restaurant, eating oysters at a marble-topped bar. I didn’t know what to think.

“Don’t worry,” Vogelsang said, “I’ll take care of you.”

Chapter 4

Perhaps it was the strange bed, the smell of the sheets or my excited imagination, but my dreams that night were exclusively erotic. Faces leered and tongues lapped, a thicket of pubic hair sprang from the ground, breasts and buttocks sprouted beneath me like vegetables, like fruit, ripe and wet and stippled with dew. Then I was downstairs, in the ballroom. Aorta was pinned to me, naked, her tongue was in my mouth, pasta bubbled on the stove, a legion of stuffed otters, beavers and bobcats stiffened their hackles, she was massaging my abdomen with the strange stiff bristle of her bleached hair. Then she broke away. Cruel and silent as the sphinx, she shifted round the room, playing with herself, taunting me until I lunged for her.

In one of those odd conjunctions of dream and reality, I was awakened by her voice. “Felix,” she was saying, her voice throaty and raw, as if cracked with sexual exhaustion, “everybody’s up.” I forced my eyes open. She was standing in the doorway, wrapped in a white robe, and she looked smaller than I’d remembered her, shrunken somehow, vulnerable. It was a moment before I realized what it was: she wasn’t wearing any makeup. No black lipstick, no punctured eyes, no skin-prickling claws. “Vogelsang’s making breakfast,” she whispered, hoarse, hoarse, and then turned and shuffled off down the hallway.

She was right. He was making breakfast: I could smell it. Coffee, Canadian bacon, flapjacks, eggs: the aura of the logging camp suffused the room, penetrated to the core of my being, and in that instant the genitive urge gave way to the alimentary. I jerked myself up and fumbled through my duffel bag for one of the new flannel shirts I’d bought for the summer camp. It was cold. As I buttoned the shirt, bacon in my nostrils, the chill air slapping at my thighs like a cold hand, I looked round the room with satisfaction. A moosehead hovered over the bed, the split-pine walls glistened with varnish, my jacket hung — simplicity itself — from a coat tree in the corner. I slipped into my jeans and workboots, feeling like a candidate for a cigarette ad.

Downstairs, in the big room we’d vacated in the dark, full of dark fears, there was a flood of sunlight. Everything was gleaming, pricked with light, from the glass of the display cases and the burnished copper of the espresso machine to the wild grinning eye Phil cast at me as I stepped through the doorway and held my hands out to the hissing fire. Phil was already at the table, hunched over a mound of flapjacks and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice; Gesh sat beside him, his plate empty, a Bloody Mary clutched in his hand as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet. I listened to the distant whine of a tea kettle, and to Vivaldi, who was measuring out the irretrievable moments as if to be sure we all had enough.

Vogelsang startled me. He slammed through the kitchen door, arms laden — coffee pot, pitcher of cream, a platter of eggs in poaching cups flanked by flat red slabs of bacon. He was wound up, so brisk he seemed awkward, each movement an effort to contain the flashes of energy that jerked at his fingers and set his limbs atremble. I thought he was going to lift off the floor and flap round the room like a cockatiel sprung from its cage, but he managed instead to set the platter down and boom a greeting at me. “Felix!” he shouted. “It’s about time.” He was wearing a running suit, chevrons at the shoulders, stripes down the seams of the legs. Too loudly, and far too cheerfully, he informed me that he’d already run seven miles and loaded the back of the pickup with our equipment.

I sat down and began to consume eggs. Vogelsang crouched at the head of the table, lecturing in spasms, alternately gulping fistfuls of garlic pills and ginseng and dosing himself with breath neutralizer. “Picks, shovels, a wheelbarrow,” he said, interrupting himself to swallow a desiccated-liver tablet. “A couple rolls of barbed wire and a come-along, and two little Kawasakis I’ve just finished overhauling. It’s all in the truck. Plus some odds and ends: an axe, a set of socket wrenches, claw hammer, that sort of thing. Oh: and the two-by-fours and whatnot for the greenhouse. Boyd will be up there at the end of the week, and he’s going to bring up the worm castings and seeds and all the rest in his van.”

Gesh was wearing a torn flannel shirt that featured cowboys with lariats, his hair was in aboriginal disarray and his eyes looked as if they’d been freshly transplanted. He mixed himself another Bloody Mary, threw back two Quaaludes and gave us a sick grin.

