Birds of America

REAL ESTATE

It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt such inexplicable desolation then, such sludge in the heart, felt the season’s mockery, all that chartreuse humidity in her throat like a gag. How else to explain such a feeling? She could almost could one burst with joylessness? What she was feeling was too strange, too contrary, too isolated for a mere emotion. It had to be a premonition — one of being finally whisked away after much boring flailing and flapping and the pained, purposeless work that constituted life. And in spring, no less: a premonition of death. A rehearsal. A secretary’s call to remind of the appointment.

Of course, it had always been in the spring that she discovered her husband’s affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now? There had been a parade of flings — in the end, they’d made her laugh: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

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Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she’d watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas, or dandelion down, all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were calendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies. Hello! Good-bye! Ha! Ha! Ha! What did Ruth care now? Those girls were over and gone. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.

“You assume they’re over and gone,” said her friend Carla, who, in Ruth’s living room, was working on both her inner child and her inner thighs, getting rid of the child but in touch with the thighs; Ruth couldn’t keep it straight. Carla sometimes came over and did her exercises in the middle of Ruth’s Afghan rug. Carla liked to blurt out things and then say, “Ooops, did I say that?” Or sometimes: “You know what? Life is short. Dumpy, too, so you’ve got to do your best: no Empire waists.” She lay on her back and did breathing exercises and encouraged Ruth to do the same. “I can’t. I’ll just fall asleep,” said Ruth, though she suspected she wouldn’t really.

Carla shrugged. “If you fall asleep, great. It’s a beauty nap. If you almost do but don’t actually, it’s meditation.”

“That’s meditation?”

“That’s meditation.”

Two years ago, when Ruth was going through chemo — the oncologist in Chicago had set Ruth’s five-year survival chances at fifty-fifty; how mean not to lie and say sixty-forty! — Carla had brought over lasagnas, which lasted in their various shrinking incarnations in Ruth’s refrigerator for weeks. “Try not to think of roadkill when you reheat,” Carla said. She also brought over sage and rosemary soaps, which looked like slabs of butter with twigs in them. She brought Ruth a book to read, a collection of stories entitled Trust Me, and she had, on the jacket, crossed out the author’s name and written in her own: Carla McGraw. Carla was a friend. Who had many friends these days?

“I do assume,” Ruth said. “I have to.” Terence’s last affair, two springs ago, had ended badly. He’d told Ruth he had a meeting that would go on rather late, until ten or so, but then he arrived home, damp and disheveled, at 7:30. “The meeting’s been canceled,” he said, and went directly upstairs, where she could hear him sobbing in the bathroom. He cried for almost an hour, and as she listened to him, her heart filled up with pity and a deep, sisterly love. At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn’t reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took back home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold.

Oh, the rich torment that was life. She just didn’t investigate Terence’s activities anymore. No steaming open credit-card statements, no “accidentally” picking up the phone extension. As the doctor who diagnosed her now fully remissioned cancer once said to her, “The only way to know absolutely everything in life is via an autopsy.”

Nuptial forensics. Ruth would let her marriage live. No mercy killing, no autopsy. She would let it live! Ha! She would settle, as a person must, for not knowing everything: ignorance as mystery; mystery as faith; faith as food; food as sex; sex as love; love as hate; hate as transcendence. Was this a religion or some weird kind of math?

Or was this, in fact, just spring?

Certain things helped: the occasional Winston (convinced, as Ruth was, despite the one lung, the lip blisters, and the keloidal track across her ribs, that at the end she would regret the cigarettes she hadn’t smoked more than the ones she had; besides, she no longer coughed much at all, let alone so hard that her retinas detached); pots of lobelia (“Excuse me, gotta go,” she had said more than once to a loquacious store clerk, “I’ve got some new lobelia sitting in a steaming hot car”); plus a long, scenic search for a new house.

“A move … yes. A move will be good. We’ve soiled the nest, in many respects,” her husband had said, in the circuitous syntax and ponderous Louisiana drawl that, like so much else about him, had once made her misty with desire and now drove her nuts with scorn. “Think about it, honey,” he’d said after the reconciliation, the first remission, and the initial reconnaissance through the realtors — after her feelings had gone well beyond rage into sarcasm and carcinoma. “We should probably consider leaving this home entirely behind. Depending on what you want to do — or, of course. If you have another home in mind, I’m practically certain I’d be amenable. We would want to discuss it, however, or anything else you might be thinking of. I myself — though it may be presumptuous of me, I realize — but then, hey: it wouldn’t be the first time, now would it? I myself was thinking that, if you were inclined—”

“Terence!” Ruth clapped her hands twice, sharply. “Speak more quickly! I don’t have long to live!” They’d been married for twenty-three years. Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically. “And, please,” she added, “don’t be fooled by the euphemisms of realtors. This was never a home, darling. This is a house.”

In this way — a wedding of emotionally handicapped parking spaces, an arduously tatted lace of property and irritation — they’d managed to stay married. He was not such a bad guy! — just a handsome country boy, disbelieving of his own luck, which came to him imperfectly but continually, like crackers from a cookie jar. She had counted on him to make money — was that so wrong? — and he had made some, in used-car dealerships and computer software stock. With its sweet, urgent beginnings, and grateful, hand-holding end, marriage was always its worst in the middle: it was always a muddle, a ruin, an unnavigable field. But it was not, she felt, a total wasteland. In her own marriage there was one sweet little recurrent season, one tiny nameless room, that suited and consoled her. She would lie in Terence’s arms and he would be quiet and his quietness would restore her. There was music. There was peace. That was all. There were no words in it. But that tiny spot — like any season, or moon, or theater set; like a cake in a rotary display — invariably spun out of reach and view, and the quarreling would resume and she would have to wait a long time for the cake to come round again.

Of course, their daughter, Mitzy, adored Terence — the hot, lucky fire of him. In Ruth, on the other hand, Mitzy seemed to sense only the chill spirit of a woman getting by. But what was a person in Ruth’s position supposed to do, except rebuild herself, from the ground up, as an iceberg? Ruth wanted to know! And so, in the strange, warm dissolutions that came over her these May nights silently before sleep, a pointillist’s breaking up of the body and self and of the very room, a gentle fracturing to bubbles and black dotted swiss, Ruth began, again, to foresee her own death.

