Four for a Quarter: Fictions

Four for a Quarter

REHOBOTH

The photo booth is just inside off the boardwalk, away from the crowds. The backs of the white benches swing over the seats. You can sit facing the ocean or sit facing the storefronts. Out on the white cluttered beach, two Amish couples wade in the sheeting waves. Their shoes and socks chest high. Skirts tucked between bare legs. Their blue brilliant against the white sand and sky. Four of them. Two men and two women. They have come a long way. Everyone else pretends, I pretend, we are not looking. They toss bread to the cloud of gulls.

THE CHILDREN'S MUSEUM

It is educational. The photo booth is made of clear glass panels so that the lenses and the machinery that develops the photographic strips can be seen. I twirl the piano stool inside to the right height. I imagine that they have replaced the camera too with one that takes X-rays, and my souvenir will record a transparent me. My heart will be an opaque dollop in the airy cage of my ribs. I watch the coin I drop travel through the machine, and the ghostly parts begin to ratchet and twitch. Outside a small crowd has gathered to watch.

PENN STATION

More than the confession, I remember learning about confession. Behind the heavy curtains of the booths, on a little table next to the priest's chair were paper and pencil. I thought they were there to help the priest remember. Yes, he will note the cardinal sins and the venial ones, add up the penance in long columns of numbers. I saw my sins would be written in a ribbony hand, hauled into the air by fluttering cardinals. The words, unknotting as they flew up, trailed from the beaks of the birds, leaving me as white and clean as new paper.

WOOLWORTH'S

I part the curtains of the photo booth, get out, and wait. Women clerks in pastel smocks (one aqua, one pink, one mint, one yellow) point up. The store's parakeets and canaries are loose. The birds flit between perches of sale banners hanging from the stained ceiling tile. I am the same person now as when I went into the booth. I am the same in each of the four black-and-white pictures of me. I blow on the wet strip. I try to count the birds now roosting on the suspended fluorescent light fixtures at the very back of the store.

Diagnostic Drift

1.

You flowed and flowed. You stood in the bathtub, the blood sheeting your legs. I called the doctor, who said to bring you in and who later said there were probably always this many miscarriages. He was speaking of the general population, not you. Back then, he said, they were mistaken for menstrual bleeding. These days new tests let us know sooner. We call this diagnostic drift, he said, a condition always present but unseen. Until now. Now we know what we are seeing sooner. Now we know sooner what we are seeing. You had held your dress up away from the blood, and I had daubed at your bleeding with a wet washcloth. You hadn't known you were pregnant until you weren't. A classic case, the doctor said. Should we worry? I asked. Should this have happened? It is diagnostic drift, the doctor said. A few years ago you wouldn't even know what happened happened. This happens all the time. We won't even need to notice until the third time it happens, if it even happens again at all.

2.

There, there, another doctor said. It happens all the time. This time, you had known earlier you were pregnant and had been pregnant longer. You'd seen a sign, you said, the day it happened. An English sparrow chick dead on the sidewalk you walked on the way home. This time, in the bathtub, the blood was thicker and there was tissue in the pile of the washcloth. The doctor asked us to bring it with us to the emergency room. There, there, she said. It is difficult, the doctor said. She held your hand. This happens all the time. There is no way of knowing. We know more now, she said, but we don't know everything. We'll keep an eye on it, she said, riffling through the sheets of paper. You looked off into the distance. At a distance, I looked at you, your hair fanned out on the white paper sheet.

3.

It is more common than you might think, this doctor said to me. You were getting dressed behind the curtain. You had started bleeding during a prenatal visit. Things had been going well this time. Your doctor called me at work. He wanted me to drive you to the hospital, didn't want you to drive yourself. She's lost some blood, he said. She's a bit light-headed, he said to me on the phone. I drove through the streets of a new city. We had just moved. All the streets looked the same — three-flats and Cyclone-fenced front yards. It was the doctor at the hospital who said that this was more common than you'd think. While you were there, I walked around the blocks of hospital buildings. I walked around three times. I told the doctor about the other times, about the doctor who had told us of diagnostic drift and that now we should be paying attention. Let's just wait and see, she said. These things happen. I asked her how long we should wait before we tried again, and she thought, for some reason, I meant exercise instead of sex. As soon as possible, she said. The sooner the better. But then when she understood what I meant she said, oh that. I watched your shadow move on the white cloth screen. Give it a few days, weeks, a month or so, maybe. Talk with your doctor.

4.

There is no blood. There's nothing to be done. There is your heartbeat but the other one is gone. The doctor has his nurse make the arrangements at a clinic for the D&C. We know the city better now. The main roads empty into rotaries I must circle, working my way around to the new road I need to take. I drop you off at the clinic. There is no place to park, so I idle at the front gate. You're escorted in through the picket of a few silent protesters. I drive around the city, lazily circling the rotaries a few times, and then cruise along the highway next to the widening river where eights and fours skate back and forth on the smooth surface, disappearing in the shadows beneath the old bridges. I know we know more now than we did, but it is hard to say. I know right now you are being questioned. An aide is asking questions and writing your answers onto forms she keeps in a file. Your history is being worked up. This happened and this happened and this happened and then this.

Four Fifth Beatles

HAIBUN BY YOKO ONO

STUART SUTCLIFFE

a cicada shell it sang itself utterly away

— Basho

Stuart's fingers blistered during the long rehearsals. He never played long enough for his fingers to callus. The group often used his flat to rehearse.

Pete's mum owned The Casbah Coffee Club. One night, John and McCartney persuaded Stuart to buy, on time, a Höfner bass guitar. Bad skin and pimples, McCartney said of him much later. Stuart had the skin of an art student.

In Germany, he wears dark Ray-Ban clip-on flip-up sunglasses like baseball players wear. He sings “Love Me Tender.“ Stuart's hair was the first hair hair. He asked Astrid to cut his hair to look like Klaus's. She cut his greased-back, teddy-boy hair into a mop. And, after that, everyone's hair was cut that way.

December, George is sent back to England, underage. McCartney and Pete attempt arson at the Bambi Kino, are also deported. John takes a train, ferries home. Stuart stays in Hamburg. He has a cold. He meets Astrid, and eight months later he leaves The Beatles. He wants to paint. He wants something else.

McCartney borrowed Stuart's bass until he could earn enough to buy a smaller left-handed Höfner of his own. I can hear Stuart ask McCartney not to change the strings around. And I can see McCartney play it upside down.

Before all this, before the time in Hamburg, Stuart joined John, McCartney, and George. They were The Silver Beetles then. In the Renshaw Hall Bar, Stuart helped John change the name. They liked Buddy Holly. They liked his band, The Crickets, and came up with The Beatals. John later changed the name to The Beatles. It sounded French, he thought, and he got to Beatles through “Le Beat“ and “Beat-less.“

Later, in Germany, Stuart collapsed in an art class in Hamburg. His condition grew worse. April. Stuart died before the ambulance reached the hospital. Three days later Astrid told The Beatles at the Hamburg airport. His brain exploded. His father did not know for three weeks. He was sailing to South America. A priest told him when he docked in Buenos Aires.

There Stuart is on the Lonely Hearts Club album cover. There, among the dead, next to the flat picture of Aubrey Beardsley. “He's the artist around here,“ John said of Stuart.

sudden ice storm storms

brick hearth the hearth cricket sings

in spite of this this

BRIAN EPSTEIN

clinging to the bell he dozes so peacefully this new butterfly

— Buson

Throughout his life Brian was kind. When John married Cynthia, Brian was the best man and afterwards bought their lunch. During Cynthia's pregnancy, Brian arranged for a private room in a hospital and offered them use of his flat. They needed somewhere to live. He was Julian's godfather.

Brian loved men, though no one knew until years after his death. It had been an open secret among his friends. In the army, he had a tailor make an officer's uniform he wore when cruising the bars of London. He was arrested for impersonating an officer at the Army and Navy Club on Piccadilly. He was never charged, agreeing to see an army psychiatrist instead. They discharged him ten months later. The medical grounds were “emotionally and mentally unfit.“

Brian studied acting. He was arrested for “persistent importuning.“ He was blackmailed. Throughout the later court case against the blackmailer, Brian was “Mr. X.“ Anonymity was allowed then. John often made jokes about it to friends and to Brian. No one outside said a word.

