Get in Trouble: Stories

Light

two men, one raised by wolves

The man at the bar on the stool beside her: bent like a hook over some item. A book, not a drink. A children’s book, dog-eared. When he noticed her stare, he grinned and said, “Got a light?” It was a Friday night, and The Splinter was full of men saying things. Some guy off in a booth was saying, for example, “Well, sure, you can be raised by wolves and lead a normal life but—”

She said, “I don’t smoke.”

The man straightened up. He said, “Not that kind of light. I mean a light. Do you have a light?”

“I don’t understand,” she said. And then because he was not bad looking, she said, “Sorry.”

“Stupid bitch,” he said. “Never mind.” He went back to his book. The pages were greasy and soft and torn; he had it open at a watercolor illustration of a boy and a girl standing in front of a dragon the size of a Volkswagen bus. The man had a pen. He’d drawn word bubbles coming out of the children’s mouths, and now he was writing in words. The children were saying—

The man snapped the book shut; it was a library book.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a children’s librarian. Can I ask why you’re defacing that book?”

“I don’t know, can you? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but why ask me?” the man said. Turning his back to her, he hunched over the picture book again.

Which was really too much. She had once been a child. She owned a library card. She opened up her shoulder bag and took a needle out of the travel sewing kit. She palmed the needle and then, after finishing off her Rum and Rum and Coke — a drink she’d invented in her twenties and was still very fond of — she jabbed the man in his left buttock. Very fast. Her hand was back in her lap and she was signaling the bartender for another drink when the man beside her howled and sat up. Now everyone was looking at him. He slid off his bar stool and hurried away, glancing back at her once in outrage.

There was a drop of blood on the needle. She wiped it on a bar napkin.

At a table nearby three women were talking about a new pocket universe. A new diet. A coworker’s new baby; a girl born with no shadow. This was bad, although thank God not as bad as it could have been, a woman — someone called her Caroline — was saying. A long, lubricated conversation followed about over-the-counter shadows — prosthetics, available in most drugstores, not expensive and reasonably durable. Everyone was in agreement that it was almost impossible to distinguish a homemade or store-bought shadow from a real one. Caroline and her friends began to talk of babies born with two shadows. Children with two shadows did not grow up happy. They didn’t get on well with other children. You could cut a pair of shadows apart with a pair of crooked scissors, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. By the end of the day the second shadow always grew back, twice as long. If you didn’t bother to cut back the second shadow, then eventually you had twins, one of whom was only slightly realer than the other.

Lindsey had grown up in a stucco house in a scab-raw development in Dade County. On one side of the development there were orange groves; opposite Lindsey’s house had been a bruised and trampled nothing. A wilderness. It grew back, then overran the edges of the new development. Banyan trees dripping with spiky little air-drinking epiphytics; banana spiders; tunnels of coral reef, barely covered by blackish, sandy dirt, that Lindsey and her brother lowered themselves into and then emerged out of, skinned, bloody, triumphant; bulldozed football-field-sized depressions that filled with water when it rained and produced thousands of fingernail-sized tan toads. Lindsey kept them in jars. She caught wolf spiders, Cuban lizards, tobacco grasshoppers yellow and pink — solid as toy cars — that spat when you caged them in your hand, blue crabs that swarmed across the yard, through the house, and into the swimming pool where they drowned. Geckos with their velvet bellies and papery clockwork insides, tick-tock barks; scorpions; king snakes and coral snakes and corn snakes, red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black friendly Jack; anoles, obscure until they sent out the bloody fans of their throats. When Lindsey was ten, a lightning strike ignited a fire under the coral reef. For a week the ground was warm to the touch. Smoke ghosted up. They kept the sprinklers on but the grass died anyway. Snakes were everywhere. Lindsey’s new twin brother, Alan, caught five, lost three of them in the house while he was watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Lindsey had had a happy childhood. The women in the bar didn’t know what they were talking about.

It was almost a shame when the man who had theories about being raised by wolves came over and threw his drink in the face of the woman named Caroline. There was a commotion. Lindsey took advantage of it and left, in a leisurely way, without paying her tab. She caught the eye she wanted to catch. They had both been thinking of making an exit, and so she went for a walk on the beach with the man who threw drinks and had theories about being raised by wolves. He was charming, but she felt his theories were only that: charming. When she said this, he became less charming. Nevertheless, she invited him home.

“Nice place,” he said. “I like all the whatsits.”

“It’s all my brother’s stuff,” Lindsey said.

“Your brother? Does he live with you?”

“God, no,” Lindsey said. “He’s…wherever he is.”

“I had a sister. Died when I was two,” the man said. “Wolves make really shitty parents.”

“Ha,” she said experimentally.

“Ha,” he said. And then, “Look at that,” as he was undressing her. Their four shadows fell across her double bed, sticky and wilted as if from lovemaking that hadn’t even begun. At the sight of their languorously intertwined shadows, the wolf man became charming again. “Look at these sweet little tits,” he said over and over again, as though she might not ever have noticed how sweet and little her tits were. He exclaimed at the sight of every part of her: afterward she slept poorly, apprehensive that he might steal away, taking along one of the body parts or pieces that he seemed to admire so much.

In the morning, she woke and found herself stuck beneath the body of the wolf man as if she had been trapped beneath a collapsed and derelict building. When she began to wriggle her way out from under him, he woke and complained of a fucking terrible hangover. He called her “Joanie” several times, asked to borrow a pair of scissors, and spent a long time in her bathroom with the door locked while she read the paper. Smuggling ring apprehended by _____. Government overthrown in ______. Family of twelve last seen in vicinity of ______. Start of hurricane season _____. The wolf man came out of the bathroom, dressed hurriedly, and left.

She found, in a spongy black heap, the amputated shadow of his dead twin and three soaked, pungent towels on the bathroom floor; there were stubby black bits of beard in the sink. The blades of her nail scissors tarry and blunted.

She threw away the reeking towels. She mopped up the shadow, folding it into a large Ziploc bag, carried the bag into the kitchen, and put the shadow down the disposal. She ran the water for a long time.

Then she went outside and sat on her patio and watched the iguanas eat the flowers off her hibiscus. It was six a.m. and already quite warm.

no vodka, one egg

Sponges hold water. Water holds light. Lindsey was hollow all the way through when she wasn’t full of alcohol. The water in the canal was glazed, veined with light that wouldn’t hold still. It was vile. She had the beginnings of one of her headaches. Light beat down and her second shadow began to move, rippling in waves like the light-shot water in the canal. She went inside. The egg in the door had a spot of blood in its yolk when she cracked it in the pan. She liked vodka in her orange juice, but there was no orange juice in the fridge, no vodka in the freezer; only a smallish iguana.

