Notes from the Fog: Stories

The Boys

It happens. A close relative dies. One who lives elsewhere. And then some time has to be set aside, even if no such thing is possible. Because of work, because of a lack of funds when it comes to traveling. And also because of one’s own dear family at home, a husband and two daughters, who need to be fed and petted and listened to and tolerated. Even just ignoring them or quietly loathing them takes its toll.

In this case the family member was my sister. She was in for a routine surgery, or so I was told. And you have to wonder what surgery is ever routine. As you live your life, you will, on occasion, be cut open and explored. It is what life is, part of the routine. Perhaps we should not be surprised. A knife will slice you open and some wunderkind wearing gloves will reach into the wound, with corrective fingers, one expects, and grope around. This is what killed my sister. The wunderkind reached too deep, reached the wrong way, the body crashed, and everyone wore black.

My husband brought me flowers. The kids cried, although they hardly knew her. My own reaction was delayed, to this day, really. It may never come, at least not in my lifetime—which doesn’t mean I didn’t love the hell out of her. Of course I did. Of course of course of course. I was her sister and she was mine, always—or so we had said long ago. We’d sort of stopped saying it. We had our own lives to chisel up. In some small way I was stirred to action. I had just been so bored, and now someone had died and I was needed and maybe we’d all be knocked out of our habits into a better, realer world.

I flew out to the so-called mountains where my sister and her husband lived with their children. Two little boys who spent their lives in toy helmets, so far as I could tell. They were not allowed to wear them to bed, but this turned out to be a struggle, a bit of a battleground, and some nights, with a mother newly dead, they won this war with their father and went to bed all suited up, ready to survive a nighttime clobbering. They had a game they played, and it involved sticks—store-bought sticks with lights and triggers on them. The helmets kept their heads safe. Without them they’d have killed each other already. When I was near them I almost felt like I should be wearing one myself. I’d met my nephews before, of course, but they seemed to regard me as an animal they could not ride. What was an aunt even for? What did I mean to them? I supplied presents that suffered too much from an educational vibe, and no goodies, and my fun factor was decidedly low. Where had my fun factor gone? Had I ever had one? Their world must have been filled with people like me: curious beasts lacking in magic, unable to entertain them. Could we be eaten? Could we be killed for pleasure? It seemed they had yet to decide.

I didn’t have boys myself, and I’d like to think that my profound indifference to them had influenced the moment of conception of each of my two girls. It is not that boys were filthy, or brutish, or dumb and unsingular. One might have said that of anyone, of any age, of any gender. It is, as they say, a routine assessment of the human being. It’s just that little boys always seemed terribly expendable, a product of nature that was meant to exist in excess, so it could be endlessly culled by other forces. Boys themselves seem to know this. The so-called death wish is apparent in their behavior, which is often entertaining, but only from a distance. Some creatures have a low survival rate, and so the world produces far too many of them, and as they fight among each other to live they grow more savage, more base, more dull, and the winners, the survivors, are distinctly unappealing little beings. Which isn’t to say that some of them don’t turn out lovely, with smooth, unknowable bodies, and voices of debilitating power, and a kind of broad indifference to remote suffering that allows great historical changes to take place.

The first night, I sat with my sister’s husband. He’d always been a mystery to me, but perhaps no more so than anyone else. He used his moods as weapons, and you kept your distance. I don’t mean that he was angry or aggressive or mean. It was the opposite. He had an alarming level of good cheer, a machine-honed smile, and whenever you saw him you felt overwhelmed by it, rebuked that someone in the world could be so profoundly happy. He wanted to hug and hold you and beam at you. He wanted to shout with joy, even, which was always alarming. What did it say about the rest of us, who moped and shuffled and mumbled and were always on the verge of quiet tears, or had spent so long shielding our emotions from view that the emotions themselves had finally been snuffed out and could not be detected, even by the proprietors themselves? It was like he, Drew, was running for office, even though the government had shut down and no one was voting and very likely the entire world had gone cold and dark. He was running a solitary campaign and there was no one to notice how insanely happy he was.

He was not so happy tonight. We drank wine and talked. I learned a great deal about his relationship with my sister, Sarah. She was the sweetest. She was the best. She did everything. She never complained. But sometimes she could be very quiet, Drew explained. Days without noise, as if she’d lost her voice. Was that so bad? I asked. I mean, we don’t always need to disrupt the room tone, just because we can. Speech is so overused. The language will grow meaningless if we abuse it. Let’s leave words alone so they won’t erode. Maybe it’s already too late.

“You’re not quiet,” he said. “You never had that problem.”

Drew looked at me long and steady. This was the most we’d ever talked to each other since he started dating Sarah. We poured more wine. One of the boys came down, rubbing his eyes. He stood next to me and grabbed my arm, tugged at it, his thumb in his mouth perhaps to keep himself from shouting obscenities. I resisted, without wanting to provoke him, but I wasn’t prepared to be dragged out of my chair by this young beast, so I held my ground. Drew laughed, in his hearty, amplified way. A widower for five days and he sure had his chuckle back. “I think you have a friend,” he said.

Not that I know of, I thought.

“I think he wants you to go tuck him in.”

The boy looked up at me, wondering, perhaps, just what kind of toy I was. Could I be kicked from the window and would I still love him? I didn’t know the answer myself.

“Tuck you in? Well, that I can do,” I said, and I took careful note of the level of wine still left in the bottle. I wasn’t sure how deep Drew’s stores were, and something in me wanted to fight for my share. I’d flown all the way out here and he’d better not hog all the intoxicants while I played mommy to his kid, for Christ’s sake.

Over the next few days I helped Drew with the basics. I got the boys up in the morning, rolled them into their clothing, fed them strange objects from bright, colorful boxes, and ran with them to the school bus stop so I wouldn’t be stuck with them all day. Drew went to work. An office, somewhere, with other people, presumably, and conveyor belts conveying crisp bricks of cash right into the mouths of his bosses. Some of this money must have come out the other end, and been gifted in a satchel back to Drew, because they—well, just he and the boys now—did okay. Nice house and two newish cars and furniture that didn’t look like it also served as a face towel for the young. It was a fine setup all around. They were sure doing better than we were.

I told my husband it would be just a few days. I mean, I left that message on his voice mail. He quickly texted back a thumb, pointing up. To the girls I texted that I missed them, I really did, and that it was so sad out here, sad and hard, but Uncle Drew needed me right now and the boys, the boys. Oh my god you couldn’t even imagine. The girls instantly fed all the right emojis back at me, covering all the possible ways that someone might feel about this.

When Drew came home we cooked dinner, at least for the first few days. The boys ate something Drew kept calling “cantebole.” An Italian dish, I thought at first, and I was impressed. This is how they do it in the mountains. Were the boys ready for their cantebole, Drew would ask them. Did they want a big portion of cantebole tonight, or a small one; warm, or piping hot? It turned out that cantebole simply meant, literally, “can to bowl.” Food that could slide, often in one sucking gelatinous cylinder, from a can right into a bowl. Drew had made up the phrase himself, and he seemed proud. I suppose that not all of us can claim an original contribution to the language. Cantebole looked like little pillows swimming in fake blood, and the blood bubbled and spattered when it came out of the microwave. I’m sure it wasn’t repulsive, and sometimes I longed for a meal that simple. The boys would take their bowls over to the living room, where they sat on pillows and ate by themselves, wearing big, jug-like headphones over their helmets, watching their iPads, trying to spoon their food through their face masks.

“If you spill it, what?” Drew yelled at them during our first dinner together, maybe on my behalf, to show me how tough he was, how he hadn’t forgotten his obligations as a parent.

When the boys didn’t answer he yelled again. “What happens if you make a spill?”

“You’ll clean it up,” one of the boys said, and the two of them burst out laughing.

“Ha ha,” said Drew. “I’m over here dying. You just killed me. Ha ha.”

I thought that perhaps he should not joke about dying just after their mother, and then there was the issue of his soft, guilt-based parenting style. The permissiveness followed by the false threats. But I cast no stones. Too tiring, first of all. And anyway, sometimes the window is already broken, it’s been broken for a long time, so why would you cast a stone into an empty, ruined house? Save your stones for a better target. One that’s still standing.

Drew liked to drink at night, and he liked to tell stories. One out of two, I guess. I’d survive. I found that his stories required little of me except for a crazed grin now and then. If you occasionally express disbelief and admiration to people, just through your face, you won’t be quizzed on what they are saying and they will gurgle on, engraving their message in the evening air all night long. If only it were a little simpler, though, and you could just flick a lighter and hold it up every now and then to keep the sounds coming.

I took over the kids’ bedtime. Drew felt that he sometimes couldn’t face the boys, didn’t know what to say. Sarah had done a lot of this, and when he stepped in, it made him think of her, and he got sad. He’d lose track of what he was doing and the boys would notice and then they would get sad, too. I didn’t really mind doing it. I needed a project, and it was like being a custodian for two hyper, slightly forlorn animals who’d forgotten precisely how to behave in the wild. I got the little guys on a tight schedule, and they knew not to try the helmet business with me, because I made up a story involving sleep and floods and helmets and drowning and lots and lots of dead people, and this seemed to momentarily convince them to keep their heads uncovered at night—strictly to survive. When the boys were brushed and bundled into their pajamas, their hair still wet from the bath, I tucked them in and dove between them on their big, shared bed.

“I ate a horse’s face once,” the littlest boy said one night.

“Oh? Did the horse cry, or was it already dead?”

“That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to say gross. Ew.”

“Well, in some cultures, the horse’s face is like candy. It’s a rare treat.”

“What’s a culture?”

“It’s a group of people who are stuck with each other.”

“Like a family?”

“Yes, but bigger. Without a house. Spread all over the place.”

“Is there a dad and mom?”

I snuffed out the conversation with some tickling. The two of them were ridiculously easy prey. I could gesture at them, a snatching motion with my hand, not even touching them, and they would weep with laughter, protecting their soft spots, which was pretty much every part of them. The tickling was foreshadowed, and I almost didn’t even need to be in the room. I could hold up a single finger and they trembled. They were mine. I owned them. As I was doing it, triggering the most helpless giggles from these two little guys, I couldn’t help thinking how much I’d love to be able to end an adult conversation this way. Just when things got fraught or tense or dull I’d slide my hand along an inner thigh or into an armpit, and poke into the sweetness to see what sort of explosive verbal helplessness came back. Except of course adults aren’t ticklish. Profoundly not. Parts of their bodies have died, the whole interior—a kind of early death of the nerves. Immune to sensation to a large degree. Dead person walking, and etc. Being tickled, once you’re older, is simply like being excavated, as if your flesh were soft and would give way, as if it could be spooned out of you with a long finger.

We got into a little bit of a routine after the kids went to sleep. Drew drank too much at night, then pretended, I think, to need my help getting to bed. He would act sort of out of it, almost asleep. Bereaved, tired, and drunk. He would murmur in some private dialogue with himself. The widower’s soliloquy, I guess. I heard Sarah’s name, but I tried not to listen too carefully—it was like eavesdropping on his thoughts, which I wanted no part of. I pretended that he was speaking a language I didn’t know, and it sort of worked. I’d take his arm and escort him upstairs. Thank god he didn’t really need to lean on me, because he was huge and leaden and I am only as big as I need to be—that’s always been my size. We’d get upstairs and I’d help him strip down to his boxers and T-shirt. Beyond that I had no interest, or even tolerance, I don’t think. There was not a human being on earth whose sleepwear concerned me, least of all Drew’s. Nor were there any nude bodies beyond those freely available on the Internet that I felt I needed to see. Anywhere. And I must say that the human body, in this sort of man at this age, perhaps especially after the loss of a spouse, can cause some feelings. If I looked at him too closely I felt like I was at the morgue or the butcher or that the world had ended. Somehow I had started to associate Sarah’s death with him. Because she had died I started to think that so had Drew, by association. Or literally. That he was effectively dead and whatever he’d been doing these last few days only amounted to final spasms and twitches. Throes, I guess they are called. Soon he’d stop seizing. Soon he’d go cold. I’d have to make a call and get him removed. I knew this wasn’t true, of course, but I also worried that it was. I was torn between worry and knowledge, and worry was always more persuasive. Worry had the upper hand. It was best to just get Drew under the covers so that I didn’t have to see. I could deal with his head, poking above the blankets. That was manageable.

“Sometimes I pay for hand jobs,” he mumbled one night, as I was pulling down his shades.

I was hardly listening, and I didn’t think he was even fully awake, but I was curious. “How much?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, but he tossed and turned a little bit and issued a high-pitched cough.

“How much do hand jobs cost?” I asked again.

Drew rolled over and spoke into his pillow. “You have to pay for a massage, and then it’s extra for that.” Maybe he was being shy or maybe he was just barely awake. “Sarah knew. It wasn’t like that. I mean, I never told her, but I know she knew. She was okay with it. We never discussed it. She didn’t mind. I wanted to tell her.”

“So you can’t go in and say, no massage, just a hand job. I’m in a hurry?”

“No, you can’t even say hand job. They will kick you out.”

It sounded like he was talking from experience. I pictured him getting kicked out of a massage parlor, emerging into the afternoon light of a strip mall, shielding his eyes, deciding if he should maybe just get some ice cream. “So how much then?” I asked.

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Interesting.”

The next morning I got the boys to their bus stop early and they begged me to wait with them. Of course I would never have left them alone, but it was nice to be wanted, and I let them try to talk me into staying. Usually they’d just pull on my arms until I fell in the grass with them, and that was it, they’d made their case. I told them that they should both be lawyers, they were very persuasive young men. And I would say just this once as they sat on me and played with my hair, telling me that I was their favorite couch, the best couch ever.

The rule in the mornings was that the boys could wear their helmets to the bus stop, but when the bus came they had to take them off, and then I carried the helmets home, two stinking shells that clacked together and that I dreamed of hurling far into the woods, where I am sure they would serve as a cautionary tale to the animals, a dual beheading of some mythical beast. Except there weren’t any woods. The land was too valuable in this neighborhood. Just lawn after lawn after lawn. For some reason, Drew had warned me not to use anyone else’s trash can. Like, ever, or else I would have already ditched the helmets in one of them by now and then played dumb later. He was very solemn in his warning. If you put even the littlest piece of trash in someone else’s can, they’d see you and they’d go nuts, apparently. It was worse than shitting on someone’s floor, I guess. Every house had a massive trash can out front, nearly the size of my bedroom in college. You could easily put a body in one. You could stuff blankets and pillows down into the bottom and have, I bet, an incredibly cozy and private nap. No one would think to look for you in there. It was sort of the ultimate panic room. Hidden in plain sight. With mountains in the distance, too, if you drilled yourself a little peephole.

The boys held my hands and together we leaned over the curb and looked down the street to see if the bus was coming. No feet allowed in the street, I always said. At times like this the boys were fond of interviewing me. Did I know how to swim? Did I like cheese? Who was my favorite superhero? How old was I? Why wasn’t I at my own house right now? Did I ride a school bus when I was a little girl? When was I leaving? Would I be gone when they got home from school today? How did I get to be an aunt? Is there a school for that? When did I meet their mom? Were we friends or enemies? Could I beat their dad in a fight?

“I have two girls at home, you know,” I told them. “You guys have met them, but you were little little little.”

I slipped into baby talk here, while holding my hand low to the ground to indicate how small they had been, and the boys suddenly looked uncomfortable.

“I’m sure you don’t remember them,” I said. “They are your cousins. They are very tall now. They are taller than I am!”

“Our cousins? We heard they tried to beat us up.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From our dad. He called them hitters. He said we were only babies and they tried to bounce us like basketballs. One of them kicked me in the face.”

“By mistake,” the little one added. “That’s what Mom said.”

I held the elder boy’s face in my hands and studied it closely. What a soft and sweet and smooth little face. I squinted. I pretended to think. “Yes, hm,” I said. “I believe I do still see a footprint.”

He pulled away from me, giggling. “Liar!” he shrieked.

The little one wanted to look. “I want to see the footprint!” he shouted.

I thought back to the few times all of us had been together—morose, drunken, silent, family time, with the exception of Drew’s explosive, alienating cheer, while the kids had squirted off to god knows where. All of this was possible, but if someone was truly kicked in the face, even a young boy, I’d like to think my daughter was provoked.

“Well, listen,” I said to the boys. “If they had tried to beat you up I’m sure they would have succeeded, because they were bigger than you, and stronger than you. Still are. So no funny stuff. Have you ever heard of a teenager? Have you ever seen one? I’m not sure if they have them around here.” I looked up and down the street. I pretended to be afraid.

“You’re weird.”

“I’m your aunt. That’s how it is.”

“Girls are smarter and faster and better at everything than boys,” said the littler one.

“Oh? Who told you that.”

“Our mom.”

“Oh, yeah. Your mom. I really miss her a bunch. In fifth grade she wore a cape all year, and she wouldn’t answer to her real name.”

“But boys aren’t bad, are they?” the eldest asked me.

“Oh, sweetie, no, they’re not. Not even close. And you know what your mom meant when she said that, right?”

No, they didn’t, neither of them. The looked up at me, waiting.