At first, looking at other houses on Sunday afternoons — wandering across other people’s floors and carpets, opening the closets to look at other people’s shoes — gave Ruth a thrill. The tacky photos on the potter’s piano. The dean with no doorknobs. The orthodontist with thirty built-in cubbyholes for his thirty tennis shoes. Wallpaper peeling like birch skin. Assorted stained, scuffed floors and misaligned moldings. The Dacron carpets. The trashy magazines on the coffee table. And those economy snacks! People had pretzel boxes the size of bookcases. And no bookcases. What would they do with a book? Just put it in the pretzel box! Ruth took an unseemly interest in the faulty angles of a staircase landing, or the contents of a room: the ceramic pinecone lamps, the wedding photo of the dogs. Was the town that boring that this was now what amused her? What was so intriguing to her about all this home owning thrown open to the marketplace? The airing of the family vault? The peek into the grave? Ruth hired a realtor. Stepping into a house, hunting out its little spaces, surveying its ceiling stains and roof rot exhilarated her. It amazed her that there was always something wrong with a house, and after awhile, her amazement became a kind of pleasure; it was pleasing that there should always be something wrong. It made the house seem more natural that way.

But soon she backed off. “I could never buy a house that had that magazine on the coffee table,” she said once. A kind of fear overtook her. “I don’t like that neo-Georgian thing,” she said now, before the realtor, Kit, had even turned off the car, forcing Kit to back out again from the driveway. “I’m sorry, but when I look at it,” Ruth added, “my eye feels disorganized, and my heart just empties right out.”

“I care about you, Ruth,” said Kit, who was terrified of losing clients and so worked hard to hide the fact that she had the patience of a gnat. “Our motto is ‘We Care,’ and that is just so true: We really, really care, Ruth. We care about you. We care about your feelings and desires. We want you to be happy. So, here we are driving along. Driving toward a thing, then driving past. You want a house, Ruth, or shall we just go to the goddamn movies?”

“You think I’m being unrealistic.”

“Aw, I get enough realism as it is. Realism’s overrated. I mean it about the movies.”

“You do?”

“Sure!” And so that once, Ruth went to the movies with her realtor. It was a preseason matinee of Forrest Gump, which made her teary with weariness, hurt, and bone-thinning boredom. “Such a career-ender for poor Tom Hanks. Mark my words,” Ruth whispered to her realtor, candy wrappers floating down in the dark toward her shoes. “Thank God we bought toffees. What would we do without these toffees?”

· · ·

Eventually, not even a month later, in Kit’s white Cabriolet, the top down, the wind whipping everyone’s hair in an unsightly way, Ruth and Terence took a final tour of the suburbanized cornfields on the periphery of town and found a house. It was the original ancient four-square farmhouse in the center of a 1979 subdivision. A man-made pond had been dug into the former field that edged the side yard. A wishing well full of wildflowers stood in the front yard.

“This is it,” Terence said, gesturing toward the house.

“It is?” said Ruth. She tried to study it with an open mind — its porch and dormers angled as if by a Cubist, its chimney crumbling on one side, its cedar shingles ornately leprous with old green paint. “If one of us kisses it, will it turn into a house?” The dispiriting white ranches and split-levels lined up on either side at least possessed a geometry she understood.

“It needs a lot of work,” admitted Kit.

“Yes,” said Ruth. Even the FOR SALE sign had sprouted a shock of dandelions at its base. “Unlike chocolates, houses are predictable: you always know you’re getting rot and decay and a long, tough mortgage. Eat them or put them back in the box — you can’t do either without a lawsuit or an ordinance hearing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Terence. He took Ruth aside.

“This is it,” he hissed. “This is our dream house.”

“Dream house?” All the dreams she’d been having were about death — its blurry pixilation, its movement through a dark, soft sleep to a hard, bright end.

“I’m surprised you can’t see it,” said Terence, visibly frustrated.

She squinted again toward the soffits, the Picasso porch, the roof mottled with moss and soot. She studied the geese and the goose poop, moist, mashed cigars of which littered the stony shore of the pond. “Ah, maybe,” she said. “Maybe yes. I think I’m beginning to see it. Who owns it again?”

“A Canadian. He’s been renting it out. It’s a nice neighborhood. Near a nature conservatory and the zoo.”

“The zoo?”

Ruth thought about this. They would have to hire a lot of people, of course. It would be like running a company to get this thing back in shape, bossing everybody around, monitoring the loans and payments. She sighed. Such entrepreneurial spirit did not run in her family. It was not native to her. She came from a long line of teachers and ministers — employees. Hopeless people. People with faith but no hope. There was not one successful small business anywhere in her genes. “I’m starting to see the whole thing,” she said.

On the other side of town, where other people lived, a man named Noel and a woman named Nitchka were in an apartment, in the kitchen, having a discussion about music. The woman said, “So you know nothing at all? Not a single song?”

“I don’t think so,” said Noel. Why was this a problem for her? It wasn’t a problem for him. So he didn’t know any songs. He had always been willing to let her know more than he did; it didn’t bother him, until it bothered her.

“Noel, what kind of upbringing did you have, anyway?” He knew she felt he had been deprived and that he should feel angry about it. But he did! He did feel angry about it! “Didn’t your parents ever sing songs to you?” she asked. “Can’t you even sing one single song by heart? Sing a song. Just any song.”

“Like what?”

“If there was a gun to your head, what song would you sing?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted, and threw a chair across the room. They hadn’t had sex in two months.

“Is it that you don’t even know the name of a song?”

At night, every night, they just lay there with their magazines and Tylenol PM and then, often with the lights still on, were whisked quickly down into their own separate worlds of sleep — his filled with lots of whirling trees and antique flying machines and bouquets of ferns. He had no idea why.

“I know the name of a song,” he said.

“What song?”

“ ‘Open the Door, Richard.’ ”

“What kind of song is that?”

It was a song his friend Richard’s mother would sing when he was twelve and he and Richard were locked in the bedroom, flipping madly through magazines: Breasts and the Rest, Tight Tushies, and Lollapalooza Ladies. But it was a real song, which still existed — though you couldn’t find those magazines anymore. Noel had looked.