The Keys were overrun with iguanas. They ate her hibiscus; every once in a while she caught one of the smaller ones with the pool net and stuck it in her freezer for a few days. This was supposedly a humane way of dealing with iguanas. You could even eat them, although she did not. She was a vegetarian.

She put out food for the bigger iguanas when she saw them. They liked ripe fruit. She liked to watch them eat. She knew that she was not being consistent or fair in her dealings, but there it was.

men unlucky at cards

Lindsey’s job was not a particularly complicated one. There was an office, and behind the office was a warehouse full of sleeping people. There was an agency in D.C. that paid her company to take responsibility for the sleepers. Every year, hikers and cavers and construction workers found a few dozen more. No one knew how to wake them up. No one knew what they meant, what they did, where they came from. No one really even knew if they were people.

There were always at least two security guards on duty at the warehouse. They were mostly, in Lindsey’s opinion, lecherous assholes. She spent the day going through invoices, and then went home again. The wolf man wasn’t at The Splinter and the bartender threw everyone out at two a.m.; she went back to the warehouse on a hunch, four hours into the night shift.

Bickle and Lowes had hauled out five sleepers, three women and two men. They’d put Miami Hydra baseball caps on the male sleepers and stripped the women, propped them up in chairs around a foldout table. Someone had arranged the hands of one of the male sleepers down between the legs of one of the women. Cards had been dealt out. Maybe it was just a game of strip poker and the three women had been unlucky. It was hard to play your cards well when you were asleep.

Larry Bickle stood behind one of the women, his cheek against her hair. He seemed to be giving her advice about how to play her cards. He wasn’t holding his drink carefully enough, and the woman’s neat lap brimmed with beer.

Lindsey watched for a few minutes. Bickle and Lowes had gotten to the sloppy, expansive stage of drunkenness that, sober, she resented most. False happiness.

When Lowes saw Lindsey he stood up so fast his chair tipped over. “Hey, now,” he’d said. “It’s different from how it looks.”

Both guards had little conical paper party hats on their heads.

A third man, no one Lindsey recognized, came wandering down the middle aisle like he’d been shopping at Walmart. He wore boxer shorts and a party hat. “Who’s this?” he said, leering at Lindsey.

Larry Bickle’s hand was on his gun. What was he going to do? Shoot her? She said, “I’ve already called the police.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Larry Bickle said. He said some other things.

“You called who?” Edgar Lowes said.

“They’ll be here in about ten minutes,” Lindsey said. “If I were you, I’d leave right now. Just go.”

“What is that bitch saying?” Larry Bickle said unhappily. He was really quite drunk. His hand was still on his gun.

She took out her own gun, a Beretta. She pointed it in the direction of Bickle and Lowes. “Put your gun belts on the ground and take off your uniforms. Leave your keys and your ID cards. You, too, whoever you are. Hand over your IDs and I won’t write this up.”

“You’ve got little cats on your gun,” Edgar Lowes said.

“Hello Kitty stickers,” she said. “I count coup.” Although she’d only ever shot one person.

The men took off their clothes, but seemed to forget the paper hats. Edgar Lowes had a long purple scar down his chest. He saw Lindsey looking. “Triple bypass. I need this job. Health insurance.”

“Too bad,” Lindsey said. She followed them out into the parking lot. The third man didn’t seem to care that he was naked. He didn’t even have his hands cupped around his balls, the way Bickle and Lowes did. He said to Lindsey, “They’ve done this a couple of times, ma’am. Heard about it from a friend. Tonight was my birthday party.”

Then: “That’s my digital camera.”

“Happy birthday. Thanks for the camera, Mr.”—she checked his ID—“Mr. Junro. You keep your mouth shut about this and, like I said, I won’t press charges. Say thank you if you agree.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Junro said.

“I’m still not giving your camera back,” Lindsey said.

“That’s okay,” Mr. Junro said. “That’s fine.”

She watched the three men get into their cars and drive away. Then she went back into the warehouse and folded up the uniforms, emptied the guns, cleaned up the sleepers, used the dolly to get the sleepers back to their boxes. There was a bottle of cognac on the card table that had probably not belonged to either Bickle or Lowes, and plenty of beer. She drank steadily. A song came to her, and she sang it. Tall and tan and young and drunken and. She knew she was getting the words wrong. A moonlit pyre. Like a bird on fire. I have tried in my way to be you.

It was almost five a.m. Not much point in going home. The floor came up at her in waves, and she would have liked to lie down on it.

The sleeper in Box 113 was Harrisburg Pennsylvania. The sleepers were all named after their place of origin. Other countries did it differently. Harrisburg Pennsylvania had long eyelashes and a bruise on his cheek that had never faded. The skin of a sleeper was always just a little cooler than you expected. You could get used to anything. She set the alarm in her cell phone to wake her up at seven a.m., which was an hour before the shift change.

In the morning, Harrisburg Pennsylvania was still asleep and Lindsey was still drunk.

All she said to her supervisor, the general office manager, was that she’d fired Bickle and Lowes. Mr. Charles gave her a long-suffering look. He said, “You look a bit rough.”

“I’ll go home early,” she said.

She would have liked to replace Bickle and Lowes with women, but in the end she hired an older man with excellent job references and a graduate student, Jason, who said he planned to spend his evenings working on his dissertation. (He was a philosophy student, and she asked what philosopher his dissertation was on. If he’d said, “Nietzsche,” she might have terminated the interview. But he said, “John Locke.”)

She’d already requested additional grant money to pay for security cameras, but when it was turned down she went ahead and bought the cameras anyway. She had a bad feeling about the two men who worked the Sunday to Wednesday day shift.

as children they were inseparable

On Tuesday, there was a phone call from Alan. He was yelling in Lin-Lan before she could even say hello.

“Berma lisgo airport. Tus fah me?”

“Alan?”

He said, “I’m at the airport, Lin-Lin, just wondering if I can come and stay with you for a bit. Not too long. Just need to keep my head down for a while. You won’t even know I’m there.”

“Back up,” she said. “Alan? Where are you?”

“The airport,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Where all the planes are.”

“I thought you were in Tibet,” she said.

“Well,” Alan said. “That wasn’t working out. I’ve decided to move on.”

“What did you do?” she said. “Alan?”

“Lin-Lin, please,” he said. “I’ll explain everything tonight. When do you get home? Six? I’ll make dinner. House key still under the broken planter?”

“Fisfis meh,” she said. “Fine.”

He hung up.

The last time she’d seen Alan in the flesh was two years ago, just after Elliot had left for good. Her husband.

They’d both been more than a little drunk and Alan was always nicer when he was drunk. He gave her a hug and said, “Come on, Lindsey. You can tell me. It’s a bit of a relief, isn’t it?”

