Berkeley Noir

Hill House by Lexi Pandell

Berkeley Hills

I arrive at the hill house and pull out my phone to double-check the address. A droplet of sweat clings to the tip of my nose and I blow it off. It splashes on the screen, just missing the jagged crack across the front.

It’s the right place.

Patrick Bloom’s house is smaller than I’d expected, only two stories high. But when I peer through a gap in the massive wooden fence, I can tell that it’s nice — one of those Berkeley homes with old bones, scaled all over in brown shingles. This whole street is stacked with unassuming multimillion-dollar houses.

I lock my bike to a No Parking sign and try to catch my breath. When I moved back to Berkeley from New York, everyone told me I should get a bike. Unfortunately for me, I’d forgotten why I never biked when I was growing up here. Worse than the shitty drivers are the hills, like the one up to this house. I had to get off my bike after nearly keeling over backward.

October has brought its unseasonal, and unfortunately named, Indian-summer heat. While my friends back east are bundling up for autumn, I’m wearing a tank top featuring the leering Cal mascot, Oski, and my dark hair is twirled in a bun, and I’m still pouring sweat. The wet strap of my duffel bag bites into my shoulder.

I unlatch the gate and walk through a garden to get to the front door. Tomatoes on tangles of vines, plumes of herbs, beans racing along trellises like string lights, fireworks of green leaves belonging to carrots, kale, lettuce, beets. There’s even a raised bed with corn — who the fuck grows corn at home?

Patrick Bloom, I guess.

I knock, willing my stomach to untie itself from its knot. After a moment, Patrick Bloom, the world’s most renowned health writer, opens the door and looks out, not in an unfriendly way, just a little blank, until he sees my shirt and bag and realizes that I am the grad student there to house-sit.

“Mariana?”

I nod and he lets me in. It’s the kind of house designed to feel like a home. I’d seen it featured in a magazine before. In addition to Patrick Bloom’s writing, his wife designed book covers, a few of them famous. Their home has long been the subject of public interest.

Patrick Bloom shows me how to work the oven, where to find the bathroom, how to access the deck with a view of San Francisco. His famous mop of curly white hair is even bigger in person; a thin spot burrowed at the back of his head makes it look a little like a halo.

Patrick Bloom stands for something that intrigues me. Cleanliness. Health. Wholesomeness. The idea that your life can be better if you eat quinoa and listen to your body and walk more. Not that his work isn’t based on science, just that the resulting advice is so simple and smart that you hate yourself for not thinking of it first. I devoured all of his books while I was living in New York, bartending and filing the odd music review for an alt-weekly. I applied to journalism school at Cal, where Patrick Bloom is a professor, with the assumption that I wouldn’t get in. When I showed up for the new student tour, the admissions officer flashed a crocodile smile and told me that she thought my essay was excellent. I don’t remember what I wrote, though I do know that I mentioned Patrick Bloom.

Patrick Bloom’s assistant is a second-year student named Eloise. She’s blond and so skinny that the bones of her knees show through her jeans. She snacks on baby carrots and hummus while she uses the school computers to plow through research for Patrick Bloom’s upcoming book. She must use the printers ten times as much as any other student. She delivers his reading material in hard copy. Hulking scientific studies, long articles, entire e-books.

There are only a handful of teaching assistants in our program. Most of them, well, teach. But Eloise is entirely dedicated to Patrick Bloom. The university covers her tuition. That’s how much he’s worth to them.

Eloise was handpicked by the TA before her and someday she, too, will pass the torch. It’s competitive — rumor has it that a recommendation from Patrick Bloom will snag you a job at any top magazine. Eloise was the one who suggested my house-sitting for Patrick Bloom when she was called away for her grandfather’s funeral in Connecticut.

“Is that something you do a lot?” I asked. “House-sitting?”

“Yeah, but it’s not weird. And his house is amazing. So it’s, like, fun.”

Patrick Bloom leads me upstairs. Photos of him and his wife posing with various celebrities, feminine touches in a throw pillow here or a watercolor painting there. We walk past his children’s rooms. Nautical theme for the boy, with model ships lining his windowsill. The girl’s is painted ballet-shoe pink.

It looks like a family of four still lives here, but his children are off at college and his wife died three years ago. I know this because he wrote an award-winning memoir about cooking for her as she was dying. She designed the book cover as her last major piece. I thought it was kind of ugly and maudlin, if I’m being honest, but the writing was some of his best.

We pass a room with a big wooden door. His study. The door is locked. He doesn’t have to tell me that it’s off-limits.

I think he’s going to show me to a guest room, but instead he leads me to the master bedroom.

“This is where you’ll stay.”

I drop my duffel. The walls are painted brown and there are wide windows with no blinds. It’s like the mouth of a cave.

“A little unconventional, I know,” he says. “The design of the room is based on scientific research on the optimal sleeping environment. I’m writing about it in my next book.”

He doesn’t seem to think it’s odd that I just smile and nod at everything he says. I’m a terrible journalism student — I don’t ask nearly enough questions.

Downstairs, he drums the refrigerator with his fingers and tells me to eat anything I like, he doesn’t mind. He shows me back out to the garden and tells me to harvest.

“Whatever you don’t pick will go bad.” He considers a zucchini, small but plump. He yanks it from the vine. “It will rot. Especially in this heat...”

A car pulls up out front and honks lightly. Patrick Bloom dashes inside for his luggage. He can’t possibly be leaving already, I barely know anything about his home. But, indeed, he is. He shakes my hand and thanks me. His skin is still sticky from the zucchini.

“If anything comes up, my number is on the fridge,” he tells me.

And then he is gone.

I go inside. The zucchini remains on the table where he left it. I pick it up and sniff. It smells green. I hate zucchini. I put it down and retrace my steps from the tour, exploring for a second time at my own pace. I realize I’m holding my breath. No one is here monitoring me. I don’t know why I’m afraid.

I go to the bathroom and see a flash of highlighter-bright urine in the bowl. Jesus. I flush the toilet before sitting down. A rack of magazines flank the toilet. Food, lifestyle, travel. Do all rich people keep their magazines in the bathroom? Has he ever run out of toilet paper and had to rip off a page to use on his ass?

It’s nearly dinnertime and the sun streaming through the windows turns orange. I only brought two things to eat — a jar of peanut butter and a box of granola bars. I had planned to bike to the grocery store. I’m grateful I can eat his food. Fuck dealing with that hill again. Plus, how many people can say they’ve eaten something from Patrick Bloom’s garden?

I text a photo of it to my brother Jack. We are not related by blood, but we grew up together and I’m an only child, so he’s the closest thing to a sibling I have.

Got any tips about picking this stuff? I write.

I know zilch about gardening, but Jack does, in a way.

When Jack was fifteen and I was eleven, my mom found pressed pills in his backpack. He told me they weren’t for him, just something he was selling. I don’t know what explanation he gave my mom, but it wasn’t good enough. She went ballistic. The next day, we woke up and Jack was gone.

Two weeks later, a farm worker visiting family in Oakland saw the poster with Jack’s face and called us with a tip. We drove an hour and a half to Gilroy, where we found Jack kneeling in a strawberry field. He had grown tan enough that, with his bandanna and hoodie, he fit in with the dozens of scrawny Mexican guys out there. The biggest difference was that, while they wore steel-toed work boots, he had on his scuffed-up Doc Martens.

The car ride back to Berkeley started out quiet. Even from the backseat, I could see that his hands were dirty and blistered.

“You stink,” my mom said finally. It was true. A cloud of stench, sweet and earthy.

“If you’re not going to let me make money my way,” Jack said, “I’ll make it another way.”

“I don’t give a fuck about what you do on the street, you’re not my kid. But don’t bring that shit into my home. I find anything else and you’re out.”

After that, Jack took odd jobs doing yard work for frat houses and rich professors near campus, though I’m fairly certain he kept dealing on the side.

Now in Patrick Bloom’s garden with the late-day sun beating on my bare shoulders, I stare at my phone. I know Jack isn’t going to respond to my text, but I wait for a few minutes anyway.

I guess I’ll have to do it myself.

I pull a cucumber off the vine, pluck some late-season tomatoes, and rip a head of lettuce from the ground.

In the kitchen, I find some knives. Japanese. Very sharp. I cut open the cucumber to discover that it’s disgusting. Pulpy and warm. The lettuce is okay, though I find dead winged insects lining the crotch of the leaves. I wash it five times. I slice into the tomatoes but miscalculate and catch the end of my finger. It spurts. Shit. I wrap it in a paper towel and then wipe the little droplets of blood from the cutting board.

It’s not until I’m eating the salad that I taste the metallic tang of the blood I missed. The cutting board I used is made of a porous wood and, by the time I rinse it after dinner, it’s stained.

It seems atmospheric to read Patrick Bloom’s books at his house during my first night there, and he has copies on the bookshelf with uncracked spines. I take a couple to the living room and flip to my favorite sections. A preface about foraging for mushrooms in the wilds of Humboldt County. A chapter about our genetic similarities to flies. A passage that compares Gatorade with the sugar water left out for hummingbirds.

Normally, I read his books and feel excited about the possibility of language and how bizarre the world is. Tonight, it just exhausts me.

It’s stuffy in here. It feels like my insides are stewing. I fight to keep my eyes open. The words swim on the page. I need to sleep.

I go upstairs and lie down on Patrick Bloom’s bed, but I can’t drift off. This room gives me the creeps. It’s the kind of room where someone would go to die, dark and primitive.

Every time I roll over, I catch my reflection in the shadeless windows and my heart jumps, certain that I’m seeing a ghost. I almost pass out, but the howl of a distant Amtrak jolts me awake.

It is shockingly, terribly hot. I jump out of bed and rattle the windows, but there’s no way to open them. There are no fans, either. I swing the door open, praying for circulation.

I pluck my iPhone off the bedside table. No response from Jack. Not that I’ve gotten one from him in months, but still. Nighttime is Jack’s time. My mom always hounded him about staying up until three, four, five in the morning and then sleeping all day long.

If he’ll ever respond, it’s now.

My mom met Jack’s dad, Dez, when I was four and she was a freshman at Cal. She had recently returned to school after my birth derailed her life; Dez managed a Top Dog. When Dez replaced my spot in my mother’s bed, I moved to a cot in the living room. Jack slept on the couch. We weren’t supposed to have more than two people in the apartment, but nobody ratted on us. Our neighbors had all kinds of things they weren’t supposed to. Pets, drugs, massage businesses, subletters.

Jack was twice my age and a mystery to me even then. He had a sullen, boyish beauty. At night, if I turned over toward the couch and opened my eyes, I’d usually find him awake and staring back. I began to think of Jack as nocturnal; something other than human.

Just before finals week of her junior year, a crushed-lilac bruise appeared around my mother’s eye. She made Dez pack his bags while she was off in some lecture hall filling in the bubbles on a Scantron. She ended up getting an A.

After that, I moved back into the bedroom with her. Jack stayed on our couch and Dez sent money every month. What kind of guy dumps his kid with an ex like that? A guy like Dez. He wasn’t a junkie or a criminal, just the world’s biggest asshole. Still, in turn, my mom cared for Jack. In turn, Jack cared for me.

When a girl pushed me down on the playground, he followed her after school, shoved her against the wall, and said that if she ever touched his little sister again he’d break her arm. He walked between me and the homeless folks we passed on the street; when they hassled us, he covered my ears and cussed them out. He always shared his candy, panicked if I ate it too quickly, watched me chew as if he were afraid I might choke. He stole pretty things for me — origami paper, hot-pink erasers, stickers.

My mother ignored the ways Jack grew stranger and darker. As a teenager, he came home with a lip pierced in the school bathroom with a safety pin and tiny, squiggly shapes pricked into his skin by a friend’s shaky hand using a sewing needle dipped in pen ink. But that was the Bush era, a time for Bay Area teens to go to punk shows and rage against The Man. Besides, I may have called Jack my brother, but my mom never called him her son. Her responsibility to him, as she saw it, was to make sure he survived to adulthood, no more and no less.

I hadn’t heard anything from Jack for more than a decade when I got a call from my mom in March.