“See? I know a song that you don’t!” he exclaimed.

“Is this a song of spiritual significance to you?”

“Yup, it really is.” He picked up a rubber band from the counter, stretched it between his fingers, and released it. It hit her in the chin. “Sorry. That was an accident,” he said.

“Something is deeply missing in you!” Nitchka shouted, and stormed out of the apartment for a walk.

Noel sank back against the refrigerator. He could see his own reflection in the window over the sink. It was dim and translucent, and a long twisted cobweb outside, caught on the eaves, swung back and forth across his face like a noose. He looked crazy and ill — but with just a smidgen of charisma! “If there was a gun to your head,” he said to the reflection, “what song would you sing?”

· · ·

Ruth wondered whether she really needed a project this badly. A diversion. A resurrection. An undertaking. Their daughter, Mitzy, grown and gone — was the whole empty nest thing such a crisis that they would devote the rest of their days to this mortician’s delight? Was it that horribly, echoey quiet and nothing-nothing not to have Mitzy and her struggles furnishing their lives? Was it so bad no longer to have a daughter’s frustrated artistic temperament bleeding daily on the carpet of their brains? Mitzy, dear Mitzy, was a dancer. All those ballet and tap lessons as a child — she wasn’t supposed to have taken them seriously! They had been intended as middle-class irony and window dressing — you weren’t actually supposed to become a dancer. But Mitzy had. Despite that she was the fattest in the troupe every time, never belonging, rejected from every important company, until one day a young director saw how beautifully, soulfully she danced—“How beautifully the fat girl dances!”—and ushered her past the corps, set her center stage, and made her a star. Now she traveled the world over and was the darling of the critics. “Size fourteen, yet!” crowed one reviewer. “It is a miracle to see!” She had become a triumph of feet over heft, spirit over matter, matter over doesn’t-matter, a figure of immortality, a big fat angel really, and she had “many, many homosexual fans,” as Terence put it. As a result, she now rarely came home. Ruth sometimes got postcards, but Ruth hated postcards — so careless and cheap, especially from this new angel of dance writing to her own sick mother. But that was the way with children.

Once, over a year and a half ago, Mitzy had come home, but it was only for two weeks — during Ruth’s chemotherapy. Mitzy was, as usual, in a state of crisis. “Sure they like my work,” she wailed as Ruth adjusted that first itchy acrylic wig, the one that used to scare people. “But do they like me?” Mitzy was an only child, so it was natural that her first bout of sibling rivalry would be with her own work. When Ruth suggested as much, Mitzy gave her a withering look accompanied by a snorting noise, and after that, with a cocked eyebrow and a wince of a gaze, Mitzy began monopolizing the telephone with moving and travel plans. “You seem to be doing extremely well, Mom,” she said, looking over her shoulder, jotting things down. Then she’d fled.

At first Terence, even more than she, seemed enlivened by the prospect of new real estate. The simplest discussion — of door-jambs or gutters — made his blood move around his face and neck like a lava lamp. Roof-shingle samples — rough, grainy squares of sepia, rose, and gray — lit his eyes up like love. He brought home doorknob catalogs and phoned a plasterer or two. After a while, however, she could see him tire and retreat, recoil even — another fling flung. “My God, Terence. Don’t quit on me now. This is just like the Rollerblades!” He had last fall gone through a Rollerblade period.

“I’m way too busy,” he said.

And before Ruth knew it, the entire house project — its purchase and renovation — had been turned over to her.

First Ruth had to try to sell their current house. She decided to try something called a “fosbo.” FOSBO: a “For Sale by Owner.” She put ads in papers, bought a sign for the front yard, and planted violet and coral impatiens in the flower beds for the horticulturally unsuspecting, those with no knowledge of perennials. Gorgeous yard! Mature plantings! She worked up a little flyer describing the moldings and light fixtures, all “original to the house.” Someone came by to look and sniff. He fingered one of the ripped window shades. “Original to the house?” he said.

“All right, you’re out of here,” she said. To subsequent prospective buyers, she abandoned any sales pitch and went for candor. “I admit, this bathroom’s got mildew. And look at this stupid little hallway. This is why we’re moving! We hate this house.” She soon hired back her Forrest Gump realtor, who, at the open house, played Vivaldi on the stereo and baked banana bread, selling the place in two hours.

The night after they closed on both houses, having sat silently through the two proceedings, like deaf-mutes being had, the mysterious Canadian once more absent and represented only by a purple-suited realtor named Flo, Ruth and Terence stood in their empty new house and ate take-out Chinese straight from the cartons. Their furniture was sitting in a truck, which was parked in a supermarket parking lot on the east side of town, and it all would be delivered the next day. For now, they stood at the bare front window of their large, echoey new dining room. A small lit candle on the floor cast their shadows up on the ceiling, gloomy and fat. Wind rattled the panes and the boiler in the cellar burst on in small, frightening explosions. The radiators hissed and smelled like cats, burning off dust as they heated up, vibrating the cobwebs in the ceiling corners above them. The entire frame of the house groaned and rumbled. There was scampering in the walls. The sound of footsteps — or something like footsteps — thudded softly in the attic, two floors above them.

“We’ve bought a haunted house,” said Ruth. Terence’s mouth was full of hot cabbagey egg roll. “A ghost!” she continued. “Just a little extra protein. Just a little amino-acid bonus.” It was what her own father had always said when he found a small green worm in his bowl of blueberries.

“The house is settling,” said Terence.

“It’s had a hundred and ten years to settle; you would think it had gotten it done with by now.”

“Settling goes on and on,” said Terence.

“We would know,” said Ruth.

He looked at her, then dug into the container of lo mein.

A scrabbling sound came from the front porch. Terence chewed, swallowed, then walked over to turn the light on, but the light didn’t come on. “Was this disclosed?” he shouted.

“It’s probably just the lightbulb.”

“All new lightbulbs were just put in, Flo said.” He opened the front door. “The light’s broken, and it should have been disclosed.” He was holding a flashlight with one hand and unscrewing the front light with the other. Behind the light fixture gleamed three pairs of masked eyes. Dark raccoon feces were mounded up in the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof.

“What the hell?” shouted Terence, backing away.

“This house is infested!” said Ruth. She put down her food.