The sky was swollen and low. Lindsey loved this, the sudden green afternoon darkness as rain came down in heavy drumming torrents so loud she could hardly hear the radio station in her car, the calm, jokey pronouncements of the local weather witch. The vice president was under investigation; evidence suggested a series of secret dealings with malign spirits. A woman had given birth to half a dozen rabbits. A local gas station had been robbed by invisible men. Some cult had thrown all the infidels out of a popular pocket universe. Nothing new, in other words. The sky was always falling. U.S. 1 was bumper to bumper all the way to Plantation Key.

Alan sat out on the patio, a bottle of wine under his chair, the wineglass in his hand half full of rain, half full of wine. “Lindsey!” he said. “Want a drink?” He didn’t get up.

She said, “Alan? It’s raining.”

“It’s warm,” he said and blinked fat balls of rain out of his eyelashes. “It was cold where I was.”

“I thought you were going to make dinner,” she said.

“Oh.” Alan stood up and made a show of wringing out his shirt and his peasant-style cotton pants. The rain collapsed steadily on their heads.

“There’s nothing in your kitchen. I would have made margaritas, but all you had was the salt.”

“Let’s go inside,” Lindsey said. “Do you have any dry clothes? Where’s your luggage, Alan?”

He gave her a sly look. “You know. In there.”

She knew. “You put your stuff in Elliot’s room.” It had been her room, too, but she hadn’t slept there in almost a year. She only slept there when she was alone.

Alan said, “All the things he left are still there. Like he might still be in there, too, somewhere down in the sheets, all folded up like a secret note. Very creepy, Lin-Lin.”

Alan was only thirty-eight. The same age as Lindsey, of course, unless you were counting from the point where he was finally real enough to eat his own birthday cake. She thought that he looked every year of their age. Older.

“Go get changed,” she said. “I’ll order takeout.”

“What’s in the grocery bags?” he said.

She slapped his hand away. “Nothing for you,” she said.

close encounters of the absurd kind

She’d met Elliot at an open mike in a pocket universe in Coconut Grove. A benefit at a gay bar for some charity. Men everywhere, but most of them not interested in her. By the time Alan’s turn came, he was already drunk or high or both. He got onstage and said, “I’ll be in the bathroom.” Then he carefully climbed off again. Everyone cheered. Elliot was on later.

Elliot was over seven feet tall; his hair was a sunny yellow and his skin was greenish. Lindsey had noticed the way that Alan looked at him when they first came in. Alan had been in this universe before.

Elliot sang that song about the monster from Ipanema. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he made Lindsey laugh so hard that whiskey came out of her nose. After the song, he came over and sat at the bar. He said, “You’re Alan’s twin.” He only had four fingers on each hand. His skin looked smooth and rough at the same time.

She said, “I’m the original. He’s the copy. Wherever he is. Passed out in the bathroom probably.”

Elliot said, “Should I go get him or should we leave him here?”

“Where are we going?” she said.

“To bed,” he said. His pupils were oddly shaped. His hair wasn’t really hair. It was more like barbules, pinfeathers.

“What would we do there?” she said, and he just looked at her. Sometimes these things worked and sometimes they didn’t. That was the fun of it.

She thought about it. “Okay. On the condition you promise me you’ve never fooled around with Alan. Ever.”

“Your universe or mine?” he said.

Elliot wasn’t the first thing Lindsey had brought back from a pocket universe. She’d gone on vacation once and brought back the pit of a green fruit that fizzed like sherbet when you bit into it, and gave you dreams about staircases, ladders, rockets, things that went up and up, although nothing had come up when she planted it, although almost everything grew in Florida.

Her mother had gone on vacation in a pocket universe when she was first pregnant with Lindsey. Now people knew better. Doctors cautioned pregnant women against such trips.

For the last few years Alan had had a job with a tour group that ran trips out of Singapore. He spoke German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, passable Tibetan, various pocket-universe trade languages. The tours took charter flights into Tibet and then trekked up into some of the more tourist-friendly pocket universes. Tibet was riddled with pocket universes.

“You lost them?” she said.

“Not all of them,” Alan said. His hair was still wet with rain. He needed a haircut. “Just one van. I thought I told the driver Sakya but I may have said Gyantse. They showed up eventually, just two days behind schedule. It’s not as if they were children. Everyone in Sakya speaks English. When they caught up with us I was charming and full of remorse and we were all pals again.”

She waited for the rest of the story. Somehow it made you feel better, knowing that Alan had the same effect on everyone.

“But then there was a mix-up at customs back at Changi. They found a reliquary in this old bastard’s luggage. Some ridiculous little god in a dried-up seed pod. Some other things. The old bastard swore up and down that none of it was his. That I’d snuck up to his room and put them into his luggage. That I’d seduced him. The agency got involved and the whole story about Sakya came out. So that was that.”

“Alan,” she said.

“I was hoping I could stay down here for a few weeks.”

“You’ll stay out of my hair,” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Can I borrow a toothbrush?”

more like Disney World than Disney World

Their parents were retired, living in an older, established pocket universe that was apparently much more like Florida than Florida had ever been. No mosquitoes, no indigenous species larger than a lapdog, except for birdlike creatures whose songs made you want to cry and whose flesh tasted like veal. Fruit trees no one had to cultivate. Grass so downy and tender and fragrant no one slept indoors. Lakes so big and so shallow that you could spend all day walking across them. It wasn’t a large universe, and nowadays there was a long waiting list of men and women waiting to retire to it. Lindsey and Alan’s parents had invested all of their savings in a one-room cabana with a view of one of the smaller lakes. Lotus-eating, they called it. It sounded boring to Lindsey, but her mother no longer e-mailed to ask if Lindsey was seeing anyone. If she was ever going to remarry and produce children. Grandchildren were no longer required. Grandchildren would have obliged Lindsey and Alan’s parents to leave paradise in order to visit once in a while. Come back all that long way to Florida. “That nasty place we used to live,” Lindsey’s mother said. Alan had a theory that their parents were not telling them everything. “They’ve become nudists,” he insisted. “Or swingers. Or both. Mom always had exhibitionist tendencies. Always leaving the bathroom door open. No wonder I’m gay. No wonder you’re not.”

Lindsey lay awake in her bed. Alan was in the kitchen. Pretending to make tea for himself while he looked for a hidden stash of alcohol. There was the kettle, whistling. The refrigerator door opened and shut. The television went on. Went off. Various closet doors and cabinet drawers opened, shut. It was Alan’s ritual, the way he made himself at home. Now he was next door, in Elliot’s room. Two clicks as he shut and locked the door. Other noises. Going through drawers, more carefully this time. Alan had loved Elliot, too. Elliot had left almost everything behind.

Alan. Putting his things away. The rattle of hangers as he made room for himself, shoving Elliot’s clothes farther back into the closet. Or worse, trying them on. Beautiful Elliot’s beautiful clothes.