Jack had gotten in touch to tell her he was back in Berkeley. He gave her a phone number, which she read to me.

“I have nothing to say to him,” I snapped. But I still remembered the number long after I hung up. Memory works in funny ways.

When the acceptance letter came for journalism school, I said yes, even though I’d never wanted to move back to Berkeley and even though it felt too much like following in my mother’s footsteps. This was different. It was grad school. Patrick Bloom was an instructor there. And I had applied before I knew Jack was back.

I hadn’t made my decision for him.

But I had called him the first week of classes.

“Jack?” I said after he picked up. When the line went dead, I was certain that it was him.

I’ve been texting him since, but I haven’t heard a thing.

I roll over to face the ceiling. I angle my phone toward my face and it lights up. Spots flood my vision. No wonder I can’t sleep when this shit is so bright.

The house I’m watching is cool, you should swing by, I type. And then I add the address. Not that he’d ever come. Not that I’m certain I’d want him to, anyway.

I leave my iPhone faceup, but it does not illuminate with a message that night. I don’t fall asleep until sunrise.

I wake in the afternoon. In the master bath, I examine the deodorant-crusted stains ringing the pits of my shirt. I peel it off, put it in a pile for the laundry. After my shower, I can’t find the bath towels, so I wipe Patrick Bloom’s skinny hand towel and tiny square of a face towel all over my body. I feel like a cat rubbing itself on things to leave its mark.

I bring my laptop to the patio. I’m supposed to take notes on an episode of a podcast for my radio class. My whole body hurts from the lack of sleep and, though the podcast is supposed to be some great feat of audio editing, it can’t hold my attention. My head keeps drooping.

When my laptop dies, I realize I forgot to bring a charger. Of course.

Biking all the way home for a stupid charger sounds awful. I could go upstairs to Patrick Bloom’s study. He might have a charger there. But I already bled all over his cutting board; I don’t need to make things worse by breaking into his study. I’d inevitably fuck something up. Accidentally set off an alarm or knock over some priceless heirloom — I don’t know what kind of delicate, precious things someone like Patrick Bloom would have in there.

Forget the computer, I’m only here for two more days. I’ll consider it a digital detox.

I want to be having more fun in Patrick Bloom’s home than I am. I get the joint I brought and take it outside to smoke on the deck. I hope his neighbors don’t complain about the smell. No one cares about pot in Berkeley, but I don’t know if the rules are different in the hills. These are the hippies who sold out, not the hippies who became crackheads and now line the streets just a few miles away.

I take a long rip.

I was thirteen when I first smoked. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment by then — my mother and I still shared a room, which we split down the middle with a folding wooden divider. Jack had his own room, barely bigger than a closet. It was so small that when he and I sat on the carpet beside his bed, leaning against the comforter that smelled like Old Spice and boy body, the toes of my checkered Vans touched the door.

“I want you to smoke with me,” he said. I snorted like it was a joke, but he looked me square in the eyes. “I don’t want you doing it for the first time with some randos.”

I watched how the light flickered off his face as he took the first hit. I tried to match his stoicism, the length of his inhale, the way his finger flickered over the carb. My throat screamed, but I didn’t dare cough.

When the bowl was cashed, Jack put a mixed CD in his Discman and leaned close to share his headphones. His bloodshot eyes half-closed. He tongued his lip piercing, wheeling that little metal hoop around and around. I wanted to be closer to him. I wanted, I thought with a flash that scared me, to lick the curve of skin just above the chain he wore around his neck.

A song came on and Jack pulled the jewel case from under his bed. The track names were handwritten in Sharpie. The one we were listening to was called “Sister Jack.”

“It’s you,” he said with a stoner’s laugh. He patted my knee and the inside of my leg went electric.

I grip the banister of Patrick Bloom’s patio until the worn wood starts to splinter. I blow a cloud of smoke and imagine it conjuring Jack. Why do I still think of him as part of my life? He’s nothing more than a shadow.

The weed has hit me and I’m starving. I go back to the garden and snap off a head of corn. A grub pokes out from the folds of husk. I pluck it out and stomp it underfoot. Inside, I sauté the corn in a thick pat of butter.

I’ve smoked enough to tranquilize a horse, but the second my head touches Patrick Bloom’s pillow, I find that, once again, I cannot sleep.

If I move around, maybe my exhaustion will catch up with me.

I put on my sneakers and leave the house for a walk through the neighborhood. My heart races faster as I make my way up and down the lurching hills. The dark-windowed houses loom overhead and the quiet is punctuated by bursts of sound. A dog barking as I pass, a motorcycle backfiring somewhere high on the twisted roads. I wonder what I’d look like to someone watching from inside one of these beautiful houses. A hoodlum from the flatlands, no doubt.

I turn onto a road where the sidewalk narrows to a sliver. I hear an engine rumble and then a car careens around a blind curve, flying toward me so quickly that I think I’m going to die. The car jerks to swerve around me, the side-view mirror close enough that I could reach out and touch it. I forget to breathe until the streak of rear lights disappears into the night.

It’s my last day. I need to keep it together.

I try working on a hard-copy editing test in the garden under the slanted shade of the house, but my brain is out to sea. Flies dive-bomb the caverns of my ears. I swat them away and one of them tumbles into the mug of expensive coffee I made in Patrick Bloom’s kitchen. I could fish it out but, instead, I watch it struggle at the surface until its last twitch.

I need to go inside, it’s too hot. Might as well grab something to eat first.

I think of Eloise as I go to the carrot bed and try gently tugging on one of the tops. The ground looks soft, but the carrot doesn’t budge. I reach my hand into the dirt and feel around for something firm. When I do, I grab it. As I pull my hand up, the soil spews worms with translucent skin. I can see the blackness of their guts.

I yank my hand away. It’s crawling with bugs. I drop the carrot, leap back, and beat the insects from my arm. Ants are trapped in the beads of my sweat, their little legs flailing. One fat-bodied ant digs its mouth into the not-yet-healed cut on my index finger, its mandible pinching into my raw flesh so firmly that its whole body stands on end. I squash it with my thumb.

The carrot I picked is short and fat. It looks too pale. I’ve lost my appetite for it anyhow. I shove it back in the ground, even though I’m sure I’ve killed it.

I go inside and shower in water so hot that I leave more sweaty than clean.

I’m walking upstairs when I see the study. I think of finding a charger. Using my laptop would help pass the time. I could get work done. Or just bum around on Facebook.

The study is locked, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t get in.

I shouldn’t go in.

I want to, though. I really, really want to. It is, in fact, the only thing that I want to do. My laptop is part of it but, to be honest, I mostly want to know what it’s like in there.

Isn’t that a perk of house-sitting? Peeking into someone’s life?

I run my hands over the smooth wood and examine the lock. Easy. I pull a bobby pin from my hair and wedge it into the keyhole. A trick Jack showed me when we were kids. I wriggle it around until I feel a click, a give, and the lock comes undone.

Sun streams through the windows, illuminating two tall file cabinets. A towering desktop computer sits alongside a bundle of extra laptop chargers. I set my computer on the desk and plug it in.

It’ll take awhile to reboot. I figure it’s okay to look around in the meantime.

Stacks of books border his desk, which is littered with pens. I come upon a pile of papers. Printouts from Eloise. There’s a sticky note on top. Hope this helps, it reads. It’s meant for Patrick Bloom but it feels like it’s for me — if there’s a chance I’ll become this guy’s assistant next year, I should see what I’d actually have to do.

It looks like original writing, not articles or studies. Printed in Times New Roman, twelve-point font with a smattering of grammatical errors.

Something like an essay.

It’s... an assignment? A class assignment?

It’s a chapter.

That can’t be right. Patrick Bloom would never have a grad student write something for him. I must be mistaken. I open a file cabinet. There are entire drawers dedicated to different books. First, Man Eat Food. A bunch of papers have headers that say, Winnie Ford. I pull out my phone and look her up on LinkedIn. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, class of 2002. Currently a senior editor for the lifestyle magazine that did the shoot of Patrick Bloom’s home.

I look through Microgreen.

Gardening in Eden.

Truth, Lies, and Celery.

WalkFit.

All of them have traces of the assistants who ghostwrote them. Cover pages with their names. Hand-scrawled marginalia. Last-minute swipes of Wite-Out.

I brace myself and then look through the one for Mother, Wife, Mine, Gone. It takes me an hour of searching through every paper in that pile, but I find it. My favorite line rendered in a student’s handwriting: She took her last breath, jagged and true. She was there. And then she was gone.

He even had them write the book about his dead wife.

I manage to put the papers back in the files, the files in the cabinet, and I lock the door from the inside on my way out.

I need to go to sleep. Now. That is the only way I’ll get through my last evening in this house. I head downstairs to hunt for something that will seriously fuck me up. I haul myself onto the kitchen counter and search through the highest shelf to find what I’m looking for. A bottle of gin. I take it down, fill a cup, and top off the bottle with tap water.

I plunk a handful of ice cubes into my glass and drink it like it’s medicine. I’m out of weed, but this guy has to have something fun. I rifle through the bathroom. Ibuprofen, acid reflux meds, a box of Tums. Aha, there it is. A prescription bottle with the label torn off. The pills inside are white and round. They look like Ativan, though I’m not totally sure. Fuck it, let’s find out. I down two with a gulp of gin.

I put on sweatpants, take off my bra, lie down in Patrick Bloom’s bed, and wait for this shit to kick in. I don’t even care that my sweat is soaking into his beautiful, expensive comforter.

My body starts to feel heavy, yet floaty. This is good. I release a big sigh. My phone is resting on the bed next to me. I pick it up. My fingers tingle as I dial Jack. It goes to a generic voice mail. I call once more, twice, three times.

I laugh. Jack is not going to pick up. He’s never going to pick up.

I remember being sixteen. Lying on my bed, my presence cloaked by the wooden divider in the room, reading a book for class. I knew from the heavy footsteps that Jack had come home. When he came in and slid my mom’s drawers open, I peered around the screen to see what he was doing.

Jack was adept at plowing through my mom’s things. I knew that she hid cash in her sock drawer because I’d gone looking once and pocketed twenty bucks. But Jack wasn’t looking for something, he was looking to hide something. Something wrapped in a deconstructed brown grocery bag, bound in tape, and tucked under his arm.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Jack jumped. I’d never startled him before.

“Mari, if you don’t tell anyone, we can pretend you didn’t see anything.”

I didn’t need to know what was in that package to know that my mom would kick him out if she found it. The idea of that happening was more than I could bear.

I couldn’t tell Jack no. Yet he saw my hesitation and knew his secret wasn’t safe. His face warped with disgust. He stormed out, shoved the package into his backpack, and left. He didn’t come home until the next day.

Jack gave me the silent treatment after that and lived with us for only a few more weeks before disappearing again. That time we didn’t find him, not in a strawberry field, not anywhere.

Once in a while, I’d plug his name into Google, but it was like he had never existed at all.

Why did he give my mom his number if he didn’t plan on picking up his stupid phone?

Fucker.

I keep calling.

Finally, the ringtone starts ending sooner. He’s actively silencing my calls. He’s seeing them come through. Jack is out there.

Or maybe his phone is just blocking me.

My vision gets fuzzy.

I blink, slowly. My eyes close. Sleep cradles me.

Is someone knocking on the front door? I prop myself up. My drool has soaked Patrick Bloom’s pillow. I look at my phone. It’s three a.m.; I’ve been unconscious for nine hours. The drugs are wearing thin, but I’m still stoned.

I hear two more loud pounds and the chime of the doorbell.

I stumble downstairs and see the silhouette of a man in the front window. Tall, lanky. I know exactly who it is.

I open the door. Jack is wearing a black T-shirt and has a short, tidy beard. He looks older than his thirty-two years. Time and sun have etched lines into his skin. I want to run to him, but he’s practically a stranger. I remember that I’m not wearing a bra and cross my arms over my chest.

“Mari, I need your help,” he says. Panic thrums behind his eyes. He turns to walk to the street and I follow him, a little sister’s instinct. My head is drowning in Ativan and my tongue feels like it’s filled with wet sand.