“That the two of you,” I said, poking each of them gently in the chest, “in your own ways, are going to be special and great and fantastic at brand-new things, things no one has even heard of yet.”

When their bus came the little one hugged me and the big one ran off without saying goodbye.

When I got back to the house, Drew had already left for work. On the table was a neat stack of cash. I counted it. Two hundred dollars exactly. I left it there.

It took me a little while before I felt like I could masturbate in that house, but soon I had a good system set up, and I grew more comfortable with my visit. If you’re staying somewhere over an extended period of time, and you cannot masturbate, not ever, then you start to plot your exit. It’s just untenable after a while. I have no trouble in hotel rooms, what few I’ve stayed in, but somehow it’s different in a home other than your own. It feels more obviously complicated, although I’m not sure why. We take shits in other people’s homes. That’s arguably far worse than touching oneself delicately in the shower. I’d taken a shit right under Drew’s nose the other day. We were making dinner, and suddenly I had to go, and I was gone for a while—ten minutes, maybe, more. I read several op-eds on my phone while sitting on the toilet. I definitely wasn’t peeing that whole time. He knew for a fact that I’d taken a shit, or tried to, and I’m sure he didn’t care. I guess I don’t know for sure. But still, I’d been nervous about masturbation, even though it was part of my routine at home, and that had made me less inclined to do it. I can’t succeed at it when I’m afraid or tense. But then I decided that if Drew wasn’t home, and the boys were at school, with hours before anyone was expected to return, I could add this to my schedule, in between sorting and storing my sister’s clothing, jewelry, and papers.

There was very little left to do with respect to Sarah. I organized her clothing according to type, then packed each group separately—sweaters, pants, socks. I boxed up her jewelry, leaving a few favorite pieces out for Drew, which he said he would keep in a dish on his dresser. I wasn’t sure if Drew had a special dish in mind, so I just dumped the jewelry there, a tangle of metal and colored stones. Drew also wondered if Sarah’s coats could be given away, and I took care of this, driving them down to a clothing donation center. I went through Sarah’s computer and dragged her files to a folder Drew had set up in the cloud. It was called “Sarah.” Would anyone ever open this folder? Would the boys grow up and one day decide to look through it, and would there even be computers by then? Instead of carefully going through her papers and everything else she filled her drawers with, I put most of it in boxes and tried to label things as accurately as I could. Holiday Cards. Pictures. Letters. There were fabric swatches and catalogs stuffed with yellow Post-its. Big plans. These went into a box called “Ideas.” But soon her things were boxed away and that was that. I’d cruise through the house looking for objects that were explicitly hers, and eventually I found none. I’m not the first person to observe how little evidence people leave behind when they die. Or, I don’t know, maybe I am. Sarah was just a few boxes, and the boxes were moved out of sight.

My husband called, wanting to know what was up. When was I coming home? The girls missed me, he said, which was poorly encrypted code, and he should have known better. He didn’t say “we” miss you. And by saying the girls missed me—since they were not exactly capable of believing that either of their parents were fully human—he meant that the technical side of their upkeep, which mostly meant the coordination of schedules with the intolerable parents of their friends, people he often refused to even name, suffered during my absence. I was needed to receive and relay signals, mostly, to rehearse concern with other parents over the frequently uncertain whereabouts of our children, who would soon be gone. A metal tower might have served the same function, and it wouldn’t need to eat. What was true was that I sort of missed the girls, but if I was home their doors would be closed, and I wouldn’t even be knocking. I’d stopped trying. I could miss them here, or I could miss them there. I wasn’t sure it mattered.

I asked my husband about homework and bedtimes and food and screen time, in relation to our fiercely willful children, and he gave short, empty answers, assuming each question was a veiled accusation, designed to expose his inattention, which perhaps it was. I loved and trusted him, which turned out to mean that sometimes I also did not.

“So is Drew just a mess?” my husband asked. “Is he a disaster?”

“You know, he’s okay. He’s either in shock and holding it all in, or this is the extent of his reaction. I don’t know him that well. It’s sort of hard to say.”

“I can’t imagine,” he said, which is often what we say when we obsessively imagine something all the time.

“The boys seem okay,” I said, and he said, “Oh right, the boys. Holy crap. I forgot about them. The boys. Jesus. Are they just? Are they just so?” And he wasn’t really able to finish the sentence. A silence bloomed on the phone. The boys. They were and they weren’t, I thought. That’s how I would answer that question. They were just the boys and that was all.

At dinner that night Drew explained that there would be a sum of money from the hospital. Accidental death, is what they called it. No one wanted a lawsuit, Drew told me—which I’m sure wasn’t true. I’m sure there were lawyers living in the walls who pined with their pants down for any lawsuit, anywhere, ever. How much money would it take, the hospital apparently asked Drew. How much do you have, he answered. They named a number and he named a number, and those two numbers entered the sunless, dank bodies of a team of lawyers. Out came the shiny, fresh-smelling settlement, more than enough to keep the two young boys in bright new helmets long into their dotage. Mouth guards, helmets, visors, Doritos, and game consoles: a full, rich, satisfying life on this planet.

This was good, right? I asked. Of course it was no consolation whatsoever, and how could it be, but maybe having less financial pressure around the raising of the boys would help him somewhat, or help ensure a good life for the boys?

Drew shook his head. There was no financial pressure to begin with, he said. They were fine. The money didn’t really mean anything. But it was connected to an idea he had. A kind of plan. And it involved me. He looked at me pretty carefully. It was something he wanted to run by me.

Drew would turn these funds over to me. Along with the two boys. That’s what he wanted to talk about. There would be plenty of money to take care of them, to pay for clothing, food, and school. He didn’t know what to do with them, what to say to them. He couldn’t stand the thought of letting them go, and he couldn’t stand the thought of keeping them. He put his head in his hands and I felt that it would not be a good idea to touch him right now.

There was no use pretending I hadn’t seen this coming. He was such a hulking, sad figure. He thought his life would be easier without those two weird sweethearts running around bopping each other over the head.

“Just for a little while,” he said.

When I called my husband, he met the request with silence. It was one of the ways he responded to things. A long, thoughtful silence. Sometimes he’d leave the room. Days could go by. The conversation wasn’t over, you knew. It had just been suspended, time had stopped, and when he spoke again the world would start back up and life would continue. I admired this thoughtfulness, except when it reared up in situations that did not warrant long, pensive silences, like at restaurants when he was asked what he would like to order. Or now.

“Both children, both boys?” he asked, finally.

“Both of them.”

“For how long?”

“It wasn’t discussed.”

“Which means forever.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you didn’t ask.”

“You’re not here. You don’t understand.”

“I could say the exact same thing about you.”

“Okay, no one is anywhere. No one understands. No one, no one, no one. Is your answer no?” I asked him.

“Why would you say that? That’s not even remotely fair.”

“Oh I guess it just reflects the joy and openness and enthusiasm you’re showing about the idea.”

I Skyped with the girls. They’d colored their hair. They were so lovely, so grown-up, so gone from me in every way. I told them what was going on, the idea that had come up. The boys might come back with me, live with us for a while. Go to school. Be their little brothers.

“Bring them here, bring them here!” they shrieked. “We will, like, totally put their diapers on!”

“They don’t wear diapers anymore. They are pretty grown-up for their age.”

They wanted this, they wanted this, they were sure that it would be fantastic. I couldn’t help thinking that they thought they’d be getting a couple of pets. For a little while, maybe, or for certain hours of the day, that might almost be true. To a small degree. It was just those other hours, when the pet was a person, and the person needed things, and the person wanted things, and the person couldn’t sleep, or the person was sad no matter what, just sad as a long-term unfixable way to be. That was what concerned me. The larger side effects of adding a human being to a situation. Any human being, of any age, blood relative or not.

“Talk to your father,” I told them. “If this is something you want, and if you understand what this really means, really, without assuming that this will all be fun, and knowing that I am going to need a lot of help from both of you. Talk to your father.”

“Dad?” They laughed. “Dad has never said no to us ever once in all of our lives. Has he?” They looked at each other in genuine puzzlement. Soon they were blowing kisses and begging to talk to the boys, or to just see them. But the boys, I said, were busy. They couldn’t come to the phone right now. Maybe next time.

I started to show up in Drew’s room before I went to bed. He’d pretend to be asleep, but he’d make the assignment easy for me, sometimes releasing himself from his underwear. Usually he was, if not hard, swollen enough for me to begin. It was like I was just taking over a craft project he’d already started. I sat at the edge of the bed and it never took very long. He wilted fast in my hand afterward. I wiped my hand on the sheet. Then I left. Cleanup wasn’t part of the deal. That was his problem. He could pay his own sister for that, or some street whore, for all I cared.

In the morning there’d be money, and I’d tuck it into my bag. Soon my flight had been paid for and the missed days of work felt less impactful. I was getting into zero-sum territory, financially, and I had much more free time.

At the bus stop one morning, I mentioned to the boys that their dad would be bringing home their favorite pizza for dinner. The deep-dish kind, and, who knows, maybe there would be a surprise for dessert. This I didn’t know, but I’d be going shopping, so I could take care of it.

“Our dad doesn’t want us,” said the big one.

“Oh that’s not true.”

“It’s okay. He told us that.” They both nodded up at me, as if they’d discussed this together and decided that it was fine.

“No, he did not. You are a big fibber.” I smacked him lightly on his helmet.

“I know. But someone at school said that to us when we said we were leaving.”

“Your dad loves you. My gosh. Are you kidding me?”

“We know.”

The boys were holding hands.

“He really loves you,” I went on. “And right now your dad and I think it might be better for you to come live with me, and your uncle and your cousins.”

“Will our mom be there?” asked the little one.

“No, honey, she won’t.”

“Someone at the funeral tried to tell me where she is, but it was hard to picture.”

“I know. I can’t picture it either.”

“Does it have a name?”

“It might. Should we make up a name for it?”

He made a face. “I don’t like to make up things. I’m not a baby.”

“Okay.”

“I want to know the real name.”

I found myself telling them that I would try to find out. I would look into it. I promised that I would do my best but that it might be very difficult.

“There is no real name,” the big one told the little one. “She’s gone forever.” And the little one whispered that he knew that, he wasn’t stupid.

I kissed them both and they ran off to the bus, and when they got on, they rushed to the back and pressed their faces against the glass, waving at me.

When I thought about how I was spending my time, I realized that I was masturbating two people. Myself and Drew. For the sheer sake of efficiency, just following the logic, I could reduce this workload by 100 percent, saving time and effort, without forfeiting our mutual outcomes, simply by having intercourse with Drew. Suddenly I wouldn’t have to masturbate anybody. I’d go from masturbating two separate people to masturbating nobody. A drastic reduction. But, in theory anyway, the amount of rendered orgasms would be the same, one for each of us, one per day. I was proud of this revelation but the shame was that I had no one to share it with. For some reason I thought of Sarah. This would have been something I could have shared with her. She of all people would have appreciated how efficient I was being. I would no longer have to masturbate her husband. I would no longer have to masturbate myself. It seemed like a clear win.

The transition to the new situation was not especially complicated. I certainly did not need to consult Drew. His opinion did not interest me. I readied myself before entering his room, so I could sit astride him and begin the procedure. Intercourse itself, if you dispense with various ceremonies, along with human speech, can be remarkably efficient. Probably, a long time ago, creatures had to perform intercourse in absolute silence, in the woods, in caves, or else they’d be detected and killed. We still have these skills, they are not entirely dormant in us, even if the threat is gone. Excess noise during intercourse is the sign of a decadent society. Drew still pretended to be asleep, although sometimes he put his hands on my hips, but even that seemed to broach an intimacy that I felt was not warranted. He cried sometimes afterward, and didn’t try to hide it from me. But I wasn’t there for that. I had the boys to think of, and I liked sleeping alone, where no one could touch me.

The plans were rolling into place. My husband texted me a picture, and it looked like he’d squeezed a bunk bed into the spare room and started to paint it. There were toys on the floor, old ones from when the girls were little. “Thank you,” I wrote back. I sent him a red heart emoji, and I held down the button, so there’d be more of them than he could handle. He always came around. Even when he was far away, I could see his body pitching and turning, starting to bank, and then he would come around, back to me.

There was so much to do. Schools and doctors to call, appointments to make. Paperwork to sort out with Drew. He was very organized. He had a binder. He’d given it all a lot of thought. There was a bank account, and he gave me the card and the PIN. There was a caregiver’s contract that conferred authority on me in an emergency. We would be in constant contact, he explained. He would Skype the boys every night. He wanted updates on every little thing. Pictures and videos and the whole deal.

“I don’t know what to say,” Drew said. And I knew that. I knew he didn’t, and I expected nothing to be said. It was strange to see him in the daylight. At night he was just a shape, hardly even that. He cried out and he wept and he came, and he hid his face in the sheets. He did not speak and I never saw his eyes. He’d bought this palace and it was already haunted, he was already spooked. I wondered if he was always like that. Sarah had never said. But when I thought about it, I couldn’t remember her mentioning Drew even once. It was always the boys, and what they were up to. The boys the boys the boys.

The trip was upon us, and the boys needed gear, so I took them shopping. I told them that they could pick out shirts and shoes and pants, even caps, along with socks and undies, but when I saw what they chose, I quietly put everything back and picked out a few things myself. They would never know the difference, and I’m sure they would have just as soon gone around naked. In the store they ran wild, their little helmets jiggling on their heads. When other shoppers glared at them in exaggerated shock I stared them down, ready for anything. Go ahead, I thought. Say something. Do something. Think something.

We went for french fries and milkshakes for lunch. I told them they were being so grown-up. So brave. They were such good young men. My little young men. We were all going to be okay, just great. We had a big adventure waiting for us in their new town.

“Daddy said he will visit,” the big one said, and the little one nodded.

“Daddy will absolutely visit,” I said. “He can visit whenever he wants to. And we will visit him, too. Everyone will visit everyone.”

“Are there schools there? Are there other kids?”

“Yes and yes. And did I say yes?”

“What about those things you told us about. Teenagers. Do they have those there?”

“Your cousins are teenagers. They can’t wait to see you. It will be like having two great big sisters. A big sister is the best thing in the world. They will always protect you. Your mom was my big sister. Just like you”—I pointed to the big one—“are a big brother to you”—and I pointed at the little one.

“Why?” asked the little one.

“Because your mom was born first. She came out into the world before me, and she looked around, she checked everything out, and then she whispered to me, wherever I was, that it was all clear. Everything was fine. I could come out.”

“And did you? Did you come out?”

“I did. One year after your mom.”

“Why did it take so long? Did you forget the way?”

“I was kind of slow. I was still sort of scared. But the whole time I was headed her way. I knew she was waiting for me and I was excited to see her. I just couldn’t wait to see her face.”

The boys looked at me and we all decided that it was probably time to go, because we still had to pack, and we had a plane trip tomorrow, and wasn’t that going to be fun, but we’d better get ready and we’d better get a really really good night’s sleep. At the curb to the parking lot the little one grabbed our hands and cried out for us to wait. No feet in the street, he said. Never, we all yelled. Never ever. He wanted to be the one to say all clear, so he held us back and looked one way, then the other. He took his time, and we waited for him to give the sign that it was okay to go, we could walk, it would be safe.

The Grow-Light Blues

Carl Hirsch didn’t do holiday parties. At least, not correctly. All the so-called people, wind streaming from their faces. Fleshy machines spewing pollution, fucking up the environment. If he squinted, the celebrating bodies of his coworkers very nearly blistered into molecules, shining with color. Too often the whole of it—people, places, and things—looked to scatter. Everyone on the verge of turning to soup. So what if there was no precedent for a full-scale human melt, bodies reduced to liquid pouring from a window? You could still worry about it. Sometimes you had to.

Tonight’s party was in one of those long, skinny city apartments you’re supposed to verbally fellate with praise. It was like walking into a tiny, dismal doghouse, a real doghouse, and then kissing the furred ass of the dog who lived there, who was super annoyed to have you clogging up his tiny room. You were allowed to stay as long as you kept using your tongue.

Hopefully, this doghouse had sick drinks. And free money. And those soft bones in sauce they sometimes served at company parties. Even if he was only permitted to sniff them, because of his, uh, dietary regimen.

“The light, the space, my god!” Carl found himself saying to the small, perfectly dressed host, who stood on the landing.

The host greeted Carl with alarm.

Carl reached up, too late, to cover his face. He didn’t want to be a burden—at least, not to just anyone. And yet, fuck this guy. Didn’t Emily Post have a whole chapter on hiding all reaction to astonishing creatures who appeared at your door? Shutting your little face down so as not to reveal the horror and disgust you might really feel?

To the host, Carl said, grinning far too hard, “Just show me to my rooms and I’ll get out of everyone’s way. Jones is on his way up with my luggage. This is going to be such a fun year, roommate!”

The host didn’t hear him, missed the joke. He was already looking over Carl’s shoulder to where people were crowding up the narrow staircase, trying to push their way inside. Because heaven. Because drinks. Because loneliness and flesh pleasure. Because the invite said, “Levitate, my friends! Let us see the soles of your feet!” Because Mayflower, where they all worked, was pure shithouse. The future was ripe for sexual conquest, and they were busy greasing up their parts.