At two in the morning, he came and stood outside her bedroom door. He said softly, “Lindsey? Are you awake?”

She didn’t answer and he went away again.

In the morning he was asleep on the sofa. A DVD was playing, the sound was off. Somehow he’d found Elliot’s stash of imported pocket-universe porn, the secret stash she’d spent weeks looking for and never found. Trust Alan to turn it up. But she was childishly pleased to see he hadn’t found the gin behind the sofa cushion.

When she came home from work he was out on the patio again, trying, uselessly, to catch her favorite iguana. “Be careful of the tail,” she said.

“Monster came up and bit my toe,” he said.

“That’s Elliot. That’s what I call him. I’ve been feeding him,” she said. “He’s gotten used to people. Probably thinks you’re invading his territory.”

“Elliot?” he said and laughed. “That’s sick.”

“He’s big and green,” she said. “You don’t see the resemblance?” Her iguana disappeared into the network of banyan trees that dipped over the canal. The banyans were full of iguanas, leaves rustling greenly with their green and secret meetings. “The only difference is he comes back.”

She went to get a take-out menu. Or maybe Alan would come down to The Splinter with her. The door to Elliot’s room was open. Everything had been tidied away. Even the bed had been made.

Even worse: when they went down to The Splinter, every time someone sat down next to her, Alan made a game of pre tending that he was her boyfriend. They fought all the way home. In the morning he asked if she would lend him the car. She knew better, but she lent him the car just the same.

Mr. Charles knocked on her office door at two. “Bad news,” he said. “Jack Harris in Pittsburgh went ahead and sent us two dozen sleepers. Jason signed for them. Didn’t think to call us first.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“ ’Fraid not,” he said. “I’m going to call Jack Harris. Ask what the hell he thought he was doing. I made it clear the other day that we weren’t approved with regards to capacity. That’s six over. He’s just going to have to take those six right back again.”

“Has the driver already gone?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Typical,” she said. “They think they can walk all over us.”

“While I’m calling,” he said. “Maybe you go over to the warehouse and take a look at the paperwork. Figure out what to do with this group in the meantime.”

There were twenty-two new sleepers, eighteen males and four females. The new kid from the night shift — Jason — already had them on the dollies.

She went over to get a better look. “Where are they coming from?”

Jason handed her the dockets. “All over the place. Four of them turned up on property belonging to some guy in South Dakota. Says the government ought to compensate him for the loss of his crop.”

“What happened to his crop?” she said.

“He set fire to it. They were underneath a big old dead tree out in his fields. Fortunately for everybody his son was there, too. While the father was pouring gasoline on everything, the son dragged the sleepers into the bed of the truck, got them out of there. Called the hotline.”

“Lucky,” she said. “What the hell was the father thinking?”

“People your age—” Jason said and stopped. Started again. “Older people seem to get these weird ideas sometimes. They want everything to be the way it was. Before.”

“I’m not that old,” she said.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. Got pink. “I just mean, you know…”

She touched her hair. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I have two shadows. So I’m part of the weirdness. People like me are the people that people get ideas about. Why are you on the day shift?”

“Jermaine’s wife is out of town, so he has to take care of the kids. So what are we going to do with these guys? The extras?”

“Leave them on the dollies,” she said. “It’s not like they care where they are.”

She tried calling Alan’s cell phone at five-thirty, but got no answer. She checked e-mail and played Solitaire. She hated Solitaire. Enjoyed shuffling through the cards she should have played. Playing cards when she shouldn’t have. Why should she pretend to want to win when there wasn’t anything to win?

At seven-thirty she looked out and saw her car in the parking lot. When she went out, Alan wasn’t there. So she went down to the warehouse and found him with the grad student. Jason. Flirting, of course. Or talking philosophy. Was there a difference? The other guard, Hurley, was eating his dinner.

“Hey, Lin-Lin,” Alan said. “Come see this. Come here.”

“What are you doing?” Lindsey said. “Where have you been?”

“Grocery shopping,” he said. “Come here, Lindsey. Come see.”

Jason made a don’t-blame-me face. She’d have to take him aside at some point. Warn him about Alan. Philosophy didn’t prepare you for people like Alan.

“Look at her,” Alan said.

She looked down. A woman dressed in a way that suggested she had probably been someone important once, maybe hundreds of years ago, somewhere, probably, that wasn’t anything like here. Versailles Kentucky. “I’ve seen sleepers before.”

“No. You don’t see,” Alan said. “Of course you don’t. You don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, do you? This kind of haircut would look good on you.”

He fluffed Versailles Kentucky’s hair.

“Alan,” she said. A warning.

“Look,” he said. “Just look. Look at her. She looks just like you. She’s you.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Am I?” Alan appealed to Jason. “You thought so, too.”

Jason hung his head. He mumbled something. Said, “I said that maybe there was a similarity.”

Alan reached down and grabbed the sleeper’s bare foot, lifted the leg straight up.

“Alan!” Lindsey said. She pried his hand loose. The indents of his fingers came up on Versailles Kentucky’s leg in red and white. “What are you doing?”

“It’s fine,” Alan said. “I just wanted to see if she has a birthmark like yours. Lindsey has a birthmark behind her knee,” he said to Jason. “Looks like a battleship.”

Even Hurley was staring now.

The sleeper didn’t look a thing like Lindsey. No birthmark. Funny, though. The more she thought about it, the more Lindsey thought maybe she looked like Alan.

not herself today

She turned her head a little to the side. Put on all the lights in the bathroom and stuck her face up close to the mirror again. Stepped back. The longer she looked, the less she looked like anyone she knew. She certainly didn’t look like herself. Maybe she hadn’t for years. There wasn’t anyone she could ask, except Alan.

Alan was right. She needed a haircut.

Alan had the blender out. The kitchen stank of rum. “Let me guess,” he said. “You met someone nice in there.” He held out a glass. “I thought we could have a nice quiet night in. Watch The Weather Channel. Do charades. You can knit. I’ll wind your yarn for you.”

“I don’t knit.”

“No,” he said. His voice was kind. Loving. “You tangle. You knot. You muddle.”

“You needle,” she said. “What is it that you want? Why are you here? To pick a fight? Hash out old childhood psychodramas?”

“Per bol tuh, Lin-Lin?” Alan said. “What do you want?” She sipped ferociously. She knew what she wanted. “Why are you here?”

“This is my home,” she said. “I have everything I want. A job at a company with real growth potential. A boss who likes me. A bar just around the corner, and it’s full of men who want to buy me drinks. A yard full of iguanas and a spare shadow in case one should suddenly fall off.”

“This isn’t your house,” Alan said. “Elliot bought it. Elliot filled it up with his junk. And all the nice stuff is mine. You haven’t changed a thing since he took off.”