“How’d you find me?” I manage to slur.

“You texted me the address.”

“Oh.” Right. Of course.

“No one can track it,” he says. “You have my burner number.”

Why does my brother have a burner phone? And why is that the number I have for him?

He takes me to his car, opens the door, and gestures for me to look in the backseat. There’s a thick plastic bag. It’s misshapen, but I suspect from its size and heft what it is. Shock rushes through my system, but I’m not as terrified as I know I should be. Thank god I’m on drugs.

“Who was it?”

“It’s not part of the job to know that.” He emphasizes the word job as if this is like any other job he’s had. Like pulling beer cans out of bushes on Frat Row or clearing out an anthropology professor’s drainpipe or picking strawberries in Gilroy or dealing drugs.

“Where did you...?” I don’t have to finish the sentence. Chop up the body.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I wish I hadn’t seen it. That he’d dumped the body in the bay or kept driving past Patrick Bloom’s house to Tilden and found somewhere to leave it among the rotting eucalyptus trees. But the fact is that I’m standing there looking at it and now I cannot unsee it. I reach in and touch the bag. I feel a jumble of body parts. The knob of an elbow. Stiff flesh, like an unripe tomato.

“The owner’s coming back tomorrow,” I say.

“He won’t know.”

It is late, so late that all the lights in all of the houses on the street are off. No one sees us as we pull the bag from the car and carry it to the side plot where nothing grows but weeds. After that, it is Jack’s work to bury the body, not mine. He hands me a shopping bag containing khaki shorts, sneakers, boxers, and a short-sleeved plaid button-up. I wince when I feel where the bloodstained patches of fabric have gone cold, but I try not to think about it. I nod off as I wash the man’s clothes in the laundry machine. When I’m done, I go into the basement and stuff them in the bottom of a box labeled, Goodwill.

For the rest of the night my consciousness ebbs and flows. Eventually I am in bed, though I do not know how I got upstairs. The last thing I remember is Jack whispering that he hadn’t planned this. His voice shimmers like the lights of the city twinkling in the distance. He tells me that, sometimes, the impulsive plan is the best plan, the hardest one to track. And when I sent him the image of the garden, and when I said that I was alone house-sitting, and when I kept calling and calling, well, it seemed a little like fate.

I should be worried, but I’m not. We are far away, Jack and I. Above the world in our cave. Everything below us is a blanket of stars. And when I sleep, I dream of falling headlong into Jack’s wide-open eyes.

I wake to the sound of the front door opening.

I think I imagined all of this. Then I feel a weight in the bed next to me. Bile lurches at the back of my throat.

Jack stretches his arms overhead, yawning. His white teeth glisten. At some point he shaved, and now I can see the little scar where his lip piercing used to be. He’s not wearing a shirt. His body is a tight braid of muscle and there’s a tattoo etched onto his chest that I’ve never seen — an eagle, screaming, its talons outstretched, like it’s about to snatch up his nipple. It’s not something I would have ever pictured on Jack’s skin, but then again, I don’t really know Jack anymore, do I?

When his eyes find mine, I give him a look to ask, Is it done? and he nods. I slide out of bed and go downstairs.

In the kitchen, Patrick Bloom straightens up from where he was crouched over the zucchini that remained on the table, wilting.

“Sorry, I overslept,” I say.

Patrick Bloom’s eyes land on something behind me. Jack has followed me. Patrick Bloom gives Jack a smirk, like he is pleased for him. He assumes that we fucked.

“I’m Phil,” Jack says, reaching out for a shake. Dread sinks in, heavy as a stone. I don’t know if he’s lying to save himself or to create a convincing story, but if the body is discovered, I will be the only identifiable person.

Patrick Bloom is the kind of guy who takes a hand that’s offered to him. He tells us he has to hop in the shower. He has a conference in downtown Berkeley that afternoon.

Jack curls a finger around the hair that falls between my shoulder blades. It’s the touch of someone playing at lover; I have to force myself not to flinch.

I wait for Patrick Bloom to finish talking before I rush to collect my things. When I go to wash my dishes, Patrick Bloom tells me not to bother. The housekeeper will be by later today.

He hands me two crisp hundred-dollar bills and thanks me. I sling my duffel bag over my shoulder, unlock my bike, walk Jack to the car he parked down the street. We do not say anything. He just gives me a half hug, gets in his car, and then he’s gone.

It’s much easier to bike home now that I’m heading downhill.

Months pass and I keep expecting something to happen. For Patrick Bloom to tell me that he found something in the dirt, worms coiled among bones. For the cops to bang down my door. For my life to be destroyed. But nothing does. Jack disappears again. For good, I think. I try calling, but his line has been disconnected. Eloise must have heard about my supposed boyfriend showing up at Patrick Bloom’s house, because she picks another student to be her successor and every time she sees me on campus, she glares. I finish my first year of grad school. I return to New York City over the summer for an internship. I don’t come back.

The Tangy Brine of Dark Night by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Berkeley Marina

Kaylie’s grandma weighed only ninety pounds by now, and so carrying her out to the car wasn’t too difficult. She cradled the old woman, one arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders, and gently placed her, lying down, along the bench of the backseat. She saw that she’d left her grandma’s sneakers untied, so she made secure knots in the laces and then straightened the purple windbreaker, which had bunched up around her bony hips. Kaylie gently shut the door.

Would the trunk be better? Just the thought sent a prickling uneasiness down the backs of Kaylie’s arms. She would not put her grandma in the trunk. Period. Besides, she’d need to put the kayak in there. She pointed the remote at the garage door, afraid that it wouldn’t open — her grandma hadn’t taken the car out in months — but it did. The old white Pontiac started too, and Kaylie backed into the street, carefully straightened the wheels, and put the automatic transmission in park.

This whole plan was fucking crazy. So much so that, if she got caught, she could probably plead insanity. Which was worse, the psych ward or prison? She tried to think of a way out of the course she’d started down, but none came to mind, and so she quietly exited the car and walked over to her neighbor’s side yard where they left the kayak, which hadn’t been used in so long that lichen crusted its hull. She’d return it before they even realized it was gone. Luckily it was a short boat, with an open deck, none of those scary little hatches to get stuck inside, but it was heavy. Kaylie ended up having to drag it to the car, the pavement grating the plastic, as loud as a cement mixer. If any neighbors looked out their windows, who knew what they’d surmise. Thankfully the Pontiac’s trunk was the size of a small room, and she managed to stuff about half of the kayak in, bow first. She put a hand on the stern and pressed down. It didn’t wiggle. Not much. It was only a mile or two to the pier — and downhill. Gravity ought to keep the kayak in place.

Kaylie jumped into the driver’s seat and began the short journey. As she turned left on San Pablo Avenue, panic fluttered in her chest. The stern end of the kayak angled out of the trunk like an erection. She should have attached a red flag. She should have secured a seat belt around Grandma.

Never mind. She was almost there, and no place calmed her frayed nerves more than the Berkeley Pier, the way that long wooden structure stretched far out into the bay, a lovely straight line conveying people into the world of fish and salt water and sky. Grandma and she had spent their happiest hours sitting in their short chairs, sipping iced tea, Grandma smoking Chesterfields, hands cradling the grips of their fishing rods, gazing at the most profound intersection on earth, the one between sky and sea. They rarely talked while fishing, not to each other, anyway. They didn’t have to. Water, fish, air, time. What else did a person need?

Kaylie had almost relaxed, at least she’d regained that gathering of resolve right behind her breastbone, the knowledge of doing right, when that damn Jimi Hendrix guitar riff vibrated in her pocket. Her sister Savannah had been calling repeatedly all day, at first once an hour, and recently about every twenty minutes, as if by calling multiple times today she could make up for the weeks and months she hadn’t called. When they had talked, the times when Kaylie thought Savannah would want to know about developments in their grandma’s condition, Savannah liked to cite her three children, making it crystal clear that Kaylie’s childlessness put her in a complete fog of ignorance about what real life entailed. “Three children,” Savannah would practically shout, as if parenthood was on par with being the CEO of a prison. She’d also note her “handful” husband. Or her “high-maintenance” husband, if she was irritated with him. Or her “demanding” husband, if she was outright angry with the man, which she often was. And yet all of these adjectives were spoken with pride, emphasizing the heft of her family responsibility load, how full her life was with this man — all to communicate that helping with Grandma was inconsequential compared to what she had on her plate. A man. A family.

Kaylie had tried to keep her resentment, her anger, in check: she too might have had someone “on her plate,” had she not spent the last few years caring for Grandma. Don’t mind that ragged cough in the next room, that’s just my grandma dying of emphysema. Very romantic.

Kaylie let the repetitive Jimi Hendrix phrase play out and then tried to return to her memories of hot summer nights, much like this one, on the pier with Grandma. But a siren, just a few streets away, pierced her thoughts. Even the sound of the Pontiac’s big rubber tires peeling along the still-sizzling pavement unnerved her. Noises tonight were too loud, as if the god she didn’t believe in had turned up the volume. Kaylie twisted on the radio and almost laughed at the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice. Her grandma’s favorite. But of course Savannah wouldn’t allow a moment of respite — oh no, the woman could be fucking telepathic when it came to moments of joy that needed to be destroyed. Jimi Hendrix began playing his bit, yet again, and Kaylie couldn’t help it, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked, hoping it might be someone benign, like the woman she’d met at a conference in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, but no, of course it was Savannah. Again. She should have turned off her ringer, but somehow her sister’s angsty presence was almost a comfort. At least it was familiar. And the only family she had left. She tapped Ignore and kept driving.

Stopping at the intersection of University and San Pablo, Kaylie put her head out the window and breathed deeply, hoping for a hint of that fishy rotten-wood smell of the pier. Of course she was still a half mile away, but knowing that it was just there, in front of her, another couple of minutes, relieved her. She knew she was doing not just the right thing, but the exact perfect thing. Savannah could go to hell.

A pulsing red light swarmed into the Pontiac. Kaylie was riding the crest of her confidence, and she felt sorry for the poor sop getting pulled over. She strained her eyes toward the dark horizon, toward the bay, pretended she could maybe see, if she looked hard enough, the Golden Gate. That put her in mind of the future, her future, and the possibility that, at long last, she’d be free to pursue a life. A real life. Maybe she’d take a trip to Dallas. She and that woman had had a lovely one-night stand, and it’d felt authentic, not like a quickie, more like a glint of possibility. Kaylie had told Grandma all about it when she got home and Grandma had said, yanking off the tubes running to her oxygen tank so she could speak as forcefully as she wanted to speak, “For fuck’s sake, get on a goddamn plane for Dallas. I got a few months at best. Pull my damn plug and go get that woman.”

Kaylie had laughed and lied, saying, “Nah. She wasn’t my type. Besides, I’m not going anywhere.”

“You can sell my house when I’m gone. That’ll be a nice grubstake for you.”

“I’ll retire,” Kaylie said, lying again. Her grandma’s termite-infested house needed a new roof, a few coats of paint, and probably a new foundation. She wouldn’t be leaving her job or chasing some woman in Dallas, at least not for a couple of decades.

The pulsing red light, as viscous and deeply colored as cough syrup, kept flooding the interior of the Pontiac. Of course Kaylie was that poor sop getting pulled over.

Breathe, she counseled herself. Just breathe through this. Make sure the cop doesn’t try to wake up Grandma, that was key. For all Kaylie knew, the Pontiac’s registration hadn’t been renewed in years. She drove through the intersection, hands at two o’clock and ten o’clock on the steering wheel, and carefully pulled into the Blick Art Materials parking lot. The patrol car followed. The wait, both of them in their cars, felt interminable. Kaylie carefully took her driver’s license out of her wallet, and actually found a paid, up-to-date registration in the glove compartment. The uniform finally approached, coming from the rear with a hand on the grip of her gun. Kaylie thanked all the deities for the pale shade of her skin, her fucking whiteness, an accident of fate that would increase her chances of finessing her way through the encounter.