The night Dylan turned them on to pot in New York, McCartney remembers Brian staring into a mirror, pointing at himself saying “Jew! Jew! Jew!“ over and over. McCartney thinks of this as hilarious and finds it “very liberating.“

John and Brian went on a four-day holiday together to Barcelona. The Spanish holiday was made into a movie, The Hours and Times. There were other books and interviews.

John wrote “You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.“

Epstein was overlooked when John, McCartney, George, and Ringo received the MBE. George said that the MBE stood for “Mister Brian Epstein.“

Brian's autobiography is A Cellarful of Noise.

McCartney said, “If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian.“

John said that Brian's death was the beginning of the end.

August. Brian dies. A hot summer. An overdose. The Beatles, in India, meet with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Jimi Hendrix cancels his concert at the Saville Theatre the same day. Out of respect, he says.

Brian had for years taken pills to sleep. Sleep caught up to sleep. Mr. X.

In a meeting at the music store, Brian had proposed to the boys the idea of managing them. John, George, and Pete arrived late for the meeting — they had been drinking. McCartney was not with them. They told Brian he was taking a bath. He was taking a bath. John invited a friend to the meeting so the friend could later give his opinion of Brian. John introduced him to Brian saying, “This is me dad.“

spring grass going green

there where the scarab buried

last year's pill of dung

BILLY PRESTON

Even with cicada — Some can sing Some can't

— Issa

Billy's kidney deteriorated in his later years, his hypertension. In 2002, a kidney transplanted. Four years later, he died in June, in the desert, in the West. He died of complications and other complications.

A year before he died, he had entered a rehabilitation in Malibu. Drugs. Respiratory failure there left him comatose. For the year he slept, sleeping into sleep.

In 1962, as part of Little Richard's touring band, Billy met the Beatles when Brian promoted a Liverpool show. They'd hook up again later.

The band always already about to break up was recording “Let It Be.“ George, closest to Billy, had quit the studio, had gone to see Ray Charles in concert in London. There, Billy was playing organ. George brought him back to Abbey Road, a kind of gift, a kind of glue.

He joined the band on the roof, the final public appearance. “Get Back“ was credited this way: “The Beatles with Billy Preston.“ His electric piano is prominent throughout the song. He plays an extended solo.

In the movie, years later, he plays Sgt. Pepper in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

As a boy of twelve, he appeared in St. Louis Blues, played W. C. Handy as a young man. He was a regular on Shindig!, a member of the show's house band.

“Will It Go Round in Circles“ and “Nothing from Nothing“ were his two hits. Billy composed Joe Cocker's “You Are So Beautiful.“ Turning breath into those Os. All those circles, breathing.

He was the fifth member of the Plastic Ono Band. He never put his hands in the wrong place, Klaus said. Or Ringo said it. Or George. Or John. Or I said it about his hands.

John said then, I was Wind. I was Wind. Billy, Breeze.

Touring, Billy, health failing, learned that George had died. He performed in the Concert for George in London, played a tribute song. Get back, he sang. Get back. Get back to where you once belonged.

copper coin heads up

the yellow flag iris bed

Japanese beetle

GEORGE MARTIN

sounds of a temple bell reverberate in a circle a long night

— Shiki

The Beatles auditioned for George in June at the Abbey Road studios. They recorded four songs. Martin wasn't there and only listened to the tape after the session ended. Their original songs were simply not good enough, George thought. And he asked each Beatle if there was anything they didn't like. George, The Beatle, said to George, “Well, there's your tie, for a start.“

In September, they recorded their first recording, “How Do You Do It.“ George thought it would be a hit. Everyone else hated it. It wasn't a hit. The next song was “Love Me Do.“ George asked Ringo to play tambourine and maracas, and he did though he was not happy about it. In November, John and McCartney begged George to record another of their original songs, “Please Please Me,“ and he did, but as an up-tempo song not as a slow ballad. George looked out over the mixing deck at the end of the session and said, “Gentlemen, you have just made your first number one record.“ He would be right that time.

Much later, after it was all over, George post-produced The Beatles Anthology that once was to be called The Long and Winding Road. George used an old four-track analog mixer to mix the songs instead of a digital deck. He found the machine somewhere at EMI. He explained this by saying that the old deck created a completely different sound, which a new deck could not recreate.

He also said the whole project seemed strange. He listened to himself chatting in the studio, thirty years before on the tape between the takes. His voice came back to him in this simple way.

George did not produce the two new singles overdubbing two of John's demos. George had lost his hearing. He left the work to others. He had listened for hours, just listening to John's voice with no desire to change or change it.

George said he scored “Eleanor Rigby“ after Bernard Herrmann's score for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho. He liked the way the bows cut through the strings.

With “Strawberry Fields Forever,“ George blended two very different takes into a single master through careful editing.

George is the not dead one of all the ones who are dead now. He played all the instruments, spliced the tape. He wrote the final notes, scored scores.

On “In My Life,“ he played a sped-up baroque piano solo. Nothing was ever fast enough, and then later, he thought, it had all been too fast.

windrows dry tinder

timothy exhales fireflies

the second cutting

4H

HANDS

I heard a story once about a boy who, with his own hands, felt through the mass of steaming alfalfa in a windrow looking for his father's fingers cut clean off by the baler. His father had walked back to the yard to sit in the metal glider and wait for the helicopter but not until he had the presence of mind to tell the boy to find the fingers somewhere in the hay. “Put them in the cooler with the chemical ice.“ The boy dumped the lunch on the ground and got down on his hands and knees to sort through the grass at his feet.

I was all alone when my own hands in their gloves slid off like gloves as I monkeyed with the bean header on the gleaner. My father had gone to town. My mother was at church. My hands were gone somewhere in the idling red machine. My lunch was in the cab. The sky was blue. The machinery had crimped the flesh enough to staunch the heavy bleeding for now. I held my arms up away from my body like doctors do after they have washed up, and I turned and walked on up to the house.

At the county fair each year I showed an animal or two, currying the coat of the steer, ratting its tail into a cloud, raking back the white lick on the forehead 100 times. The judge slaps the rump of the winner and leaves his handprint in the smooth fur. The animals give a kick or two. And later, the auction is a field of waving hands. That night in the show ring us kids chased the pigs, tried to tackle them in the mud. We clawed at them as they ran between us and through our legs. I had one in my hands, all slime and scum, and then it tore away from me.

That boy found most of the fingers, placed them one by one in the palm of his hand, then plopped them, one by one, down on the bottom of the plastic cooler, on the frozen plastic packs of chemical ice. The fingers were like bait, or more like what you've caught for bait, fingerlings. He closed the cooler and turned and walked up to his house, hung on to the door handle and listened for whump whump whump of the chopper blades coming from the city.

HEAD

The screen door was open, and I backed into the kitchen, a bit light-headed now. It was dawning on me now — I no longer had my hands — and, now that I think of it, now that it is over, I paused to consider using words like grasp and handle to tell myself what had happened to myself and found it so funny that we think of thinking as something like a hand. Get a hold of yourself, I remember remembering.

We are still on a party line even now way out here in the middle of nowhere. Talking on the phone you can hear the voltage bleed out of the wire, draining as another phone is picked up along the line, and the person you are talking to retreats into all that distance, the voice getting smaller and smaller, the message reeling out into a whisper while you silently nod so as not to say what you are thinking and hope the shaking of your head or the lines on your face get picked up and transmitted on their own past the neighbors tapping in. I need to find a pen or pencil, something, I thought, to dial for help. And the phone in the kitchen must still be dialed dialed. It's not a touch-tone, the adding machine pad of numbers that people still say they dial.

I nosed the pencil across the tablet where my father had that morning played with some puts or calls, doodling the numbers on the blotter. We were getting deeper into futures, to hedge our risk, and placed orders over the phone in code to confuse whoever that moment was listening. We went to Chicago to meet our broker and watched the pits at work. It was all hands flocking above a pastel herd of men.

The pencil. I remember smelling the paper and the crumbs of rubber from the eraser and the tinny smell of the crimped tin sleeve connecting the eraser to the wood part of the pencil and the rusty metal smell of greasy lead, but that might have been the drying blood. The pencil fell on the floor and rolled a bit beneath the table. I was off balance and had to, of course, fall to my knees because there was nothing left to catch my fall but my knees. I was bobbing for pencils there for a second until I worked the pencil — it was painted red — into my mouth with my tongue, licking the point like you lick the point before making a mark. And then I had to climb back up, all leg, an armless lift — snatch, a clean and jerk. I was hefting the pencil, and it weighed a ton.