“How did those creatures get up there?”

She felt a twinge in her one lung. “How does anything get anywhere — that’s what I want to know.” She had only ever been the lightest of smokers, never in a high-risk category, but now every pinch, prick, tick, or tock in her ribs, every glitch in the material world anywhere made her want to light up and puff.

“Oh, God, the stench.”

“Shouldn’t the inspector have found this?”

“Inspectors! Obviously, they’re useless. What this place needed was an MRI.”

“Ah, geeze. This is the worst.”

Every house is a grave, thought Ruth. All that life-stealing fuss and preparation. Which made moving from a house a resurrection — or an exodus of ghouls, depending on your point of view — and made moving to a house (yet another house!) the darkest of follies and desires. At best, it was a restlessness come falsely to rest. But the inevitable rot and demolition, from which the soul eventually had to flee (to live in the sky or disperse itself among the trees?), would necessarily make a person stupid with unhappiness.

Oh, well!

After their furniture arrived and was positioned almost exactly the way it had been in their old house, Ruth began to call a lot of people to come measure, inspect, capture, cart away, clean, spray, bring samples, provide estimates and bids, and sometimes they did come, though once people had gotten a deposit, they often disappeared entirely. Machines began to answer instead of humans and sometimes phone numbers announced themselves disconnected altogether. “We’re sorry. The number you have reached …”

The windows of the new house were huge — dusty, but bright because of their size — and because the shade shop had not yet delivered the shades, the entire neighborhood of spiffy middle management could peer into Ruth and Terence’s bedroom. For one long, bewildering day, Ruth took to waving, and only sometimes did people wave back. More often, they just squinted and stared. The next day, Ruth taped bedsheets up to the windows with masking tape, but invariably the sheets fell off after ten minutes. When she bathed, she had to crawl naked out of the bathroom down the hall and into the bedroom and then into the closet to put her clothes on. Or sometimes she just lay there on the bathroom floor and wriggled into things. It was all so very hard.

In their new backyard, crows the size of suitcases cawed and bounced in the branches of the pear tree. Carpenter ants — like shiny pieces of a child’s game — swarmed the porch steps. Ruth made even more phone calls, and finally a man with a mottled, bulbous nose and a clean white van with a cockroach painted on it came and doused the ants with poison.

“It just looks like a fire extinguisher, what you’re using,” said Ruth, watching.

“Ho no, ma’am. Way stronger than that.” He wheezed. His nose was knobby as a pickle. He looked underneath the porch and then back up at Ruth. “There’s a whole lot of dying going on in there,” he said.

“There’s nothing you can do about the crows?” Ruth asked.

“Not me, but you could get a gun and shoot ’em yourself,” he said. “It’s not legal, but if your house were one hundred yards down that way, it would be. If it were one hundred yards down that way, you could bag twenty crows a day. Since you’re where you are, within the town limits, you’re going to have to do it at night, with a silencer. Catch ’em live in the morning with nets and corn, then at sunset, take ’em out behind the garage and put ’em out of your misery.”

“Nets?” said Ruth.

She called many people. She collected more guesstimates and advice. A guy named Noel from a lawn company advised her to forget about the crows, worry about the squirrels. She should plant her tulips deeper, and with a lot of red pepper, so that squirrels would not dig them up. “Look at all these squirrels!” he said, pointing to the garage roof and to all the weedy flower beds. “And how about some ground cover in here, by the porch, some lilies by the well, and some sunflowers in the side yard?”

“Let me think about it,” said Ruth. “I would like to keep some of these violets,” she said, indicating the pleasant-looking leaves throughout the irises.

“Those aren’t violets. That’s a weed. That’s a very common, tough little weed.”

“I always thought those were violets.”

“Nope.”

“Things can really overtake a place, can’t they? This planet’s just one big divisive cutthroat competition of growing. I mean, they look like violets, don’t they? The leaves, I mean.”

Noel shrugged. “Not to me. Not really.”

How could she keep any of it straight? There was spirea and there was false spirea — she forgot which was which. “Which is the spirea again?” she asked. Noel pointed to the bridal-wreath hedge, which was joyously blooming from left to right, from sun to shade, and in two weeks would sag and brown in the same direction. “Ah, marriage,” she said aloud.

“Pardon?” said Noel.

“Are you married?” she asked.

He gave her a tired little smile and said, “No. Trying to make it happen with a girlfriend, but no, not married.”

“That’s probably better,” said Ruth.

“How about this vegetable garden?” he asked nervously.

“It’s just a lot of grass with a rhubarb in it,” said Ruth. “I’d like to dig the whole thing up and plant roses — unless you think it’s bad luck to replace food with flowers. Vanity before the Lord, or something.”

“It’s up to you,” he said.

She called him back that night. He personally, no machine, answered the phone. “I’ve been thinking about the sunflowers,” she said.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Ruth. Ruth Aikins.”

“Oh, say, Ruth. Ruth! Hi!”

“Hi,” she said in a worried way. He sounded as if he’d been drinking.

“Now what about those sunflowers?” he asked. “I’d like to plant those sunflowers real soon, you know that? Here’s why: my girlfriend’s talking again about leaving me, and I’ve just been diagnosed with lymphoma. So I’d like to see some sunflowers come up end of August.”

“Oh, my God. Life stinks!” cried Ruth.

“Yup. So I’d like to see some sunflowers. End of summer, I’d like something to look forward to.”

“What kind of girlfriend talks about leaving her beau at a time like this?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean — good riddance. On the other hand, you know what you should do? You should make yourself a good cup of tea and sit down and write her a letter. You’re going to need someone to care for you through all this. Don’t let her call all the shots. Let her understand the implications of her behavior and her responsibilities to you. I know whereof I speak.”

Ruth was about to explain further, when Noel cleared his throat hotly. “I don’t think it’s such a great idea for you to go get personal and advising. I mean, look. Ruth, is it? You see, I don’t even know your name, Ruth. I know a lot of Ruths. You could be goddamned anyone. Ruth this, Ruth that, Ruth who knows. As a matter of fact, the lymphoma thing I just made up, because I thought you were a totally different Ruth.” And with that, he hung up.