Carl knew he wasn’t the type to get fondled when he passed out. Mostly it was because of his face, thanks to his job. Rough on the eyes, tough to the touch. Scratchproof, though, which was a bonus. Particularly if some long-shot apocalypse reared up and he had to go face-first into the bramble or some such. For now, partygoers pressing in behind him, he could do nothing but raise his arms and surf forward into the mob, hoping with all his might that the wave would carry him, safe and sound, back home to his bed.

In some ways, it was inevitable that Carl, a few nights later, would take a picture of his balls and send it to the Mayflower email list. After a hot bath, he propped up his phone in the dank zone and captured the crag and the woof, the topographical crimson scorch. He got the shot, pressed “share,” and released the picture into the ether. It felt all right. A certain unburdening. Maybe even like postcoital clarity, chaste and lonely as it was. Afterward, he was tempted to stand at his apartment window and listen through the glass, into the pulse of the evening, as his message landed at key email terminals throughout the metropolis.

If you counted from the beginning, going back to the supposedly sunny morning when Carl was born, this was day ten thousand seven hundred and something of his tremendously joyful stretch of time, his project aboveground.

To hear his mother tell it, because certain mothers break into story when you enter their homes, the birds were in ecstasy the day he was born, squawking over the hospital. The air was so crisp and cool that day, his mother would add, that you felt hugged by the wind. Her phrase. When little Carl was born, the whole neighborhood, per his mother, held its breath. Someone new is among us. Someone special. It was a revisionist birth narrative, likely concocted when it struck Carl’s mother, poor thing, that her son was just another piercingly boring need machine, underperforming and overwhelming, programmed to crave so much from her that she would soon forget her interests and reengineer her whole self in order to supply the mothering that would keep her child, at the very least, out of jail, out of a coffin, and out of the sex-change doctor’s office. At which point she would subtly punish him with nearly imperceptible indifference and ambivalence. Parenting! As far as motives go, his mother had a pretty good one for her wholesale, self-serving fictionalization of Carl’s birth, and he forgave her, not that she ever asked him to, for glorifying his unremarkable debut.

In his twenties, just before his mother died, when she was listless and storied out, staring through a different hospital window as if surveying the land for her own burial, Carl finally Googled the weather on the day of his birth. And, well, lookee there: rain, rain, rain, ash, fire, murder, murder, rain. A godless Tuesday. Unprecedented torrents flooding down from the north. Dirt and mud and broken trees and houses split in half. Sunshine, maybe, but not in his part of the world.

And birds? The Internet had little to say on the matter.

As it turned out, Carl’s photo backfired. The folks at work who opened his attachment—the upper-level creatives at Mayflower as well as the engineers holed up in the silo in Albuquerque—mistook it for an image of Carl’s pitiful neck. Or maybe a scalded bit of acreage under his arm. In other words, no one seemed to see anything uniquely scrotal in the photo. Just grim, if understandable, symptom documentation from a man who was perhaps Mayflower’s most martyred employee. Slash medical subject. Slash guinea pig. Slash hero. Slash fool. Carl the Boiled, as he had started to think of himself. Taking one for the team.

At work the next day, expecting to be shunned and sort of figuratively barfed on, maybe swept into the farewell room, where underachievers got hand-stabbed by Kipler, the CEO, Carl instead collected a few drive-by hugs. He was heavily touched, right on the body, by people he’d hardly even met. A kind of unprecedented love was brought to bear all over his person.

“Oh, my gosh,” Kora, from Nutrients, said, holding him at arm’s length and staring wildly just above his head. She was always the one putting the needle in and sometimes forgetting to take it out.

“Carl? Honey?”

“I’m okay,” Carl whispered, suddenly shy.

“I know!” Kora said. “You are! You will be! You are so brave. I can’t believe you are being so open about what this is doing to you. It serves them right.” She shook her fist.

Kora the Explorer. He wouldn’t think of her that way anymore. He actually appreciated her kindness, if misdirected. If incorrect. Did it matter?

She squeezed his waist, and he felt himself pee a little. His bladder seemed to belong to someone else entirely.

Later in the morning, an older man ducked into Carl’s cubicle, a man who seemed to have been designed, by experts, to embody sorrow and regret. He shook his head with deep, theatrical empathy. His name was maybe Murray. Maury? Perhaps it was Larry. He was a tech. He performed overnight adjustments to the computer displays that were slowly roasting Carl’s face, in the service of the greater good. Money piles for Mayflower. Loss of bodily function for Carl.

“I’m just thinking about you and feeling for you,” the man said to Carl, stooped in a kind of prayer bow. “And knowing that there’s no way I can really know, I mean, I can’t…” He paused. “What you’re going through. None of us can.”

“Everything we can’t know,” Carl said, shaking his head as cheerfully as he could. “Maybe it’s time to cry uncle. Mysteries one, us nothing. We lose!”

The man dipped his head again, pressed his hands together.

“Anyway, it’s what we signed up for, right?” Carl said, trying and failing to picture the exact moment when he’d agreed to take part in the experiment. Had it ever happened? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d written his name, said yes, nodded his head, assented. Maybe by simply staying alive he implied his agreement and cooperation? Simply by walking the halls at Mayflower, and not crawling into a hole, he was saying, Yes, yes, please test your equipment on me. Especially the equipment that burns. I would be most pleased if you would.

How sweet of this man to visit and thank Carl for his service. The old Carl would have smiled and thanked him, but his thanking utensil, connected inexorably to his face, was broken. He had the paralyzed head of a mascot. What he needed now, in order to engage in human congress, were emoticons on Popsicle sticks that he could wave around, lest everyone start to think that he was dead on the inside, too.

Boiled Carl, alpha tester in this freak show, wasn’t exactly sure how the whole UV feeding thing had even come about. Why would Mayflower’s cold commanders, motherfuckers extraordinaire, reveal their true road map to him, anyway?

He’d joined Mayflower’s wearables team five years back and had been whiteboarding applications that tracked emotions, or tried to, so that the world’s feelings could finally get accurately logged. And mined. And then probably ransomed back to the people who had the feelings in the first place. Using the data they collected, Carl’s team had been able to match users’ emotion narratives—the plotted vectors of what they felt over the course of days and weeks and years—with those of other users. Maybe even in their own apartment building. Certainly in their neighborhood. Unless they lived in the middle of nowhere. Or unless their feeling vectors were highly unusual. Carl’s team proposed a kind of mood pairing. Who else is bummed out? Who doesn’t give a shit? Who feels pretty good today, maybe borderline ecstatic, even though something bad happened in Angola? Who’s lost the taste for staying out late, wants to be alone and would like a silent partner in solitude? Who eats his daily caloric value in one sitting at 3 a.m. and has a special reaction to that?

This wouldn’t be just a dating service, even though, ka-ching, hello! Get paid, hashtag gritty times! They were pretty sure they were onto something. Carl thought that, with enough users shooting their feelings into the cloud, Mayflower would be sitting on a gold mine of data. It was the ultimate privacy grab, better even than a blood sample from every living person on the planet. Which the rumor sites also had Mayflower pursuing.

But management smelled too much choice. The whole thing stank of opt out. Self-knowledge was for the dead, they said. People don’t like themselves enough to have to deal with other people with feelings so similar to their own. It makes them feel less special. A product shouldn’t be trying to tell the truth so aggressively. That was a turnoff. Besides, the feeling sensors weren’t where they should be, technology-wise, and only young people would want to wear the neck collars that Carl was proposing. Management pulled the kill switch. Management being Kipler, Kipler, Kipler, and Kipler, depending on his mood. Depending on his sweater.

Creative staged charrettes. Disruption was the watchword. Carl and his team were pressured to lift their legs and pee-shame the status quo. For a cash-yielding invention to work, for it to leak gold pudding and really destroy the economy, in Mayflower’s favor, maybe even change the meaning of money, Kipler once said, it had to look inevitable, ridiculously obvious in hindsight. They all kept coming back to food. What a problem it was. And not just because there was so little of it left on the planet.

Carl was there when Kipler first brought the life hackers into the charrette. Brutal, loud, beautiful, aspirationally immortal. Just a bunch of ageless kid-looking creatures who were like Version 2.0 people. How old were they, really? Eleven? Kipler called them Mayflower’s future. Early adopters of every health trend, enthusiasts of untested medical protocols. They micro-fasted, binged on superfoods, fussed over their own blood tests, which they posted cockily on the longevity message boards. Carl once saw them tearing down a hallway, something clear and greasy on their upper lips. They seemed deranged. Soon the life hackers were obsessed with a service called Jug. Every morning, a jug was delivered to your cubicle. It was all you needed for the day. Nutritionally bozo. Freakishly optimized, and they could load your meds into it, just to keep all your material input in one receptacle. Sometimes the jug held a thick lotion, more of a cream than a drink. Other times it was slippery and clear, with a foamy head. It depended on your bloodwork. As you graduated through jugs, the color and the quality of the liquid changed, responding to feedback. When you finished a jug, you spat your last sip back into the bottle, to be analyzed before the next day’s potion was brewed. Or supposedly. The life hackers had brought their jugs to the charrette one day and swigged from them, burping a grassy steam.

The legend that developed is that Kipler smashed some jugs that day, swung one against his own head, grinning madly. Carl would love to have seen that. Some of the goo in those bottles looked as if it couldn’t even spill. It would just hang in the air like a cloud. He pictured Kipler cream-soaked, coated in white foam.

What did happen is that Kipler said that the start-up that had invented Jug had missed the whole point. They were drawing your attention to your food, giving you a heavy accessory, isolating you socially, et cetera—he went on for like ten minutes of scathing criticism. Kipler destroyed the premise, the execution, the future of this product, and the life hackers, poor guys, seemed to wither at the table.

“Get rid of the jug,” Kipler finally said. “Get rid of the liquid. Get rid of everything. What’s left?”

No one answered.

Kipler smiled.

“Exactly,” he said. “Nothing. There’s nothing left.”

He gestured into empty space, then pointed at the overhead fixture.

“We’re all sitting here, soaking in light. We could have been eating this whole time.”

Kipler was pretty quiet after that, and everybody was freaked out, looking up into the light, squinting.

Mayflower Systems regularly bought and destroyed small companies, mostly to crush progress. And maybe also simply to frighten the universe and increase world sadness? One of the patent portfolios that had come online at around that time involved grow lights. Using light as a delivery system for nutrients, not just for plants but for animals. A lightbulb went off, and a UV healing wand for sick animals became, at Mayflower, something utterly else and fucking wonderful. A nutrient-delivery system for the skin, for people skin. A goddamn human grow light, as Kipler put it, though he thought the word “human” sounded too technical. The way skin makes vitamin D from sunlight. Except this would be other vitamins, too, and micronutrients. And then, one day, the three amigos: fat, protein, and carbohydrates, who usually got inside us only through flesh eating and the like. The marketing hook was that meals were obsolete. Meals were a headache and a hassle. Meals were disgusting. Because of sauce. Because of stench. In the future, Kipler would yell, everyone would eat by accident, while doing other things. While working!

Who would volunteer? Who would saddle up and taste the greatness? Who was stupid? Who had nothing to lose? Who lacked a family to mourn him should things, uh, falter? Who wanted to be a hero? Who could withstand tremendous levels of pain without blacking out? Who could abide a chronic, deep itch under the skin that scratching merely exacerbated?

Those, in fact, were not the criteria. None of them. They blood-tested Creative and looked for subjects with gross nutritional deficits. In other words, people who ate like shit and had the blood numbers of a gremlin. The first goal was to see if the grow light could move the needle, boost a dude’s vitamin A or whatnot. Actually satiate. And not, you know, hasten to expire. And then luminous efficacy would be stretched. Light-form carbohydrate spectrum, rays of protein. Yup. Radical color temps and other par value mods to the spectrum. The talk got geeky. If all went well, they’d pilot a dark strobe, something like a noise gate that regulated the feed? Just pulse darkness so as not to turn the poor subject into some kind of demon, twitching under a heat lamp.

Carl’s bloodwork deemed him the most deviant, healthwise, and the applause he got, a king’s greeting, which must have been cheers of relief, sort of decided the thing. It was Carl who’d be going under the light. All you can eat. Everyone hollered to give it up for Carl and then everyone sort of did, vocally. The entire room, as if they’d planned it, yelled, “Bon appétit, Carl!” Flashlights were clicked on, and these flannel-shirted semi-strangers gathered around him, shining their beams in his face, as a kind of joke, Carl guessed, but it was sickening a little.

Mayflower put Carl on a detox. Not Jug. Just some potions cooked up in the cafeteria, sometimes administered to him in the men’s room, when privacy was called for. Bone-broth Jell-O. Quite a lot of citrus. Cold coffee shot into his dark parts. A vitamin lotion smeared onto his newly shaved head, because hairless skin something something, one of the nutrient nurses explained. Your pores just gape open. Oxygen, she explained, was richer when emulsified into a cream.

Carl felt shaky, poisoned in a way he didn’t quite mind, and when the day came he was ready.

The first time he ate the light, sitting at his desk starving his ass off, staring at his laptop screen, it felt like getting slapped. Rapidly. That was the nutrient penetration, they explained. Like shotgun pellets. To Carl, it felt as if someone had pinned him to the floor and was just pimp-slapping him into a puddle. Carl asked for goggles. His eyes hurt. His feet shrank and weakened. By the end of the first week his tongue clogged his mouth. Enough to foul his speech and make him sound like an animal. And he suffered from a bottomless, gnawing hunger. Maybe because he was getting only enough nutrition, at that point, to sustain a cricket.

It was hard, hard, hard to convert fat into light. The body, Carl’s body, wanted good fats, bad fats, a salt lick, a fat friend. His cravings went berserk. He dreamed of fat, thought of eating parts of himself. The tech for the fat conversion was pretty crude. Understatement. Carl pictured Madame Blavatsky at a loom. How do you speed up fat, make it invisible, but also really fast, really powerful? You could do it, but badly, and this sort of light just balls-out hurt going in. Hurt and burned. Or the reverse. The flesh was chilled by it, for some reason, and there could be rot. Of the skin.

There were some glitches. Display burnout, necrosis. The paint on the cubicle wall behind Carl’s head, which collected the light when he wasn’t sitting there, bubbled up and peeled. There were side effects, including the dark hardening of Carl’s face. They called it “blizzard face.” A team was already at work on a grow-light recovery lotion to market as a solution to the problem they’d created.

Carl felt like an astronaut, a child, a corpse. He asked the obvious questions. Why not some other patch of skin? Something less, maybe, facial? But Kipler was adamant. The face was already getting bathed in light all day by people looking at their computers and phones. “All day! Take what’s there and body-slam it!” he shouted. That was the entire point.

“We use the gestural habits that are already in place. What’s already happening! There’s nothing new to learn, nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to feel. Victory! Do you not see that? Get out of my world if you don’t see that. People don’t want to think about eating. We are giving them a gift. The invention is hidden. It’s nothing! Think nothing.”

During an early charrette, after the experiment began, a tech ran in yelling about an update to the display, some UV dilation they’d pulled off to widen the protein band, muscling it into something called gray light. They’d crowded one more amino acid onto the spectrum, apparently.

“Carl,” the tech said, bowing. “Your presence is humbly requested in Albuquerque. We’ve freaking iterated the shit out of this display. It’s like pure food. We cooled the bitch right down. You’re going to feast, my man. Bring your goggles.”

And then, in a fight announcer’s voice, the tech boomed, “Let’s get ready for Pro-Tein!”

High fives all around.

Carl stood up and shadowboxed, ducking and weaving, but the effort left him dizzy and breathless. He sat back down.

When he returned from Albuquerque, he was hungrier than ever. He had a potbelly. A sore had formed on his chin. He’d enjoyed a small boost in his folate level. In iron. Magnesium. But he was still losing muscle mass, and he felt a tight bulge in one of his eyes. The medics kept waving him through, chortling about miracles. The project was considered a success. Carl was a great explorer. They pushed him in a wheelchair down hallways, just to keep his energy up. Sometimes he slept through a feed, waking up famished with a hot, tight face. Carl dreamed of the sort of hood used for falcons. Someone could push the shrouded man around and everybody would whisper, “That’s Carl. Look at Carl. Oh, my god, there he is.”

“I want what he’s having,” Carl would say to himself, in a voice he could no longer recognize.

When Carl finally sent his crotch shot out into the world, the testing had been going on for endless hungry, scorched weeks. The computer displays were fucking hot, and for a while, before the hardening, Carl rashed up. His skin tightened, his face itched, and something behind his face, the fascia, they called it, seemed to kind of break up. Which caused a kind of feature slide. He submitted to daily bloodwork. They gave him some drug called Shitazine, or that wasn’t exactly what it was called, which turned him totally off mouth food. So they could do a full nutritional assay. On weekends, ravenous and puckered, he got a smoothie, jacked with protein, just to keep him off life support. Monday mornings they chelated him, or something that sounded like that, to zero out his nutritional stats, so that he could sizzle-fry in front of the panels all week and they could clock what was coming in.