“You’ll need the bikes for patrolling the place once you get the crop in — three hundred ninety acres is no putting green, you know — and for handling the irrigation system during the dry months. But the first thing you’ve got to do — and this is vitally important — is to get that fencing up.” Vogelsang paused to shake the vial of breath spray irritably, set it down on the table and fumble in his pocket for another. Phil was reading the sports page. Gesh looked as if he were about to fall into his drink.

Half an hour later we were milling around Vogelsang’s driveway, preparatory to setting off on the four-hour drive to Mendocino County and the wild venue we would tame like the pioneers and prospectors we were. Gravel crunched under our feet. Birds piped and throbbled. Sunlight fell through the trees with a cheering insistence and the air was like milk. Vogelsang was fussing around the vehicles, cinching ropes and rearranging cartons of supplies, but I wasn’t paying him any attention. I was feeling the pulse of things, suddenly aware of that richness of color and texture you take for granted until you see it represented in oils or illuminating the big screen in a darkened theater. The smell of eucalyptus was as sharp as recollection.

Then Vogelsang was pumping my hand. Aorta stood beside him, restored to impermeability behind her layers of makeup and a black vinyl jacket. “Good luck,” Vogelsang said, reasserting his promise to look in on us in a week or so. Phil fired up the vehicle our benefactor had provided for us — an ancient, fender-punched Datsun pickup — and I climbed into the Toyota beside Gesh. “Where’s the ticker tape?” 1 called, grinning, as I turned over the engine and wheeled up the drive, feeling heroic, poised on the verge of greatness, ready for anything. The gears clattered, I waved my arm off, Phil fell in behind me and Gesh began to snore.

By the time we reached Santa Rosa the sky was the color of dishwater and sunk so low I had to turn the lights on. At Cloverdale, just below the Mendocino County line and fifty miles or so from Willits, our point of reference, it began to rain. Not with a burst of lightning or a roll of thunder, but with the sudden crashing fall characteristic of coastal precipitation.

The hammering on the roof woke Gesh. He said he felt like shit. “Raw and unadulterated,” he added, slitting a cellophane Mandrax packet with his teeth. “How about we stop for a cup of coffee and wait till it clears?”

We watched the water heave down the windows of the Hopland Coffee Shoppe in big scalloped sheets. It was so dark it could have been dusk shading into night. Phil was soaked through — apparently the truck’s window wouldn’t roll up. “Just my luck,” he said gloomily, and asked Gesh for some pharmaceutical help. Gesh, who seemed to have an unlimited supply, slipped him three Quaaludes. I took two. For equilibrium. It was ten-thirty in the morning. We waited until the waitress stopped refilling our coffee cups, shrugged our shoulders and hunched out into the rain.

Willits, the rain-blurred sign announced some fifty minutes later, had a population of 4,120 and stood at an elevation of 1,377 feet. We passed a series of diners, motels and gas stations, Al’s Redwood Room, and a Safeway market. The town seemed contained in a single strip, stretched out along Highway 101 for the convenience of tourists intent on the redwood forests to the north. It was as bleak and barren and uninspiring as an iceberg bobbing in the Bering Sea. Gesh and I caught glimpses of it through the beating windshield wipers. “For the next nine months,” I said, a trace of retardation in my voice as a result of the drug, which shifts your system down a couple of gears into a sort of prehibernatory torpor, “this is our closest urban center.”

“Urban center,” Gesh repeated, his voice as lugubrious as a noseblow. “Shee-it.”

Fifteen miles north of Willits we were to turn off on a blacktop road, follow it past a place called Shirelle’s Bum Steer and six or seven tumbledown farms, and then up a gravel drive to a gate that opened on “five point three miles of unimproved dirt road,” to quote Vogelsang’s directions. Fine. But it was raining so hard we missed the turnoff and Phil nearly slammed into my tail end when I braked to cut a U-turn. I rattled up on the shoulder, hit the emergency flasher and ran back to confer with him.

The intensity of the rain was staggering: I felt I was carrying a sack of potatoes on my back as I jogged the twenty steps to the pickup and poked my head through the open window. Rain tore at the back of my neck and sent exploratory tributaries down the collar of my jacket. A lone logging truck hissed up the highway, spewing water, and vanished in the haze. “What’s the story?” Phil mumbled, each word played out on a string like a yo-yo winding down. The sagging pompadour was flattened across his forehead and a drop of water depended from his nose.