She put out cages for the squirrels — the squirrels who gnawed the hyacinth bulbs, giving their smooth surfaces runs like stockings, the squirrels who utterly devoured the crocuses. From the back porch, she watched each squirrel thrash around in the cage for an hour, hurling itself against the cage bars and rubbing bald spots into its head, before she finally took pity and drove each one to a faraway quarry to set it free. The quarry was a spot that Terence had recommended as “a beautiful seclusion, a rodent Eden, a hillside of oaks above a running brook.” Such poetry: probably he’d gotten laid there once. Talk about your rodent Eden! In actuality, the place was a depressing little gravel gully, with a trickle of brown water running through it, a tiny crew of scrub oaks manning the nearby incline. It was the kind of place where the squirrel mafia would have dumped their offed squirrels.

She lifted the trapdoor and watched each animal scurry off toward the hillside. Did they know what they were doing? Would they join their friends, or would every last one of them find their way back to the hollow walls of her house and set up shop again?

The bats — bats! — arrived the following week, one afternoon during a loud, dark thundershower, like a horror movie. They flew back and forth in the stairwells, then hung upside down from the picture-frame molding in the dining room, where they discreetly defecated, leaving clumps of shiny black guano pasted to the wall.

Ruth phoned her husband at his office but only got his voice mail, so she then phoned Carla, who came dashing over with a tennis racket, a butterfly net, and a push broom, all with ribbons tied around their handles. “These are my housewarming presents,” she said.

“They’re swooping again! Look out! They’re swooping!”

“Let me at those sons of bitches,” Carla said.

From her fetal position on the floor, Ruth looked up at her. “What did I ever do to get such a great friend as you?”

Carla stopped. Her face was flushed with affection, her cheeks blotched with pink. “You think so?” A bat dive-bombed her hair. The old wives’ tale — that bats got caught in your hair — seemed truer to Ruth than the new wives’ tale — that bats getting caught in your hair was just an old wives’ tale. Bats possessed curiosity and arrogance. They were little social scientists. They got close to hair — to investigate, measure, and interview. And when something got close — a moth to a flame, a woman to a house, a woman to a grave, a sick woman to a fresh, wide-open grave like a bed — it could fall in and get caught.

“You gotta stuff your dormer eaves with steel wool,” said Carla.

“Hey. Ain’t it the truth,” said Ruth.

They buried the whacked bats in tabbouleh containers, in the side yard: everything just tabbouleh in the end.

· · ·

With the crows in mind, Ruth started to go with Carla to the shooting range. The geese, Carla said, were not that big a problem. The geese could be discouraged simply by shaking up the eggs in their nests. Carla was practical. She had a heart the shape of an ax. She brought over a canoe and paddled Ruth out into the cattails to find the goose nests, and there she took each goose egg and shook it furiously. “If you just take and toss the egg,” explained Carla, “the damn goose will lay another one. This way, you kill the gosling, and the goose never knows. It sits there warming the damn eggnog until the winter comes, and the goose then just leaves, heartbroken, and never comes back. With the crows, however, you just have to blow their brains out.”

At the shooting range, they paid a man with a green metal money box twenty dollars for an hour of shooting. They got several cans of diet Coke, which they bought from a vending machine outside near the rest rooms, and which they set at their feet, at their heels, just behind them. They each had pistols, Ruth’s from World War I, Carla’s from World War II, which they had bought in an antique-gun store. “Anyone could shoot birds with a shotgun,” Carla had said. “Let’s be unique.”

“That’s never really been a big ambition of mine,” said Ruth.

They were the only ones there at the range and stood fifty yards from three brown sacks of hay with red circles painted on them. They fired at the circles — one! two! three! — then turned, squatted, set their guns back down, and sipped their Cokes. The noise was astonishing, bursting through the fields around them, echoing off the small hills and back out of the sky, mocking and retaliatory. “My Lord!” Ruth exclaimed. Her gun felt hard and unaimable. “I don’t think I’m doing this right,” she said. She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural — a seamless extension of her angry feral self. But instead, it felt heavy and huge and so unnaturally loud, she never wanted to fire such a thing again.

But she did. Only twice did she see her hay sack buckle. Mostly, she seemed to be firing too high, into the trees behind the targets, perhaps hitting squirrels — perhaps the very squirrels she had caught in her have-a-heart cage, now set free and shot dead with her have-a-house gun. “It’s all too much,” said Ruth. “I can’t possibly be doing this right. It’s way too complicated and mean.”

“You’ve forgotten about the damn crows,” said Carla. “Don’t forget them.”

“That’s right,” said Ruth, and she picked up the gun again. “Crows.” Then she lowered her gun. “But won’t I just be shooting them at close range, after I catch them in nets?”

“Maybe,” said Carla. “But maybe not.”

When Nitchka finally left him, she first watched her favorite TV show, then turned off the television, lifted up her CD player and her now-unhooked VCR, and stopped to poise herself dramatically in the front hall. “You know, you haven’t a clue what the human experience is even about,” she said.

“This song and dance again,” he said. “Are you taking it on the road?” She set her things down outside in the hall so she could slam the door loudly and leave him — leave him, he imagined, for some new, handsome man she had met at work. Dumped for Hunks. That was the title of his life. In heaven, just to spite her, that would be the name of his goddamn band.

He drank a lot that week, and on Friday, his boss, McCarthy, called to say Noel was fired. “You think we can run a lawn store this way?” he said.

“If there was a gun to your head,” said Noel, “what song would you sing?”

“Get help,” said McCarthy. “That’s all I have to say.” Then there was a dial tone.

Noel began to collect unemployment, getting to the office just before it closed. He began to sleep in the days and stay up late at night. He got turned around. He went out at midnight for walks, feeling insomniac and mocked by the dark snore of the neighborhood. Rage circled and built in him, like a saxophone solo. He began to venture into other parts of town. Sidewalks appeared, then disappeared again. The moon shone on one side and then on the other. Once, he brought duct tape with him and a ski mask. Another time, he brought duct tape, a ski mask, and a gun one of his stepfathers had given him when he was twenty. If you carefully taped a window from the outside, it could be broken quietly: the glass would stick to the tape and cave gently outward.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. He turned on the light in the bedroom. He taped the woman’s mouth first, then the man’s. He made them get out of bed and stand over by the dresser. “I’m going to take your TV set,” said Noel. “And I’m going to take your VCR. But before I do, I want you to sing me a song. I’m a music lover, and I want you to sing me one song, any song. By heart. You first,” he said to the man. He pressed the gun to his head. “One song.” He pulled the duct tape gently off the man’s mouth.