If he thought about it, having survived the genital share, there wasn’t a simple answer to why he’d sent the picture. But there wasn’t a complicated answer, either. To Carl himself, it seemed both obvious and mysterious, inevitable and random. He could embrace nearly any interpretation. But since no one appeared to have seen it for what it was, trying to understand it suddenly felt bizarre. He was embarrassed that he’d done it and also disappointed that he hadn’t done it well. He was ashamed and indifferent. Disturbed and content.

But most of all his body was empty and dry, and he was powerfully, powerfully hungry.

Carl was due at the lab on Thursdays, but this week they called him in early.

“You are technically malnourished,” the doctor told him, smiling. “But here’s the thing. So are most people, and they actually eat food. Being malnourished is not per se a concern of ours. You’ve lost a few pounds—well, more than that—but that could be attributed to stress at work. And, anyway, ideal body weight? Still not quite there. So okay. Pretty much. Muscle mass, sure. And your fingernails are brittle, which, of course. Well. What’s important, what’s kind of amazing, is that you’re not starving. Your magnesium levels are ridiculous. I mean, just a joke, in terms of not eating anything. This isn’t possible. What we’re doing. It’s not possible!”

“Okay,” Carl said.

“I mean, you’re hardly in ketosis here!” the doctor shouted, waving his clipboard.

Carl wanted to enjoy this news. Some carbs were flowing in. Whoopee. He was not technically dead. He looked at the two-way mirror, wondering who was back there. Kipler, no doubt, every single version of him. He had a lot riding on Carl. He needed this to work. Why was he hiding? Carl wondered. Afraid of a man whose face has died?

Then Carl did that thing he’d seen on TV where the suspect in the interrogation room gets up and confronts the two-way mirror. Pounds on it to call out the lurkers standing in judgment, deciding his future. Come on out, and all that. What are you afraid of? Except Carl did it sort of mildly. It was hard to walk. He tottered over to the glass, cupped his hands against it. He didn’t want to break anything. Just a few taps on the glass. Hello? he thought. Hello? Did he really need to say it out loud? How much of this shit needed to be spelled out?

“Uh, what are you doing?” the doctor asked.

To answer that in detail, Carl would have had to wave a pretty complicated set of emoticons. Desperation, suspicion, apology, and, hovering over all the others, exhaustion. Just a yellow ball of tired face. Not yawning, though. Not that kind of tired.

“Tired face, tired face,” Carl said to the doctor. “Just fucking tired face.”

“There’s nothing back there,” the doctor said. “It’s a closet. I’ll show you.”

Carl waved him away. He apologized. He was being paranoid, he explained. It’s just that he was always so hungry, and it wasn’t pain so much as tremendous pressure flushing through him. “It’s like someone keeps pouring hot water inside me. Inside my whole body. I’m getting rinsed out by very hot water. Agony face. Face for I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

The doctor looked at him but made no note.

“I’m just being foolish,” Carl said. “You know me.”

The doctor nodded. They hardly knew each other.

Carl ducked out and resumed his session at his desk. The light from his computer today was cool, almost soothing. Maybe they’d iterated a healing blue ray. Maybe this would all start feeling better. To kill time, he fired up a lost-person website and put in his own name. The tracking on these things was pretty poor. You could register, supposedly, and get better data. Live tracking was promised. Was it real? Could he pay the money and then see, in digital scribble, the path he’d been taking these past few months? Would the bird’s-eye view reveal something new? Because he’d been through it on the ground, in person, and even he couldn’t be sure.

The problem was that there were too many Carl Hirsches to choose from. Maybe thirty in Carl’s region alone. You could pick only one at a time, then pay your money for the reveal. But behind each clickable Carl Hirsch was the same picture, the only extant picture of a Carl Hirsch anywhere, apparently.

The picture looked a good deal like Carl’s own father, dead a long time now, who never lived in this area. Never even visited, as far as Carl knew. Was it really him? The picture was from that era when subjects did not look at the camera, so here was someone who looked very much like his dad, from so long ago, staring into the distance, at something behind Carl that he couldn’t see. No matter how he jogged his head, he could not quite get those eyes to look at him.

The rest of the week went okay. The sympathy dried up, but all seemed well. Carl fried at his desk, sipped distilled water. His guards didn’t seem to be minding him so carefully, and Kora hadn’t come by to stick him with Shitazine, so he grabbed a scone at one point, and it burst into powder in his mouth. He fell to the ground coughing, a cloud of crumbs spraying everywhere, but no one at Mayflower particularly minded him. They knew his life was hell.

In the coatroom as Carl was leaving that Friday, Kipler pulled him aside. Out in the open, in front of the rush-hour crowd of employees, who pretended that their boss wasn’t standing right there, huddled up with Blizzard Face himself.

“So what’s with the crotch shot?”

“What?”

“Why did you send a picture of your testicles to so many strangers? People were revolted and confused. And over email. The least secure form of communication ever devised, including whatever the apes used.”

“You knew?”

“A scrotum isn’t some rare species, nor does any living person have a neck that fucked up. We know what your symptoms are. We caused them. I’ve probably seen forty unique pairs of balls. Just a round number. Not all of them up close, but I know what they look like.”

“I’m sorry,” Carl said.

“So are we. You’re out. It breaks your nondisclosure. Honestly, even if it doesn’t, it breaks something. Something is wrong. Your data. I don’t know. I don’t specialize in precise ways to say something so obvious. You’re done.”

“I agree,” Carl said.

“Go have a sandwich, already. You’re off the feed. We neutralized your panels a few days ago from a kill switch in Albuquerque.”

“I was going to say,” Carl said. “Something seemed like an improvement.”

“The alpha unit wasn’t friendly. We know that. Sorry for, you know. Mostly it was proof of concept. And guess what. Proof achieved. Through the so-called roof. Maybe your numbers weren’t good, but they were numbers. You fed. Badly, and with little retention. But you fed. We’re moving to beta. The life hackers are going to strap in. This thing will make it to market. I’m sorry you can’t take the ride with us.”

“So am I fired?”

“Don’t push your luck. The NDA still stands, for, like, three lifetimes. Your children’s children, not that offspring are a likely outcome for you, can’t even whisper it to each other. I’ll be dead myself, but I’ll leave instructions that your kids get slapped across the room and out a window if that happens. Slapped right the hell off the planet. So nary a whisper. Not that you’re having kids. We find that it’s easiest for you to keep quiet about all this if you, you know, don’t even remember it. That way it’s not a secret you’re keeping. You don’t even know about it yourself. Which is very nearly true. That’s the argument from our side. Not even the argument, just the language. It never happened.”

“Thanks,” Carl said.

“I love you, man,” Kipler said. He closed in on Carl, wrapped him in his arms. “What a bullet you took for us,” he whispered. “A huge bullet. The biggest.”

As the employees of Mayflower filed out of the building for the night, Carl held on to Kipler in the coatroom, squeezing him tightly, feeling the man’s heartbeat throb against his face.

For a while, everything went quiet. Carl returned to mouth food with an animal focus, but he couldn’t keep it down, and all the time he fretted about the UV panels. Showing up, who knows, in traffic lights. On televisions. At home, pulsing from his mirror. He stayed cautious of screens, skipped past them quickly.

The winter failed, and along came April, one of the twelve punishments. Carl had seen this month too often by now and had hardened against its pleasures.

April was a bastard name for a month so numb. Slush on the ground, a salty slurry in the air. Slush, most likely, in his insides, which he pictured as muddied guts down a hole.

Day after day, Carl tromped to work. He tromped home. His pants grew stiff with salt. He lost his security clearance and was migrated through Mayflower’s cubicles once, twice. Finally, they exiled him, with the older, idea-free crowd, to a featureless room overlooking the vast, immaculate cafeteria. In Carl’s new work corridor, the employees went uninstructed and drastically unpoliced. Did they really work there? They shared a single computer and a pristine in-box. To Carl, the workspace was a petting zoo, without visitors. People moved from table to window to door, moaning. He did his best not to touch anyone.

He soon lost his taste for food. Maybe he’d outgrown it, which possibly meant that his clock had finally run down, and okay, that was okay. A creature senses an ending. A window, a door, a hole opens, and he steps through. For now, he sipped the occasional yogurt drink and kept some bread nearby, but something had died in him, and he worried that eating, even a little, would feed it, would stoke the thing and bring it back to life. He felt safer with it gone.

Sometimes Carl woke up confused. He spent time trying to figure out how to reverse what had happened. What was the opposite of a human grow light? He tried the obvious: darkness, the deepest kind. He tried it and tried it and tried it. At home for days with the shades down, then—where the darkness was so much better, so exquisite and fine—out of town, along the sand roads, under the salt pines, in the dunes, or deep in the woods off the highway.

One night, the police picked him up, and they were not pleased. What face could Carl show them but his own, burned and unmoving? What he told them, at length and through his charred mouth, was not true and it was not enough. They drove him home in silence, and when they dropped him off they saw him all the way to his door and inside, and after Carl locked up he listened for a long time, but never did hear them walk away.

At the age of forty-one, Carl left Mayflower and accepted an IT job in a school system near the water. Tech support turned out to be lightbulbs, wind blinds, a chimney. Chairs, phones, walls. The yard, too. Carl would maintain all of them.

The school kept Carl away from the children. He understood. Children’s fears should be managed. Sometimes their eyes need to be covered. So much is better left unseen. There would be more and greater to fear when they were older. Best to save room. But Carl found a way to tend the landscape in the mornings, at a squinting distance from the school doors. From afar, he was a faceless man in a jumpsuit, leaning into his shovel, Carl the Small, the frantic waver. Every day, the kids, fired like missiles from the yellow school buses, waved at Carl, and he saluted them all, righty-o. Hello there, you guys! People should always greet one another that way. If he could store a message for creatures thousands of years in the future, it would be simple. Upon meeting one another in whatever passes, in your world, for a room, a hallway, a road, a field, do not play dead while you are still alive. Just try to say hello.

It turned out that there was a woman at the school who did not die from seeing Carl up close, again and again. They had lunch together, and lunch together, and lunch and a walk, and a weekend coffee, and lunch again, until something felt wrong when they didn’t meet up, even if it was to do nothing much but take the woods path, or walk, once night had come on, right through town.

Her name was Maura, and she ran art and languages for the sixth graders. She asked what had happened to him, and he shook his head. He wanted to pull a long-story face. The hardened shell of him had withered by then, gone soft. It looked as if someone had died just outside his body and he was still wearing that person’s skin. He shook his head, that was all, and this was fine with her. She said she understood. Which meant, to Carl, that in one way or another maybe Maura was keeping to her own nondisclosure agreement, one that she’d struck with herself or others, sometime in the past, far from here.

It was no romance, which relieved them both. Maura and Carl were plain about what they needed to feel pleasure. If their intimacy could feel turn-based and a little like a chore, just friends bestowing favors, like old women doing each other’s hair, it was at least a manageable sorrow that he could endure. He could keep an eye on it and be sure that it didn’t grow.

Maura was older than Carl. She was kinder, finer-looking, more at peace, as far as he knew, with having been born. What a gift, not to be constantly scouting for an exit! And if Carl felt private or mean he knew to leave the house and pour out his cruelty in a safe place, where Maura could not be hurt. Perhaps what was most animal in him had been cooked out by Kipler and his rig, burned or boiled or just reduced so that it hardly ever appeared. He hated to think so positively, because he felt as if it did a kind of violence to his brain, but perhaps something good had come of all that heat, all that light. An off-script use case to the human grow light that no doubt they’d never suspect over at Mayflower: you could use that fierce power to eliminate the wrong and rotten parts of yourself. Not a grow light but the reverse, which felt better to Carl than he would have liked to admit.

It was probably not the Lord who allowed Maura to conceive a child, even though she thanked Him. Carl tried thanking Him, too. His policy on the matter—as they tended her pregnancy all summer and into the fall, walking to school together on weekday mornings before silently parting for the day, then meeting again for the walk home—was that gratitude needed only to be released from one’s person, spoken out loud. From there, it could find its proper destination on its own.

When his son was born, on a cold, cloudless October night, Carl could not help himself. Some very old words came back to him. What a tremendously ridiculous person he’d become, even though nothing that had happened to him had been ridiculous. The words he recalled were somehow suddenly available, wanting out. He whispered them, over and over, until the little creature, still unnamed, mouth bubbling on Maura’s tummy, fell asleep for the very first time in his life: Someone new is among us. Someone special.

It hurt him to say this, because he was Carl. He knew the odds, the science, the facts. Or at least he used to. Was such a statement really as grossly untrue as it seemed? Just him being wishful, being scared? What, really, was so special about one more boy in the world?

Maybe the verdict on this could stay out for now. Just scattered into the distance, a verdict you could never really reach, even if you wanted to. Maybe, in whatever time he had left, Carl would work as hard as he could to keep the verdict on that question, along with every other question that pressed in, as far away from his family as humanly possible.

George and Elizabeth

When George’s father died, he neglected to tell his therapist, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except for those killer moods of hers. She knew how to punish him with a vicious show of boredom.

He’d been deep in a session with her, maintaining that when he was younger he had discovered that there was no difference, in bed, between men and women. Literally. At the biological level. If you could wrap a present, you could make one into the other. And therefore this issue of preference had weirdly become moot. You didn’t have to check either box.

“Have you ever worked with clay?” he asked her. “Have you ever pushed pudding around in your bowl?”

George gestured to show what he meant. Spoon work, a bit of charade knitting.

Dr. Graco waved for him to get on with it.

It was finally, he explained, just a shame that there were no other categories he could sample.

“So you feel incapable of surprise at the sexual level?” she asked.

“I’m sure there are things out there I haven’t tried, but in the end they belong to categories that have washed out for me. Just, you know, haircuts I’ve already had, beards, whatever. There’s too much time left on the clock. I wish that I had paced myself.”

“Paced yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it a race?”

“Yes. I just got my number. I should have pinned it to my shirt. Sorry about that.”

“You don’t take this seriously, do you?”

“Well… I pay you to take it seriously. Which gives me room to deflect and joke about it and put my insecurities on display, which you should know how to decode and use in your treatment. Another layer of evidence for your salt box.”

“Do you often think about how I conduct your treatment, as you call it?”

George sighed.

“I thought about it once, and then I died,” he said. “I bled out.”

And boom, the session was over. He was in the waiting room putting on his coat before he remembered his news, what he’d been so determined to tell her, but he had to deal with the ovoid white noise machine which turned speech into mush, and the miserable young man waiting his turn who refused to ever acknowledge George when he burst out of his appointment. It was all a bit exhausting. Were the two of them really supposed to pretend that they weren’t both paying Dr. Graco to inhale their misery and exhibit a professional silence about it? And couldn’t they finally just unite in shame and even go sadly rut somewhere? Roll out their crusts against a building, even, or on the merry-go-round in Central Park?

Sex with sad people was something that could still deliver—in terms of sheer lethargy and awkwardness—but the demographics were stubborn. These people didn’t exactly come out to play very often. It wasn’t clear what birdcall you were supposed to use. You practically had to go around knocking on doors. And then the whole thing could verge on coercion.

The news of his father’s death had come in yesterday from a laundromat. Or perhaps it was simply a place with loud machines and yelling in the background. Someone was on the other end of the phone asking if a Mr. George was next of kin.

At first George was confused. “To what?” he asked. The word “kin” made him picture the Hare Krishna display, human beings going hairless and sleek as they evolved. As if a bald, aquiline man couldn’t swing a club and crush someone.

“All the tenants do a next of kin. I just need to know if that’s you. Tenant name is… I can’t really read this writing, to be honest. I didn’t know this man. We have a lot of units.”

George very slowly said his father’s name.

“That’s it. Check. And are you Mr. George?”

George said he was. Whenever someone tried to pronounce his true last name, it sounded unspeakably vulgar.

“I’m sorry to report your loss,” the voice said.

Then don’t, thought George. Keep it to yourself.

He guessed he knew he’d get a call like this one day, and he guessed he’d have to think about it for a while, because the initial impact felt mild, even irritating. He’d have to stick his head into the dirty, hot, self-satisfied state of California and try not to drown in smugness while he solved the problem of his father’s body, which he hadn’t particularly cared for when his father was alive. But what was most on his mind was this question of kin, and why they had not made another call first.

There was a sister, but she’d scored out of the family. It was hard to blame her. Better food, prettier people, sleeker interiors. George read about her now and then online. She’d achieved a kind of fame in the world of industrial materials. At some point she’d promoted her ridiculous middle name, Pattern, to pole position. Like Onan, maybe. Or Pelé. Her old name, Elizabeth, George figured, was holding her back, and in a way he couldn’t blame her, given the sheepish Elizabeths he’d privately failed to grant human status in college. Sleepwalkers, enablers, preposterously loyal friends. Pattern was a family name belonging to their great-grandmother, who lived on a brutally cold little island, and who, according to their mother, had made a sport of surviving terminal illnesses. Now George’s lovely sister Pattern, so many years later, was a person, a business, a philosophy, a crime. She did something in aerospace. Or to it. Had his brilliant sister once said, in a Newsweek profile, that she wanted to “help people forget everything they thought they knew about the earth”? One such bit of hypnosis had apparently resulted in immense profits for her, the kind of money you could get very paranoid about losing. She produced shimmering synthetic materials from terribly scarce natural resources—a kind of metal drapery that served as “towels” for drones—which meant Pattern was often photographed shaking hands with old people in robes on the tarmacs of the world, no doubt after administering shuddering hand jobs to them back on the airbus.