“Vogelsang said fifteen miles from Willits. I read fifteen and a half on my odometer. The road we just passed must be it.”

Phil was shivering. The iris of his wild eye looked like an ice crystal in a cocktail glass. “Christ,” he moaned, “I hope so. All’s I want to do now is sit in front of the fire and crash for a couple hours.”

Shirelle’s Bum Steer greeted us like a shout of affirmation as we lurched across the highway and onto the presumptive road. I could hear Phil honking his joy behind me as we sped past the place — a ramshackle country bar attached to a house in need of paint. A pair of mud-streaked pickups huddled beneath the drooling oak out front, the hand-lettered sign was pitched at a drunken angle, and a single sad Coors neon glowed in the window like a candle at the shrine of a martyr. I took it in at a glance, noting bleakly that this was our nearest outpost of civilization. “The Land of the Rednecks,” Gesh muttered, and added that he felt like Lewis of Lewis and Clark, or maybe it was Clark, and then we were rattling over a raging tributary of the Eel River (in summer it would subside to a series of fetid, mosquito-breeding pools) and threading our way up a valley between cropped, long-faced hills that bristled with pine like so many unshaven cheeks. We were counting off tumbledown farms and scouring the left-hand side of the road for a block of stone that protruded from the ground like an admonitory finger — our indication to swing into the next road to our right — when Gesh shouted “Eureka!” and I cut hard into a dirt road that was co-incidentally the brown rippling bed of a stream.

Suddenly we were going uphill — climbing a precipice — the tires groping for purchase, water slashing at the fenders, the engine cranking with a propulsive whine and carrying us fifty or sixty feet in a headlong rush before the wheels sank to the hubcaps in a sea of reddish mud. Phil, loaded down with the barbed wire and Kawasakis, was able to develop better traction, and careened wildly up the hill and into the back of the stalled Toyota. I don’t recall the sound effects, whether there was a crunch, a shriek or a thud. But my head flew forward as if on an urgent journey of its own, the windshield groaned and then flowered in silver filigree, and the trunk latch popped open, forever. I looked at Gesh. He was cursing, and there was blood on his forearm.

Then we were all out in the downpour, ankle-deep in mud and roiling water. Trees loomed over us like cupped black hands, the rain lashed our faces with a thousand stings, I rubbed my forehead and discovered that an object the size and consistency of a golf ball had been inserted beneath the skin in the vicinity of my left eyebrow. For a moment we just stood there, hunched like lost souls awaiting the ferry across the river of lamentation, cursing softly. Then Gesh plunged into the undergrowth like an enraged bull, tearing at ferns and briars and poison oak, knocking down saplings, uprooting stumps. I thought he’d gone mad.

Meanwhile, Phil had begun to dance around the road, wringing his hands and rotating his head as if he were trying out an esoteric new routine for Alvin Ailey. “Hey, I didn’t know—“ he began, but I waved him off. “I’m okay,” I said, noting at the same time and with the dispassion of a man in a movie theater watching the Lusitania go down, that my duffel bag had been thrown from the trunk and into the center of the streambed. The heavy khaki cloth had gone dark with wet, and debris had already begun to collect against it. Inside were my shirts, my socks, my underwear, my sweaters. I took hold of the dripping strap and jerked the bag up out of the mud, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process. Phil helped me heave the sodden thing back into the trunk, and together we managed to secure the ruptured latch with a piece of wire.

Suddenly Gesh emerged from the woods, his face cross-hatched with welts and contusions, the trench coat flapping about his knees. He was dragging a downed tree the size of a battering ram. For a moment we just stood there gaping at him, our hands at our sides, rain crashing through the trees, mud swirling at our feet. It was as if we’d just been wakened from a dream of sleeping. “Christ ass,” Gesh shouted, “give me a hand, will you?”