HEART

My mother has a thing for hands and hearts. Sometimes just hearts or hands that hold a heart, a heart in a palm of a hand. It is Irish, I think, or Amish. The hex sign she hung on the pole shed, the circle of heart-shaped petals, the petals like palms, hearts held in each palm. She majored in such stuff at State, where she met my dad, spending time in laboratories of fabric and model kitchens of the future. As a kid, I'd watch her quilt, the extra snub-nosed thimbles capping each one of my fingers and thumbs, armored touching. I'd press the pebbled tips into my skin and pull them off, leaving a cluster of vaccine scars, a constellation of little moons all pockmarked. She shows the finished goods at the fair along with all the embroidery she's done while watching the home shows the satellite dish sucks in. Those shows are always the same. They start with a mess and then, by knowing how, end in some revelation of order. Look, they always say, and the shot isn't of the thing but of the people looking at the thing.

I looked at where my hands had been, weeping — my wrists not me. The carpet was new and still out-gassing that smell of new carpet.

My mother won a ribbon once on the simple strength of folding cloth, crimping napkins into the shapes of birds or pineapples or a kind of cotton geyser spouting from a glass. I'd watch her hands fold the flat fabric into a life. It seemed such a shame to watch my own hands undo all that work, leave the used-up napkin a balled-up fist on the plate, the wad expanding as we watched, another kind of life. It was etiquette, she'd always say. The right and proper thing to do, to use up the art, to put the art to use.

Still, she has her taste is all I'm saying, and she keeps house.

Rescue found me in the sunken bathtub sunk in, my handless hands, my arms up above my head, my head light-headed and turning lighter. There was new carpet. I'll be in the tub, I told 911. Spinning overhead was a border of hearts near the crown molding she had trimmed with the small pointed brush. The hearts like fruit on vines, entwined with them, pulsed and looked like pulses on those machines on doctor shows. The wallpaper was a readout, spikes and valleys, and as I followed the track around and around, the lub dub I could hear in my own ear I could see pictured on the graphed paper papering the wall. I followed my heart around the room, a cartoon caroming from corner to corner to corner to corner.

They found me, they said, in the bathtub in a bath of my own blood, fit inside the ceramic shell, all pith, a kernel's germ, a soaked organ in a cracked-open chest. And the carpet spotless, as good as new.

HEALTH

The sign says that I should wash my hands for health. The doctors put them back together, my hands, as best they could. They even used some toes. The skin is a patchwork jumble of patches of my skin from all the other parts of my body, like my mother's quilts, the crazy kind. Who knew I was made up of such shades in color, grades of grit, like sandpaper, the differences in each tuft of hair?

I have to look at my hands now to know what they are doing. They are attached but not connected, the wiring all frayed and shorted out so that when they move they don't send to me, to my brain, a signal that they are moving. I have to watch them. I have to say to myself — well, not to myself but to the hands—“Look,“ I am watching. Do this, do that. “Look,“ they are moving.

It is hard this way to squeeze and slip the bar of soap around and around in my hands, working up a lather, bubbles. It had been so effortless, a simple task. I never thought about it before, how the fingers work together, one after the other, to get the cake of soap to spin on its own thin layer of melting. Now, I drop it a lot.

I am in the bathtub where they found me. I put my hands in the water to search for the soap. The surface of the water cuts my hands off at the wrist and they drift beneath the surface, twitching wreckage, a sore coral reef. It is not like they can feel anymore either, that sense all whacked and warped. I feel both the losses of my hands — the phantom limbs, as if I had lost them altogether, and the overloaded feedback of having these trumped-up hands after all. So, maybe, I am feeling too much. Feeling and feeling that feeling of how it used to feel, all that memory of what feeling felt like before. Before. It doesn't stop.

I can drive the combine. My new cobbled hands perch on the wheel of the big machine. It power steers. I think of them, these hands, as machines now too — all gears and guy wires, cables and sprockets. The machine I am driving takes apart the corn I am picking. The various operations of separating the grain from the cob, each kernel — cut clean and polished — collected in the bin. It happens all around me, the shutter of the massive sieves and augers, screens and belts. The combine is painted red. It's a dumb machine, but it knows what it is doing and it does what it does effortlessly.

When I pray, and I still pray, I crash my hands together in a mangled ball. Where did that come from? Who thought that up? Palm to palm, like that, that says you are praying. When I pray, I thank the Lord for the miracle of microsurgery and the mechanism of the whirlybird and the chemistry of soap made up of ash and fat, the leftover parts put back together to make us clean and new and better.

Leap Years

ELEVEN DAYS

She always said that she just wanted their one night together. One night, that's all I want. She wrote this in notes to him. She said it once or twice each time they talked on the phone. She wrote it on a postcard. We will have our one night together. They had been together in the way they were together for many years now. Both spent nights in different cities, with other people. There had been times they had been together but not one whole night. Rooms that lasted an afternoon, or a morning or an evening. A day rate, the hotels called the arrangement. Someone else would have the night in the room. The housekeeper arriving, shooing them out as they were leaving. There had been the lunches and breakfasts, the brunches, the buffets and dinners, the drinks at bars, with other people and alone. The conversations on couches in lobbies, airport lounges, train station waiting rooms. On sidewalks. In hallways passing each other. In his car or hers, driving or stopped or parked. Or outside of cars, in the shadows of parking decks, the expanse of parking lots, the moon off in the distance struggling to rise. Waiting for a bus, standing in the subway, riding in cabs, the cab that one night. There were rides in empty elevators, empty but for them, a few seconds between floors to embrace, their hearts racing as the car stalled to let on someone else. They had been together, but not one whole night. She added up all this time together — the seconds, the minutes, the hours or two she remembered being together — and figured it accumulated into a semblance of a few patchworked days — a spotty night or two, perhaps, cobbled together a week of such fractured moments made up of hours, minutes, seconds. Catch as catch can. She was good with numbers. But none of the moments were sustained long enough, false continuity, into one whole night, a night long enough not to simply sleep with one another but to really sleep with each other, together, to fall asleep, to waste the time together in that luxurious unconscious proximity. No, that had never happened. She wanted that, that one night together. But on all those other nights when she stayed up thinking about this dilemma, stayed up alone, her husband asleep beside her, wanting that one night together with this other man, late those nights she let herself wonder if even that would be enough or if that one night would be too much. In the night, in the dark, she thought of all the nights divvied up to her, the nights she had already spent and the finite number of nights not known to her yet that she would have to spend on this or that, another night without being together. It added up. Awake she thought about the falling asleep with him, and then falling asleep she thought about the waking up with him there. That would be some kind of leap, that one night of being together so that they could be apart, to have, finally, the time, some time they could skip over together — they would be there and not, suspended out of time. Out of time, at last, and out of time, outside of it. It made no sense late at night. The time distorted her sense of time. She remembered that the world still ran on two calendars, an old and new one. She thought of the time when the new calendar began to replace the old, of the eleven days the world gave up to switch from the old calendar to the new one. Everyone went to bed one night and woke up eleven days later, a chunk of an October missing. And history would record nothing happened on those days, that those days never happened. It didn't matter if one used one calendar or the other — both erased those days, lost them. She imagined how it felt, this artificial eclipse, the world both standing still and, still, jumping forward. This happened years before movies, before time-lapse film that sped very fast to record in very slow motion the explosion of a flower or a bullet flowing through an apple. A fortnight of still pictures gave the illusion of movement. In the theater, they sat in the dark to see the light. They watched a movie together, holding hands in the dark, another part of a night. It flickered and skipped, the interrupted image. In this dark, with him next to her, trying to put together the images, she imagined a night eleven days long, eleven days of night to be together.

A LEAP SECOND

He opened the box of extra seconds, letting them warm to room temperature. The seconds, packed in like eggs, hummed in the carton. He turned to the window to pass the time. Later, he would select one second and add it to the official time, but for now he thought about what had happened. Outside, it was snowing. It seemed to always snow at this time, at times like this. The snow was a kind of static in the window. Not long ago, she had said it was over. This this was over. A moment before they had been a they and then, then. One day, way before that moment they would no longer be a they, there had been that other moment, a moment when they had become a they. Time passed as he thought of these two distinct points in time. Outside, it snowed regularly. The earth was slowing down. One day it would stop all together. But that wouldn't be for a very long time. Meanwhile, time needed to be corrected. Brought up to date. Another extra second needed to be added in order for time to synchronize with the decaying speed of the world, the planet stalling. He will spend the rest of his life doing this, what he is doing now, turning to the box, his hand hovering over the thrumming seconds as if to select a chocolate from a sampler. The rest of his life will be an accumulation of these second seconds. Suddenly, he thinks.