“Any song?” repeated the man. He tried to look into the eyeholes of Noel’s ski mask, but Noel turned abruptly and stared at the olive gray glass of the TV.

“Yeah,” said Noel. “Any song.”

“Okay.” The man began. “ ‘O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain …’ ” His voice was deep and sure. “ ‘… for purple mountain majesties …’ ” Noel turned back and studied the man carefully. He seemed to know it all by heart. How had he learned it all by heart? “You want all the verses?” the man stopped and asked, a bit too proudly, Noel thought, for someone who had a gun aimed his way.

“Nah, that’s enough,” Noel said irritably. “Now you,” he said to the woman. He pulled the duct tape off her mouth. Her upper lip was moistly pink, raw from the adhesive. He glanced down at the tape and saw the spiky glisten of little mustache hairs. She began immediately, anxiously, to sing. “ ‘You are my lucky star. I’m lucky where you are/Two lovely eyes at me that were—’ ”

“What kind of song is this?”

She nervously ignored him, kept on: “ ‘… beaming, gleaming, I was starstruck.’ ” She began to sway a little, move her hands up and down. She cleared her throat and modulated upward, a light, chirpy warble, though her face was stretched wide with fright, like heated wax. “ ‘You’re all my lucky charms. I’m lucky in your arms. …’ ” Here her hands fluttered up to her heart.

“All right, that’s enough. I’m taking the VCR now.”

“That’s practically the end anyway,” said the woman.

At the next house he did, he got a Christmas carol, plus “La Vie en Rose.” At the third house, the week following, he got one nursery rhyme, half a school song, and “Memory” from Cats. He began to write down the titles and words. At home, looking over his notepad, he realized he was creating a whole new kind of songbook. Still the heart of these songs eluded him. Looking at the words the next day, a good, almost-new VCR at his feet, he could never conjure the tune. And without the tune, the words seemed stupid and half-mad.

To avoid the chaos of the house entirely, Ruth took to going to matinees. First-run movies, second-run — she didn’t care. Movies were the ultimate real estate: you stepped in and looked around and almost always bought. She was especially stirred by a movie she saw about a beautiful widow who fell in love with a space alien who had assumed human form — the form of the woman’s long lost husband! Eventually, however, the man had to go back to his real home, and an immense and amazing spaceship came to get him, landing in a nearby field. To Ruth, it seemed so sad and true, just like life: someone assumed the form of the great love of your life, only to reveal himself later as an alien who had to get on a spaceship and go back to his planet. Certainly it had been true for Terence. Terence had gotten on a spaceship and gone back long ago. Although, of course, in real life you seldom saw the actual spaceship. Usually, there was just a lot of drinking, mumbling, and some passing out in the family room.

Sometimes on the way back from the movies, she would drive by their old house. They had sold it to an unmemorable young couple, and now, driving past it slowly, eyeing it like a pervert, she began to want it back. It was a good house. They didn’t deserve it, that couple: look how ignorant they were — pulling out all those forsythia bushes as if they were weeds.

Or maybe they were weeds. She never knew anymore what was good life and what was bad, what was desirable matter and what was antimatter, what was the thing itself and what was the death of the thing: one mimicked the other, and she resented the work of having to distinguish.

Which, again, was the false spirea and which was the true?

The house was hers. If it hadn’t been for that damn banana bread, it still would be hers.

Perhaps she could get arrested creeping slowly past in her car like this. She didn’t know. But every time she drove by, the house seemed to see her and cry out, It’s you! Hello, hello! You’re back! So she tried not to do it too often. She would speed up a little, give a fluttery wave, and drive off.

At home, she could not actually net the crows, though their old habitat, the former cornfield that constituted the neighborhood, continued to attract them like an ancestral land or a good life recalled over gin. They hovered in the yards, tormented the cats, and ate the still-wet day-old songbirds right out of their nests. How was she supposed to catch such fiends? She could not. She draped nets in the branches of trees, to snag them, but always a wind caused the nets to twist or drop, or pages of old newspaper blew by and got stuck inside, plastering the nets with op-ed pages and ads. From the vegetable garden now turning flower bed came the persistent oniony smell of those chives not yet smothered by the weed barrier. And the rhubarb, too, kept exploding stubbornly through, no matter how she plucked at it, though each clutch of stalks was paler and more spindly than the last.

She began generally not to feel well. Never a temple, her body had gone from being a home, to being a house, to being a phone booth, to being a kite. Nothing about it gave her proper shelter. She no longer felt housed within it at all. When she went for a stroll or was out in the yard throwing the nets up into the oaks, other people in the neighborhood walked briskly past her. The healthy, the feeling well, when they felt that way, couldn’t remember feeling any other, couldn’t imagine it. They were niftily in their bodies. They were not only out of the range of sympathy; they were out of the range of mere imagining. Whereas the sick could only think of being otherwise. Their hearts, their every other thought, went out to that well person they hated a little but wanted to be. But the sick were sick. They were not in charge. They had lost their place at the top of the food chain. The feeling well were running the show; which was why the world was such a savage place. From her own porch, she could hear the PA announcements from the zoo. They were opening; they were closing; would someone move their car. She could also hear the elephant, his sad bluesy trumpet, and the Bengal tiger roaring his heartbreak: all that animal unhappiness. The zoo was a terrible place and a terrible place to live near: the pacing ocelot, the polar bear green with fungus, the zebra demented and hungry and eating the fence, the children brought there to taunt the animals with paper cups and their own clean place in the world, the vulture sobbing behind his scowl.

Ruth began staying inside, drinking tea. She felt tightenings, pain and vertigo, but then, was that so new? It seemed her body, so mysterious and apart from her, could only produce illness. Though once, of course, it had produced Mitzy. How had it done that? Mitzy was the only good thing her body had ever been able to grow. She was a real chunk of change that one, a gorgeous george. How had her body done it? How does a body ever do it? Life inhabits life. Birds inhabit trees. Bones sprout bones. Blood gathers and makes new blood.