The cop hefted a huge flashlight to shoulder height, as if it were a spiked javelin. She blinded Kaylie by shining it right in her face. Kaylie fumbled her license and registration out the car window as fast as she could. She might have white skin, but other variables in this situation — the contents of the backseat, the kayak in the trunk, and the ancient Pontiac itself — were not going to be helpful. As the cop turned the flashlight’s beam on the documents, Kaylie tried to memorize the information on her badge. Officer Marta Ramirez was pretty, even with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, and wore no makeup — a hopeful sign — and carried a nice solid build. She might have been family, but Kaylie knew flirting would not be a good idea in this situation. Still, she might be able to signal sisterhood. Uh, did you go to Pride this year? Or, How does your wife like your uniform?

Of course that could backfire if she was in fact straight. Or even if she wasn’t. Kaylie kept her mouth shut.

Marta (and why not be on a first-name basis in the privacy of Kaylie’s own mind?) shined her light into the backseat. “Who’s this?”

“That’s my grandma.”

“Why is she—”

“She’s ninety-three. Full-on Alzheimer’s. Sleeping is so difficult for her. You’ve heard of sundown syndrome?”

The cop’s whole body loosened, slumped a little. Her eyes softened. “Oh, yeah. My grandma too.”

“Really? I’m sorry to hear that. Anyway, Grandma’s like a baby who can only fall asleep in a moving car. So I take her out at night sometimes, just drive her around so she can sleep.” Kaylie was pleased with her quick thinking, and as she spoke, she tried to come up with as good of an explanation for the kayak.

“You should put the seat belt on her.”

“I know! I usually do. I was just realizing that when you pulled me over.”

“I pulled you over because the kayak is improperly secured.” The cop shot the beam of her massive flashlight at the erect kayak stern. “That’s a real hazard. It doesn’t look like you’ve tied it at all. If it slides out, someone could get killed.”

“God, I’m sorry. Stupid of me. Yeah, I borrowed the kayak from a friend this past weekend. I figured if I was going to drive Grandma around tonight, I might as well use the opportunity to return the kayak. I mean, she won’t wake up when I get to my friend’s house. I just have to slide the kayak out and drag it to her side yard.”

Just shut the fuck up. Less is more, idiot. Stop talking.

The cop paused for far too long. Kaylie could see all the questions flashing through her mind. The woman took a deep breath of assessment.

“I’m sorry,” Kaylie repeated, with lots of feeling.

Officer Marta Ramirez (Kaylie returned, in her mind, to the more respectful full title and name) began a slow circumnavigation of the Pontiac, using her flashlight to examine all four tires, and even look under the carriage. She shined her light into the passenger-side back window and gazed at Kaylie’s grandma for a long time. A very long time. Long enough for Kaylie to wonder if prison was really like Orange Is the New Black, long enough for her to consider the possibility that behind bars she might actually, at long last, find a girlfriend. She wouldn’t have to worry about fixing up or selling the house. She wouldn’t have to lift anyone in and out of a bathtub, clean sheets soaked with piss or streaked with shit, listen to the painful sounds of someone she loved trying to breathe. That part was all over now — it was as if she realized this for the first time, just now as the cop stared at her grandma in the backseat — whether she went to prison or not.

When Officer Ramirez circled back to the driver’s window, she pressed her lips together and made eye contact. “Okay. I’m not going to write you a ticket.”

Wait. Kaylie had almost begun looking forward to prison. To not having a single job other than surviving. If she’d been given another few moments, she might have started fantasizing about prison sex. Maybe instead she should start fantasizing policewoman sex, gratitude sex.

“I really, really, really appreciate that,” Kaylie said. “Thank you.”

“Get Grandma home. And get a rack for that kayak.”

“I will! Tomorrow. I mean, I’ll get Grandma home right now, and a rack for the kayak tomorrow. I mean, for next time I borrow it.”

Now that their official interaction was over, could Kaylie ask Marta Ramirez for her phone number? She imagined cracking that joke, if it was one, for Grandma, and Grandma’s loud honking laugh. Do it! the ghost of Grandma shouted. Do it!

“Hey,” Kaylie said as the cop started walking away. “I mean, I don’t know if you’re married or not. But I wondered if maybe some time you’d like—”

The woman spun around on the soles of her shiny black practical tie-up shoes. “Really?” she responded. “I just let you off. I mean, I just let you off, and—”

“And I said thank you. Good night.” Kaylie rolled up her window and started the engine, the car lurched forward, and she almost hit a parked car as she tried to turn the huge tank around. Marta Ramirez was busy getting into her own vehicle and didn’t bother to look up again.

Five minutes later, Kaylie parked the car in one of the spots along the Berkeley waterfront, on the east side of the pier. She rolled down her window and sat listening to the wavelets lapping against the giant stones which formed the barrier between the bay and the parking spaces. It was high tide, and the water splashed within feet of her car. At last she could fill her nostrils with the salty wet smell of the bay.

Twisting around in her seat, she couldn’t see much of Grandma in the dark, but Kaylie knew exactly what she looked like: the sparse pale smoke hair, the tissuey skin with deep laugh lines, her thin frail limbs, knobby with arthritis.

“We’re here, Grandma,” she whispered, and a wave of grief rolled through her.

Only to be interrupted by Jimi Hendrix.

Savannah lived an hour away, in Vacaville, but Kaylie could count on the fingers of one hand the times her sister had been over to help with Grandma in the past six months. Oh, but she’d had plenty of advice. She’d done research. She’d suggested herbal remedies. New doctors. Just last month she proposed a trip to the Mayo Clinic. As if there were a cure for advanced emphysema.

When Kaylie let her know a few weeks ago that the end was near, and wanted to keep her in the loop about their options, Savannah had responded with outrage. She thought Kaylie’s “predictions” were “premature.” She specifically said that using the words “dying” and “hospice” were manipulative on Kaylie’s part. As if she were maliciously trying to pry Savannah away from her blue-ribbon children and husband. At the end of her rant, Savannah announced that she’d “look into the situation,” and hung up.

Late this afternoon, as Grandma had struggled to draw air into her lungs, her whole body racked with pain, Kaylie spooned doses of morphine into her mouth. One after another. Once Grandma lost consciousness, it was nearly impossible to get her to swallow more, but the other options for killing her were horrifying, and so Kaylie cradled her ancient skull in the crook of her elbow, wrapping her arm around so she could use her hand to hold Grandma’s jaw open. She continued dripping morphine onto her tongue, sometimes massaging her throat to ease it down, until she finished her off at eight fifteen p.m., just as dusk softened the harsh light of day.

Kaylie knew, without a shred of doubt, that Grandma would want exactly that — to have Kaylie be the one — and exactly this, what she was about to do next.

But now that they’d at long last arrived at the pier, back at the pier, Kaylie’s will began collapsing. Not her resolve. She knew this was right. But the physical energy necessary to carry it out went missing. She realized that she hadn’t eaten anything all day, not even a bowl of cereal. She briefly considered stopping in at Skates Restaurant, just on the other side of the pier, for some sustaining nutrients, but the idea of sitting at a table clad with a starched white cloth and shiny cutlery, surrounded by the sounds of clinking cocktails, digging into sole meunière, while her grandma waited unguarded in the backseat of the Pontiac, just wasn’t right.

Kaylie stalled by listening to her phone messages. In the first one, from midmorning, Savannah simply asked, “So how is she?” This one was followed by a couple of insistent demands of, “Why aren’t you calling me back?” In the next, Savannah announced that she was coming to Berkeley, that she’d leave right after she put the kids to bed. Kaylie should expect her by nine o’clock.

She must have just missed her. By now Savannah had probably parked her Lexus in front of Grandma’s house, keyed her way in the front door, and found the empty bed. Kaylie had made sure to bring the bottles, eyedropper, and even the spoon with her, to not leave anything sketchy at the bedside, but now she wished she’d stopped on her way to the marina to drop them in a garbage bin far from home, and also far from the marina. She should chuck them now, in any case. If Savannah called the police, and that would definitely be her style, then Kaylie needed to be free of evidence.

She grabbed the plastic bag into which she’d stuffed all the paraphernalia and got out of the car, locking Grandma in, as if that would be necessary. Walking at the pace Savannah used for exercise — she called it pep-stepping — Kaylie hustled along the harbor until she came to one of the public bathrooms. Perfect. Her bagful of gear looked like it belonged to any addict, and she stuffed it deep into the garbage bin, shoving it under some McDonald’s bags. Then she crouched down by water’s edge and washed her hands, the rank iciness triggering so many memories, though she refused to cry. She had to finish what she’d begun, and she had to do it quickly.

And yet, walking back to the car she couldn’t resist stopping at the entrance to the pier, long fenced off due to structural issues too expensive for the city to fix. One of her most painful regrets was how, in the past few years during Grandma’s illness, she hadn’t been able to bring her to the pier. They’d come a few times to the water’s edge, where the Pontiac was now parked, and even tried fishing from the rocky barrier, but it wasn’t the same, not even close. Navigating a catch across those sharp, massive rocks was nearly impossible. Anyway, all their friends were gone.

Kaylie put a sneaker toe through one of the diamond-shaped openings of the chain-link fence barring admittance to the pier. It was an easy climb — only a few feet high, and no barbed wire — and a moment later she leaped down on the other side. Oh, how good it felt to walk that length, smell the barnacles clinging to rotting wood, the soft breeze a balm against the inland heat, its touch as intimate as a lover’s. And beyond, the lights of San Francisco, blinking their friendly message of hope in a ravaged country. Best of all, though, was the splash of the bay, slurping and wallowing, concealing all its bounty, so much life swimming right below her feet, the perch, bass, crabs, halibut, and stingrays. Once they’d caught a small shark.

Duong and Tham Nguyen had helped them land the shark and that night Grandma invited their family over to dinner. It was one of the best nights ever. They brought a bunch of crazy Vietnamese dishes, and she and Grandma made potato salad and green Jell-O with canned tangerine slices. The adults drank a lot of beer and smoked lots of cigarettes. They all shouted jokes into the night.

Kaylie was fifteen that year. Savannah had long since disowned her sister and grandma. She hated that they ate fish they caught themselves, hated that Grandma chain-smoked, hated even her array of friends from the pier, claimed that they were just a bunch of homeless people. “Maybe,” Grandma had answered the first time Savannah shouted that assessment, but actually they weren’t. Duong and Tham Nguyen ran a framing business in Berkeley. Pamela Roberts, an ancient black woman who fished every single day, even well into her dementia, and who everyone watched out for, had had a union job at the Ford auto assembly plant in Richmond until she retired. Shelly, a young black woman, was a public librarian in Oakland, and always fished with her two terriers as companions. James and Frank, a couple of Irish brothers, who staged loud, funny arguments as they fished, mostly for the entertainment of others, worked construction when they could get it. Everyone shared food and drinks and stories, when they felt like it, and also respected a person’s desire for solitude and quiet. Kaylie and her grandma knew everyone and their stories. Who’d recently arrived in the Bay Area, or even in the country. Who’d been left by a partner. Who was struggling to make rent. One white guy, probably around sixty, was reportedly a billionaire, and yet every Sunday he sat with his feet up on the railing, a fishing line draped into the bay, never talked to anyone, but never bothered anyone, either. Fishing was a community, and Grandma had been at its heart.

Once over the chain-link fence, Kaylie walked quickly to avoid being spotted by anyone on shore. The pier was no longer lit, and soon the tangy brine of dark night encompassed her stride. She didn’t think Savannah would look for them here. Would she? It certainly made the most sense — that they’d come here — but it was a completely different kind of sense than the kind her sister possessed. If Savannah did call the police, it was possible that Officer Marta Ramirez had filed some sort of event report, even if she hadn’t written a ticket, and they could be tracked pretty quickly. Kaylie shouldn’t dally. Because once her sister decided on a course of action, good luck trying to divert her. At the age of twelve, Savannah had talked her way into a scholarship at a private school in Berkeley. Her biggest fear was that her classmates would so much as glimpse their grandma, with her wispy hair, the scalp showing through even when she was young, and her smoky breath and exuberant manner of talking, her loud honking laugh. Savannah moved out when she was seventeen and worked at Nordstrom to put herself through community college. She won sales awards with big bonuses. She now sold high-end furniture. She’d already said, well before it was an appropriate concession, that Kaylie could have the house. Now wasn’t that generous, inasmuch as the house needed more work than its value.