I could feel the drug loosen its grip — think of a crouton drawn from a pot of fondue — and then I was at Gesh’s side, jerking furiously at the wet, moss-covered log. Phil fell in beside me, and we maneuvered the thing alongside the car, then staggered into the undergrowth for another. We worked silently, grunting at one another, each locked in his own thoughts (I was thinking of hot showers, hot soup, electric blankets and thermal underwear). Everything dripped, thorns raked at our wrists and faces, sowbugs crept up our arms, rain hissed in the branches like a stadium packed with disgruntled fans. As Phil and I wrestled with a half-petrified log, Gesh jacked the Toyota out of the mud. “All right, push!” he exhorted, the jack at its apogee, and the three of us leaned into the fender and then jumped back as the car slammed down on the makeshift platform with a percussive splintering crack. Then we jacked up the other side.

There was a smell of slow rot on the air, of mold and compost. Birds mocked us from the trees. Our hands and faces were black with loam, as if we’d been buried and unearthed and buried again. Gesh tried to light a cigarette. His pants were torn at the knee and the trench coat hung from him like a wet beach towel. Phil was clowning. He bent to scoop up a handful of mud and slap it down across the crown of his head, like Stan Laurel at the conclusion of a pie-throwing skirmish. It wasn’t funny. “Okay,” Gesh growled, flinging down the wet cigarette and spreading his big hands across the indented bumper of the Toyota, “why don’t you see what you can do?”

I wiped my hands on the seat of my pants and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was musty and cold, the windows opaque with wet. I turned the key, took note of the answering roar (we’d lost the muffler apparently), and watched the wipers flail at the rain. Then I revved the engine, peeled the bark from the logs and hydroplaned up the road as far as I could go, my co-workers slogging madly behind me like refugees chasing after the Red Cross wagon. When I bogged down, the whole process started over again: heave, haul, crank, shove. Sometimes I’d manage to make a couple hundred feet; other times I’d come wheeling off the log grid and sink instantaneously in the mud. The rain was no help: it fell steadily all afternoon. And we were, as I was later to discover, climbing a vertical drop of something like six hundred feet from the blacktop road to the cabin.

Finally, after four and a half back-breaking hours, we reached a point at which the road began to level out, and when I came off the launching pad for what must have been the twentieth time, I kept going. The car fishtailed right and left, low-hanging branches swooped at the windshield, the cheers of my partners faded in the background, and I kept going. There was a short straightaway, a series of S curves and then a wide sweeping loop that brought me up into a rain-screened clearing about the size and shape of a Little League field. I didn’t know where I was going, slashing through swaths of waist-high weed and thumping over frame-rattling boulders and mounds of rusted machine parts, hooked on the idea of momentum …

Until I saw the cabin.

No, I thought, no, this can’t be it, as I slammed on the brakes and skidded into a heap of scrap metal that featured a rusted boxspring and the exoskeleton of the first washing machine ever made. I’d experienced hiatuses between expectation and actuality before — who hasn’t? But this was staggering. Hunting lodge? The place was an extended shack, the yard strewn with refuse, the doorway gaping like an open mouth, like the hungry maw of the demon-god of abandoned houses demanding propitiation. Someone — Vogelsang, no doubt — had nailed tarpaper up on the outer walls in place of shingles, and there was a ridiculous white cloud of sheet Styrofoam lashed across the roof (in the hope of forestalling leaks, as I was later to learn). One thing I was sure of, even then, sitting stunned behind the fractured windshield of the stalled Toyota: no one had lived in the place for twenty years. Or more.

Inside, it was worse. The roof leaked in eight places, the front door had blown in and torn back from its hinges, a furious collision of sumac and vetch darkened the windows. I dropped my duffel bag on the cracked linoleum floor (a floral pattern popular in the forties), and walked round the main room as if I were touring a museum. The room was L-shaped, roughly divided into kitchen and parlor. I paused over the.22 holes in the kitchen wall, the gas-powered refrigerator that had been nonfunctional for thirty years, the sink stained with the refuse of forgotten meals. There were two small bedrooms off the parlor, and a crude staircase that led to a third in the attic. The kitchen door gave onto a partially enclosed porch that connected with a dilapidated storage shed. Beyond the storage shed, a rust-pitted propane tank (Pro-Flame) and a grim, tree-choked ravine. I took all this in, shivering, and then turned to the stove.