Well, that wasn’t fair. Probably, George figured, her staff conducted proclivity research so that it could provide bespoke orgasms to these titans of industry, whose children Pattern was boiling down for parts, whose reefs, mines, and caves her company was thoroughly hosing.

At home Pattern was probably submissive to a much older spouse, whose approach to gender was seasonal. Or maybe his sister wasn’t married? It was difficult to remember, really. Perhaps because he had probably never known? Perhaps because Pattern did not exactly speak to any of the old family? Ever?

Now, with Mother in a Ball jar and Dad finally passed, George was the last man standing. Or sitting, really. Sort of slumped at home in the mouth of his old, disgusting couch. Trying to figure out his travel plans and how exactly he could get the bereavement discount for his flight. Like what if they tested him at the gate with their grief wand and found out, with digital certainty, that he super sort of didn’t give a shit?

His most recent contact with his sister was an email from soldier1@pattern.com, back when her rare visits home were brokered by her staff, who would wait for their boss in a black-ops Winnebago out on the street. Ten years ago now? His mother was dead already, or still alive? At the time George wondered if Pattern couldn’t just send a mannequin to holiday meals in her place, its pockets stuffed with money. Maybe make it edible, the face carved from meat, to deepen the catharsis when they gnashed it apart with their teeth. Anyway, wouldn’t his sister like to know that there was now one less person who might make a grab for her money? She could soften security at the compound, wherever she lived. Dad was dead. Probably she already knew. When you’re that wealthy, changes in your biological signature, such as the sudden omission of a patriarch, show up instantly on your live update. You blink in the high-resolution mirror at your reflection, notice no change whatsoever, and then move on with your day. Maybe she’d have her personal physicians test her for grief later in the week, just to be sure.

The question now was how to fire off an email to his very important sister that would leapfrog her spam filter, which was probably a group of human people, arms linked, blocking unwanted communications to their elusive boss, who had possibly evolved into a smoke by now.

Simple was probably best. “Dear Pat,” George wrote. “Mom and Dad have gone out and they are not coming back. It’s just you and me now. Finally we have this world to ourselves. P.S. Write back!”

George went to California to pack his father’s things, intending a full-force jettison into the dumpster. He’d only just started surveying the watery one-bedroom apartment, where he could not picture his father standing, sitting, sleeping, or eating, mostly because he had trouble picturing his father at all, when a neighbor woman, worrisomely tall, came to be standing uninvited in the living room. He’d left the door open and cracked the windows so the breeze could do its work. Let the elements scrub this place free of his father. He needed candles, wind, a shaman. And on the subject of need: after sudden travel into blistering sunshine, he needed salty food to blow off in his mouth. He needed sex, if only with himself. Oh, to be alone with his laptop so he could leak a little cream onto his belly. Now there was a trespasser in his father’s home, suited up in business wear. It was enormously difficult to picture such people as babies. And yet one provided the courtesy anyway. An effort to relate. Their full maturation was even harder to summon. He was apparently to believe that, over time, these creatures, just nude little seals at first, would elongate and gain words. A layer of fur would cover them, with moist parts, and teeth, and huge pockets for gathering money. Was there a website where the corporate Ichabods of the world showed off their waterworks, gave each other rubdowns, and whispered pillow talk in an invented language? Perhaps a new category beckoned.

“Oh my god. You can’t be George,” the woman said.

George sort of shared her disbelief. He couldn’t be. The metaphysics were troubling, if you let them get to you. But day after day, with crushing regularity, he failed to prove otherwise.

The woman approached, her nose high. Examine the specimen, she possibly thought. Maybe draw its blood.

“I can’t believe it!”

He asked if he could help her. Maybe she wanted to buy something, a relic of the dead man. The realtor had said that everything had to go. Take this apartment down to the bones.

So far, George was just picking at the skin. He was looking through his father’s takeout menus, skimming the man’s Internet history. There were items of New Mexican pottery to destroy, shirts to try on.

Maybe he’d dress up like his father and take some selfies. Get the man online, if posthumously. If no one much liked him when he was alive, at least the old man could get some likes in the afterlife. Serious.

The woman remembered herself.

“I’m Trish, Jim’s… you know.”

“Uh-huh,” George said.

“I won’t even pretend to think he might have told you about me,” Trish said. “It’s not like we were married in any real official way. At least not yet.”

Oh god. A half wife.

The last time he spoke to his father—months ago now—George remembered not listening while his father said he had met someone, and that she—what was it?—provided the kind of service you didn’t really get paid for, or paid enough, because damn this country! And that this new girlfriend was from somewhere unique, and George knew to act impressed. Certainly his dad had seemed very proud, as if he’d met some dignitary from another planet.

So details had been shared, just not absorbed. Would she tell George now that his father had really loved him? Pined and whatever, wished for phone calls, had the boy’s name on Google Alert?

“Of course, Trish,” George said, and then he smacked his forehead, ever so lightly, to let her know just what he thought of his forgetfulness. She deserved as much. They embraced, at a distance, as if his father’s body were stretched out between them. Then she stepped closer and really wrapped him up. He felt her breath go out of her as she collapsed against him.

George knew he was supposed to feel something. Emotional, sexual. Rage and sorrow and a little bit of predatory hunger. Even a deeper shade of indifference? History virtually demanded that the errant son, upon packing up his estranged and dead father’s belongings, would seek closure with the new, younger wife. Half wife. Some sort of circuitry demanded to be completed. He had an obligation.

It felt pretty good to hold her. She softened, but didn’t go boneless. He dropped his face into her neck. Lately he’d consorted with some hug-proof men and women. They hardened when he closed in. Their bones came out. Not this one. She knew what she was doing.

“Well, you sure don’t smell like your father,” she said, breaking the hug. “And you don’t look like him. I mean not even close.”

She laughed.

“Oh I must,” said George. He honestly couldn’t be sure.

“Nope. Trust me. I have seen that man up close. You are a very handsome young man.”

“Thank you,” said George.

“I think I want to see some ID! I might have to cry foul!”

They met later for dinner at a taco garage on the beach. Their food arrived inside what looked like an industrial metal disk.

George dug in and wished it didn’t taste so ridiculously good.

“Oh my god,” he gushed.

It was sort of the problem with California, the unembarrassed way it delivered pleasure. It backed you into a corner.

After dinner they walked on the beach and tried to talk about George’s father without shitting directly inside the man’s urn, which was probably still ember hot. George hadn’t unboxed it yet.

“I loved him, I did. I’m sure of it,” Trish said. “When all the anger finally went out of him there was something so sweet there.”

George pictured his father deflated like a pool toy, crumpled in a garage.

“He called me by your mom’s name a lot. By mistake. Rina. Irene. Boy did he do that a lot.”

“Oh, that must have been hard,” said George. Who was Irene? he wondered. Had he ever met her? His mother’s name was Lydia.

“No, I get it. He had a life before me. We weren’t babies. It’s just that I suppose I want to be happy, too. Which is really a radical idea, if you think about it,” Trish said.

George thought about it, but he was tired and losing focus. He preferred a solitary loneliness to the kind he felt around other people. And this woman, Trish. Was she family to him now? Why did it feel like they were on a date?

“It’s just that my happiness, what I needed to do to get it, threatened your father,” continued Trish.

“My father, threatened,” George said. “But whatever could you mean?”

Trish laughed. “Oh I like you. You’re nothing like him.”

George took that in. It sounded fine, possibly true. He had no real way of knowing. He remembered his father’s new radio, which he had watched him build when he was a kid, and whose dial he twisted into static for hours and hours. He could make his dad laugh by pretending the static came from his mouth, lip-synching it. He remembered how frightened his father had been in New York when he visited so many years later. George held his arm everywhere they went. It had irritated him terribly.

What else? His father made him tomato soup once. His father slapped him while he was brushing his teeth, sending a spray of toothpaste across the mirror.

George was probably supposed to splurge on memories now. He wasn’t sure he had the energy. Maybe the thing was to let the memories hurl back and cripple him, months or years from now. They needed time, wherever they were hiding, to build force, so that when they returned to smother him, he might never recover.

After their walk, they stood in a cloud of charred smoke behind the restaurant. The ocean broke and swished somewhere over a dune. Trish arched her back and yawned.

“All of this death,” she said.

“Horn-y,” George shouted. He wasn’t, but still. Maybe if they stopped talking for a while they’d break this mood.

Trish tried not to laugh.

“No, uh, funny you should say that. I was just thinking, it makes me want to…” She smiled.

How George wished that this was the beginning of a suicide pact, after a pleasant dinner at the beach with your dead father’s mistress. Just walk out together into the waves. But something told him that he knew what was coming instead.

“I’m going to comfort myself tonight, with or without you,” Trish said. “Do you feel like scrubbing in?”

George looked away. The time was, he would sleep with anyone, of any physical style. Any make, any model. Pretty much any year. If only he could do away with the transactional phase, when the barter chips came out, when the language of seduction was suddenly spoken, rather than sung, in such non-melodious tones. It was often a deal breaker. Often. Not always.

After they’d had sex, which required one of them to leave the room to focus on the project alone, they washed up and had a drink. It felt good to sip some so-called legacy whiskey from his father’s Pueblo coffee mugs. Now that they’d stared into each other’s cold depravity, they could relax.

Trish circled around to the inevitable.

“So what’s up with Pattern?”

Here we go.

“What’s she like? Are you guys in touch? Your father never would speak of her.”

Probably due to the nondisclosure agreement she must have had him sign, George figured.

“You know,” he said, pausing, as if his answer was more than ordinarily true, “she’s really nice, really kind. I think she’s misunderstood.”

“Did I misunderstand it when her company, in eighteen months, caused more erosion to the Great Barrier Reef than had since been recorded in all of history?”

“She apologized for that.”

“I thought you were going to say she didn’t do it. Or that it didn’t happen that way.”

“No, she did do it, with great intention, I think. I bet at low tide she would have stood on the reef herself and smashed it into crumbs for whatever fungal fuel they were mining. But, you know, she apologized. In a way, that’s much better than never having done it. She has authority now. Gravity. She’s human.”

“What was she before?”

Before? George thought. Before that she was his sister. She babysat for him. He once saw her get beaten up by another girl. She went to a special smart-people high school that had classes on Saturdays. Before that she was just this older person in his home. She had her own friends. She kept her door closed. Someone should have told him she was going to disappear. He would have tried to get to know her.

In the morning Trish recited the narrative she had concocted for them. Their closeness honored a legacy. Nothing was betrayed by their physical intimacy. They’d both lost someone. It was now their job to make fire in the shape of—here George lost track of her theory—George’s dad.

Trish looked like she wanted to be challenged. Instead George nodded and agreed and tried to hold her. He said he thought that a fire like that would be a fine idea. Even though they’d treated each other like specimens the night before, two lab technicians straining to achieve a result, their hug was oddly platonic today. He pictured the two of them out in the snow, pouring a gasoline silhouette of his dead father. Igniting it. Effigy or burn pile?

“We didn’t know each other before,” said Trish. “Now we do. We’re in each other’s lives. This is real. And it’s good. You’re not just going to go home and forget me. It won’t be possible.”

George would sign off on pretty much any press release about what had happened last night, and what they now meant to each other, so long as it featured him catching his plane at 9:30 a.m. and never seeing her again.

As he was leaving, Trish grabbed him.

“I would say ‘one for the road,’ but I don’t really believe in that. Just that whole way of thinking and speaking. It sounds sorrowful and final and I don’t want that to be our thing. That’s not us. I don’t like the word ‘road’ and I definitely don’t like the word ‘one.’ Two is much better. Two is where it’s at.”

She held up two fingers and tried to get George to kiss them.

George smiled at her, pleaded exhaustion. It was sweet of her to offer, he said, and normally he would, but.

“You know, research shows,” Trish said, not giving up, “that really it’s a great energy boost, to love and be loved. To climax. To cause to climax. To cuddle and talk and to listen and speak. You’re here! You’re standing right here with me now!”

“I’m sorry,” said George. “I guess it’s all just starting to hit me. Dad. Being gone. I don’t think I’d bring the right spirit right now. You would deserve better.”

It didn’t feel good or right to play this card, but as he said it he found it was more true than he’d intended.

Trish was beautiful, but given the growing privacy of his sexual practice, such factors no longer seemed to matter. He would probably love to have sex with her, if she could somehow find a way of vanishing, and if the two of them could also find a way to forget that they had tried that already, last night, and the experience had been deeply medical and isolating. It was just too soon to hope for a sufficiently powerful denial to erase all that and let them, once again, look at each other like strangers, full of lust and hope.

“Is that a bad thing,” George asked his therapist, after returning home and telling her the basics.

“And please don’t ask me what I think,” he continued. “The reason people ask a question is because they would like an answer. Reflecting my question back to me, I swear, is going to make me hurl myself out of the window.”

Together they looked at the small, dirty window. There were bars on it. The office was on the ground floor.

“I’d hate to be a cause of your death,” said the therapist, unblinking.

“Well, I just wonder what you think.”

“Okay, but I don’t think you need to lecture me in order to get me to answer a question. You seem to think I need to be educated about how to respond to you. There are also many other reasons people ask questions, aside from wanting answers. You’re an imbecile if you think otherwise.”

“Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.”

“Well, then, I think it must be lonely. I do. To find yourself attracted to a woman who also seems, as you say, attracted to you—if that’s true—and to think you’d be more content to fantasize about her than to experience her physically. So it sounds lonely to me. But we should also notice that this is a loneliness you’ve chosen, based on your sexual desires. Your sexuality seems to thrive on loneliness. And I can’t help but sense that some part of you is proud of that. Your story seems vaguely boastful.”

“Plus her being my father’s widow.”

Dr. Graco frowned.

“What was that?” she asked.

“You know, her also having been involved with my father, before he died. I guess I left that part out.”

Dr. Graco took a moment to write in her notebook. She wrote quickly, and with a kind of disdain, as if she didn’t like to have to make contact with the page. A fear of contaminants, maybe. A disgust with language.

It had sometimes occurred to him that therapists used this quiet writing time, after you’ve said something striking, or, more likely, boring, to make notes to themselves about other matters. Grocery lists, plans. One never got to see what was written down, and there was simply no possible way that all of it was strictly relevant. How much of it was sheer stalling, running out the clock? How much of it just got the narcissist in the chair across from you to shut up for a while?

She wrote through one page and had turned to another before looking up.

“I am sorry to hear about your father.”

“I should have told you. I apologize.”

“He died… recently?”

“Two weeks ago. That’s why I was away. My missed appointment. Which I paid for, but. I was gone. I’m not sure if you.”

“I see. Do you mean it when you say you should have told me?”

“Well, I found the prospect of telling you exhausting, I guess. I was annoyed that I had to do it. To be honest, I wished you could just, through osmosis, have the information, in the same way you can see what I’m wearing and we don’t need to discuss it. It’s just a self-evident fact. You could just look at me and know that my father is dead.”

She resumed writing, but he did not want to wait for her.

“That’s not a criticism of you, by the way. I don’t think you were supposed to guess. I mean I don’t think I think that. Maybe. You know, to just be sensitive and perceptive enough to know. I am sometimes disappointed about your powers, I guess. That’s true, I should admit that. I just wish I had, like, a helper, who could run ahead of me to deliver the facts, freeing me up from supplying all of this context when I talk to people. Otherwise I’m just suddenly this guy who’s like, my father died, blah blah. I’m just that guy.”

“But you weren’t. Because you didn’t tell me. You were not that guy.”

“Right, I guess.”

“So then who were you?”

“What?”

“You didn’t want to be the guy who told me your father had died, so by not telling me, what guy did you end up being instead?”

For some reason, George saw himself and Pattern, as kids, waiting on a beach for their lunch to digest, so they could go swimming. Pattern was dutifully counting down from two thousand. It was a useless memory, irrelevant here. He remembered when he shopped and cooked for his mother, when she wasn’t feeling well, and then really wasn’t feeling well. He cleaned and took care of her. His father had already planted his flag in California. He was that guy, but for such a short time. Two weeks? He’d been very many people since then. Who was he when he didn’t tell Dr. Graco that his father died? Nobody. No one remarkable. He’d been someone too scared or too bored, he didn’t know which, to discuss something important.

“That just made me think of something,” he said finally. “The word ‘guy.’ I don’t know. Have you heard of Guy Fox?”

“I assume you don’t mean the historic figure, Guy Fawkes?”

“No. F-o-x. Porn star, but that’s not really a good label for what he does. It’s not clear you can even call it porn anymore. It’s so sort of remote and kind of random, and definitely not obviously sexual. Or even at all. I mean almost, just, boredom. Anyway, it’s a new sort of thing. He provides eye contact. People pay a lot. He’ll just watch you, on video. You can stream him to your TV, and he’ll watch you. People pay him to watch while they have sex, of course, or masturbate, but now supposedly people just hire him to watch them while they hang out alone in their houses. Whenever they look up, he’s looking at them. They are paying to have eye contact whenever they want. They want someone out there seeing them. And he’s just amazing. Apparently there’s nothing quite like getting seen by him. It’s an addiction.”