Kaylie heard voices. The dark lumps at the end of the pier were people. Quietly, she started backing up. She’d heard of rogue youths robbing people out here. One time armed teens forced a couple to jump into the bay where the water is so cold, hypothermia claims a body in about ten minutes. Even if you’re a good swimmer, you don’t have a chance.

Unfortunately, that’s when her phone rang again, Jimi Hendrix joyously making love to his guitar, loud and encompassing, as if he were playing the very night air.

“What the fuck?” a voice at the end of the pier said.

“Shit,” said another. “We got company.”

She heard the crinkle of cellophane bags, the clunk of dropped half-full aluminum cans. A second later, three youths sprinted past her, their bare chests — two white and one brown — skinny as hope. They passed so quickly she didn’t even have time to be scared. She listened to their sneakered feet pound all the way to the end of the pier. She heard the faint clinking of the chain-link fence as they heaved themselves over it. Then she cracked up, laughed out loud: those boys were afraid of her.

Kaylie’s laughter morphed into tears, and she collapsed onto the wooden planks of the pier, stretching out on her back and looking up through the blur of her tears at the few pale stars, the ones bright enough to shine through the city haze of artificial light. She wished she’d brought a fishing rod, longed for the feel of its grip in her hand, the jiggle of a bite, the tug at the beginning of the fish’s resistance, and then the gentle, steady, focused reeling in. No one could clean a fish as expertly as Grandma, slicing through the fish belly with her boning knife, scraping out the guts. Of course the best part was eating the fried fish, usually with a side of chips or nothing else at all. Every single time, after cleaning her plate, Grandma would say the exact same words: “Nothing better than eating fish you caught yourself.” Then she’d grin ear to ear as if it were an original comment or the first time she’d said it. Often after a good fish fry, they went to the grocery store for ice cream, which they brought home and ate straight from the carton. Once Savannah had made one of her rare visits as they were scraping the bottom of a tub of double-fudge caramel swirl, and she’d literally groaned out loud in disgust.

Kaylie wiped her wet face with the bottom of her T-shirt, got to her feet, and walked to the end of the pier. The kids had left half-drunk beers and half-eaten bags of chips. She was sorry she’d scared them away. Stupid kids trying to enjoy a summer night. Kaylie climbed up on the thick railroad tie that formed the bottom of the blockade at the pier’s end. She peered through the vertical pilings at the long stretch of black water. A breeze ruffled the surface.

No, not a breeze. Something was there, in the water. A hard shiver shot through to Kaylie’s core. Yes, it was a body, dark and wet, and apparently alive, as it slithered out of the water and then sank again. Someone was drowning. She grabbed her phone at the same time as she looked down the pier, trying to see if the kids were still nearby. She could call the police with one tap, but despite earlier fantasies, she didn’t actually want to go to prison. The police were much more likely to book her than the kids, since she was here and they were gone, not to mention the dead body in the Pontiac. Anyway, the dark night, the teeming bay, the decaying wood, her jagged hunger, her grief, the crazy tsunamis of grief — these all converged to destroy any brain function she had left. She at least knew enough to not trust her perceptions anymore.

Kaylie pushed her face back through the pilings and studied the surface of the bay. Had she imagined the body? She reached into the bag of Doritos, tossed a handful onto the water, and then screamed as something surged to the surface, opened its whiskered jaws, and swallowed the chips. She tossed in another handful, and the beast was joined by two more, writhing, diving, snorting.

The fright manufactured by her traumatized imagination prevented Kaylie from actually laughing, but she might have at another time. Just sea lions. The fishing community hated them. Their ranks were growing, and they ate more than their share of the bay fish. Also, they’d become bold. Sometimes people fed them scraps, after cleaning their catch, teaching them that people meant food. Recently a sea lion literally boarded a docked fishing boat and bit a woman’s leg. Another had lunged so forcefully out of the water that it had nearly inhaled a guy’s arm as he tried to toss fish heads in the water. A swimmer had been attacked by a sea lion just last year. Kaylie threw them the rest of the chips, and then, what the hell, poured them what was left of the beers too.

Walking back down the pier, she figured she’d better call her sister. She should have much earlier, to ward off the search. To give Kaylie a bit more time.

“Where are you?” Savannah screeched. “I’m at Grandma’s. She’s not here.”

Savannah had always had a sixth sense, maybe full-on telepathy, born of her desperation to ward off the dangers she saw and felt and heard at every turn. Especially the dangers of Kaylie and Grandma and their embarrassing presences in her life. Of course Savannah couldn’t know that Kaylie — and Grandma — were at the Berkeley Pier. And yet, it was very hard for Kaylie to not believe that she did know.

“Answer me, Kaylie. Answer me now. Is Grandma okay?”

“Of course Grandma’s okay. Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Uh, maybe because she has emphysema?”

“I think she said she’s having dinner at the Garcias’ house tonight. Did you try there?”

“Of course I didn’t try there. I have no idea who the Garcias are.”

“Yellow house on the corner.”

“I’m supposed to just go knock on their door?”

“If you want to see Grandma.”

“It’s after ten. She wouldn’t still be there. Plus, she hasn’t been out of bed in days.”

“Can’t help you.” Kaylie tapped off her phone. Naturally, it rang again immediately. She debated the pros and cons of answering, and was not able to conjure logic about either choice, so she went with the pull of a ringing phone and answered.

“I’m calling the police,” Savannah said. “Grandma better not be with you, because if she is, they’ll find you. I can give them your phone number and they can track you.”

“You’re sounding crazy, Van,” Kaylie said, using the nickname she knew her sister hated.

Even now, even with the prospect of their grandma being missing, her sister took the time to correct: “Sa-van-nah.”

Kaylie tapped out of the call again and vowed to not answer until she’d finished. How long until Savannah checked the garage and discovered that the Pontiac was missing?

Back at the car, she realized that getting the kayak and her grandma over the giant craggy boulders would be next to impossible, so she drove quickly to the boat ramp on the other side of the marina. There, it was easy to slide the boat into the water. She gently hefted Grandma out of the backseat and placed her in the front of the kayak. She couldn’t cry now. She just couldn’t.

She dropped into the back of the kayak, placing a leg on either side of Grandma, and used the blade of the paddle to shove off the floor of the cement ramp, and just like that, they were adrift in the harbor. She paddled hard, and damned if a half-moon didn’t rise over the hills just as she cleared the breakwater. It’d been plenty bright even without the moonlight, but now she could see perfectly well, maybe too well, because others might be able to spot them from shore too. But there was no turning back. She couldn’t quite predict what her sister would do. She’d be crazy irate, and so it was possible she’d go full bore for a murder charge. But no, she definitely wouldn’t want that publicity. One way or another, though, somehow someone would have to account for the missing person. Then again, maybe not. People died all the time and folks didn’t ask for specifics on body disposal. The neighbors would just express their condolences.

The strong bay currents carried the kayak with its two passengers, the dead one resting against the stomach and chest of the living one, swiftly away from shore. The moonlight sparkled on the crests of the wavelets as a fresh breeze whipped up. Kaylie tugged the blade through the thick black water, but with the wind and the currents, her efforts seemed to have no effect at all. She looked over her shoulder at the Golden Gate where even stronger currents swept out to the Pacific Ocean.

She’d hoped to get under the pier, where she’d gently ease her grandma into a beloved last resting place. She’d imagined a quiet decorous ritual, a peaceful slip into the salty depths. But she didn’t have the strength to fight the forces of nature, these strong bay currents. So she rested the paddle across her thighs and allowed the westward drift.

The Jimi Hendrix riff danced against her breast where she’d shoved her phone into her jacket’s inside pocket. She reached in, grabbed the phone, and threw it as far as she could, the splash much too tiny to feel satisfying. Maybe they’d think she drowned. She could move to another part of the country, somewhere entirely unexpected, like North Dakota, and become a different person altogether.

The idea of disappearing, of faking her own death, reminded Kaylie that she did in fact have a life, a fairly nice one — sure, no girlfriend yet, but a decent job, a place to live. Funny how a person can keep functioning even when they think they can’t. Life goes on. Hers would anyway. With its devastating disappointments. Its small joys. The occasional ecstasy. She didn’t want to move to North Dakota. She wanted to stay here. Her grandma’s death felt like obliteration, like suffocation, like too deep a hole to ever emerge from, but she would emerge. Kaylie knew that.

When a dark shape, like a colossal slug, surfaced alongside the kayak, Kaylie startled. The wet mammal was joined by another, and then another. Kaylie’s brain quivered like a jellyfish, the fear squishing thought, until, all at once, she realized how much Grandma would love this. How somehow, in the midst of her confusion and grief, she’d taken all the exact right actions. There was only one left, and it would be brutal, clumsy, horrific. But she had no choice at all, and even if she did have a choice, this would be the one she’d make. She imagined Grandma’s grin if she could see herself now, dead in the front of a small plastic kayak, cruising along a speedy San Francisco Bay current at night, a pod of sea lions swimming alongside, their snorts prehistoric, their smell as rank as rotten oysters, as they chaperoned her into the next life.

For courage, Kaylie gazed out at the Berkeley Pier, a thin black line in the distance, a horizon itself, splitting the moon-sparkled water from the pale gray sky. Then she laid the paddle along the length of the kayak; it wouldn’t do to lose it now. Nor would flipping the entire boat be a good idea. She’d have to muster superhuman strength, and also be swift.

Kaylie shoved her arms under her grandma’s shoulders and clasped her ribs. One, two, three, heave.

The kayak rocked to the side, nearly capsizing, but the body remained on board. Already Kaylie was sweating.

Ambulating on her hands and feet, she crawled over Grandma’s body to the other end of the kayak, again nearly capsizing. Once there, she rested a moment, steadying her heart and mind, and then swung her grandma’s stiffening legs into the water.

That’s when the head of one sea lion rose up, the beast making eye contact with Kaylie. Maybe it smiled. Maybe its yellow teeth and deep maw gave Kaylie a shot of adrenaline. She pitched her grandma’s body into the water with a single shove. The splash was modest, and the old woman sank instantly. Several dark hides mounded out of the water before diving after the body.

Kaylie paddled away with all her might, hoping for a tide change that would sweep her toward shore, toward her house and modest life, her decent job and the possibility of a girlfriend one day, maybe even Officer Marta Ramirez. You never knew. What she did know was that she wanted to live awhile longer. She wanted to be around when the pier reopened, if it ever did, and wondered if Duong and Tham Nguyen, Pamela Roberts, Shelly the librarian, James and Frank, the lone rich dude, all their friends, whether they’d come back, or if there’d be a whole new crowd. Maybe they’d gentrify the pier, bring in food trucks and artists tables. Kaylie didn’t know. But she paddled as if her life depended on it, which it did.

Twin Flames by Mara Faye Lethem

Southside

Final interview with Núria Callas Perales, September 12 and 13, 2018, Barcelona, Spain. Transcribed and edited by Montse Àrcadia Sala, amanuensis of the Gumshoe Division of the Church of Núria, Berkeley, California. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

“You want to know the difference between good and evil?” Dramatic pause. “Tea is good, and coffee is evil.” It’s one of those jokes that depends a lot on the delivery. And who’s doing the delivering. Louise was the only person I could imagine ever really pulling it off. I’m sure you’ve read that I was “in her orbit” or “under her spell” or whatever. I just wanted to get close to her. From the very first day I met her, at that highly unorthodox job interview, when she told me she was hoping to find someone who could “continue her work.” Maybe it’s because English is my third language, but I never thought that could mean what the tabloid press said it meant.

I could describe Louise Slade in many ways. The term “force of nature” comes to mind. She was a little, shining nugget of a woman, in a purple silk shirt, her white hair whisked up into a thin bun, with a lovely sheen of high-SPF sunscreen and nice, bony fingers. A mix of noblesse oblige and ecclesiastical shabby chic. I’ve always had a thing for older women. Be careful what you wish for, they say. I did get close to her. And, yeah, she did, somehow, get under my skin.