“I have more iguanas now,” she said. She took her Rum Runner into the living room. Alan already had The Weather Channel on. Behind the perky blond weather witch, in violent primary colors, a tropical depression hovered off the coast of Cuba.

Alan came and stood behind the couch. He put his drink down and began to rub her neck.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “That storm.”

“Remember when we were kids? That hurricane?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I probably ought to go haul the storm shutters out of the storage unit. We got pounded last summer.”

He went and got the pitcher of frozen rum. Came back and stretched out on the floor at her feet, the pitcher balanced on his stomach. “That kid at your warehouse,” he said. He closed his eyes.

“Jason?”

“He seems like a nice kid.”

“He’s a philosophy student, Lan-Lan. Come on. You can do better.”

“Do better? I’m thinking out loud about a guy with a fine ass, Lindsey. Not buying a house. Or contemplating a career change. Oops, I guess I am officially doing that. Perhaps I’ll become a do-gooder. A do-better.”

“Just don’t make my life harder, okay? Alan?” She nudged him in the hip with her toe, and watched, delighted, as the pitcher tipped over.

“Fisfis tuh!” Alan said. “You did that on purpose!”

He took off his shirt and tossed it at her. Missed. There was a puddle of pink rum on the tile floor.

“Of course I did it on purpose,” she said. “I’m not drunk enough yet to do it accidentally.”

“I’ll drink to that.” He picked up her Rum Runner and slurped noisily. “Go make another pitcher while I clean up this fucking mess.”

do the monster

“He’s got gorgeous eyes. Really, really green. Green as that color there. Right at the eye. That swirl.”

“I hadn’t noticed his eyes.”

“That’s because he isn’t your type. You don’t like nice guys. Here, can I put this on?”

“Yeah. There’s a track on there, I think it’s the third track. Yeah, that one. Elliot loved this song. He’d put it on, start twitching, then tapping, then shaking, all over. By the end he’d be slithering all over the furniture.”

“Oh, yeah. He was a god on the dance floor. But look at me. I’m not too bad, either.”

“He was more flexible around the hips. I think he had a bendier spine. He could turn his head almost all the way around.”

“Come on, Lindsey, you’re not dancing. Come on and dance.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be such a pain in the ass.”

“I have a pain inside,” she said. And then wondered what she meant. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

“Come on. Just dance. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m okay. See? I’m dancing.”

Jason came to dinner. Alan wore one of Elliot’s shirts. Lindsey made a perfect cheese soufflé, and she didn’t even say anything when Jason assumed that Alan had made it.

She listened to Alan’s stories about various pocket universes he’d toured as if she had never heard them before. Most were owned by the Chinese government, and as well as the more famous tourist universes, there were the ones where the Chinese sent dissidents. Very few of the pocket universes were larger than, say, Maryland. Some had been abandoned a long time ago. Some were inhabited. Some weren’t friendly. Some pocket universes contained their own pocket universes. You could go a long ways in and never come out again. You could start your own country out there and do whatever you liked, and yet most of the people Lindsey knew, herself included, had never done anything more adventuresome than go for a week to some place where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you’d read as a child; a brochure; a dream.

There were sex-themed pocket universes, of course. Tax shelters and places to dispose of all kinds of things: trash, junked cars, bodies. People went to casinos inside pocket universes more like Vegas than Vegas. More like Hawaii than Hawaii. You must be this tall to enter. This rich. Just this foolish. Because who knew what might happen? Pocket universes might wink out again, suddenly, all at once. There were best-selling books explaining how that might happen.

There was pocket-universe spillover, too. Alan began to reminisce about his adolescence in a way that suggested that it had not really been all that long ago.

“Venetian Pools,” he said to Jason. “I haven’t been there in a couple of years. Since I was a kid, really. All those grottoes that you could wander off into with someone. Go make out and get such an enormous hard-on you had to jump in the water so nobody noticed and the water was so fucking cold! Can you still get baked ziti at the restaurant? Do you remember that, Lindsey? Sitting out by the pool in your bikini and eating baked ziti? But I heard you can’t swim now. Because of the mermaids.”

The mermaids were an invasive species, like the iguanas. People had brought them from one of the Disney pocket universes as pets, and now they were everywhere, small but numerous in a way that appealed to children and bird-watchers. They liked to show off and although they didn’t seem much smarter than, say, a talking dog, and maybe not even as smart, since they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures, they were too popular with the tourists at the Venetian Pools to be gotten rid of. There were freshwater mermaids and saltwater mermaids — larger and more elusive — and the freshwater kind had begun to show up at Venetian Pools at least ten years ago.

Jason said he’d taken his sister’s kids. “I heard they used to drain the pools every night in summer. But they can’t do that now, because of the mermaids. So the water isn’t as clear as it used to be. They can’t even set up filters because the mermaids just tear them out again. Like beavers, I guess. They’ve constructed this elaborate system of dams and retaining walls and structures out of the coral, these elaborate pens to hold fish. Venetian Pools sell fish so you can toss them in for the mermaids to round up. The kids were into that.”

“We get them in the canal sometimes, the saltwater ones,” Lindsey said. “They’re a lot bigger. They sing.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Lots of singing. Really eerie stuff. Makes you feel like shit. They pipe elevator music over the loudspeakers to drown it out, but even the kids felt bad after a while. I had to buy all this stuff in the gift shop to cheer them up.”

Lindsey pondered the problem of Jason, the favorite uncle who could be talked into buying things. He was too young for Alan. When you thought about it, who wasn’t too young for Alan?

Alan said, “Didn’t you have plans, Lindsey?”

“Did I?” Lindsey said. Then relented. “Actually, I was thinking about heading down to The Splinter. Maybe I’ll see you guys down there later?”

“That old hole,” Alan said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was sending out those old invisible death rays in Jason’s direction. Lindsey could practically feel the air getting thicker. It was like humidity, only skankier. “I used to go there to hook up with cute straight guys in the bathroom while Lindsey was passing out her phone number over by the pool tables. The good old days, right, Lindsey? You know what they say about girls with two shadows, don’t you, Jason?”

Jason said, “Maybe I should just head home.” But Lindsey could tell by the way that he was looking at Alan that he had no idea what he was saying. He wasn’t even really listening to what Alan said. He was just responding to that vibe that Alan put out. That come hither come hither come a little more hither siren song.

“Don’t go,” Alan said. Luscious, dripping invisible sweetness rolled off him. Lindsey knew how to do that, too, although she mostly didn’t bother now. Most guys, you didn’t have to. “Stay a little longer. Lindsey has plans, and I’m lonely. Stay a little longer and I’ll play you some of the highlights of Lindsey’s ex-husband’s collection of pocket-universe gay porn.”