A miracle of manufacturing.

On one particular afternoon that was too cool for spring, when Ruth was sitting inside drinking tea so hot it skinned her tongue, she heard something. Upstairs, there was the old pacing in the attic that she had come to ignore. But now there was a knock on the door — loud, rhythmic, urgent. There were voices outside.

“Yes?” Ruth called, approaching the entryway, then opening the door.

Before her stood a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. “We heard there was a party here,” said the girl. She had tar black hair and a silver ring through her upper lip. Her eyes looked meek and lost. “Me and Arianna heard down on State Street that there was a party right here at this house.”

“There’s not,” said Ruth. “There’s just not.” And then she closed the door, firmly.

But looking out the window, Ruth could see more teenagers gathering in front of the house. They collected on the lawn like fruit flies on fruit. Some sat on the front steps. Some roared up on mopeds. Some hopped out of station wagons crowded with more kids just like themselves. One carload of kids poured out of the car, marched right up the front steps, and, without ringing the bell, opened the unlocked door and walked in.

Ruth put her tea down on the bookcase and walked toward the front entryway. “Excuse me!” she said, facing the kids in the front hall.

The kids stopped and stared at her. “May I help you?” asked Ruth.

“We’re visiting someone who lives here.”

“I live here.”

“We were invited to a party by a kid who lives here.”

“There is no kid who lives here. And there is no party.”

“There’s no kid who lives here?”

“No, there isn’t.”

A voice suddenly came from behind Ruth. A voice more proprietary, a voice from deeper within the house than even she was. “Yes, there is,” it said.

Ruth turned and saw standing in the middle of her living room a fifteen-year-old boy dressed entirely in black, his head shaved spottily, his ears, nose, lips, and eyebrows pierced with multiple gold and copper rings. The rim of his left ear held three bronze clips.

“Who are you?” Ruth asked. Her heart flapped and fluttered, like something hit sloppily by a car.

“I’m Tod.”

“Tod?”

“People call me Ed.”

“Ed?”

“I live here.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t! What do you mean, you live here?”

“I’ve been living in your attic.”

“You have?” Ruth felt sweat burst forth from behind the wings of her nose. “You’re our ghost? You’ve been pacing around upstairs?”

“Yeah, he has,” said one of the kids at the door.

“But I don’t understand.” Ruth reached over and plucked a Kleenex from the box on the mail table, and wiped her face with it.

“I ran away from my own home months ago. I have a key to this house from the prior owner, who was a friend. So from time to time, I’ve been sleeping upstairs in your attic. It’s not so bad up there.”

“You’ve been what? You’ve been living here, going in and out? Don’t your parents know where you are?” Ruth asked.

“Look, I’m sorry about this party,” said Tod. “I didn’t mean for it to get this out of hand. I only invited a few people. I thought you were going away. It was supposed to be a small party. I didn’t mean for it to be a big party.”

“No,” said Ruth. “You don’t seem to understand. Big party, little party: you weren’t supposed to have a party here at all. You were not even supposed to be in this house, let alone invite others to join you.”

“But I had the key. I thought, I don’t know. I thought it would be all right.”

“Give me the key. Right now. Give me the key.”

He handed her the key, with a smirk. “I don’t know if it’ll do you any good. Look.” Ruth turned and all the kids at the door held up their own shiny brass keys. “I made copies,” said Tod.

Ruth began to shriek. “Get out of here! Get out of here right now! All of you! Not only will I have these locks changed but if you ever set foot in this neighborhood again, I’ll have the police on you so fast, you won’t know what hit you.”

“But we need someplace to drink, man,” said one of the departing boys.

“Go to the damn park!”

“The cops are all over the park,” one girl whined.

“Then go to the railroad tracks, like we used to do, for God’s sake,” she yelled. “Just get the hell out of here.” She was shocked by the bourgeois venom and indignation in her own voice. She had, after all, once been a hippie. She had taken a lot of windowpane and preached about the evils of private ownership from a red Orlon blanket on a street corner in Chicago.

Life: what an absurd little story it always made.

“Sorry,” said Tod. He touched her arm, and, swinging a cloth satchel over his shoulder, walked toward the front door with the rest of them.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said. “Ed.”

The geese, the crows, the squirrels, the raccoons, the bats, the ants, the kids: Ruth now went to the firing range with Carla as often as she could. She would stand with her feet apart, both hands grasping the gun, then fire. She concentrated, tried to gather bits of strength in her, crumbs to make a loaf. She had been given way too much to cope with in life. Did God have her mixed up with someone else? Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job. I have never been your true and faithful servant. Then she would pull the trigger. When you told a stupid joke to God and got no response, was it that the joke was too stupid, or not quite stupid enough? She narrowed her eyes. Mostly, she just tried to squint, but then dread closed her eyes entirely. She fired again. Why did she not feel more spirited about this, the way Carla did? Ruth breathed deeply before firing, noting the Amazonian asymmetry of her breath, but in her heart she knew she was a mouse. A mouse bearing firearms, but a mouse nonetheless.

“Maybe I should have an affair,” said Carla, who then fired her pistol into the gunnysacked hay. “I’ve been thinking: maybe you should, too.”

Now Ruth fired her own gun, its great storm of sound filling her ears. An affair? The idea of taking her clothes off and being with someone who wasn’t a medical specialist just seemed ridiculous. Pointless and terrifying. Why would people do it? “Having an affair is for the young,” said Ruth. “It’s like taking drugs or jumping off cliffs. Why would you want to jump off a cliff?”

“Oh,” said Carla. “You obviously haven’t seen some of the cliffs I’ve seen.”

Ruth sighed. Perhaps, if she knew a man in town who was friendly and attractive, she might — what? What might she do? She felt the opposite of sexy. She felt busy, managerial, thirsty, crazy; everything, when you got right down to it, was the opposite of sexy. If she knew a man in town, she would — would go on a diet for him! But not Jenny Craig. She’d heard of someone who had died on Jenny Craig. If she had to go on a diet with a fake woman’s name on it, she would go on the Betty Crocker diet, her own face ladled right in there with Betty’s, in that fat red spoon. Yes, if she knew a man in town, perhaps she would let the excitement of knowing him seize the stem of her brain and energize her days. As long as it was only the stem; as long as the petals were left alone. She needed all her petals.