I was never really in favor of the defense that I was under her spell or, as your lawyers worked up, “temporary insanity due to soul transference,” but I have to admit there are parts of it that make sense. I mean, in the context of the episodes of lost time and mental disorientation associated with walk-ins. That said, I do remember a lot of details, although I’m aware that there are those who believe they form part of a shift in memories, or a link via the silver cord. Louise often spoke wistfully of her identical sister Cordelia, and their days as cheesecake reporters after graduating with twin master’s degrees from Yale at the age of seventeen. “We had the first painted toenails in Atlanta,” I recall. “Bloodred.” Louise had a number of stock rhetorical questions, one that haunts me is: “What’s a spinster...? A woman who spins. A woman with a job.”

It was that job that kept me in the Bay Area, when I thought I was just passing through. Your lawyers keep writing to me, they say I was searching for my path, following the angel number, and eventually experiencing an incompatibility between the upper and lower chakras. I can’t really corroborate that. At first, I really liked the Mission — it had the best weather — but something drew me to Berkeley. In college towns you’re less likely to have to explain what being a Catalan is. Not that I bothered anymore by that point. I just said I was from Barcelona; most everybody had heard of that, even back then.

We’re talking 1991, my salad days. Before the dot-com boom and all, when Berkeley was slightly more convincing as a hippie town. Now that I’ve become associated with it as the most famous walk-in since Anwar Sadat, despite my geographical distance I have a front-row seat to some of the city’s more deeply weird elements. No offense. There’s even a whole publishing house that came up around all the theories, but I don’t need to tell you that. My version is that I was fleeing a hairy divorce, ironically from an American named Bob. I was also fleeing Catalonia, in some ways I guess how everybody flees their home, or at least considers doing, at some point. The lawyers call it “overwhelming evidence you were no longer yourself” and the seekers see it as “new approaches to solving unsolvable problems.”

There were things about Bob — being American, from Berkeley, in fact — that made me see my city, Barcelona on the eve of the Olympics, in a different light. And my quick once-around with civil matrimony left me feeling that everyone was thinking, I told you so. Your lawyers still write to explain how I was experiencing an unhealthy soul tie, and should have been wearing hats to protect my crown chakra.

Me, Barcelona, Berkeley, we’re all so different now. I’ll never live down the dramatic reenactments on that episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I came to wish the looks I saw on people’s faces were only saying, I told you so. They should’ve had that actress made up with bruises on her arms and all over her psyche. Because that was how I arrived in Berkeley, back in 1991. A Berkeley that seemed to be still living off the fumes of the late sixties, which were fumes so strong you might just want to breathe them in all your life, especially when you had a car and a redwood hot tub. I didn’t have my own hot tub, of course, but I had a working code for the secret backyard one on Essex, and that made me feel lucky enough. I didn’t have a car, either, but the BART dropped me off on 16th and Mission where I could get burritos as big as a braç de gitano and Salvadorean chicken soup, and back in Berkeley I could binge on new flavors of Vietnamese and Thai, all cheap and nourishing to my little prematurely divorced Catalan soul. The lawyers who want to vindicate me consider this sudden shift in my tastes “consistent, further proof.”

It was definitely true that I’d been having a lot of strange new feelings in America. I chalked it up to a struggle with the identity codes and political correctness. You know, Indigenous Peoples’ Day and all that. I found some of it exhausting, like the effort of speaking English all the time, and there was also a feeling of relief, since I didn’t seem to fit into any of the identity parameters. My Catalan accent was rarely recognized. But Louise noticed it, right away. Her shorthand for Catalan was “someone with a love of language.” Hers was a very sophisticated reductionism, that made me feel I could never surprise her.

At the time I recall feeling I was escaping, getting away both from and with something, hiding in plain sight. The California sun felt familiar, since Berkeley and Barcelona had similar climates for eight months out of the year. And I loved being Cal-adjacent. Near as I could be to the university without being enrolled. I would spend hours on Friday nights at Moe’s Books, up on the third floor where no one would bother me. I know some Núrites feel that space is a portal. I can’t speak to that. I can say that books both saved my life and scared me to death. I wanted to be surrounded by all those books, but I was afraid to open many of them, and indifferent to others. I liked their smell, and the pure abundance of them. And I liked to see Moe at the helm, when I came in during the day, in his hexagonal playpen of piled-up stacks that needed pricing. It was at Moe’s that I first saw the volume Welcome to Planet Earth. I hated everything about that book, mostly the cover because that was as far as I got. I don’t know how much more respectful I can be about this shit, really. That’s why I’m taking the time to explain this, as best I can. I’m hoping you will bring this message back to Berkeley and get them all to just leave me the fuck alone. I do not have the answers you seek.

In those days I would go to the secret hot tub at least once every few weeks. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, a guy who made sets for a Chicano theater company, who also liked weed and acid and was a little bit in love with me so he would listen to me go on about, well, about pretty much whatever I felt like going on about. Not at the Essex Hot Tub, though. The sign clearly read: SILENCE, NO TALKING. Maybe that was what I liked best about it. In the throes of those salad days, I was seeking both quiet and conversation. And sex, of course. I was twenty-one years old.

Núrites describe that period of my life as a major neurological rewiring, in which Louise’s soul was studying my Akashic records and behaviors to master my physical body. I’ve always been honest with anyone who’s come to me, like you have, with these questions. After what I’d been through with Bob, I was just looking for a good time, the very earthbound pleasures of the flesh.

I always made sure to read the Daily Cal classifieds, and consider all the possibilities located therein. That was where I came across Louise’s ad. For someone who spoke Spanish and English, and could use a computer. Definitely did not say starseed with a mission. I forget the exact wording because she always referred to me, once I got the job, as her amanuensis. Which sounded better than secretary, or dictation-taker. It at least sounded like I took dictation in a medieval cloister. I took dictation in her apartment. You know the place, on Spruce Street, in Normandy Village. I remember when I showed up for the interview, thinking it looked like a reproduction of something an adventurous, fabulously wealthy young heir would have had brought back from his travels, piece by piece, and reconstructed. But more modest. Like maybe a groundskeeper’s hut on the Hearst Castle grounds.

Just off campus, Normandy Village was strangely out of time, with whitewashed walls and a cock painted on the front. I had to walk into the courtyard and then up narrow steps that wrapped around a turret to reach her wooden door with its rounded top, and the inscription, You know how little while we have to stay / And, once departed may return no more, from the third verse of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. And open the door she did, into an irregularly shaped space, half cozy and half witch’s oven. It was oddly meta to be fleeing Europe and harrowing memories of a guy named Bob into some Californian architect’s fantasy of a French village, but I got used to it soon enough. The entryway led into a sort of railroad kitchen, which in turn led into the room where we worked, her pages piled up among early American furniture and Oriental rugs that had arrived there on the SS Virginia via the Oakland dock.

Louise’s sleeping berth overlooked the desk she stood in front of to give dictation and the wooden card table where her little cubical Apple computer she liked to address as “Mac” sat. She never touched Mac. Some evenings she would type up pages on her Smith Corona, and then cut and straight-pin passages in edited order so I could transfer them to digital format the next day. Yes, I am aware of the metaphorical readings some Núrites give to these tasks but, really, it was just my job.

Most days she would dictate to me, like a classically trained thespian improvising. We were writing a biography of Joan Miró, a man she admired for his ability to stay in touch with his poetic soul and be nourished by nature, like a pagan (she was highly ecumenical, though not into New Age). She also saw his life as a parallel to the twentieth century itself, the century of modernity, the century where we recognized evil and yet were still unable to avoid it. In that way it somehow came to represent the culmination of her life’s work as a “ghost” writer, Louise’s secret autobiography.

I was more interested in her than in Joan Miró, and when I could get her talking about her own life, I was happy. A good biography, Louise would tell me, should read like a detective story. I could tell she was more comfortable with Miró’s chaste terroir flavor than a lot of the detective stories that had been written since she’d stopped reading detective stories. She told me that she’d hoped to become a priest, although the way she said it, it seemed more like an answer to an interview question than a burning ambition. She always came across as feisty and brilliant and adorable in interviews. “I see no reason to marry and have children — Cordelia did that for me” was another of her stock quotes. I guess at eighty-six you are lucky to still be able to perform the greatest-hits version of your life for an impressionable young woman, even if she is often vaguely hung over. I enjoyed my role in the daily matinee show.

“Good morning!” she’d chirp each weekday when I called her, first thing. Every day my response, which I believe she scripted, was, “What’s good about it?” The lawyers call this grooming. There was a lot of repetition. One of Louise’s bits of advice I’m still mulling over was this: “When you are reading your colleagues’ books, make a list of all the mistakes you find. And when you’ve finished, throw away the list.” At the time it made me wonder about my failed marriage, about the lists of peeves and scars we all compile, and that are so hard to release. But then maybe divorce is just a form of throwing away the list. I guess murder is another.

Behind me, when I sat in front of Mac, was the fireplace hearth. Sometimes Louise would have me pick up a Duraflame log on my way over to Spruce Street, and we would burn it over the course of the morning. Sometimes she would invite me to a thimbleful of sherry. It was on a day when those two things combined that she told me the story I will now relate to you, to the best of my memory. Her tone was prophetic. Her drawn-on eyebrows were well arched. The dim light given off by the various lamps and the log made her eyes gleam. It was a damp day, and she was obviously in one of the rare moods where I could artfully pry some details about her life from her.

It’s been more than two decades since that day by the Duraflame when Louise briefly stepped out of character. Mostly, when we weren’t drinking tea — “so strong it could walk!” — or making our lunch of chicken soup — “Do you know why Chinese food tastes so good...? It’s cut up into little pieces!” — she was all work. Her conversational gambits were efforts that seemed directed at convincing me to take up the task of continuing on in her irreplaceable place. But on that damp day, she opened up a little more to me. She was likely feeling the weight of outliving so many people, including, just the year before, her twin sister Cordelia. “We used to be identical,” Louise would say, “but we lived such different lives that the point came when no one would ever confuse us again.” Cordelia had married a Paraguayan and had three children, and painted her eyebrows on in more of a parabola. When she’d died, Louise said she knew what death was like.

On that day, the fire was reflecting in her cornflower-blue eyes. She stared into it and sighed. Usually she would intellectualize her emotions, convert them somehow into a pithy fortune-cookie aphorism. But instead of that sigh being a segue into an interfaith interpretation of vishwaprana, the cosmic breath, she inhaled deeply through her nose and blinked as she looked into the log, which was like some flambé version of a large Tootsie Roll, a California architect’s description of the primeval campfire around which humans have always told stories.

The soundtrack in my mind to this scene is “In Your Eyes” from Peter Gabriel’s So album. As I believe I mentioned, I have a soft spot for little old ladies. I just want to help them across the street, if you know what I mean. But really, what I saw in her eyes wasn’t a flicker of crypto-lesbic romance. What I saw in her eyes instead was pain, tempered by the years. “Times aren’t what they used to be. And they never were.” I could tell that Louise was done. Done playing it safe, done being a vessel for other people’s mistakes. Louise had lived a little bit in Cordelia’s shadow, like she had to toe the line, not have her own problems, not add to her mother’s concern.

It turns out those pat interview answers of hers are much easier to quote as the years pass, but I’m going to do my best here. In the hope that this will be the last time. Louise began by describing, as she had conveyed to me before, the holy trinity that was her relationship with Cordelia and their mother, also named Cordelia. Their itinerant lives as journalists, memorably in Mexico City in the early thirties where they were able to watch Diego Rivera and Orozco simultaneously at work on their murals on opposite walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, “a nonexistent competition between a millionaire communist who stood talking in front of his neat geometrical lines, and a stocky, unattractive one-armed man bending forward on the solitude of his scaffolding to paint his soul in living fire.” She did have a way with words.