“Ah, I see. Well, I’m afraid we have to stop.”

Afraid, afraid, afraid. Don’t be afraid, George thought. Embrace it.

For once he wished she’d say, “I’m delighted our session is over, George, now get the hell out of my office, you monster.”

Bowing to a certain protocol of the bereaved, George acquired a baby dog: hairless, pink, and frightening. His therapist had put him onto it after he kept insisting he was fine. She explained that people who lose a parent, especially one they weren’t close to, tend to grieve their lack of grief. Like they want to really feel something, and don’t, and so they grieve that. That absence. She said that one solution to this circular, masturbatory grief, is to take care of something. To be responsible for another living creature.

Except George and the animal had turned out to be a poor match. That’s how he put it to the dog catcher, or whatever the man was called when he sent the wet thing back, and then hired cleaners to sanitize his home. The animal was more like a quiet young child, waiting for a ride, determined not to exploit any hospitality whatsoever in George’s home. It rarely sprawled out, never seemed to relax. It sat upright in the corner, sometimes trotting to the window, where it glanced up and down the street, patiently confirming that it had been abandoned. Would it recognize rescue when it came? Sometimes you just had to wait this life out, it seemed to be thinking, and get a better deal next time. God knows where the creature slept. Or if.

Did the animal not get tired? Did it not require something? George would occasionally hose off the curry from the unmolested meat in his takeout container, and scrape it into the dog bowl, only to clean it up, untouched, days later. The animal viewed these meals with calm detachment. How alienating it was, to live with a creature so ungoverned by appetites. This thing could go hungry. It had a long game. What kind of level playing field was that? George felt entirely outmatched.

One night George tried to force the issue. He wanted more from it, and it wanted absolutely nothing from George, so perhaps, as the superior species, with broader perspective in the field, George needed to step up and trigger change. Be a leader. Rule by example. Maybe he had been playing things too passive? He pulled the thing onto his lap. He stroked its wet, stubbled skin, put on one of those TV shows that pets are supposed to like. No guns, just soft people swallowing each other.

The dog survived the affection. It trembled under George’s hands. Some love is strictly clinical. Maybe this was like one of those deep-tissue massages that release difficult feelings? George forced his hand along the dog’s awful back, wondering why anyone would willingly touch another living thing. What a disaster of feelings it stirred up, feelings that seemed to have no purpose other than to suffocate him. Finally the dog turned in George’s lap, as if standing on ice, and carefully licked its master’s face. Just once, and briefly. A studied, scientific lick, using the tongue to gain important information. Then it bounced down to its corner again, where it sat and waited.

Months after his father’s death there was still no word from Pattern. After he’d returned from California, and cleansed himself in the flat, gray atmosphere of New York, George had sent her another email, along the lines of, “Hey Pat, I’m back. I’ve got Dad’s dust. Let me know if you want to come say goodbye to it. There are still some slots free. Visiting hours are whenever and whenever and whenever. —G.”

He never heard back, and figured he wasn’t going to—on the Internet now Pattern was referred to as a fugitive wanted by Europol, for crimes against the environment—but one night, getting into bed, his phone made an odd sound. Not its typical ring. It took him a minute to track the noise to his phone, and at first he thought it must be broken, making some death noise before it finally shut down.

He picked it up and heard a long, administrative pause.

“Please hold for Pattern,” a voice said.

He waited and listened. Finally a woman said hello.

“Hello?” said George. “Pattern?”

“Who’s this?” It wasn’t Pattern. This person sounded like a bitchy tween, entitled and shrill.

“You called me,” explained George.

“Who’s on the line,” said the teenager, “or I’m hanging up.”

George was baffled. Did a conversation with his sister really require such a cloak-and-dagger ground game? He hung up the phone.

The phone rang again an hour later, and it was Pattern herself.

“Jesus, George, what the hell? You hung up on my staff?”

“First of all, hello,” he said. “Secondly, let’s take a look at the transcript and I’ll show you exactly what happened. Your team could use some human behavior training. But forget all that. What on earth is new, big sister?”

She wanted to see him, she said, and she’d found a way for that to be possible. They had things to discuss.

“No shit,” said George. He couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her.

“Wait, so where are you?” she asked. “I don’t have my thing with me.”

“What thing?”

“I mean I don’t know where you are.”

“And your thing would have told you? Have you been tracking me?”

“Oh c’mon, you asshole.”

“I’m in New York.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“No, it’s just funny. I mean it’s funny that you still call it that.”

“What would I call it?”

“No, nothing, forget it. I’m sorry. I’m just on a different, it’s, I’m thinking of something else. Forget it.”

“O-kay. You are so fucking weird and awkward. I’m not really sure I even want to see you.”

“Georgie!”

“Kidding, you freak. Can you, like, send a jet for me? Or a pod? Or what exactly is it that you guys even make now? Can you break my face into dust and make it reappear somewhere?”

“Ha ha. I’ll send a car for you. Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.”

George met Pattern in the sky bar of a strange building, which somehow you could not see from the street. Everyone had thought the developers had purchased the air rights and then very tastefully decided not to use them. Strike a blow for restraint. The elevator said otherwise. This thing was a goddamn tower. How had they done that? The optics for that sort of thing, Pattern explained to him, had been around for fifteen years or more. Brutally old-fashioned technology. Practically caveman. She thought it looked cheesy at this point.

“A stealth scraper,” said George, wanting to sound appreciative.

“Hardly. It’s literally smoke and mirrors,” Pattern said. “I am not kidding. And it’s kind of gross. But whatever. I love this bar. These cocktails are just violent. There’s a frozen pane of pork in this one. Ridiculously thin. They call it pork glass.”

“Yum,” said George, absently.

The funny thing about the bar, which was only just dawning on George, was that it was entirely free of people. And deadly silent. Out the window was a view of the city he’d never seen. Whenever he looked up he had the sensation that he was somewhere else. In Europe. In the past. On a film set. Asleep. Every now and then a young woman crept out from behind a curtain to touch Pattern on the wrist, moving her finger back and forth. Pattern would smell her wrist, make a face, and say something unintelligible.

But here she was, his very own sister. It was like looking at his mother and his father and himself, but refined, the damaged cells burned off. The best parts of them, contained in this one person.

“First of all, George,” Pattern said. “Dad’s girlfriend? Really?”

“Trish?”

“What a total pig you are. Does this woman need to be abused and neglected by two generations of our family?”

“How could you know anything about that?”

“Oh cut it out. It astonishes me when I meet people who still think they have secrets. It’s so quaint! You understand that even with your doors closed and lights out… Please tell me you understand. I couldn’t bear it if you were that naive. My own brother.”

“I understand, I think.”

“That man you pay to watch you while you’re cleaning the house? On your laptop screen?”

“Guy Fox.”

“Oh, George, you are a funny young man.”

“That’s actually a fairly mainstream habit, to have a watcher.”

“Right, George, it’s happening all over the Middle East, too. A worldwide craze. In Poland they do it live. It’s called a Peeping Tom. But who cares. Baby brother is a very strange bird.

“So,” she said, scooting closer to him and giving him a luxurious hug. “Mom and Dad never told you, huh?”

“Told me what?”

“They really never told you?”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m just not sure it’s for me to say. Mom and Dad talked about it kind of a lot, I mean we all did. I just figured they’d told you.”

“What already, Jesus. There’s no one else left to tell me.”

“You were adopted. That’s actually not the right word. Dad got in trouble at work and his boss forced him to take you home and raise you. You were born out of a donkey’s ass. Am I remembering correctly? That doesn’t sound right. From the ass of an ass.”

He tried to smile.

“I’m just kidding, George, Jesus. What is wrong with people?”

“Oh my god, right?” said George. “Why can’t people entertain more stupid jokes at their own expense? Je-sus. It’s so frustrating! When, like, my worldview isn’t supported by all the little people beneath me? And I can’t demean people and get an easy laugh? It’s so not fair!”

“Oh fuck off, George.”

They smiled. It felt really good. This was just tremendously nice.

“You don’t understand,” he said, trying harder than usual to be serious. “Mom punted so long ago I can’t even remember her smell. And Dad was just a stranger, you know? He was so formal, so polite. I always felt like I was meeting him for the first time.”

He tried to sound like his father, like any father: “Hello, George, how are you? How was your flight? Well, that’s grand. What’s your life like these days?”

Pattern stared at him.

“Honestly,” said George. “I can’t stand making small talk with people who have seen me naked. Or who fed me. Or spanked me. I mean once you spank someone, you owe them a nickname. Was that just me or were Mom and Dad, like, completely opposed to nicknames? Or even just honey or sweetie or any of that.”

“Jesus, George, what do you want from people? You have some kind of intimacy fantasy. Do you think other people go around hugging each other and holding hands, mainlining secrets and confessions into each other’s veins?”

“I have accepted the fact of strangers,” said George. “After some struggle. But it’s harder when they are in your own family.”

“Violin music for you,” said Pattern, and she snapped her fingers.

He looked up, perked his ears, expecting to hear music.

“Wow,” she marveled. “You think I’m very powerful, don’t you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I have no idea. Are you in trouble? Everything I read is so scary.”

“I am in a little bit of trouble, yes. But don’t worry. It’s nothing. And you. You seem so sad to me,” Pattern said. “Such a sad, sad young man.” She stroked his face, and it felt ridiculously, treacherously comforting.

George waved this off, insisted that he wasn’t. He just wanted to know about her. He really did. Who knows where she’d vanish to after this, and he genuinely wanted to know what her life was like, where she lived. Was she married? Had she gotten married in secret or something?

“I don’t get to act interested and really mean it,” George explained. “I mean ever, so please tell me who you are. It’s kind of a selfish question, because I can’t figure some things out about myself, so maybe if I hear about you, something will click.”

“Me? I tend to date the house husband type. Self-effacing, generous, asexual. Which is something I’m really attracted to, I should say. Men with low T, who go to bed in a full rack of pajamas. That’s my thing. I don’t go for the super-carnal hetero men; they seem like zoo animals. Those guys who know what they want, and have weird and highly developed skills as lovers, invariably have the worst possible taste—we’re supposed to congratulate them for knowing that they like to lick butter right off the stick. What a nightmare, to be subject to someone else’s expertise. The guys I tend to date, at first, are out to prove that they endorse equality, that my career matters, that my interests are primary—they make really extravagant displays of selflessness, burying all of their own needs. I go along with it, and over time I watch them deflate and lose all reason to live, by which point I have steadily lost all of my attraction for them. I imagine something like that is mirrored in the animal kingdom, but honestly that’s not my specialty. I should have an air gun in my home so I could put these guys out of their misery. Or a time-lapse video documenting the slow and steady loss of self-respect they go through. It’s a turnoff, but, you know, it’s my turnoff. Part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I’ve come to rely on the arc. It’s part of my process.”

“You think these guys don’t mean it that they believe in equality?”

“No, I think they do, and that it has a kind of cost. They just distort themselves so much trying to do the right thing that there’s nothing left.”

“And you enjoy that?”

“Well, they enjoy that. They’re driven to it. I’m just a bystander to their quest. And I enjoy that. It’s old school, but I like to watch.”

“So you are basically fun times to date.”

“I pull my weight, romantically. I’m not stingy. I supply locations. I supply funding. Transportation. I’m kind of an executive producer. I can green-light stuff.”

“Nobody cums unless you say so, right?”

“That’s not real power,” she said, as if such a thing was actually under her control. She frowned. “That’s bookkeeping. Not my thing at all. Anyway, I think the romantic phase of my life is probably over now. My options won’t be the same. Freedom.”

“Jail time?” asked George.

“It’s not exactly jail for someone like me. But it’s fine if you imagined it that way. That would be nice.”

George hated to do it. They were having such a good time, and she must get this a lot, but he was her last living blood relative and didn’t he merit some consideration over all the hangers-on who no doubt lived pretty well by buzzing around in her orbit?

“All right, so, I mean, you’re rich, right? Like, insanely so?”

Pattern nodded carefully.

“You could, like, buy anything?”

“My money is tied up in money,” Pattern said. “It’s hard to explain. You get to a point where a big sadness and fatigue takes over.”

“Not me,” said George. “I don’t. Anyway, I mean, it wouldn’t even make a dent for you to, you know, solve my life financially. Just fucking solve it. Right?”

Pattern smiled at him, a little too gently, he thought. It seemed like a bad-news smile.

“You know the studies, right?”

Dear god Jesus. “What studies?”

“About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.”

“Tell me.” He’d let the rest of the comment go.

“It’s not good.”

“Well I don’t exactly want it to be good. I want it to be fun.”

“I don’t think it’s very fun, either, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid, I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I’ll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.”

Pattern laughed into her drink.

“Sweet, sweet Georgie,” she said.

It was getting late, and the whispering interruptions had increased, Pattern’s harried staff scurrying around them, no doubt plotting the extraction. An older gentleman in a tuxedo came out to their couch and held up a piece of paper for Pattern, at eye level, which, to George, sitting right next to her, looked perfectly blank.

Pattern studied it, squinting, and sighed. She shifted in her seat.

“Armageddon,” said George. “Time to wash my drones with my drone towel!”

Pattern didn’t smile.

“I hate to say it, little George, but I think I’m going to have to break this up.”

He didn’t like this world, standing up, having to leave. Everything had seemed fine back on the couch.

“Here,” Pattern said, giving him a card. “Send your bills to William.”

“Ha ha.”

“What?”

“Your joke. That you obviously don’t even know you just made.”

She was checking her phone, not listening.

On the street they hugged for a little while and tried to say goodbye. A blue light glowed from the back seat of Pattern’s car. George had no idea who she was, what she really did, or when he would ever see her again.

“Do you think I can be in your life?” George asked. “I’m not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.”

He tried to laugh.

“Oh, you are, George,” said Pattern. “Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.”

“You know what I mean. How can I reach you?” He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.

“I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.”

“But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.”

“No, no,” she whispered. “I don’t believe that. That’s not true.”

“Is something going to happen to you? I don’t know what to believe.”

“Well,” she said. “Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?”

“Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?”

“Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.”

George kept quiet about his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he’d catch Dr. Graco studying him, and he’d think that perhaps she knew. She didn’t need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts—who and when and what and all those things that did not matter—but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.

At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And George couldn’t decide if their silence meant that they’d lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.

One night it was late and he’d let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he’d seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He’d been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.

A Suicide of Trees

Before my father went missing, he taught me to give the weaker man a chance. The advice occurred when I was a child, after a baseball affair on the gentle border of soft Ohio, right where Widow Mountain is being rebuilt by our young inmates. As usual, there were children in competition that day much smaller than myself. I was compelled by park rules to utilize the gear designated for my age group, which I had long ago outgrown, such as small hand-slips and swatters—thus, I felt, unfairly restricting me from succeeding at a festival that seemed precisely designed by the sports council to bring my family shame.

So I called it upon myself to ask Paul Mattingly, the bald servant, to loot our vehicle for my own customized gear, which I then politely applied to myself for my next opportunity in front of the judges, who were supported by pillows in the low-lying viewing arena. It was just before this crucial moment that I noticed Jane Rogerson leading my swollen father—he was pink and glistening, as if something had stung him on the inside of his body—over to the fence—the only thing standing between me and the people who were going to watch my comeback. I was getting ready and taking big swings and doing lunges to keep my legs from going cold. My father standing small in the summer dust raised up his hand to initiate a semaphore. Held it open, twisted it, pulled it down. This meant go to him now, or else get caught up in the blows and belts and slaps of his helper Rogerson, which she dispensed with the authority of a baker punching down dough. He summoned me over to him and talked me out of the whole affair. He talked the helmet off me and somehow got the bat out of my hands and the extra-large cleat off of my batting foot and talked me over to our vehicle where I was given children’s coffee and consoled by my mother, who even in close quarters could express an intense interest in the distant horizon, just beyond wherever I might be sitting. I watched from the passenger window as my batting turn was forfeited and the zero was hoisted up next to my small name on the scoreboard, snapped into position with the crispness of an egg cracking. A sharply bleating siren, accompanied by a flare that sizzled over the field, indicated that I had been disqualified, and several area televisions began to moan. Later in the evening, my father talked me into bed after Jane had given me a brief, forceful bath with her terrible sponge. When I was tucked in, he entered my room and sat on my bed and asked Jane Rogerson to leave us. Be reminded, please, that this story depicts a boy much younger than myself, who has little or no bearing on the individual that I have become. I will not entertain the pity of people I do not know.

“You are a strong boy and you are beautiful and you are my son,” my father said to me. “But you must remember that this is not true of anyone else, nor will it be, nor can it be.”

We were involved in what might be called a darkened room. There was his mustache to regard, for me, and that was all. Indeed it was often all that I saw when my father came at me in the dark. For discussions and such. The blond crop that styled his words to be so fatherly.