DAYLIGHT SAVING

Fall.

Fall, in the middle of the night, she was riding the Century Limited west from New York to Chicago when, suddenly, the train came to a creaking halt in the middle of an Ohio cornfield.

Such delays are not all that unusual for a passenger train that runs its routes over private, freight company rails.

Passenger trains are often shunted off onto a siding, letting the proprietor freight have the right-of-way.

But this pause was different.

Time was falling back.

Time zone after time zone, time was turning back time.

This wrecked the train's schedule.

If the train didn't stop, it would actually arrive early at the next station.

The train's schedule had to catch up to the train.

Pass it.

She stood looking out the open top of the Dutch door in the vestibule between cars.

No lights, but cornfields everywhere, she knew, or bean fields that next year would be cornfields and bean fields that next year would be corn again in the rotation.

All over the country, trains, passenger and freight, were slowing down, coming to a halt where they were.

Trains waited, panting, stopped in their tracks.

Out of time, she waited for the time to overtake her, time to catch up everywhere.

Time would, she thought, slam by shaking the whole car like when another train on the paralleling track slammed by this train, rattling the windows, drawing the air out of the coaches.

Time expedited, a true “Limited.“

Tracks cleared, the light green, time highballing west.

Then, the brakes would sneeze, and the travel in the coupling would groan and take hold and the tug would stutter through the cars, one after the other, and she would be moving again.

Trying to catch up now.

He would know to wait.

He would have remembered to turn back all the clocks, say to her, when they met again at the station, that they had lost the hour.

Stalled, she watched the moon move west over the cornfields, the bean fields, out ahead of the train, extending its lead.

He watched the moon rise over the lake, bearing down, gaining on the train somewhere out there behind it. The moon's a clock face, handless, or its hands a blur, a faceless clock, unstoppable.

It seemed he had now this extra hour to live through again, this time to kill, but it didn't really count.

She would arrive an hour late.

They all lied when they said they hadn't really lost the hour, that they weren't really late.

Everyone was instructed to set their clocks back before they went to sleep.

He stayed up and waited for the time, for the time that time officially drifted.

Looking up at the stars, he remembered he was looking back into time.

The light landing on earth this second was ancient.

And in the spring, when they might see each other again, he flying there or taking a train or driving, he would have to give the hour back again in any case.

Time was distance, distance time.

He was here and she was there.

Seconds opened and, then, closed.

LEAP DAY

They broke up then on leap day over e-mail, sending ever-shorter messages back and forth by hitting the reply button until the final word stop was the final word.

They left the subject field blank except for the abbreviation for regarding, re:, which multiplied with each reply to one another so, at last, the space read: re: re:re: re: etc.

Each of them, miles apart, paused a moment to read again what each had written on the screen, the fingers poised about to send the other this next leap.

Four years later, all the reasons for doing what they did are lost to them, the e-mail program purged, but this extra day returns to both a surplus sadness.

Four Alabama Seasons

WINTER

Even when the fans are not running under power, they feather in the breeze. Turning over, the blades mill wind. Flatbeds stacked with chicken cages piled two stories high pull in behind the wall of fans, parked for their turn unloading at the loading dock. White chickens stuff the black wire cages. The fans start up, turn, blur. The air pushes through the cages, and feathers spit out the other side. Everywhere on the ground are loose white feathers. The feathers blow across the street, cars stirring up the feathers, catch in the breeze that has not been manufactured. Breeze that is breeze. The feathers form a drift of down next to the red cedar slat fence of the city's junkyard. Balls of feathers, hefty as chickens and as plump, tumble into the ditch. Up north, a fence like that would be strung along a highway to knock the snow out of a blizzard. Loose feathers swirl around wrecked police black-and-whites in the lot, begin to tar the cars, coat the surface of muddy puddles left by the rain.

SPRING

Spring and all is new green grass drowned by new white, white sand of the golf course groundskeeping. The rain puts a crust on the traps that must be raked until they shimmer, a sawing corduroy seen from a distance, a breeze chopping up the surface of a scummy pond. Pollen, the gist of the season, tarnishes every surface, takes away its shine, a mat of grainy finish. But today, see? Spilled sparkle of sand curved through the blacktopped intersection out front, traced a dump truck's too-tight turn. Already, house sparrows bathe in the fresh dune, intermittent puffs of dust along the drift, a moon's crescent in shadow. There, the white sand turns black. A mockingbird on the strung cable mimics the neighborhood's air conditioners. All emit this compressed chatter as the sun clears the stand of oak soaked with wisteria. It will rain later and the sand will melt, forget itself. That dawn's gesture's just grist.

SUMMER

Sundays, a white city pickup truck steams slowly through the side street spraying for mosquitoes. The fog machine's engine, an insect, drowns out the sound of the truck's engine, a steady gearless whine. The fog itself leaps from a funnel off the bed, appears to propel the truck along, a jet of clouds under pressure. The white spray dissipates, gets grayer as it spreads, and, heavier than air, it trails the truck, a wake that spreads and skirts the curbs of the street. It spills down the hill, fills the hollow, evaporates like that afternoon's rain turning the concrete to vapor. Later, the truck crisscrosses the grid in the neighborhood, the sound muted and amplified by the spaces between houses, the trees, the yards, and the residue settles into the bunkers of the golf course, a ground blizzard sweeping over the greens, a fluid tarp. Above, the moon breaks up, fogged in the fog as it sets through it. The summer air twice thickened.

FALL

White pine. The new needles replace needles that fall as straw, rake into springy piles in the gutter. The hardwoods stay bare limbed, leaves exhausted. Clouds of mistletoe are caught in the branches, twig mist. The spindly azalea understory. Too far north for Spanish moss, the trees trap trashed plastic bags. But in the crevices and corners and on the stripped branches, lint from the cotton fields gathers. On the scored red brick and the dull mortar in between, woolly cotton patches of the stuff stuffs the joints, points the grout, a seeping spun sugar. The lint escapes the screened-in trailer trucks of the raw harvest or gets kicked up by the gleaning in the fields and threads itself into the wind, winds up coating anything with a burr enough to stick. It snows, little squalls of it accumulated in the niches, the pockets fall has turned out. It is snow that is not snow, a white reminder, until it dyes itself with all the other detritus, becomes the glue of bark and twigs and leaves, leaving nothing but filth, tilth, a kind of felt.

Ruminant

VISIBLE COW

I think of him thinking about his cows. I never even knew he was a dairyman. At the Starbucks in the Student Union where I worked he'd ask me about the steamed milk — real milk, right? — in the latte. I think of that now. He'd nurse the drink all day, staring off into space, the space so thick I could almost see that electromagnetic soup of digital bleats bawling from the laptops, the cell phones, the other students all around him nudging and pawing, grazing through their e-mail, their texts. I drifted over to him, started talking. He bought me a macchiato stained with milk and never let on he left a dairy farm to come to school. Though once early on, now that I think about it, he told me one could major in ice cream if one wanted to. I majored in numbers. Made ends meet. Thinking about it now, there were infinite silences between us like the silences between the bits of the binary alphabets herding around us in the ether. He didn't say much at all, but that is the nature of farm boys, I guessed, or at least the ones I met back then, weaned in the vacuums of all those empty acres out there. All that absence to fill with work or with the internal working of the brain. I guess you get used to it, can hear, in those silences, yourself think. It was only later, when we were breaking up, that he showed me the snapshots of his cows posed on some hillock somewhere out there. They had names of course. The names began with A or B, Apple or Bossie, Alice or Betty, the initials trading places through the generations, a to b to a to b like some equation or formula or the rhyme scheme of a sonnet's endless couplets. I could tell a lot by the way he tiled the photographs like the descending cataract of a table full of solitaire. He had shuffled through the lot of them again and again. He recited the names. I think now this must have been what he was thinking of when I watched him thinking. The album of pictures. The list of names. They all looked alike to me, the cows, all of them, white on black slabs of clouds, stayed by the four little guy- wire pegged legs pegged to the ground. All of them caught in the act of chewing. He liked to take me then to the dairy barns on the edge of campus, to the herds of milling cows, mewing calves, the blocky steers rubbing their coats on the white wooden fences. There he found the one sad beast with a flap in her side, a fistula the bovine scientists covered over with a plastic window. The cow, content in her stanchion, snuffed up the grain in neat piles at her feet. I watched him consider the animal, all lost in thought. Through the porthole I could see the churning stomach percolate the fermenting feed back and forth. It was complicated like mixing a drink back at the coffee bar, all agitation and vapor and the chemistry of layers breaking down, so busy, all of these goings-on, going on on the inside while we, stock still on the outside, stood, lost in thought, struck dumb.