“Oh, Louise,” I interjected, in my best jaded American accent, “what broke up your triumvirate?” My English is very good, but marked by Latinisms. I could see she liked my usage of the word triumvirate. I knew the twins had had a very intimate upbringing à trois. Their mother Cordelia Slade was a writer too. And had lived with Louise in that very same storybook apartment until her death. But the younger Cordelia Slade became Cordelia Zenarrutza, when she married a Paraguayan military man from an old family, who was twenty-two years her senior. Of course, Louise informed me, the midthirties was not a great time to be from Paraguay. At the time I’d barely even heard mention of the Chaco War, and certainly never heard it referred to by its nickname: the Green Hell. When Cordelia Zenarrutza, Mrs. José Félix Zenarrutza-Sánchez, set sail for the Southern Cone, Louise and Cordelia Slade Senior would have to wait at least ten days for an airmail update. The Chaco was sparsely inhabited, a vast region of virgin jungles and deserted plains burning under the tropical sun, with rumors of oil wealth, and access to the Paraguay River, something the landlocked countries of Bolivia and Paraguay both very much wanted to control.

José Félix’s military victories in the conflict would later buoy him to the presidency. Six months later, he dissolved the legislature and suspended the constitution to write his own, granting himself sweeping powers. Six months after that, almost to the day, he perished in a plane crash en route to his summer residence. José Félix’s constitution remained in effect until 1971. But this wasn’t the story Louise told me that day as she stared into the fire. No, the story she told me was a story of Green Hell. The price Cordelia Zenarrutza paid to become First Lady of Paraguay, however briefly.

“Cordelia never wrote to us about her time in Boquerón. She didn’t put it into words for me until after she and my niece and nephews were back in California.” That was when Louise looked away from the flames briefly and straight at me. “But she didn’t have to. Those weeks she spent in Boquerón, I didn’t sleep well at all. Every night I was visited by demons. They pinned me down and ripped at my sweaty nightgown. Mother was shocked at the noises I made beside her in our twin beds, and at how much water I drank. I was insatiably thirsty.”

I noticed a cataract in Louise’s eye, like a passing altostratus cloud.

“I’ll never understand how José Félix could bring his young bride there, to that Green Hell... When Cordelia came back to us and described it, I already knew what it looked like. The thatched roof on the Boquerón outpost, the tall, tall pole with the Paraguayan flag, the only water source a well miles away at Isla Poí. With decomposing bodies floating in it.” Louise moved her gaze back onto the composite log. “We were the only women there... I’ve never killed anyone. But I know what it’s like. My sister did it for me.”

That night was the last time I ever went to the Essex Hot Tub. I tried a few times after that, but my code no longer worked. I remember the heady scent of blossoming trees as I walked down Stuart. It’s common knowledge what happened at the hot tub that night. And I told you already, I don’t want to talk about Bob. It’s like the punch line to that joke: What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs floating in a pool?

How could I have ever thought that I could get away from my ex-husband by fleeing to his hometown? It turned out Bob was within the radius of six degrees of separation from me all that time. And in the center, dead in the center, was the Essex Hot Tub. Did we have the same entrance code?

The Church of Núria, now located in Normandy Village, is just batshit. As wrongheaded as a cargo cult. Sure, there’ve been moments where I enjoyed the attention, especially from that sweet soul-integration teacher, Penny. I will say this, though: I’m done. You’re the last pilgrim I will entertain. I don’t know why babies shit so much. Or little dogs. Or men. I don’t know why women are expected to clean that shit up. I can’t explain these things for you. Please, stop asking for the answers to your questions. I don’t know why marriage is rape and why war is rape and why rape is rape and why tea is good and coffee is evil.

All I know is that Cordelia Zenarrutza took her three children to Pasadena, put the Green Hell and the Palacio de los López behind her, and didn’t remarry. Louise and I never finished that book on Miró, on the twentieth century, and on the difference between good and evil. And despite what you’ve read in the papers, and the attempts at extradition, for many years I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually killed Bob, or whether I’d just added him to the list of mistakes. And then thrown it away.

“Lucky Day” by Thomas Burchfield

Berkeley Public Library

The rule was simple: no patrons were to be admitted to the library before it opened, no matter how hard they knocked on the big glass doors. The staff wouldn’t even bother with eye contact. Patrons could knock till their knuckles broke and complain till their voices cracked, but they weren’t getting in.

Mason, a cautious man who’d been working at the Berkeley Public Library as an aide for only three weeks (sneaking back into Berkeley after four years away, following his mother’s death and his family’s turbulent dissolution), understood this immediately.

He’d arrived at nine a.m. that morning with the manager of the day, Slim, an enormous languid fellow with spiky yellow hair and a wart on his nose that turned red during heavy rain, such as had been whipping the Bay Area the last three days with frenzied enthusiasm. BART service was sputtering even more than usual and ACT busses were detouring around flooded areas. Most everyone else would be late.

Except for Mason who, for his own reasons, left his closet-sized studio apartment near the Ashby Street BART extra early and took carefully planned detours.

Once Slim had punched the alarm codes to the Bancroft Street employee entrance and let Mason in, he apologized profusely. The new library director was arriving today, first day on the job, loose ends with the catering for the welcome reception. Slim would only be a few minutes. Would Mason mind being left alone, just for a while? Then he dashed back out into the rain.

Too new to object, Mason got right to work, opening the sorting room, checking the phone messages — sure enough, even Cleve, his manager, was mired in traffic. (Oh well. It was three hours until opening.) Mason next pinned the daily assignment sheet to the bulletin board. His first-hour duty: clean up and straighten the new bookshelves on the first floor, the first thing patrons saw as they entered from the sunken plaza.

The task was mundane to anyone but Mason, who sank into happy reverie: this was the best time to be in the library, alone, before anyone else arrived, among all the minds great and small, talented and not, that could fit on the shelves. As always, he found some of these minds had fallen or slumped over since yesterday; others had been picked up and abandoned far from home and now lay rejected, lost, and unloved. Mason took them all home. He’d edge the rows of books until the spines were perfectly snug (except for books by his favorite authors — those he brought forward out of line just a fraction). Then he’d run his fingertips over the rows of Mylar mirrors, each spine labeled NEW in red block letters, shining with promise.

Deep in his fun, he only heard the pounding on the glass door as a murmur from far above. When it finally penetrated, desperate and persistent, he swam awake like a drowsy fish. Then his irritated glance turned into a double take.

It was Sharpie banging at the door. He was a regular patron, one of the two kinds of characters who made the library a second home. The first were those who had someone to take care of them; the second, the majority, were those who had no one — the homeless.

Sharpie was among the latter. He was still very young, his fuzzy face not yet cured red by exposure; friendly, boyishly handsome, but clearly hapless. He wore the same tracksuit every day, black nylon with yellow stripes, and grimy black-and-yellow cross-trainers with loose heels that slapped against his bare feet as he walked. Extremely claustrophobic, his usual spot was the first-floor reading room, by the romance novels, an enormous greasy backpack, swollen with his material life, by his side. He’d spend most of his day reading the romance novels, or seeming to. It was strange, Mason’s fellow staffers remarked — a young man reading romance novels, a homeless young man.

It was Mason who said, “I bet that’s where he finds love.” Then, blushing, he added, “I mean, he’s not finding much of it anywhere else, is he?”

And now here he was, over two hours early, without his backpack, clutching his left side with one hand, thumping on the glass with the other, smearing it with reddish-brown paste, while outside the three-day storm was whipping into day four.

“Help me!” Sharpie cried, a sad voice under the hard rain. “Help me, man! I’m hurtin’!”

Rising to face a real emergency, Mason’s conscience brushed the rule off the table.

He let Sharpie in.

The plan, a quick gel in Mason’s mind, was to sit him down, then thumb 911. But as he took Sharpie by his cold, wet nylon arm, bony and trembling, and started to guide him between the new fiction shelves to a nearby bench, the door banged again, so violently it shook. This time, someone was calling — no, barking — Mason’s name, like the knuckles on glass. As Mason turned to look, Sharpie slipped out of his grasp.

Mason grew sick as his vision shook, spun, and tilted. He’d been dreading this moment ever since he’d snuck back into Berkeley — his big brother Harry, long lost and best forgotten; Harry pounding on the blood-smeared door as he shouted Mason’s name. His fevered face and rusty-gray beard ran and dripped with rain. As the brothers faced each other through the glass, Mason’s reflection stared back out, a homely big-eared ghost under his brother’s brilliant sharp bones. A memory of their mother’s face briefly joined them and Mason once again heard her last words, from years ago, and a promise he’d made.

“Hey! Ma-son!” Harry banged again on the door, his cracked grinning face still handsome as a god, though one left out in the weather for too long. No matter what happened, Harry’s corpse would be a beautiful ruin, handsomer dead than Mason alive.

Mason crept toward the door, drawing out his wallet, fumbling out a tenner. He opened the door just enough to insert his face: Hi, Harry, gee, what d’ya know! Uh, I’m busy, nice to see you; sorry, Harry, the library doesn’t open till noon; here, ten bucks, take it, Harry; get outta the rain, buy a sandwich at the E-Z Stop Deli.

But, like a big camel, once Harry got his nose in, he took the whole tent. He slapped the door open and passed through Mason as though he were mist. “My brain’s so big,” Mason remembered him saying, “I don’t see the world. It’s just some shit to play with.”

Nope, no telling Harry what to do when or when to do what.

Mason turned to follow him, but Harry suddenly spun about and pulled him into a rib-bending embrace.

“Bro! Awwww, my little broaaaa! Where ya been, Big Ears!?” Mason’s feet left the floor as Harry spun him around like a dance partner. Close up, his face looked flayed and pitted by the weather, his pupils widening, turning his eyes into black pits. A wet bouquet of the street steamed from the fake-fur collar of his thick coat. His breath was a cloud of stale tobacco and dead animal.

Harry set Mason down hard enough to bend his knees. Mason, now facing the door again, tried to glance behind him. Where’d Sharpie—

Harry punched his arm, that familiar hard-knuckle jab: “Wake up, Mase, y’twerp! You ain’t seen me in more years than I got fingers left.” His mutilated right hand stole back into its stinky coat slot, where he preferred to keep it. “So, how’s it goin’, buddy?”

“Um, all right. Harry—”

His brother blew right past him: “Never mind. You don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit.”

Mason stood staring for a few seconds out at a small crowd that was filling the sunken plaza in the dismal downpour. Someone held up a smartphone. A young girl was now banging at the door — young and fresh (but not for long), shabby in a strangely boutique manner, homeless du jour. But Mason’s mind was a frozen swamp of panic, so there’d be no more early entries. He turned to find his brother had passed through the security gate and was now pretending to marvel at the blond-wood bookshelves on wheels.

“Wow! Workin’ the library! Mighta known you’d be workin’ for The Man! Good hustle there, bro! Are these all the pwecious tomeths?”

“Just the new ones. Got ’em on the back wall, there too. And the DV — look, Harry—”

“Whoa, lovely beautiful building, man.” He gazed around with his wide black eyes. “Love those green art deco walls outside.” He shoved one of the shelves so it moved. “But here you got these dumbass shelves on wheels.” He rolled his eyes. “Cheap, cheap, cheap,” he sang. “You’re so brilliant, you work in a library that uses Ikea shelves.” Then he sneered. “Of course, you can read. You’re dyslexia freeee, y’stuck-up little shit.”

“You’re not supposed to be in here, Harry,” Mason dropped his voice and tried to enunciate like Harry, each word a hammer tap. “We don’t o-pen un-til noon—”

“You’re not supposed to be in here, Harry,” the big man mimicked, a skill that once rolled waves of laughter across a room. He jabbed a finger right at his little brother: “You just let some other asshole in, Mase.” His voice scraped like a file, his eyes two black marbles. “I saw you.” He splayed his good left hand over his chest, nodding. “And I... me... I’m your lonnnng-lost bro-ther.” Harry’s lips curled and split apart to show his brown teeth, a bad omen. “How long you been back in town? You been avoidin’ me since you got this job. I seen you, man. I seen you peekin’ up over the BART steps, like a little prairie dog! Too chickenshit to go outside!”