And then he taught me what it was to be much stronger than others, which is a lesson I am still proud of. The mustache seemed to retreat, but how quickly did it borrow my air and slam right onto me, scratching my face and digging at my eye! My breath failed at the sight of it, my father’s yellow mouth-fur like an animal spun from a pitching machine to pin me on my bed. He asserted some great weight onto my neck until I was stilled. No, I could not think of any way to move and he clenched my arms in his hands and I thought he might drive his shoulder into my chest cage.

The house was calm, the blinds drawn. I had never before waited so long to breathe. He was breathing fine, loud, hard. There was air coming onto me that I could not have, you see. One was in bed covered in his father. A certain impatience bloomed in me. The man was using his largeness to effect a stillness in his son. And in his air the sounds came up and burst open—his, my own, the room’s, I do not know.

“What are the circumstances, then? Exactly what might the case be here?”

Oh dear I could not move the air into me.

“Who gets to decide what happens next? Do you think it might be you or do you think it might be me?”

My feet were cold and they stuck out and I had scratches on my leg I could not get to. My father was so close to me I could not see him. There were birds of light cresting into my blackout. No mustache, no body, no bed, no house.

“Me or you,” the words. “Me or you.”

My father is gone now, but maybe yours is too. Is yours dead or has he vanished? If you do not know, we are in the same old boat, and the boat is made of rotten mush. But as much as I would be pleased to relate to you, to suggest that our lives are virtually the same, right down to the disfigurement between our legs, however laughable that sounds, I warrant that you have not also lost a second person, a lodger from your very own home, to be precise, who vanished or died in or around the same day and time as your father. And that you may or may not be a suspect in the situation. A person of interest. Or even a person at all.

These days we practice our supper at a large oak affair. There is Jane Rogerson, Paul Mattingly, my mother, and myself. The leaves of the dining board have been snapped under to soften not just the loss of my father, but also the lodger, who’d been leasing rooms from us these last endless years. Our two men are disappeared or dead, we do not know, and we can hardly tell the difference anymore. They vanished around the same time, and our smaller minds believe the events may be related. The candles and the newspaper rack and the candy bowl—in which my father dipped his little finger before making a speech—are gone, and the curtains are now bound up with wire. We keep them open because no one is much bothered by the glare, although Paul says he gets distracted by the many gray birds that now circle the house, their beaks bearded in dark foam.

The only sounds at supper are the huffing sobs of Rogerson, my father’s lady-in-waiting. I watch this woman carefully when she weeps, not least because of the glaring sexuality discharged by those who frequently cry. She will not meet my stare. Her body comes in a small parcel and she likes to deny herself in pale sweaters knitted so minimally that one could pass an entire hand through the holes to stroke the person beneath.

At first my mother took Rogerson’s sadness as a sign of hunger, and urged me to pass her more fish, which is no problem in terms of supplies. We never run out. But I have tired of scraping out her portions later into the day laborers’ food mailbox and now we only serve her enough to color her plate.

At my mother’s request, I have requisitioned my father’s room for scenarios. We have a Thursday night theater that features a quite credible imitation of my father by Paul, who is twice the size of our lost man. Paul stoops and shuffles through the room, one hand clutching his collar together, the other hand held out for money. Even my mother giggles at the accuracy of it, or she coughs and seems to choke, and always recovers with a smile. Paul can certainly render a man. A plate of sweet pastry is kept nearby.

On Mondays I sometimes query Jane Rogerson in my father’s room. She enters nervously just after her nap and does not survey her surroundings, which vexes me a great deal. She has lost a mourner’s share of weight and her face has taken on the deep creases of an old man’s bottom. If she knows something, it will be hard to determine, for there is more to Rogerson than a woman who once nearly sponged the life out of me at bath times, a treatment so fantastically rough that I often bled from the road burn on my back. Some might warrant that she sponged my missing father too, yet with a more delicate hand, in a mature style, a transaction that occurred off-hours, with a soundtrack of deep moaning. One can easily overhear certain insinuations about their bathing ritual. If I spent more furtive time in the servants’ quarters, I could hear many sorts of things from Paul Mattingly and his guests. I am usually strong enough to decline such easy acquisitions of knowledge.

I have performed minuscule rearrangements to my father’s bedroom items to catch Rogerson off guard. If she inhabited this room during the late hours, for instance, when a sexuality might be attempted, she could be startled if my father’s array of his “forest jewels,” the acorns and pinecones and woodland scruff he collected and staged so meticulously, no longer sprinkles over his bureau. She has little to say. Her speech returns mostly to moments of my childhood, a topic I feel can have no bearing on the investigation. She entreats me to recall scenarios that apparently featured just the two of us, strolling overland to some knoll or other that would host our required picnic, me with my elastic-waisted pants down around my ankles to better regulate my faulty gait. When I concentrate my mind on the matter, however, I can remember nothing of the sort, just small, red people on boats being splashed in a terrible syrup. It is the one memory I have confidence in.

Sometimes I sit beneath the window that gives out onto the scene of my father’s disappearance. Somewhere, ghosted into the glass, is the blueprint of what happened here. A father, my own, swifted off: by someone else’s power, by a higher power, by the powers that be. Mostly I look out at the burned yard, I sip from a bowl of soup, I surround myself with my father’s trade magazines: Population Now, The Limits of Rooms. I will not be approached for conversation, unless it is the detective, who enjoys broad legal access to my person, and who has spectacularly failed to turn his interrogation of me into the kind of courtship one so often reads about in literature between accuser and accused: a fiery, sexual battle of wills between fiercely intelligent if facially destroyed men who, though they differ in moral composition—one man kills children, the other man does not—overlap so deeply in other respects that they are like brothers who share a single, knotted torso.

In the many scenarios of my father’s disappearance, all of which have been whiteboarded in the living room and summarily dismissed, wanton speculation is succumbed to like a delicious drug, and I am ashamed at our collective lack of intelligence, imagination, and vision. Our heads may as well be crushed. We may as well lease ourselves for experimentation down at the night school.

My father, goes a theory put forward by Paul Mattingly, is caught in a crowd of day laborers—known to cluster at the head of our driveway—and is swept into the back of a truck, mistaken, perhaps, for a subdivision carpenter, someone grimly determined to support his family. The men in the truck are cheerful and talkative and they motor up a smooth road into the hillside. When the rain begins, a tarp is tented over the cab of the truck, ballooning in time with the anxious breath of the passengers. This is when my father becomes nervous and asks to be released. He uses simple phrasing. He does not disguise his voice. His captors are impressed by his calmness, but kill him anyway.

My dissent from this view is not so important. It is not that I think Paul Mattingly is a simpleton, at least not precisely. He is a nice man to play fort with, and I am glad he is able to help my mother. But one cannot be too cagey. The belongings of our lodger, whose disappearance features a lower grief index—if it rates at all—are now in the possession of Paul Mattingly, who apprentices himself after the great collectors. With so little to do around the house, now that my father is not here to spearhead some garden project—our sole video footage of the lost man finds him squatting on his camp foldout, barking orders through a megaphone as unidentifiable children shuttle mulch to the juniper shrubs—Mattingly has been known to round up the items of various men who are missing and to store these items in glass cases. Creating his bias, so to speak. The certain feeling that he might be rooting for someone, therefore blunting his instrument of assessment.

Additionally, Mattingly’s narrative nowhere mentions our lodger running like buster through the woods, quite possibly on fire, screaming for his life. I saw this myself. Asleep or awake, I saw it very clearly.

In mythology, when a stranger from a distant land catches fire, it can signal that he is from the underworld, and that the kindness of his hosts—their ministrations with warm soup, the private massage offered by the eldest daughter, the gift of hand-drawn currency folded in muslin—has caused him to swell with shame, and then to combust. This suggests that our domestic tranquility has built-in protection from peril—intruders will burn if they seek to harm us—and it gives some comfort. Our lodger, however, came from Cleveland Village, the north end, and if we were unduly kind to him I’ll admit that it was not under my watch. In other words, our lodger caught fire for reasons mythology cannot quite explain. A different sort of logic applies to his immolation.

All throughout the late summer, when the detective visits he is distracted, he is sad, he is happy, he is handsome and witty, he repulses me. I assure him that I have nothing to hide, but can anyone ever say this with any honesty? Who can legitimately speak in such a way? I have so much to hide that I may one day break into pieces.

Today, while I am theorizing with him, he checks his watch repeatedly, but clearly does not see what he desires there. What a sorrow it is when our disappointments come from something we wear on our own bodies. I cannot say that I feel for him, because my feelings have been littered elsewhere. They are gone from me. But I see his predicament. I see it and I honor it.

It is important to me that he knows what I know, to a certain extent, anyway. Beyond that certain extent, I’m not sure he could handle his own mind. I wouldn’t want that responsibility.

I give him to understand the moment that informed the disappearance: my father, an assistant at the Institute, whose job it was to test the occupancy rate of its rooms and offices and elevators, recruiting bright young humans to fill those spaces until the floor joists started to creak. His morning tasks to occur in or around the home. The garden, the path, the hedge, the mailbox. A sliver of lunch before the bicycle ride to work. Daily my father had to navigate the cluster of day laborers clogging our driveway, who enjoyed a lightly sexual heckling of my father as he tried to get his bike moving from an uphill standstill with his little legs. Many times I watched the day laborers grab at my father’s crotch as he tried to cycle his way free, while my father grimaced or smiled, I was never sure which. All of this produced the sound of a father going away. One should issue a record album of such sounds, the acoustics of departure, even forced departure, undertaken while muscle-bound workers fan your groin. A man like that can be heard for miles. How could we possibly lose track of him?

His supervisor Lauren Markinson asserts that he showcased an appearance no more disheveled than usual when he submitted his revised population figures during his final day in our lives, and my mother alleges an evening encounter with him, although the latter is easily refuted, given that Mattingly is the only sire my mother is allowed, whether or not my mother knows this. Young men in my situation, who are now no longer young, must early on make a reality calculation on behalf of their mothers, to keep them just shy of the amount of information that would ruin them.

One cannot help entertaining the theory that my father, given his professional inclinations, worked a population reduction upon his own home, clearing the way for his only son, myself, to thrive, the way old-growth trees are known to suck poison from deep in the earth in order to weaken themselves, just as the baby saplings around them require more room to grow. A suicide of trees, I believe it is called. It is a fancy name for a father throwing himself under a bus, allowing his son to thrive. It is part of a larger genre of misassigned heroism, but I am pleased to let my father enjoy the credit. And now I am filling the cavity left by two men, my father and the lodger, swelling into the newly vacant rooms. Space is for taking, and my father knew this.

After all, what’s mine is mine, and also some of what isn’t.

My father would also say that metaphors are for the dead, or winning is for losers, or that the expression “good day” is an oxymoron.

Until now, the question around here, posited by friends, family, strangers, and the police, has been punishingly literal: Who took my father? We have failed to ask, at least out loud: Might he still be on the property, buried alive, barely breathing? Or might it not have been his time? Could we admit that in some instances it is just more polite to quietly disappear? Did he leave of his own accord? And the lodger? Did they leave together, hand in hand? How many abductions are self-engineered, simply out of kindness?

But it is not my job to posit the questions, only to field them, however much I’d like to be stationed behind the detective’s face so I could better attack myself and take charge of the drama that should have resulted by now.

When my father was alive, I had to wake and look into a mirror that rigged me into an old man, a limper, with a face that looked newly leaked of air, as if I had been sleeping on one of those airplanes that never land, ejecting its occasionally dead passengers over the Atlantic. My father’s living body on the property was a caution to me: like a crystal ball smeared with the blood of a neighbor’s pet. If there was a really good question, it might be: Why should a younger man be forced to look upon his own crippled future, in the form of an older man? What purpose could that kind of dark forecasting ever possibly serve?

In other words, in these tired times, why have a father at all?

Pursuant to his investigation of my missing father, not to mention the lodger, the detective shows me pictures: trucks, men, trees. In folklore, when an authority figure visits your house, even to interrogate you about a so-called crime, you are obligated to return his gifts in kind, so I have offered sweet coffee, a duck prosciutto, and Jane Rogerson’s braided fry bread with shards of dark sugar, but the detective has declined. He does not seem suspicious of me so much as arthritically afflicted, and while I inspect his materials he paces the great room as if he’s dodging crippled birds on the floor. He shows me photographs of gray shapes that resemble planets attacked long ago, and I study these, not sure if I should shake or nod my head. I hadn’t realized that landscapes could be guilty of something, but locations, the detective reminds me, foster guilt, they contain and stage crime and are therefore far more useful than mug shots of men and women, which have apparently lost professional credibility. I am meant to address the images he shows me, trap though that might be, and say “whatever comes into my mind.” This is presumably the exhausted pink man’s technique for locating my lost father, and possibly also our lost lodger, and I will certainly indulge him. If you can find a disappeared man this way then I am pleased. It is always fascinating to discover the truth-divining techniques used by sweaty, small, nervous men, who even while succeeding appear to be in agony. Pinched, suffering faces, fat bellies, and bad skin. They mean so well, they try so hard, feeble though they are! I imagine what he really wants to do is climb inside my head and thrust away into the hidden folds of my brain, until some evidence leaks forth onto my face. It is not entirely unpleasant for me to contemplate such an assault.

Of the detective’s evidence, the pictures of trucks are what I enjoy, since they have apparently been stolen and returned, sometimes with blood and grass in the bumper, sometimes with a tooth in the wheel well, sometimes with three different kinds of semen dried into the cup holder. It does suggest quite a party for my father, if he died this way. A festive demise. Most of the trucks are lovely vehicles abducted for the secret uses of people we know little about. I admit to the detective across the coffee table the central mystery that overwhelms us all. We do not know the people who drive the roads. We do not. There are so many of them, and we will never speak to them or hear their stories. We will not see them make love or die, we will not reach our hands down their throats to massage their lungs.

When people steal trucks, the detective tells me, they seem keen to perform the most illegal acts, which can tend to require a certain degree of what is called off-road travel, a jagged lurching into restricted areas where the law cannot easily survey. Here they smash people, they tear them, they bury them. And then the truck thieves seem compelled to leave a morsel of human waste, doing so out of a sense of duty to history or statistics, a desire to belong to the elite population of people who defecate at a crime scene.

Some witnesses say the truck that may have taken my father—the one that sped past our house the morning he went missing—was dark navy, although my imagination tends to apply a red stain to things. All I frequently remember of a person is his mouth. My father’s lips frequently looked boiled down into a sticky wound. I sometimes watched him as he slept next to my canoe-bodied mother, and there was his mouth, glowing like candy, which always made me think that dirt and hair would be more likely to stick to it: dirt and hair and debris, and maybe some unidentifiable shining thing, stuck to my father’s face like a jewel.

I breathe into my coffee mug and imagine my father riding in these trucks, bouncing in his seat like a hand puppet, on his way to being spectacularly killed. If it is true, then bravo for him. I am well pleased. I want to tell the detective how proud I am of my father. It offers some satisfaction. There is an age for a young man when he realizes his father will no longer excel or succeed at anything, that he will pursue decline in various degrees, perfecting his small stabs at failure until he seems like a machine designed to demonstrate mistakes, rather than a man. It is nice when an exception to the rule arises, even if it comes at a cost.

The men and women who study body mass and space, bearing loads, clustering, and oxygen quotas, have, according to my father’s publications, proposed an apportioning system, called Melissa, that distributes additional air to children when a room exceeds a certain occupancy rate. The term “Melissa” must stand for something technical that can now be acronymized into the name of a child, most likely dead now, maybe one of those taken by van and dumped in the sea, with only an audio recording remaining of the splash she made when she went down.

But what does Melissa mean for the rest of us? That the children, once our buildings buckle and spill over with a sweetness of people, will be trampling over our dead bodies before too long, that they’ll be breathing their own sugary air when we are blue and cold on the floor, that these devices will be tripped accidentally and the children will walk forth with a great new power.

In other words, it’s clear that a person requires an exit strategy that can be executed without oxygen, and I recall the one issued by our own Thomas Jefferson, who said that the best exit strategy of all is simply never to arrive in the first place.

Which leaves me here at 4523 Westmoore Ave. to puzzle out the mystery. My mother and the others come and go, and I would mistake them for shadows were it not for the sweet vegetal reek of people who sleep and cry too much, that legendary scent often said to rise off the backs of people who have lost their leader.

Perhaps the lodger was not involved in orchestrating my father’s disappearance. I would be glad if he were innocent. Perhaps Mattingly, the hairless house assistant, is no liar. It is so trying to accuse a stranger of some terrible thing when one feels predisposed to blaming someone nearer at hand. But nor is it kind to accuse a man of his own disappearance. A trap seems waiting for this sort of behavior. One should possibly instead be issuing a gentle “Bravo.” Perhaps one will soon do so. Who cannot admire a man, even a father, who otherwise brooked so little admiration, to so cleanly vanish?

The detective brings my attention to the lodger, tapping a folio in his lap of what is apparently a collection of lodger data. What was his routine? the detective would like to know. How would I characterize the varieties of his ingress and egress? Always the same door? Did he glance at my father or touch my father or make mention of my father either in the company of my father or not? And, in turn, did my father return the attention or spurn it? Did he chase after the lodger, did he grab him or hold him or did the two of them ever succumb to kisses in the evening?