BUTTER COW

Driving to the State Fair, I think of him thinking. I am along for the ride. Driving through this state, you don't have to think about driving. The car has its own head, trails straight on, knows its own mind. Mindless. In this state, the grid of the section roads is interrupted by only one diagonal highway. You just drive. You can't get lost in this space, only lost in thought. The cornfields switch to soybean fields on the right side of the car, and on the left, they switch, the soybeans and the corn, the other way around every half mile, then back again to the other — corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans. And every mile another road intersects the one you're on at the squarest of right angles. In that part of the state, the fences are gone, have all been torn out. The crop rows shoulder up to the shoulder of the road. I am thinking, he is thinking which fields of corn, fields of soybeans, were once pastures, once hayfields with windrows or scattered herds of drying bales. He sees again the fences, contemplates the gates, how they open and shut, the mazes of lost fenced lanes and vanished grass alleys between the fields, and the cattle and the hogs and even some sheep turned into a field of stubble to stumble around, snuffling in the furrows to glean. The cows drifting, staggered and staggering, find the highest part of any acre finally to arrange themselves randomly like humans in an elevator, meditating without thinking about it, a moseyed contemplation, as the sky lowers and the shadows the sun throws grow longer and the cow shadows jostle with the cows, as the cows and cow shadows rearrange themselves again — constant minute adjustments, diplomatic dances, specific gravities attracting and repelling, a grinding inclination, the cows pulling the heavy thoughts of themselves through the grass by their teeth.

And at the fair people there walk and eat, lap up against each other, wave the paper napkins stained with four kinds of grease across their moony faces, work their way around fried solids stuck on sticks as they circle each other and circle the animals parading in the show rings and pacing in the paddocks and pens. Stunned by the sun, he trudges forward, and I follow after. We can't stop eating, continue eating clouds of cotton candy even as we find ourselves in the cloud showers set up on the Grand Concourse, the spun sugar turning to syrup in our hands that we then lick clean, licking without a second thought. We escape into the cool Varied Industry pavilion, wander up to join the crowd surrounding the glassed-in refrigerated room where a woman constructs this year's cow sculpted in butter, Brown Swiss this time, the breeds taking turns through the years — Jersey, Guernsey, Holstein. She layers the spans of butter onto a cantilevered skeleton of bent wood and sprung metal. Through the glass before me I see through the glass on the other side of the room the rows of patient people there lined up, staring, chewing something as they watch her fold the butter into the lips of the dewlap and saggy melted skin above the brisket. The slabs of butter she is working onto the articulated flanks look like slabs of meat, all marble. The butter's edges are curried into each other over the hook and pin bones, worked then into the valley of the thurl. The crowd around us forgets they are chewing and chews, forgets to swallow, lost in the whorl of butter spread like fur over the jacket of fat. I think I know what he is thinking as he watches. How the assembly line of slaughter takes an animal apart, down to tabletop cuts, now unrecognizable pucks of flesh. He is thinking inside about the whole exposed anatomy in butter. Each organ inside — the heart and lungs, the liver and kidneys, the tongue and brain — made of different breeds of soft cheese. The milky blood all milk. The butter udder. He is thinking of all the slathered transformations. How the four-chambered butter stomach would transform butter grass into buttermilk and the butter grass buttermilk turns into buttermilk butter cream and the butter cream into creamy butter butter. How the butter of the butter cow would look like this butter butter. How even the nails and washers and fencing scrap and baling wire cropped up by the grazing butter cow, finding its way to the butter hardware stomach, would also be sculpted in butter. The butter metal would lodge in the butter reticulum — indigestible, inorganic — its rust made up of a rust made up of butter.

COWS ON FIRE

I am thinking about these cows, thinking about what is going on inside them. They are first calf heifers, all pregnant, two dozen or so strolling my way across the loafing shed, chewing cuds, all their big black eyes rheumy already, rolling to a stare, staring at the scoop shovel of feed I've got balanced against my flexed knee. I am thinking about what is mixed up on purpose in the feed mix, the chemical, PBB, that is killing them slowly without them even knowing, and the calves inside them curling up tighter, frying, drying up, the stem cells splintering, splitting up all wrong, sputtering, the threads of DNA all fraying inside the cells, twisted, busted, losing their train of thought, forgetting to remember the remembering of parts, the blueprint turning blue. It is Christmas, and the experiment the heifers are part of knows no holiday, the dosing to continue through the long winter break.

Outside the barn, it is snowing, of course, the snow a kind of fabric, a white drifting silence we can all drift through. The snow accumulates in the shadow of the fencing, floats on the frozen surface of the ice in the corrugated troughs. Hearing the shovel hiss through the grain in the bin the herd turned toward me, began to drift itself, the sound all the stimulus it needed now, all those stomachs thinking, thinking of food. As they move, the knocked-up cattle are lowing. The cattle are lowing. No babies wake. No sounds but the shuffling sawdust, the snuffling and sneezing as they move. The chemical attacks the big cathedral lungs, the naves drowning in fluid, forgetting how to bail. I've filled mangers. The mangers are filled with hay. She is in the adjacent barn feeding the control group of identical cattle, mucking out their stalls. Later, I will hear her fire up the Deere, use the power-take-off to run the chain rake through the gutters, fork the spoiled straw into the spreader. Leaning on the Dutch-door, I'll watch her, later still, make a pass or two through the fuzzy air, hauling the manure over the field, the green tractor's lights blazing, the shit illuminated, flying through the steaming steam, flung by the blades of the red spreader. We've given up our holiday to help out, knew if we were back home we wouldn't be able to stop thinking of these cows dying in measured increments. Out in the world away from the campus, the chemical had gotten into the feed supply, a fire retardant mixed into the silage, a co-op's goof, the poison churned to milk inside the cows, the tainted milk poured out on the ground, cattle everywhere put down. I think of the farmer, what was he thinking, as he walked the string of cattle tethered on the lip of a pit he'd just dug, drilling a bullet in the big brain of each cow as he passed. And I think of the scientists here whose experiment this is, who are at home, right now, in front of a fire each of them poke, thinking of the ways the chemical works through the guts of the animals, how it gets swallowed and coughed up, combines and divides in the grinding up of the ground-up feed, how it gets absorbed, how it does its slow soluble work in the limpid pockets of the ruminant body. The cows nuzzle me from behind looking for more, their tongues scraping the folds of the hard Carhart jacket, wanting a taste, a taste of the dust. The barn is cold. The heifers blow clouds of steam from their wet muzzles that hover like bubbles of thought. What are they thinking? I think of the balls of calves caved up inside them, dying hearths, turning to ash, and the destroyed cattle at the bottom of those pits, the storm of lime snowing down on them. And later after all the chores, all the domestic husbandry, we will go back to her place, make love in the dark, the stink of the barn on us both, the sweet smell of the shit, the general spoil fermenting, turning off all the thinking, going to that thoughtless place within us, then, and then her hot slick blood on me, the time of the month, after I've pulled myself out of her, her blood drying and turning cold on my shrinking shrinking skin in the dark.

EAT MOR CHIKIN

I think of him thinking inside the cow. He is inside the cow thinking. He is supposed to be handing out the coupons he holds in his hoof. Instead, he stands off to the side at the entrance of the food court, near the dozen trash bins lined up in their stalls. Inside the cow, he regards the worker, the big fiberglass head listing to the right, as the worker extracts the stuffed sacks of spent paper napkins, slimed pressed-board plates, sweating cups, plastic cutlery from the bins buried behind the wagging tongues imprinted with “Thank You.“ “Thank You“ after “Thank You“ repeated down the whole row. The sacks sag, the melted ice from the drinks, the dregs of sauces, sopping salads, as the bags are lifted from one bin and dumped into a bigger bin on wheels. The cow, a Holstein, black and white, reared up on its two rear legs, its front hoofs clutching fans of coupons, regards the man in the jumpsuit, snapping open a new plastic sack to replace the plastic sack he has just emptied from the bin. He lines the empty bin again, stores it away behind the swinging “Thank You“ sign.