Mason’s eyes skittered about. He was still all alone in the building. The manager hadn’t returned. Maybe an assistant had arrived, or another aide, better that, they’d be more likely to help him cover his mistake — no, mistakes. He’d made two of them — no, that was one mistake, twice in a row. He needed assistance, but by no means wanted it. Better, much better, if he could shovel this mess out the door all by himself, so no one would ever go What the fuck? and... what... what about—

The new library director! Ohhh, fuck me! New boss, first day on the job, maniacs crawling the floor before the doors even—

“Whoa! What’s this!?” Harry fixed his bullet stare on the floor at his feet, right by the “Lucky Day” shelves, which housed especially popular books.

“Blood!” He fully bared his big brown crumbling teeth, the gums shrunk to the roots. He marched deeper into the library, toward the circulation desk, following the blood spatters.

“Wellll, what the fuck we got here? Trail of blood! Ooo! That could be the title of your next shitty screenplay, Mase! I’d say someone’s hurt! What d’ya say we go help him!?” He stopped and turned to Mason, his face aghast, slapped his good hand over his mouth. “Oops! I forgot! Ssshhh in the library!” Then he pointed the finger, whispering, “And you’d better hush too, lil’ bro.” He turned back to the hunt. “Fuck libraries, man,” he whispered loudly. “Can’t read, can’t talk like I like to. Can’t be myself.” He swayed as he followed the trail of little red splashes, dissolved from rainwater, toward the first-floor reading room.

“Harry...” Mason maintained his library voice, compressed and quiet, sitting on the dreary apprehension that he and his brother were rebooting the same goddamn movie.

Harry spun around again, pointing, suddenly growing larger and larger, until Mason began to feel neck strain.

“Mase, mind your own fuckin’ business for once, will ya? Three, four years and I’m still findin’ you under my feet!” His finger was shaking. It was a familiar pattern. The angrier he got, the more his brain, sloshing with chemical imbalances and bad wiring, would misfire. “All the times I kicked you and... y’just didn’t learn...”

As Harry ranted away, Sharpie slipped out of the reading room behind him and up the old main staircase, still clutching his side. Harry must have seen Mason’s eyes shift, because he turned back toward the reading room in time to see the tail of Sharpie’s shadow paint the steps. He turned on Mason again, his fist raised. Mason flinched and ducked. Harry laughed. He laughed harder as Mason feebly patted at his pants pocket, where he kept his cell phone.

“Playin’ with yourself in public again!” Harry teased. “Never could keep your hands off your pecker!” Then his face darkened further. “Or is that a gun you got there? Better not be. ’Cause I got... this!”

Harry yanked a little pistol out of his pocket. It was a .22, dull black, brown taped handle. It was much too small for his huge hands and with two fingers of his gun hand missing — ring finger and pinky, blown off while juggling a lit cherry bomb — Harry’s grip on it was clumsy at best. But even a bad shot can wound or kill.

“Harry! Harry, what’re you doing?” Mason cried as his brother started up the steps.

Harry stopped to stare down, offended: “What am I doin’? I’m killin’ the little fuck I caught screwin’ my girlfriend in my tent! Do you know what that does to a man!? No, ya don’t. ’Cause you’ve never been a man. Now you stay down here like a good boy, or I’ll shoot your funny ears off!”

Then he stomped on up the stairs. “Sharpie, you fuck!” he called, hissing like a rattlesnake. “I’m comin’ for ya! Fuckin’ better run, Sharpie, ’cause I’m the fuckin’ Term-in-a-tor! I’m gonna shoot your dick off and stuff it in your mouth!”

Then he tripped and the pistol fell from his hand, clattered on the landing. He picked it up with his left hand, his not-gun hand.

Mason ran to the bottom of the stairs. “Listen, Harry—”

Harry spun around on the landing, pointing the pistol: “No, you listen. You promised Mother you’d look after me. And you didn’t. See what happens when you don’t keep a promise, Mason? You pay! Now you stay there, got me? This ain’t none of your business.”

That’s not what she said, Mason wanted to argue, but arguing would have been madness. Instead, as Mason dashed up the stairs after Harry, he did what he should have done the second he saw Sharpie at the door: he pulled out his cell phone. He fat-fingered the keypad as he tripped up the steps: 011, 912, 921, finally: “Berkeley Police Department Emergency Services... Slow down, sir... What’s the address again?... Is this a medical or police emergency?... How many intruders, sir?... One of them is armed? Your name again, please—”

BATTERY LOW, the little screen broke in. And then it closed its eye with perfect timing as a gunshot cracked from the reading room, echoing through the whole building. Mason jumped and so did his phone, right out of his hand.

He now stood in the grand old former lobby. He turned to the high-ceilinged reading room to see Sharpie dashing out from the Japanese-Spanish section, clutching his side as he scurried behind the double row of long reading tables. He ran into the far corner, into the modern world and US history section. Harry came out from between the Chinese DVDs and nonfiction, awkwardly clutching the little gun in his big hands. His fingers would barely fit in the trigger guard. No wonder Sharpie was still alive.

“Oopsie! Sorry, Mase!” Harry waved the .22 in the air. “I forgot my silencer! Next time!” Then he disappeared behind the first row of the 910s, the travel books: “Sharpie, you little shit!”

He moved in on Sharpie, winding from shelf row to shelf row. He fired again, then again, aiming through gaps in the shelves. The first bullet banged off metal. The second bullet, fired from the 920s, the biographies, broke the spine of Deirdre Bair’s Al Capone biography. As the book shuddered and slumped over, the bullet ripped out the other side and sent a Gandhi biography sprawling to the floor.

Sharpie scurried back and forth crying and whimpering at the far end. Harry seemed to take a teasing pleasure in the hunt. As he drew closer, he swept row after row of books to the floor, as though that would give him better aim; books that Mason had spent a good part of yesterday reshelving, straightening, until they were lined up like the proudest soldiers in the best army on parade. All that work... all the care Mason took... now this!

Mason followed, staying back a couple rows. The pattern was clear now. Harry was losing the point of his anger, which was congealing into a ball of rage firing in all directions. This was Harry all over: he’d never be happy until everyone else was drowning in the same lake of misery.

Mason had no plan either, only a dismal fear and a deeper despair. He’d lost his job now. What else was left to lose? At that moment another emotion appeared — spontaneously, it seemed.

“Harry!” Mason suddenly shouted. “Harry, stop it!”

His own voice scared him. It startled Harry too, because he spun around and stared back at Mason through a gap in the shelves. He put a finger to his lips and took aim right at Mason.

“I told you to shush!”

Crack! went the pistol. Zip! went the bullet as it split the pinna of Mason’s ear. Warm liquid ran between his fingers and down his arm.

“Awwww! I shot Mason’s poor widdle ear! Keep it up and you’re gonna say goodbye to the other one!”

But as Harry spun back to his quarry, he fumbled his gun again and accidentally kicked it out from the shelves into the middle of the room. As he stepped out and kneeled to retrieve it, Sharpie made a break. But he’d lost a lot of blood and as he crossed the reading room back the way he came, he slipped on it, fell hard on his wounded side, with a sad cry.

Now Harry rose to his full height. He marched down on Sharpie with high stalking steps, as though stepping over trip wires. Sharpie was going nowhere. And weak little Mason, what would he do? What he always did. Shake like a leaf.

But, as he had been about so much else, Harry was wrong. Mason was staring at his bloody hand, watching it turn into a bloody fist as he fully remembered their mother’s last words.

And they weren’t “Take care of Harry.”

They were “Have Harry put away.”

That was the promise Mason had failed to keep. His fear and confusion turned inside out like a sock, into purpose and rage. Even though he was already as good as fired, he’d defend Sharpie and this library, this island in the world for both of them, to the last. He was nowhere near Harry’s size, but he had an idea to make himself look bigger.

As Harry reached the far end of the first row of reading tables, Mason jumped from floor to chair to tabletop. He dashed and leaped over the tabletops, avoiding the fixed study lamps, heading right for Harry, who stood a few steps from where Sharpie lay helpless and bleeding.

Swaying about, Harry took aim with both hands: “Fuck my girl, will ya—”

“Harry!” Mason shouted.

Harry spun around as Mason sprang off the table through the air. The pistol cracked again as Mason slammed down onto his brother and they crashed together into a bare wall. Mason took a hard punch in the shoulder. His ears exploded, a jolt shook his whole body. The air sputtering out in a rosy mist from his right lung choked off his scream as he hit the floor.

Mason opened his eyes as Harry slammed down flat and hard inches away. A tooth flew out when his face bounced on the floor. He’d been tackled, knocked flat, by a someone Mason had never seen before, a stoutly built woman with bushy hair. She’d hit Harry like a falling bookshelf.

“What’s going on here? Are you all right?”

Harry tried to get up, but she cracked him a good one with a hammy forearm. “Oof!” His head bounced on the floor again.

“Stay put!”

But he wouldn’t listen, so she thumped him once more. Harry surrendered in blubbering tears.

Good hit, Mason wanted to say. Anxious cries swirled in with galloping footsteps. He also wanted to ask if Sharpie was all right, but by then he was shutting down as Harry sputtered in fury, his face reflected in the sheet of blood spreading between them.

“Fuck!” Harry spat out another bloody tooth. “How come this shit always happens to me?”

Mason awoke thinking he was lying at the bottom of an aquarium. He was tightly wrapped and braced, a rubber mask glued to his face, his ears still ringing. As he rattled in place in his cocoon, the ceiling, seen through watery light, slid overhead. Blurred faces swam by, then swam away. But for a ball of pain in his shoulder, he felt serene, detached.

Voices whispered behind the ringing and clamor. One was Sharpie’s: “Can I check out a book... so I got something to read in the hospital?”

Harry’s voice was there too, barking and spitting, but it mattered nothing to Mason. The last time it had taken four cops to subdue him. Probably take a thousand this time, Mason drowsily thought.

Among those two voices, there came a third. It was the woman who’d finally brought Harry down: “It’s been a hell of a first day on the job...”

Mason floated down the stairs to the first floor and out through the security gates. He heard smatterings of applause. So, they’d opened at last. “Go, Mason!” someone cried.

Then the daily greeting rumbled out through the PA system: “Good afternoon! Welcome to the Berkeley Public Library! We apologize for the late opening after our little kerfuffle. The second-floor reading room will remain closed for the time being! Our Tai-chi-for-Lunch class at one p.m. is canceled for today. Again, we apologize! However, our three o’clock Super Cinema program in the Community Meeting Room will continue with O Brother, Where Art Thou? The temperature outside is forty-five degrees, but it looks like we’re getting a break from all the bad weather! Again, welcome... and have a great day!”

Indeed it was looking to be a fine day, as bits of blue sky showed through the gray ceiling.

“Make way for the hero!” someone cried.

“What’s so funny?” the EMT asked as they loaded Mason into the ambulance. But with that mask fastened over his mouth and nose, Mason couldn’t tell him.

Barroom Butterfly by Barry Gifford

Central Berkeley

Roy’s grandfather subscribed to several magazines, among them Time, Field & Stream, Sport, and Reader’s Digest, but the one that interested Roy most was San Francisco Bay Crime Monthly. One afternoon Roy came home from school and found his grandfather reading a new issue.

“Hi, Pops. Anything good in there?”

“Hello, boy. Yes, I’ve just started an intriguing story.”

Roy sat down on the floor next to his grandfather’s chair. “Can you read it to me?”

“How old are you now, Roy?”

“Ten.”

“I don’t know everything that’s in this one yet. I wouldn’t want your mother to get mad at me if there’s something she doesn’t want you to hear.”

“She’s not home. Anyway, I’ve heard everything.”

“You have, huh? All right, but I might have to leave out some gruesome details, if there are any.”

“Those are the best parts, Pops. I won’t tell Mom. Start at the beginning.”

“What does she mean by spooked?” Roy asked. “Frightened?”

“Yes, but her point is that women can be unpredictable.”

“Is my mother unpredictable?”

Pops laughed. “Your mother is only thirty-two years old and she’s already been married three times. What do you think?”