“Alan,” Lindsey said. Second warning. She knew he was keeping count.

“Sorry,” Alan said. He put his hand on Jason’s leg. “Husband’s collection of gay porn. She and Elliot, wherever he is, are still married. I had the biggest hard-on for Elliot. He always said Lindsey was all he wanted. But it’s never about what you want, is it? It’s about what you need. Right?”

“Right,” Jason said.

“We’ll talk later,” Lindsey said. “Beh slam bih, tuh eb meh.”

“Sure,” Alan said. “Talk, talk.” He blew her a kiss.

How did Alan do it? Why did everyone except for Lindsey fall for it? Except, she realized, pedaling her bike down to The Splinter, she did fall for it. She still fell for it. It was her house, and who had been thrown out of it? Who had been insulted, mocked, abused, then summarily dismissed? Her. That’s who.

Cars went by, riding their horns. Damn Alan anyway.

She didn’t bother to chain up the bike; she probably wouldn’t be riding it home. She went into The Splinter and sat down beside a man with an aggressively sharp cologne.

“You look nice,” she said. “Buy me a drink and I’ll be nice, too.”

there are easier ways to kill yourself

The man was kissing her neck. She couldn’t find her keys, but that didn’t matter. The door was unlocked. Jason’s car still in the driveway. No surprise there.

“I have two shadows,” she said. It was all shadows. They were shadows, too.

“I don’t care,” the man said. He really was very nice.

“No,” she said. “I mean, my brother’s home. We have to be quiet. Okay if we don’t turn on the lights? Where are you from?”

“Georgia,” the man said. “I work construction. Came down here for the hurricane.”

“The hurricane?” she said. “I thought it was headed for the Gulf of Mexico. Watch out for the counter.”

“Now it’s coming back this way. Won’t hit for another couple of days if it hits. You into kinky stuff? You can tie me up,” the man said.

“Better knot,” she said. “Get it? I’m not into knots. Can never get them untied, even sober. This guy had to have his foot amputated. No circulation. True story. Friend told me.”

“Guess I’ve been lucky so far,” the man said. He didn’t sound too disappointed, either way. “This house has been through some hurricanes, I bet.”

“One or two,” she said. “Water comes right in over the tile floor. Messy. Then it goes out again.”

She tried to remember his name. Couldn’t. It didn’t matter. She felt terrific. That had been the thing about being married. The monogamy. Even drunk, she’d always known who was in bed with her. Elliot had been different, all right, but he had always been the same kind of different. Never a different kind of different. Didn’t like kissing. Didn’t like sleeping in the same bed. Didn’t like being serious. Didn’t like it when Lindsey was sad. Didn’t like living in a house. Didn’t like the way the water in the canal felt. Didn’t like this, didn’t like that. Didn’t like the Keys. Didn’t like the way people here looked at him. Didn’t stay. Elliot, Elliot, Elliot.

“My name’s Alberto,” the man said.

“Sorry,” she said. She and Elliot had always had fun in bed.

“He had a funny-looking penis,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Alberto said.

“Do you want something to drink?” she said.

“Actually, do you have a bathroom?”

“Down the hall,” she said. “First door.”

But he came back in a minute. He turned on the lights and stood there.

“Like what you see?” she said.

His arms were shiny and wet. There was blood on his arms. “I need a tourniquet,” he said. “Some kind of tourniquet.”

“What did you do?” she said. Almost sober. Putting her robe on. “Is it Alan?”

But it was Jason. Blood all over the bathtub and the half-tiled wall. He’d slashed both his wrists open with a potato peeler. The potato peeler was still there in his hand.

“Is he okay?” she said. “Alan! Where the fuck are you?”

Alberto wrapped one of her good hand towels around one of Jason’s wrists. “Hold this.” He stuck another towel around the other wrist and then wrapped duct tape around that. “I called 911,” he said. “He’s breathing. Couldn’t or didn’t want to do the job properly. Bad choice of equipment either way. Who is this guy? Your brother?”

“My employee,” she said. “I don’t believe this. What’s with the duct tape?”

“Carry it with me,” he said. “You never know when you’re going to need some duct tape. Get me a blanket. We need to keep him warm. My ex-wife did this once.”

She skidded down the hall. Slammed open the door to Elliot’s room. Turned on the lights and grabbed the comforter off the bed.

“Vas poh! Your new boyfriend’s in the bathroom,” she said. “Cut his wrists with my potato peeler. Wake up, Lan-Lan! This is your mess.”

“Fisfis wah, Lin-Lin,” Alan said, so she pushed him off the bed.

“What did you do, Alan?” she said. “Did you do something to him?”

He was wearing a pair of Elliot’s pajama bottoms. “You’re not being funny,” he said.

“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I’m drunk. There’s a man named Alberto in the bathroom. Jason tried to kill himself. Or something.”

“Oh, fuck,” he said. Tried to sit up. “I was nice to him, Lindsey! Okay? It was real nice. We fucked and then we smoked some stuff and then we were kissing and I fell asleep.”

She held out her hand, pulled him up off the floor. “What kind of stuff? Come on.”

“Something I picked up somewhere,” he said. She wasn’t really listening. “Good stuff. Organic. Blessed by monks. They give it to the gods. I took some off a shrine. Everybody does it. You just leave a bowl of milk or something instead. There’s no fucking way it made him crazy.”

The bathroom was crowded with everyone inside it. No way to avoid standing in Jason’s blood. “Oh, fuck,” Alan said.

“My brother, Alan,” she said. “Here’s his comforter. For Jason. Alan, this is Alberto. Jason, can you hear me?” His eyes were open now.

Alberto said to Alan, “It’s better than it looks. He didn’t really slice up his wrists. More like he peeled them. Dug into one vein pretty good, but I think I’ve slowed down the bleeding.”

Alan shoved Lindsey out of the way and threw up in the sink.

“Alan?” Jason said. There were sirens.

“No,” Lindsey said. “It’s me. Lindsey. Your boss. My bathtub, Jason. Your blood all over my bathtub. My potato peeler! Mine! What were you thinking?”

“There was an iguana in your freezer,” Jason said.

Alberto said, “Why the potato peeler?”

“I was just so happy,” Jason said. He was covered in blood. “I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I didn’t want to stop feeling that way. You know?”

“No,” Lindsey said.

“Are you going to fire me?” Jason said.

“What do you think?” Lindsey said.

“I’ll sue for sexual harassment if you try,” Jason said. “I’ll say you fired me because I’m gay. Because I slept with your brother.”

Alan threw up in the sink again.

“How do you feel now?” Alberto said. “You feel okay?”