Inside the cow, he is thinking of insides and outsides, I think. The tables in the food court are filled with hundreds of people eating, moving the mounds of food off the paper plates with plastic forks, spoons, lifting the food to hundreds of mouths. Looking out from inside the cow, he actually sees through an incision in the cow's throat, a slit covered over with a screen of gauzy black-and-white fur. The head of the cow is more like a hat perched on top of his head inside the cow's head, looking out the slit cut into the cow's throat. The spot, he will tell me later, where one would insert a knife right after slaughter to drain the animal's blood before the butchering.

He is working for a fast-food franchise that serves only chicken. The chain's advertising adopted animated cattle as spokesmen, employs three-dimensional life-sized cows vandalizing billboards with the misspelled command to eat mor chikin, the graffiti awkwardly applied by hoof.

Inside the cow, he is to direct the milling people mulling over the growls of their stomachs, thinking about the illuminated menus of the food court, to eat mor chikin. The sandwich board he wears is printed with that child-like hand, the cow-like hoof. Later, he will tell me that he thinks it's funny that inside the cow, the cow is sandwiched inside slices of sandwich board, the sandwich sign urging the reader to eat more sandwiches. He thinks that he becomes, inside the cow, another sign, a menu that the people in the food court consider, attempt to decipher, as they decode the messages emanating from their stomachs. In what way are we hungry? he thinks they are asking as he asks himself the question again and again inside the cow.

In the neck of the cow, there is the slit so he can see, but there is no opening for him to eat. The cow's mouth is not a real mouth. The tongue extending out of it is fabric stuffed with batting. Later he will tell me how during the long hours inside the suit, drifting through the corridors of the mall, children pulling the cow's tail or rubbing the rubber udder on his stomach as if to make the cow let down, he imagined himself a manifestation of all the different insides of the animal, its skeleton, its mass of arteries and veins, its trunks and branches of nerves, its nodes of lymph, its backwaters and oxbows of guts and guts and guts and guts.

When it is time to eat, he can't remove his head, the cow's head, in public. I see him inside the cow in the distance. The cow's black-and-white head extends above most of the shimmering car roofs in the mall's parking lot. Inside the cow he must turn the whole body left and right as he turns back and forth to look for me inside my car in the parking lot. The head above the shimmering roofs and hoods of the parked car does not pivot on its neck. The whole cow cranes this way and that. I have parked over by the war memorial with its display of mottled hulking tanks. Inside the cow, he sees me, waves his now empty hoof. He slowly makes his way through the maze of cars to mine. He leans over the hood of my car once he arrives, catching his breath. He is thinking, looking deep into the pool of polished metal, his reflection, the cow's reflection reflecting back to him through the slit in the throat. Before he gets in the car, he removes the head, twisting it off like a deep-sea diver's helmet. He stores the head in the backseat and gets in the front to eat the lunch I've brought him, hamburgers with the works, waffle fries, and black cow shake from a competitor's place.

He eats. He eats, I think, without thinking, mouth open, exhausted. He sweats inside the cow and, inside the car, the car fills up with the sweet sweat smells and the smell of the sweated onions, the rancid grease, the reeking suit. It is close inside the car, and it is getting closer still. He eats without talking. He eats in silence, a silence only punctuated by the sound of his chewing, chewing. He eats. The empty head in the backseat, I catch its look in the rearview mirror, the big soulful eyes staring back at me into space.

Four Postcards from Indiana

STORY

On the way to Story, Indiana, 315 T'ed into an unnamed road, and, at the junction, the side of a yolk yellow farmhouse stared back at me with four identical windows on the fading façade, each window divided into four picture panes of glass. The green information sign indicated that Story was five miles thataway with an arrow pointing to the right. A white picket fence separated the sign and the road from the house, and, dead ahead, fenced in its own little precinct of half-sized pickets, some kind of monument caught the light already filtered by the gobo clusters of leaves in the copse of tulip poplars in the yard. I parked the car.

Crossing the road, I saw the plinth of stone transform as I got closer, watched as it sprouted shoulders, then grew a head, busting out into a rustic bust, its face pancaked, its contours — the lips, eyes, and eyebrows — charred black. A black widow— peaked helmet of hair. Matte muttonchop shadows burned each cheek. A coy naive sphinx. The stone head's etched left eyebrow arched, waiting for the question already answered. Tattooed on its roughed-out apron of a chest, a hand pointed left to Columbus and another hand right to Fairfax, a town no longer on the map. Take your pick.

“What's your story?“ I asked it.

The cicada brood bloomed and buzzed in the trees. Cardinals chewed out each other, flitted overhead. There, below the folded hands, not much of a clue — a year, 1851, and a diminutive signature of H Cross, its second “s“ washed out as the sandstone melted into the seam at the base. At that angle, the stone head turned into the Hoosier Mona Lisa, the crisscrossed hands, the unselfconscious conscious smile, the eyes half- lidded, backlit by a painted landscape more animated than the foiled subject.

I looked back at the car. I'd left its hazard lamps blinking, the indicator lights signaling that both ways were a possibility simultaneously or that each canceled the other out.

In the end, I turned away from Story, bore the other route toward Columbus — the town filled with autographed churches and fire stations, those modern slabs of steel and glass that just so happened to find themselves planted in what had been an Indiana cornfield. And where I found, in an ordinary gas station, a postcard picturing the corner I left behind — the yellow house, the picket fence, the knob of stone with its unreadable and unreachable directions, and the sign pointing to Story that I sent to you asking one last time: Who should we tell? What should we do? Where should we go? Why?

SANTA CLAUS

“A watch means that conditions are right for a tornado.“ As we drove, I explained the difference between a watch and a warning. This was her first summer in Indiana, and every time she turned on the radio she found herself in another depression, pressure dropping. An imaginary line extending just north of and passing through the counties of La la la and Mmmmm. The Balkan states of the weather map. It would be in effect for a couple of hours.

“Is that us?“ she said.

“It's just a watch,“ I said, and I told her what to look for, though I had never seen one myself. I remembered sightings, hearing of funnels over towns. One Easter. One Palm Sunday. “If you see one, we get in a ditch. Someplace low.“ I remembered feeling this way every spring and summer — too hot, too still. You can hear better. There was this picture in the grocery store encyclopedia of a drinking straw driven into the trunk of an elm. She had seen violent storms in Baltimore but only the leavings of hurricanes, not this kind of wind — all eye and finger, one that can see and feel.

Of course, it started raining, and the voice on the radio tracked the storms, interrupted by the sizzle of static — soft or loud, close or far away. I'm here now, the static said. Teasing. Moving.

“It's not us,“ I said.

In the half-light we passed the statue of Santa Claus, melted limestone, in a field surrounded by broken skeletons of farm implements slick with rain and submerged in mud. Horses, startled by the lightning, shied and ran sideways away from the sound. The book said the statue said: For the Children of the World.

Triple A just mentioned the St. Nicholas Inn, the only motel in Santa Claus. It was made up of little bungalows, Munchkin-size, scattered behind a gas station.

“A mite windy,“ said the woman, letting us into number 4. The baby riding on her hip yelped each time it thundered. “No one stays here. They drive up from Louisville or down from Naplis to see Santa Claus. My baby sees him every day.“

We went into our room and found everything half-sized — the TV, the end table, the bed. “Think,“ she said, “to grow up seeing Santa Claus every day but Christmas.“ Yes, in the part of the world where flying is easy — lawn deer, flamingoes, silked jockeys.

As we slept did we shrink? Were we that small? Did our feet touch the ground? Did we count each other's sheep as they clouded that tiny room? We heard the baby cry all night through the storm.

The next morning I knew the sky was clear before she pulled the drapes and turned on the morning news. Eyes still closed, I heard that a tornado had touched down in the Baltimore zoo the day before. A woman reported that she survived by being blown into the hippo house. A miracle. The world is full of miracles. Closing my eyes again, I see the woman blown into the hippo house. One puff, a blow to the belly, arms and legs trailing, millions of shrimp swimming backwards into the hippo house. Size has no scale. I am asleep again.