But she didn’t know any men in town. Why didn’t she know one?

In mid-June, the house he chose was an old former farmhouse in the middle of a subdivision. It was clearly being renovated — there were ladders and tarps in the yard — and in this careless presentation, it seemed an easy target. Music lovers! he thought. They go for renovation! Besides, in an old house there was always one back window that, having warped into a trapezoid, had then been sanded and resanded and could be lifted off the frame like a lid. When he worked for the lawn company, he’d worked on many houses like these. Perhaps he’d even been here before, a month ago or so — he wasn’t sure. Things looked different at night, and tonight the moon was not as bright as last time, less than full, like the face beneath a low slant hat, like a head scalped at the brow.

· · ·

Noel looked at the couple. They had started singing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Lately, to save time, inspire the singers, and amuse himself, Noel had been requesting duets. “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “I wanna write this one down. I’ve just started to write these things down.” And, like a fool, he left them to go into the next room to get a pen and a piece of paper.

“You have a sweet voice,” the woman said when he returned. She was standing in front of the nightstand. He was smoothing a creased piece of paper against his chest. “A sweet speaking voice. You must sing well, too.”

“Nah, I have a terrible voice,” he said. He felt his shirt pocket for a pen. “I was always asked to be quiet when the other children sang. The music teacher in grade school always asked me just to move my lips. ‘Glory in eggshell seas,’ she would say. ‘Just mouth that.’ ”

“No, no. Your voice is sweet. The timbre is sweet. I can hear it.” She took a small step sideways. The man, the husband, stayed where he was. He was wearing a big red sweatshirt and no underwear. His penis hung beneath the shirt hem like a long jewel yam. Ah, marriage. The woman, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her nightgown, took another small step. “It’s sweet, but with weight.”

Noel thought he could hear some people outside calling a dog by clapping their hands. “Bravo,” said the owner of the dog, or so it sounded. “Bravo.”

“Well, thank you,” said Noel, his eyes cast downward.

“Surely your mother must have told you that,” she said, but he decided not to answer that one. He turned to write down the words to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” and with the beginning of the tune edging into his head—pardon me, boys—something exploded in the room. Suddenly, he thought he felt the yearning heart of civilization in him, felt at last, oh, Nitchka, what human experience on this planet was all about: its hard fiery center, a quick rudeness in its force; he could feel it catching him, a surprise, like a nail to the brain. A dark violet then light washed over him. Everything went quiet. Music, he saw now, led you steadily into silence. You followed the thread of a song into a sudden sort of sleep. The white paper leapt up in a blinding flash, hot and sharp. The dresser edge caught his cheekbone in a gash, and he seemed no longer to be standing. His shoes slid along the rug. His hands reached up, then down again, then up along the dresser knobs, then flung themselves through the air and back against the floor. His brow, enclosing, then devouring his sight, finally settled dankly against his own sleeve.

Heat drained from his head, like a stone.

A police car pulled up quietly outside, with its lights turned off. There was some distant noise from geese on the pond.

There was no echo after the explosion. It was not like at the range. There had been just a click and a vibrating snap that had flown out before her toward the mask, and then the room roared and went silent, giving back nothing at all.

Terence gasped. “Good God,” he said. “I suppose this is just what you’ve always wanted: a dead man on your bedroom floor.”

“What do you mean by that? How can you say such a heartless thing?” Shouldn’t her voice have had a quaver in it? Instead, it sounded flat and dry. “Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?”

“Did you have to be such a good shot?” Terence asked. He began to pace.

“I’ve been practicing,” she said. Something immunological surged in her briefly like wine. For a minute, she felt restored and safe — safer than she had in years. How dare anyone come into her bedroom! How much was she expected to take? But then it all left her, wickedly, and she could again feel only her own abandonment and disease. She turned away from Terence and started to cry. “Oh, God, let me die,” she finally said. “I am just so tired.” Though she could hardly see, she knelt down next to the masked man and pressed his long, strange hands to her own small ones. They were not yet cold — no colder than her own. She thought she could feel herself begin to depart with him, the two of them rising together, translucent as jellyfish, leaving through the air, floating out into a night sky of singing and release, flying until they reached a bright, bright spaceship — a set of teeth on fire in the dark — and, absorbed into the larger light, were taken aboard for home. “And what on earth was all that?” she could hear them both say merrily of their lives, as if their lives were now just odd, noisy, and distant, as in fact they were.

“What have we here?” she heard someone say.

“Look for yourself, I guess,” said someone else.

She touched the man’s black knit mask. It was pilled with gray, like the dotted swiss of her premonitions, but it was askew, misaligned at the eyes — the soft turkey white of a cheekbone where the eye should be — and it was drenched with water and maroon. She could peel it off to see his face, see who he was, but she didn’t dare. She tried to straighten the fabric, tried to find the eyes, then pulled it tightly down and turned away, wiping her hands on her nightgown. Without looking, she patted the dead man’s arm. Then she turned and started out of the room. She went down the stairs and ran from the house.

Her crying now came in a stifled and parched way, and her hair fell into her mouth. Her chest ached and all her bones filled with a sharp pulsing. She was ill. She knew. Running barefoot across the lawn, she could feel some chaos in her gut — her intestines no longer curled neat and orderly as a French horn, but heaped carelessly upon one another like a box of vacuum-cleaner parts. The cancer, dismantling as it came, had begun its way back. She felt its poison, its tentacular reach and clutch, as a puppet feels a hand.

“Mitzy, my baby,” she said in the dark. “Baby, come home.”

Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body — Jesus, how the body! — took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn neatly into light and slip out the window. You couldn’t go like that. Within one’s own departing but stubborn flesh, there was only the long, sentimental, piecemeal farewell. Sir? A towel. Is there a towel? The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet, dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me, too, barked the dog. Don’t go, don’t go, it said, running along the fence, almost keeping pace but not quite, its reflection a shrinking charm in the car mirrors as you trundled past the viburnum, past the pine grove, past the property line, past every last patch of land, straight down the swallowing road, disappearing and disappearing. Until at last it was true: you had disappeared.