There were two stoves, actually. One was a range — combination gas and wood, circa 1935—and the other was a squat wood stove made of cast iron. There was no wood. All the clothes I owned were soaked through, my shoulders had begun to quake involuntarily, I was exhaling clouds. Something had to be done. Beyond the brown windows lay 390 acres of pine, hardwood and scrub, every stick of it wet as a sponge. I pictured myself back out in that dripping tangle, snapping off branches and peeling back strips of sodden bark, and dissolved the image as abruptly as I might have switched channels on the TV. Then I thought of the storage room, and slammed through the kitchen door in a rush, inadvertently flushing a bird that had been roosting in the porch beams. It flew up in my face like a bad dream, and then it was gone.

The storage room was penumbral, cluttered with refuse. There were bundles of yellowed newspaper (TRUMAN CALLS FOR FAIR DEAL; DIMAGGIO UNRAVELS SOX), staved-in gasoline cans and remnants of what might once have been a hand loom. I stepped into the low-ceilinged room as I might have stepped into Pharaoh’s tomb, treading carefully, keeping an eye out for lucre — or rather, in this case, the merest splinter of anything combustible — among the heaps of rags, cans and bottles that flowed across the floor and slapped at the walls like the spillage of some diluvian tide. Dust lay over everything, white as pulverized bone. When I snapped a chair leg across my knee, a pair of sleek dark forms shot through the jagged window on the near side of the room. Rats, I thought absently — or maybe ground squirrels. Five minutes later I had a respectable pile of furniture fragments and odd pieces of lumber. I set it atop a bundle of mildewed newspaper, hauled the whole mess back into the main room, checked the flue on the stovepipe, and realized I didn’t have any matches.

This was too much. I cursed. Kicked something. And then threw myself down on the stinking sun-faded sofa opposite the cold stove. Dust rose in a mighty swirling mushroom cloud and settled on my wet jacket. For a while I just sat there shivering, listening to the rain percolate through the ceiling and spatter the ancient linoleum, the storm laying down a screen of static outside. Then I heard the laboring engine of Phil’s pickup, churning its way up the mountain. They were in for a surprise, I thought, lifting myself from the sofa and gazing out through the open door at the raked and rugged hills, the trees like claws, the gray distance that couldn’t begin to suggest the gaps between ridges.

Impatient, jittery, wet to the bone, I paced the room half a dozen times and then thought of looking over the bedrooms again, with an eye to staking a claim on one of them. The nearest was unremarkable: four walls, crudely done (some misguided soul had attempted to put up slabs of sheetrock and had given up halfway through the job), a torn mattress set atop a boxspring, a broom handle nailed diagonally across the far corner to serve as a clothing rack. I moved past it, down the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, and then into the back bedroom. It was as spare and Essene as the first. The walls were pine slats, there was a boxspring propped up on wooden packing crates, an unfinished window looked out on the trees. At first I almost missed the calendar nailed to the inside of the door. But the door swung to on uneven hinges, and when I turned, it was staring me in the face.

A calendar. I could hear the pickup rattling into the yard, the engine wheezing like a miler’s lungs. The picture over the month-and-date portion of the calendar featured a woman in a cloche hat, her face averted, skirt pinched to reveal her legs — a dull, brownish, Norman Rockwell sort of thing. But it wasn’t the picture that caught my eye. It was the year—1949, the year I was born. Odd, I thought, and then I noticed the month. November. My month. I could feel the blood rushing to my stomach, as if I’d been hit in the midsection, the impossible, nagging cosmic joke of it, the heavy black pencil strokes an act of the will, irrefutable, closing in on the very day. My day. My birthday. Circled in black.

I stepped back involuntarily. “Hey, Felix!” Gesh was shouting from the front room. “You in there?” It was one of those moments that annihilate a lifetime of empirical assumptions with a sudden mocking laugh. “Felix!” Gesh shouted. I stepped back another pace, as bewildered and disoriented as if I’d just been slapped.

Something was wrong here, and I didn’t like it. From childhood I’d been taught that there were answers for everything, that the square root of four was two, that the sky was blue because of the diffraction of light through dust particles in the atmosphere, that life originated from the action of an electrical charge on simple proteins. I was not superstitious. Like anyone else, I knew that in an infinite and multifarious universe, the most bizarre coincidences were commonplace, were calculable probabilities. Nonetheless, I wanted to quit. Right then, right there, my face smarting and heart hammering, I wanted to quit.