Later we wrote our postcards in the car, parked next to the post office. The doors were open. To keep the post office, the natives changed the name of their town from Santa Fe to Santa Claus. Now, besides the amusement park, the post office is the town's only industry. All the letters come here. All the ones addressed to the North Pole. All the lists. All the directions home. We came here to mail some from the eye of the storm. All the stamps were airmail. It is too hot for Christmas, too still. You could hear the sleigh bells.

“Look. Look,“ I said, pointing across the evaporating parking lot to the back gate of Santa Claus Land, “Santa Claus.“ In shirtsleeves and Bermudas, he swung a black lunchbox as he went to work. He was sweating and he wasn't whistling. She didn't look up.

“Where?“ she said.

But he was already gone through the gate and hidden behind the scraps of newspaper caught in the Cyclone fence. I pointed with my finger.

“There.“

FRENCH LICK

We came into the valley from Santa Claus and skirted the grand hotel fronting the road, a walled city. We crossed the old Monon tracks, the spur where the private cars from Chicago were switched right up to the door of the resort. “Monon,“ you said. I told you again about Hoosier, who's there. The French in Indiana. We stayed down the road in a motel — half in French Lick, half in West Baden. Alsace-Lorraine. “A lick,“ I said, “was for the wild game. The seasoning in the ground.“ I showed you the salt blocks in the supermarket.

“Kiss me, there,“ you said.

We walked back over to the grand hotel. In the coffee shop you had a tongue sandwich, and the waitress behind the counter said I was the first to order a bagel and cream cheese “since I've worked here. What do I do?“ Next to us on the little stools, a couple argued about the food. She complained about her peas in French. He scolded her in English. We came for the waters, you said. But really you only wanted your postcards canceled with French Lick. We played Space Invaders in the arcade, and they kept coming. Then we lingered on the veranda, following the deck chairs to the spring. The spring was in a gazebo, bubbling through a pool of green water. “Kiss me, here,“ you said, but the sulfur smell was too strong. “If nature can't Pluto will.“ You read the sign. “This is what they came for?“ you said. “This is what they came for, the presidents and gangsters?“

The next morning you wrote your postcards, naked, at the desk. Maids were making up the next room. I watched David Letterman on TV making jokes about Muncie. Turning, you said, “Let's,“ licking ten cents Justice, “go there next.“ On my way to the shower, I stopped behind you. You were writing that animals need their licks. The sounds you make, the ones that are not quite language, name nothing.

“Knock, knock,“ I say in your ear. “Who's there?“ you say from another world.

MUNCIE

In Muncie, we are staying at the Hotel Roberts, downtown. And, though the elevator is automatic, a man wearing a Nickel Plate conductor's hat pushes the buttons. We have learned that the third Middletown study is in progress. We are mistaken for sociologists by the old men we sit with in the lobby when we watch TV. Before we can quiet them with the truth, they tell us their church affiliations and bathroom practices.

The first night here, we ordered a pizza by phone from a campus takeout to be delivered to our room. Since then we have gone through the yellow pages for anything that will be delivered. When it arrives, Theresa answers the door wrapped in the hotel bath towel. After awhile we begin to receive all sorts of things we never ordered — pints of macaroni salad, goldfish cartons of fried rice, heads of lettuce. They are delivered by college boys wearing Ball U T-shirts, who then sculpture obscene animals with the warm tinfoil. Everything seems to have the same tomato paste base.

If we leave the Roberts at all, it is to watch the summer basketball leagues play on a court next to one leg of the high school drag. The cars go by honking. The players glisten in the single scoop lamp. The backboard is perforated metal used in temporary runways. The hoop is a red halo with not even a metal chain net dangling from the rim. Or we go to the Ball factory and watch them make mason jars, press the rubber lips to the tin lids. They have shelves of jars the Ball brothers canned seventy-five years ago. The seal holds stewed tomatoes with yellow seeds, embryonic eggplants, black butter chips and sweet gherkins no one will taste, okra, of all things. We have been there several times, and unlike other factory tours, there is nothing to sample unless we care to can and wait a season. We do keep our loose pennies in a Ball jar, and Theresa makes the boys reach in it for their tip, a monkey trap. They can't withdraw their clenched fist through the narrow mouth of the jar without letting go of the money. She leaves them laughing, closing the door against them with the flat of her foot.

But all of this is typical here, or, because we do it in Muncie, it is typical. We have seen the sociologists on the sidewalks, shielding their eyes with their clipboards, trying to cross the street. They take pictures of barbershops and trophy stores. Or they sit and count cars in and out of the parking lot or look for butts beneath their feet. In every room there are questions to be answered with special pencils. “What brings you here?“ In each case, love. We write that our dream is to open all the cans one at a time and eat vegetables older than our grandfathers. We want everything delivered to us. Theresa wears nothing but two pasties of pepperoni. I am reading books on pickling. The scientists will figure out what is going on here.

The I States

IDAHO

As he plants, he dreams of potatoes. Enough already with the potatoes, he dreams, but continues to dream of potatoes. In the mountains of Peru, farmers grow potatoes above the clouds in terraced fields each no bigger than a backyard in Illinois. Hundreds of varieties are all mixed together. The tubers are the size of marbles, golf balls, gooseberries, gallstones, mothballs. They look like each kind of toe on a farmer's foot. Potatoes that look like carrots. Potatoes that look like radishes. Potatoes that look like potatoes. And the fields are not contoured but planted in rows with the furrows pointing straight down the slope so when it rains all that Peruvian rain it doesn't rain potatoes. The water runs off quickly, spilling like waterfalls over the sides of the mountains onto fields below before it has a chance to erode the crop on the one above. One day, he thinks, he will buy up the abandoned rail bed here and turn it over, planting his potatoes in one long pass, no turning the machinery. One swipe for the planting. One long haul for the hilling up. Another single pass to root out the fruit that will bubble up in his wake and float on the tide of the tilth. In Peru, the potatoes come in all colors. There is the purple potato. There is the red potato like the red potato here in Idaho. There is an orange potato the size of an orange. There is a green potato that isn't poisonous. There are hundreds of different browns. There is the blue potato, the blue potato of Peru. In Idaho, his seed is certified.

ILLINOIS

The way they see it, it's their job to strip-mine this state. They go from one little town to the next looking for the mom-and-pop shops going out of business and buy up all the inventory they've had in the basement or attics or out back since the forties, the fifties, the sixties. Sundresses and alpaca jackets. Indian bead belts and saddle shoes in their original boxes. Leather letter jackets and tartan jumpers with the mint safety pin. Pegged pants and silk Hawaiian shirts. Rooster ties and Arrow collars. Brownie sashes and Cub Scout kerchiefs. Untouched and packaged, the package as valuable as the thing inside. It's all shipped back East or to the West Coast. And they must eat in the diners on the main streets where they have always imagined the women cooking there would turn to them at the counters and display the secret to the homemade mashed potatoes. Look! The implement itself. The worn wood handle. The chrome tang. The oscillating business end of the utensil, still caked with the milk-white paste of potato. But that never happens. The breaded tenderloins are served with french fries in plastic baskets lined with stained waxed paper.

INDIANA

Above the sink in the kitchen was a window and, on the sill, an old jelly jar, the color of the cartoon caricatures etched on its glass fading from too many washings, perhaps, or from the constant exposure to the sunlight. There, there was always a chunk of a potato pierced by a trio of cocktail toothpicks, tipped with brilliant spun-cellophane buds, in such a way that they held the potato suspended on the lip of the jar so that its underside just touched the dingy water beneath where already a fur of roots sprouted and reached down. Soon, soon, the eyes above ripened into those pale segmented branches that ended in a stunted leaf or two and, once or twice, an already fading flower. Something to look at as I washed and dried the dishes and regarded the day outside already lengthening or already turning into twilight.

IOWA

There is only one potato farmer in Iowa, five hundred acres near Muscatine, surrounded by melon farms on the sandy soil. The country gets confused sometimes. One “I“ state looks the same as any other “I“ state. You tell folks you're from Iowa and they say, Iowa, potatoes, right? Well, in this case they would be right because here is a five-hundred acre field of potatoes the locals say looks like the worst stand of beans they have ever seen. It all goes to chips, shipped to the Frito Lay plant in the Quad Cities. At night, the farmer of the only potato farm in Iowa watches a woman on the Tonight Show who collects potato chips she has found bearing images of the famous rendered on the canvas of starch during the deep-fat frying. “You can see Nixon,“ she says. “And this one looks like Gorbachev right down to the stain on his forehead.“ She is from Indiana, where the country that watches late-night television now believes its potatoes are grown. “Here is Queen Victoria, Mickey Mouse, Kojak, Betty Crocker.“ She has hundreds she keeps in jewel boxes. She holds them up to the camera, waxy cameos. Working his field of potatoes, he resists thinking that things look like other things. The sun, as it sets, for example, is not like a slice of potato. His face, reflected in the dusty windscreen of his tractor's cab, is not his face.