If we examine the routine of our lodger, I suggest to the detective, we find little to worry about. On Fridays, for instance, our lodger was frequented by certain of his mathematics peers, hobbyists all. The gentlemen of these were tidy and quiet. In the oaken entranceway, where the finials appeared to imprison our visitors, his guests often stooped to sniff from clear bags of crumbs, a health-chew so rich in calories that one needed only to suck the nutrients from a fistful of the stuff and later spit the dried shards onto the garden, a compost of the mouth that spiked our flowers with deep blasts of energy. The visitors carried knapsacks and reserved their humor for the German tongue. At times, a language was uttered as if one might be avoiding a mass of bread in the mouth, after which followed always the sharp barks of laughter coughed into their fists, their eyes gleaming and tearing. One of the men liked to grip his own neck brace as if he would topple over without it.

The women who befell our lodger in the afternoons were not so many as the gentlemen, but they stayed longer and made great noises, slamming the walls with their big hands, barking math formulas into a long cone they passed between them that required many refills of dark water. They wore large trousers and let their hair go to their waists and appeared somewhat stronger and vaster than the men. My mother, the gracious hostess, shook their hands and trilled what little German she knew in their direction, squirting about them with the excitement of a hotel dog. These women handled my mother rather too freely, I believe. They passed her around between them and adopted a mechanical halt to their speech, an aloof-sounding language that was only spoken while they held my mother, until I had to intervene and usher them from the house. My mother’s sweet gasps for breath left her convulsing mildly afterward for hours, unsure whether she had been attacked or made love to, a mother who confused suffering with valor as she heaved and panted in the garden in between restorative sips of her cloudy mint drink. It would take days of private swaddling and sessions beneath the panel-light to calm her.

I tell the detective I am poor at math and a weak listener. Other people’s words can invite me into a deeply passive tranquility. Can their message possibly matter to me? I am given to wonder. Is their speech in some way medically necessary to my being? The lodger and his visitors performed operations on the chalkboard I could never decipher. I sat on the viewing couch some afternoons at their theater of operations and watched them frenzy over their figures and formulas, as if they were scooping extra air out of the room and lathering it on themselves. They did not seem to mind my presence, though I might have been sent out for something they called “crisps”—a word they seemed to use for anything that could be eaten—after which the door was frequently bolted and their laughter erupted like a flushed toilet. When I stayed on the viewing couch, a heckler invariably shouted up from his seat next to me to vex the man or woman with the chalk, whoever was laboring at the board to the scrutiny of everyone assembled. There was a considerable deal of backseat solving when they practiced their math together. More than once I saw a man brutally felled by the crisp backhand of a woman who could solve the problem faster.

I am eager to place blame, and to place it here, since it fits the differential that the intellectual elite killed the king. I believe, along with Emily Dickinson, that smart people have little to do, in the end, but make love to their children and assault those in power. But although the mathematicians were aggressive and mean and aloof, although they were sexual to a nearly unbearable degree, and they undressed me and killed me with their eyes each time I soiled the room with my presence, they were not kidnappers or killers.

As a grown man, my body has shrunk down and corrected to the society I keep, as if some corset in the air has kept me from becoming a disgusting giant. Since my father’s big poof, I am mostly couch-bound, heaped in blankets, awash in my own greenhouse effect. There will be no photos of me, but you might picture a boiled-faced man, long ago threshed by children with sticks. My age, when sounded out slowly, is also a word in Spanish, meaning “the fat behind the knee.” My height is not important, because I do not stand up much, unless the detective is visiting and he entreats me to survey the yard and the field beyond to search for clues. Then I slide on my garden boots, and off we go.

What I took him to see first was the burned outline of a person in the grass, way out on the back property. Like the chalk outline of a dead body, but made with fire. Had the person been on fire before he fell, thus burning the grass in his very own shape? That was the likely explanation. The detective photographed the singed grass before new grass and weeds grew in, and thank goodness, because now there might be burned ends of certain grasses here and there on our back property, but nothing coherent enough to suggest that a man, very possibly on fire, fell here and probably died here, although where he went after that no one seems to know.

Invariably we return to the garage, where wooden slats, smeared with a grease, lean in the corner. We’ll call this grease an inedible substance that might help machines operate more quietly. This grease has simply been rubbed just about everywhere, creating such a lovely shine on the older things of our home, a glistening creaminess on the wheelbarrow, the garbage tins, the withered football, the tenoning jig. There is an excess of it coating the baby flamethrower, propped in the corner. I tell the detective that the flamethrower belonged to my father, who used it to scorch our bamboo field each autumn. Always preferable to hacking at the stumps with a scythe. I do not tell him that a gasket can be removed to extend the flume, when giving chase, for instance.

And the wooden slats? They are new. No one can account for so many oddly shaped wooden slats now filling the garage. And they can be pieced together, after much puzzlement, to form a most terrible structure.

But, on the other hand, what items of our world cannot?

Upon our first visit to the garage, I told the detective about the wooden slats, but I did not demonstrate what could be built with them. Why build monsters for strangers? He puzzled over the grease that soon covered his hand.

“You say this is a new substance?” he asked. The utterance of the question seemed to exhaust him.

“I do not remember it before,” I replied. “You can taste it if you want to. I could have Paul bring us a spoon.” I looked around for a sign of Paul, willing my face into a searching gesture, even while inexplicably picturing Paul demonstrating intercourse to an audience of scientists in a field.

The detective sniffed his hand and held it to the sun. His face winched and he gagged, and then he laughed a little bit and seemed also, perhaps, to be crying.

He wanted to preserve some of the grease for a laboratory test, so I held open the wide-mouthed Ziploc bag he produced. I had to massage his long thin hand through the bag in order to extract the grease. I milked each finger, I felt his bones through plastic and flesh, I squeezed them down until the grease pinched off into a pasty smear at the bottom of the bag. I want to say that it felt strange—like a piece of pork—but it didn’t feel strange enough; it felt exactly and terribly just like a man’s hand should feel: there just aren’t any words.

As we hiked back up the rottenstone path, I considered the common use of grease. A body is greased so that it might better slide into a crawl space. And grease on a body can delay, for at least a short while, the effects of a high-intensity flame. These uses I kept to myself, since the detective had given in to his sadness. I walked just ahead of him so he could do his weeping in some bit of privacy, although he turned out to be the sort of man whose weeping was devoid of pathos or gravity or even any clear emotion. It sounded merely as if he was catching his breath after jogging, and I wished we had a toolshed for precisely those moments when a stranger spoils the afternoon with his expressions of feeling.

When the detective first started his inquiry, I had hoped we would join together in our wonder, our bafflement, our aching curiosity, to probe the mystery of these lost two men, collaborating so intensely that we would be reluctant to resolve the case. Why? Because certainly that would mean a farewell so devastating we might claw our own faces off. This would be the project of a lifetime, even as wives and friends came and went, as houses eroded around us and we migrated to a trailer on the back property, where one of us peed from the steps while the other continued taking notes. During long days of research, the detective and I might discover, deep in the lodger’s web browser history, for instance, a series of site visits that would link him to my father, providing a motive so compelling that his murder of my father would seem entirely forgivable and inevitable. Our book would be called A Very Understandable Murder, and while editing the proofs we’d have several scratch fights and someone’s glasses would be smashed, but we’d emerge even closer than before, particularly after I produced a wrenchingly personal chapter admitting that, though I cared for my father, I would have killed him myself had I been the lodger. And the detective and I, now old companions who occasionally bathed and groomed each other in the evening, might choose to delay the resolution of our work, each of us keenly saddened by the prospect of such resounding success, because where, in the end, would crushing accomplishment leave us, but tired and alone and full of anxiety for the future?

I do not like to speak of others. It is tiring to shine my light on people, who might shrivel under its glare and suddenly become reduced to meat and bone, a few stray teeth and a pile of hair. But remarks made in reference to the lodger are in some sense going to be remarks made about my vanished father, and are therefore permissible and useful.

We shared a certain prejudice for exercise that permits me to discuss his terribly fascinating body, which, even under the glare of my flashlight while he slept, revealed little to me. For instance, I jogged daily with the lodger down Multer to the Beeves cul-de-sac and then up Forstinge and across the Bus Road and back to the house.

At the outset of our jogs the lodger declined to limber himself. He stood at the driveway and studied the section of the newspaper devoted to numbers while I conducted my preparations. I believe in bending deeply on an inhale until my inner light goes brown, as though the buttocks of a giant are swallowing me. When I fold my body at the waist, the world around me darkens like an oily painting and I begin to see myself as people in the distant future might see me: crushed, glistening, scarcely human.

Once aground we invariably observed the universal jogger’s silence, grim men at their exercise, charging in tandem from the house, until the lodger turned down Korial at the Forstinge precipice, electing a route he referred to with a string of numerals, a decision that roused in me an instant fatigue and anxiety, tempered by an ever-so-slight, and unspecified, sexual response. And off I ran after him.

Sometimes I chanced upon the lodger attempting the jog alone, usually in the cold early mornings when we were just discovering how much of our garden had been eaten by the woodland deer, who roved up every night to strip our land of its beard. I’d step into the brick-lined ivy patch to survey the waste and see the lodger trotting nervously along the roadway, studying his feet as if he was rehearsing tactical steps. In the evenings the lodger stood for long periods at the toilet, hands akimbo, before the water was stirred slightly by his weak drops of pee. Around the house, I did not like his hands, for he could barely hold his food and he trembled when he ate. In folklore, a trembling guest usually indicates that a demon is harbored inside his chest struggling to gnaw his way free, and that the guest is just a shell the demon has used to invade the house. I sometimes horse-stamped behind the lodger on the stairs so I could see his startled face in profile, one of the biggest faces there was. Saint Francis of Assisi, who loved all creatures, admitted that he loathed large-faced men, even as he prayed to God for more tolerance.

How odd that we can be geniuses and morons at once. Given everything we know in this world—some of it, or even most of it, oppressive and meaningless and distracting—we don’t always know who is alive and who is dead. There are creatures, at large in the world, whose status eludes us. In other words, where are they, and do they breathe? Is there finally any other question we might ask?

I believe in respect for the dead. When it is warranted. When it is earned. Do you disagree? So let me not criticize he who is perhaps perished. The perished should enjoy only our praise and highest regard, unless the perished have maneuvered in the wrong, pursuing error, which leads to disgrace, regardless of the perished’s status among the living. I am fond of the perished, and do not wish to condemn them. Unless they are condemnable, and then the perished are worth at least several critical remarks. The perished are good people, usually. But when they are not, we would like to kill the perished a second time, or we would like to magically revive the perished and then sit on the perished with our bare bottoms so their last breaths come from deep in our asses. And maybe even then we would boil the perished until only their bones remained. From the bones comes a very fine powder. Very fine. You can nearly make something extraordinary with it, extraordinary and new. In this instance, let me be entirely fair, or even more than fair, just in case, so that someone who may now be dead will not be rendered before you and then reduced to dust: the lodger’s physique was stunning, wrapped in a skin so white one could almost call it clear. He was one of those young fellows whose white cap of hair made him seem all the more youthful, like a child in a silver fright wig. He was, too, apparently a brilliant mathematician, although he always made it clear that he loathed the professionalization of math, the corruption, the rampant mediocrity, the sort of sexual obviousness of the whole enterprise.

I will certainly miss the mathematicians. In the early days of their visits, when my father still loomed bodily over the property, I would watch from my window as they stopped to chat and laugh with the day laborers, sometimes pointing at our house, and my breath bounced from the glass back over my face, shrouding me in a steam that, while deeply foul and rank, had a sweetness that was unmistakably my own. It is a climate I would like to share with the detective, a homemade climate that, if only he could walk in it regularly, might afford him a far deeper sense of just what kind of people have managed to stay alive and accounted for here. Even if it’s just air, it’s our very own brew, and it’s been steeping around us for as long as we can remember.

There has been no talk of acquiring a new lodger. His room has been ribboned in yellow tape by the police, which my mother dusts so that the tape does not lose its shine. His board is paid through the year. No kin have emerged to siphon a refund from us. His blackened shoes are hardening in place outside his door. It is not clear to me why Paul has refused their inclusion in his missing persons collection, but now the shoes have stiffened into the floor, as though a leathery growth has arisen from the oak parquet, and even if I trip against them on the way to my room at night, the shoes do not yield their position.

It’s been three months and still no progress on the investigation. The detective is finished, he says. No more. He admits to a retreat of fascination on the part of his employers, a change in the subject. He brandishes his notebook and waves it over us, proving something about the inadequacy of its contents. A language of withdrawal is being used in his workplace, he says. Speech and behavior will no longer be brought to bear. The investigation is going dark.

“There are no suspects, then?” I ask.

“Sometimes the suspect and the victim are, shall we say…” A smile takes over his face and he coughs and appears to choke. He bends over and waves me away, but I am not going near him.

In the quiet speech I reserve for myself when stern talks are in order, when I have strayed from my own aims and softened in my resolve, I give the detective to know that, after all, he needs no title, and no official sanction, to visit us and puzzle over the family subtraction. It might be years and years later, when his visits here are classified merely as those of a hobbyist. He might simply be a long-retired gentleman who continues the courtesy of looking in on our diminished family, since he was once paid to wonder about what happened here, to leverage his advanced intellect onto the problem of the two missing men. Only politely will we, out of duty, remark on my father, sometimes fondly gazing at the photo that shows him anxiously clutching his high school diploma. Should not every family, missing men or not, enjoy its own detective, a professional to chase down and systematically address each puzzle that arises?

I further give him to understand, whispering now, that even if the official institutions are fetishizing progress and resolution, there is no need for our local group—beholden to absolutely no one or thing but our own refined style of courtesy—to suffer such a glaring failure of concern.

The detective remains folded over himself, coughing weakly, and I might be inclined to wonder if my syntax itself is acting as a diminisher. I think of the giant, in the Whitman poem, who spoke so forcefully that everyone around him was crushed small, so so small. The people in his life could only recover and grow back to full size if he remained absolutely silent, but the giant had trouble with this. As much as he loved his people, he could not keep from talking, however it wounded them.

It is only as the detective cheats his body toward the door, like a lump of meat moving under a rug, that my periphery is clouded with figures I know all too well: Rogerson, Mattingly, and my mother, who holds in her hand a tub of what I have come to know as a rather extraordinary ointment. The aroma that suddenly sharpens in my nose is unmistakable: here are people who will not let a man stand down.

As they close in around him, I turn back to my window, which no doubt will be recording all there is to see, the shadows moving and thumping—a struggle so soft and magically gentle that one must fairly wonder about complicity, the way animals with rope will actually bind themselves to a post, the way, in the athletic footage, a man will crumple microseconds before he is tackled. Who among us, after all, does not dream of being elected for a smothering?

Our final criteria for men, including the detective, should be this: How do they look once felled? All of us should be knocked to the floor and finally judged asprawl. The detective is down. I do not think he will rise again.

In his pocket I find a Ziploc bag, unopened, featuring a clouded bolus of paste. The grease that never went to the lab. On his notepad I discover text for the items that he is meant to purchase at the grocery store, etched in a script adorned by his curly enforcements, his to-do lists. The technique of his doodling hand is not as precise as I might have guessed, particularly for a man trained in unknown whereabouts, a whereabouts specialist. I would have hoped for an architectural style, a man who drew buildings or at least boxes and geometrical shapes linked with suggestive vectors. Systems and such, the blueprints to an interrogation room. Perhaps some numerical formulas. The suggestion that he has mastered his world and might soon launch a powerful campaign. Instead he is a balloonist, a man whose handwriting diminishes the meaning of everything he writes, infantilizing the people and trivializing the objects. This is handwriting that will take many days to undo, language that now must be unraveled and forced to lie flat, in a single line, meaning nothing once again.

We will take the words out of his book, as if they’d been written in a single miles-long piece of thread, and we will stretch the thread taut, until no more words gargle up, until uttering them out loud is simply to breathe. However long it takes.

I crouch down closer, against the last outgoing heat of him, where the air is still adjusting to the loss, closing in on the space he once occupied, and I see the hairy particulars of one man’s escape. Sometimes you can smell a hole even if you can’t see it. It is, I must admit, a hole I’d rather fancy entering myself, and I can imagine the flush of applause such a departure would excite, the signature admiration my descendants would feel for me if I crawled from life in plain sight and left nothing but questions. Questions and envy. Is it what my father felt when he left us? Pride and joy and fear and delight?

Nathaniel Hawthorne said that each question we ask is a costume for fear. We spend a lifetime getting out of costume, removing layer after layer, but most of us, he says, run out of time. We die too soon, still wearing the mask, the cloak, the cape, the paint on our faces. What can we do for our friends but help them along in this endless, complicated disrobing?

I beckon to my mother, to Rogerson, to Mattingly, and together we crouch down against the cold shape of our friend and get to work, removing from him everything that has ever stood in the way of showing who he really is—the disguises, the clothing, the skin, the inner shield. Piece by piece we take that man apart.