“I just feel so happy,” Jason said. He began to cry.

one boy, raised from the dead

During the summer between third and fourth grade, Lindsey had witnessed the mother of a girl named Amelia Somersmith call a boy back to life when he fell off the roof during a game of hide-and-seek. He fell off when a kid named Martin saw him hiding up there, and yelled his name. David Filgish stood up and just to show he didn’t care that he’d been seen, he turned a cartwheel along the garage roof, only he misjudged where the edge was. He had definitely been dead. Everybody was sure about that. Amelia’s mother came running out of the house while everyone was standing there, wondering what to do, looking down at David, and she’d said, “Oh, God, David, you idiot! Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead. Get up right now or I’m calling your mother!”

There had been a piece of grass lying right on David’s eye. Amelia’s mother’s shirt hadn’t been buttoned right, so you could see a satiny brown triangle of stomach, and she had sounded so angry that David Filgish sat up and started to cry.

Lindsey Driver had thrown up in the grass, but no one else noticed, not even her twin, Alan, who was only just becoming real enough to play with other children.

They were all too busy asking David if he was all right. Did he know what day it was. How many fingers. What was it like being dead.

not much of a bedside manner

Alan went with Jason in the ambulance. The EMTs were both quite good-looking. The wind was stronger, pushing the trees around like a bully. Lindsey would have to put the storm shutters up.

For some reason Alberto was still there. He said, “I’d really like a beer. What’ve you got?”

Lindsey could have gone for something a little stronger. She could smell nothing but blood. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

“Not all that recovered,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Lindsey said. “You’re a really nice guy. But I wish you would go away. I’d like to be alone.”

He held out his bloody arms. “Could I take a shower first?”

“Could you just go?” Lindsey said.

“I understand,” he said. “It’s been a rough night. A terrible thing has happened. Let me help. I could stay and help you clean up.”

Lindsey said nothing.

“I see,” he said. There was blood on his mouth, too. Like he’d been drinking blood. He had good shoulders. Nice eyes. She kept looking at his mouth. The duct tape was back in a pocket of his cargo pants again. He seemed to have a lot of stuff in his pockets. “You don’t like me, after all?”

“I don’t like nice guys,” Lindsey said.

There were support groups for people whose shadow grew into a twin. There were support groups for women whose husbands left them. There were support groups for alcoholics. Probably there were support groups for people who hated support groups, but Lindsey didn’t believe in support groups.

The warehouse had been built to take a pretty heavy hit. Nevertheless, there were certain precautions: the checklist ran to thirty-five pages. Without Jason they were short-handed, and she had a bad hangover that had lasted all through the weekend, all the way into Monday. The worst in a while. By the time Alan got back from the hospital on Saturday night, she’d finished the gin and started in on the tequila. She was almost wishing that Alberto had stayed. She thought about asking how Jason was, but it seemed pointless. Either he was okay or he wasn’t. She wasn’t okay. Alan got her down the hall and onto her bed and then climbed into bed, too. Pulled the blanket over both of them.

“Go away,” she said.

“I’m freezing,” he said. “That fucking hospital. That air-conditioning. No wonder people are sick in hospitals. Just let me lie here.”

“Go away,” she said again. “Fisfis wah.”

When she woke up, she was still saying it. “Go away, go away, go away.” He wasn’t in her bed. Instead there was a dead iguana, the little one from the freezer. Alan had arranged it — if a dead frozen iguana can be said to be arranged — on the pillow beside her face.

Alan was gone. The bathtub stank of old blood, and the rain slammed down on the roof like nails on glass. Little pellets of ice on the grass outside. Now the radio said the hurricane was on course to make landfall somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and St. Augustine sometime Wednesday afternoon. There were no plans to evacuate the Keys. Plenty of wind and rain and nastiness due for the Miami area, but no real damage. She couldn’t think why she’d asked Alberto to leave. The storm shutters still needed to go up. He had seemed like a guy who would do that.

She threw away the thawed iguana. Threw away the potato peeler all rusted with blood. Ran hot water in the bath until the bottom of the tub was a faint, blistered pink. Then she crawled back into bed.

If Alan had been there, he could have opened a can and made her soup. Brought her ginger ale in a glass. Finally she turned on the television in the living room, loud enough that she could hear it from her bedroom. That way she wouldn’t be listening for Alan. She could pretend that he was home, sitting out in the living room, watching some old monster movie and painting his fingernails black, the way he had done in high school. Kids with conjoined shadows were supposed to be into all that goth makeup, all that music. When Alan had found out twins were supposed to have secret twin languages, he’d done that, too, invented a language, Lin-Lan, and made her memorize it. Made her talk it at the dinner table, too. Ifzon meh nadora plezbig meant: Guess what I did? Bandy Tim Wong legkwa fisfis, meh meant: Went all the way with Tim Wong. (Tim Wong fucked me, in the vernacular.)

People with two shadows were supposed to get in trouble. Supposed to be trouble. They were supposed to lead friends and lovers astray, bring confusion to their enemies, bring down disaster wherever they went. (She never went anywhere.) Alan had always been a conformist at heart. Whereas she had a house and a job and once she’d even been married. If anyone was keeping track, Lindsey thought it ought to be clear who was ahead.

Mr. Charles still hadn’t managed to get rid of the six supernumerary sleepers from Pittsburgh. Jack Harris could shuffle paper like nobody’s business.

“I’ll call him,” Lindsey offered. “You know I love a good fight.”

“Good luck,” Mr. Charles said. “He says he won’t take them back until after the hurricane goes through. But rules say they have to be out of here twenty-four hours before the hurricane hits. We’re caught between a rock—”

“—and an asshole,” she said. “Let me take care of it.”

She was in the warehouse, on hold with someone who worked for Harris, when Jason showed up.

“What’s up with that?” Valentina was saying. “Your arms.”

“Fell through a sliding door,” Jason said. “Plate glass.”

“That’s not good,” Valentina said.

“Lost almost three pints of blood. Just think about that. Three pints. Hey, Lindsey. Doctors just let me out of the hospital. Said I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy.”

“Valentina,” Lindsey said. “Take the phone for a moment. Don’t worry. It’s on hold. Just yell if anyone picks up. Jason, can I talk to you over there for a moment?”

“Sure thing,” Jason said.

He winced when she grabbed him above the elbow. She didn’t loosen her grip until she had him a couple of aisles away. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t fire you. Besides the sexual harassment thing. Because I would enjoy that. Hearing you try to make that case in court.”

Jason said, “Alan’s moving in with me. Said you threw him out.”

Was any of this a surprise? Yes, and no. She said, “So if I fire you, he’ll have to get a job.”

“That depends,” Jason said. “Are you firing me or not?”

“Fisfis buh. Go ask Alan what that means.”

“Hey, Lindsey. Lindsey, hey. Someone named Jack Harris is on the phone.” Valentina. Getting too close for this conversation to go any further.