The Sex Life of the Fantastic Four

INVISIBLE GIRL

Where he touches me, I vanish. The back of his hand stroking my face erases my cheek. Involuntary, the skin initially, then the deeper flesh. The skin first, gone when it feels his fingertips. I feel the surface disappear but still feel feeling there. His touch sinks in. The subdermal layers go. The nested cells he polishes clear, his soft palm hovering. By the time I have stripped off the blue bodysuit, stepping out of the spandex which retains, for a second, the shape of my body as it falls, the body it reveals has already become translucent, the meat turning milky, the bone wiped clear in streaks like a smear of butter melts the white from a paper plate. I become clarified grease beneath him. Entwined, we are tangled up in the skein of my airy sinew, the ropey braids of my circulatory system, its cartoon of primary reds and blues. My blood thins in the extremities but knots at the nodes of erectile tissue, clotting a nipple visible again beneath the sheen he has left from licking what looked, a moment before, like air, now, me, there, concentrated into rubbery ruby light again. It disappears into his mouth. I am down to the broken dashes of the central nervous system, suggesting, still outlining, the outer neural net of my skin, feeding me the synaptic code of dots and dits from the dissipating periphery. His hands, as they caress nothing, reveal me to myself, leave the afterimage of his movement burned upon the transparent wall of my retina, the lightning streak of his skin shaping the borders of my own body. I close my eyes and watch as my eyelids dissolve. My vision passes through skin first, turning then to scrim. And I see, now, through another unoccluded lens. I see through my lids, through myself, see his cock, clearly, moving inside of the vast and now empty empty space which must be me and must be not me.

THE HUMAN TORCH

I sit at the bar, usually, drinking ouzo neat, a Jordan almond dissolving at the bottom of the shot glass. I have set the liquor on fire swizzling it with my finger. I like to watch the floor show and the show on the floor. The tunnel crowd weirded-out by the drag queens doing stripteases or singing old torch songs “One for my baby and one more for the road,“ sending up Lady Day or Barbra, that kind of thing. I dump some water into my aperitif, extinguishing the blue flame and turning the drink chalky like a precipitate in a test tube. My current favorite is a Liza interpreter who vamps this obscure number — is it by Mercer? — that plays with the line “You've let yourself go.“ She sings to her lug of a lover how he has grown fat and dull, how their liaison has suffered the consequences. There follows a litany of complaint. What a schlub, she sings. “You've let yourself go.“ But it turns in the end. It always turns. “Come on over here,“ she whispers, “come on over and let yourself go.“ I tear up, naturally, but it isn't saline staining my cheek. It's a dab of molten lava percolating there in the corner of my eye, my own brand of running mascara. I have to watch myself. Spontaneously, my eyelashes can ignite, throwing sparks up into the tinder of my eyebrows, which can smolder for hours without my knowing. Once, I set the sprinklers off in the Russian Bath House on 10th. I've stopped looking for a boy who can top me. It's too dangerous. The leather bars. Too hot. I was cooking inside the horsehide Eisenhower jacket, cooking the jacket, the seared meat smell an additional turn-on, I suppose. These powers we have acquired seem to fall into that dark space between the involuntary responses wired into us and those we can modulate. Not like the heartbeat on the one hand or walking home on the other, but like blinking and winking, say, or like desire itself. There is only so much one can do to help oneself. Oh sure I can bellow “Flame On“ all I want followed by the stunning transformation from solid buff flesh to superheated gaseous vapor. The controlled burn. Here precision scalding. There the delicate sweating of copper pipes. But in the weaker moments, when I am weak in the knees, a stranger's hand on my hand will steam off skin. I can't watch myself all the time. A human touch sets off the human torch. I am a captive within my sublime hide.

MR. FANTASTIC

To make the edge of the famous samurai swords of antiquity, the smiths beat the iron flat into foil then folded the metal over and hammered it flat again. And then another fold and peening, and still another and then another. Thousands of times. Fold and flatten, fold and flatten. Until, in this primitive way, through brute force and patience, the metal's crystalline structure became saturated with itself. Atoms packed inside the spaces between atoms, at last, both the surface and simultaneously its underside now no more than a molecule deep, the edge of the matrix serrated only by the minute undulation of subatomic matter, a sine wave, spanning a mere handful of angstroms, of the outermost electrons. Sharp, you bet. It is what I find myself doing to my own skin in private moments. I stretch and fold and knead it back together. A wrinkle in the loose hide on my forearm, a flap of fat at my chin. It is the very definition of definition, and I spend hours honing my musculature, ironing in the pleats on my belly, increasing the cant of my cheekbones with the finest shade of a sharpened pencil line. I know what people are thinking. The elasticity of your normal everyday run-of-the-mill uncosmicly irradiated penis is, itself, a goddamn miracle to most. The ways it inflates, its skin thinning to the gauziest of tissue webbed by diaphanous capillary sponge grown thick with the stiffened rebar of packed and interlocking corpuscles. Sure, I've tried it all. Swallowed myself whole, took myself in myself from behind. For awhile she liked to watch it snake toward her across the floor, liked the way it coiled up a leg then threaded the cleft of her rear, whipping around her waist then back up her back, curling over her shoulder and back down between her breasts down her stomach, parting her down down there and then her labia and into her from above, how its tensile strength lifted her in this hardened harness, held her weightless as it expanded within her and all around her. We haven't done that in awhile, and everything, believe me, grows familiar. Recently our lovemaking has tended toward the less baroque. A simple vertical embrace, my member remembering its scale from before the accident. Sue, her legs wrapped around my waist, is saddled on my hips, riding this altogether unfantastic appendage and me supporting her, strapping my silly, pliant arms around her, then around me and then around her again. Stretching, another lap and lapping another lap, another band around us both, belting us to us. My arms still encircling, encasing us from head to toe, this cocoon spinning while we kiss, my elasticity nearing its end, effaced to the point of transparency, my thinning skin becoming, at last, the clear outer covering, at last, of this new creature we create.

THE THING

I don't really need the briefs down below since my thing ain't there no more. It's more for show to let the folks know I was once a guy. A scrap of cloth for the modesty of the citizens craning their necks to take a gander at me. They can't get past the orangey crust of skin. It's something all right. Little do they know I am all hanging out there for anybody to see. My Johnson, or what I take to be my Johnson (Johnsons really — I don't know since there is no other thing like me, as far as I can tell, to let me try out these doohickeys of wadded callous and thingamabobs of oozing mucus) is plopped there in front of their collective noses. Just more eruptions and rashes on the sliding plates of my scaly surface. The Doc explained it to me, showed me the Tinkertoy models of your typical twisted normal gene, and then how mine's been tripled, another worm squirming around that ladder of goofy golf balls. It's simple for everybody but me. Male and female. Male and female down to everybody's bones but me. No bones for me. No in and out. No on and off. A whole other dimension to nookie. What I have become needs a couple other things to reproduce, I guess, not just one other. Sex, as near as I can figure, is like nothing you can dream of since those dirty pictures your brain's pumping out are made up of, you got it, those same twin strands caught wrapped up in each other. Well, I am another other. And I am on the lookout for other others like me. Meantime, when I'm alone (but this could be in the middle of Times-freaking-Square, a public spectacle where the public can't begin to see the me that's me) I make myself have this nameless thing, feel this Thing thing I have no words, no more, for.

Four Brief Lives

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone published his first book, Big Words, in graduate school. The children's book could only use thirty age-appropriate words taken from the Dolch Word List. A kind of poetry.

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone grew up in Fort Wayne. Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television, was his neighbor. Martone spied on Farnsworth. He watched the inventor watch the local stations sign off.

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone grew up in Fort Wayne. Each August, his mother took him downtown to shop for new underwear (briefs). Always August meant underwear. Later, married, Martone switched to boxers.

CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE

Michael Martone worked for the Fort Wayne newspapers, where he wrote the obituaries and maintained the morgue. Everyday he would add details to his own obit he kept on file.