“I don’t know why you want this job,” Lindsey said.

“The benefits,” Jason said. “You should see the bill from the emergency room.”

“Or why you want my brother.”

“Ms. Driver? He says it’s urgent.”

“Tell him just a second,” Lindsey said. To Jason: “All right. You can keep the job on one condition.”

“Which is?” He didn’t sound nearly as suspicious as he ought to have sounded. Still early days with Alan.

“You get the man on the phone to take back those six sleepers. Today.”

“How the fuck do I do that?” Jason said.

“I don’t care. But they had better not be here when I show up tomorrow morning. If they’re here, you had better not be. Okay?” She poked him in the arm above the bandage. “Next time borrow something sharper than a potato peeler. I’ve got a whole block full of good German knives.”

“Lindsey,” Valentina said, “this Harris guy says he can call you back tomorrow if now isn’t a good time.”

“Jason will take the call,” Lindsey said.

everything must go

Her favorite liquor store put everything on sale whenever a hurricane was due. Just their way of making a bad day a little more bearable. She stocked up on everything but only had a glass of wine with dinner. Made a salad and ate it out on the sun dock. The air had that electric green shimmy to it she associated with hurricanes. The water was still as milk, but deflating the dock was a bitch nevertheless. She stowed it in the garage. When she came out, a pod of saltwater mermaids was going out to sea. Who could have ever confused a manatee with a mermaid? They turned and looked at her. Dove down, although she could still see them ribboning there, down along the frondy bottom.

The last time a hurricane had come through, her sun dock had sailed out of the garage and ended up two canals over.

She threw the leftover salad on the grass for the iguanas. The sun went down without a fuss.

Alan didn’t come by, so she packed up his clothes for him. Washed the dirty clothes first. Listened to the rain start. She put his backpack out on the dining room table with a note. Good luck with the suicide kid.

In the morning she went out in the rain, which was light but steady, and put up the storm shutters. Her neighbors were doing the same. Cut herself on the back of the hand while she was working on the next-to-last one. Bled everywhere. Alan pulled up in Jason’s car while she was still cursing. He went into the house and got her a Band-Aid. They put up the last two shutters without talking.

Finally Alan said, “It was my fault. I don’t think he does drugs.”

“He’s not a bad kid,” she said. “So not your type.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not about that. You know. I guess I mean about everything.”

They went back into the house and he saw his backpack. “Well,” he said.

“Filhatz warfoon meh,” she said. “Bilbil tuh.”

“Nent bruk,” he said. No kidding.

He didn’t stay for breakfast. She didn’t feel any less or more real after he left.

The six sleepers were out of the warehouse and Jason had a completed stack of paperwork for her. Lots of signatures. Lots of duplicates and triplicates and fucklicates, as Valentina liked to say.

“Not bad,” Lindsey said. “Did Jack Harris offer you a job?”

“He offered to come hand me my ass,” Jason said. “I said he’d have to get in line. Nasty weather. Are you staying out there?”

“Where would I go?” she said. “There’s a big party at The Splinter tonight. It’s not like I have to come in to work tomorrow.”

“I thought they were evacuating the Keys, after all,” he said.

“It’s voluntary,” she said. “They don’t care if we stay or go. I’ve been through hurricanes. When Alan and I were kids, we spent one camped in a bathtub under a mattress. Read comics with a flashlight all night long. The noise is the worst thing. Good luck with Alan, by the way.”

“I’ve never lived with anybody before.” So maybe he knew just enough to know he had no idea what he had gotten himself into with Alan. “I’ve never fallen for anybody like this.”

“There isn’t anybody like Alan,” she said. “He has the power to cloud and confuse the minds of men.”

“What’s your superpower?” Jason said.

“He clouds and confuses,” she said. “I confuse and then cloud. It’s the order we do it in that you have to pay attention to.”

She told Mr. Charles the good news about Jack Harris; they had a cup of coffee together to celebrate, then locked the warehouse down. Mr. Charles had to pick up his kids at school. Hurricanes meant holidays. You didn’t get snow days in Florida.

On the way home all the traffic was going the other way. The wind made the traffic lights swing and flip like paper lanterns. She had that feeling she’d had at Christmas, as a child. As if someone was bringing her a present. Something shiny and loud and sharp and messy. She’d always loved bad weather. She’d always loved weather witches in their smart, black suits. Their divination kits, their dramatic seizures, their prophecies which were never entirely accurate, but which always rhymed smartly. When she was little she’d wanted more than anything to grow up and be a weather witch, although why that once had been true, she had no idea.

She rode her bike down to The Splinter. Got soaked. Didn’t care. Had a couple of whiskey sours, and then decided she was too excited about the hurricane to get properly drunk. She didn’t want to be drunk. And there wasn’t a man in the bar she wanted to bring home. The best part of hurricane sex was the hurricane, not the sex, so why bother?

The sky was green as a bruise and the rain was practically horizontal. There were no cars at all on the way home. She was only the least bit drunk. She went down the middle of the road and almost ran over an iguana four feet long, nose to tail. Stiff as a board, but its sides went out and in like little bellows. The rain got them like that, sometimes. They got stupid and slow in the cold. The rest of the time they were stupid and fast.

She wrapped her jacket around the iguana, making sure the tail was immobilized. You could break a man’s arm if you had a tail like that. She carried it under one arm, walking her bike all the way back to the house, and decided it would be a good idea to put it in the bathtub. Then she went back out into her yard with a flashlight. Checked the storm shutters to make sure they were properly fastened and discovered three more iguanas as she went. Two smaller ones and one real monster. She brought them all inside.

At eight p.m. it was pitch-dark. The hurricane was two dozen miles out. Picking up water to drop on the heads of people who didn’t want any more water. She dozed off at midnight and woke up when the power went off.

The air in the room was so full of water she had to gasp for breath. The iguanas were shadows stretched along the floor. The black shapes of the liquor boxes were every Christmas present she’d ever wanted.

Everything outside was clanking or buzzing or yanking or shrieking. She felt her way into the kitchen and got out the box with her candles and her flashlight and her emergency radio. The shutters banged away like a battle.

“Swung down,” the radio told her. “How about that — and this is just the edge, folks. Stay indoors and hunker down if you haven’t already left town. This is only a Category 2, but you betcha it’ll feel a lot bigger down here on the Keys. We’re going to have at least three more hours of this before the eye passes over us. This is one big baby girl, and she’s taking her time. The good ones always do.”

Lindsey could hardly get the candles lit; the matches were that soggy, her hands greased with sweat. When she went in the bathroom, the iguana looked as battered and beat, in the light from the candle, as some old suitcase.

Her bedroom had too many windows to stay there. She got her pillow and her quilt and a fresh T-shirt. A fresh pair of underwear.

When she went to check Elliot’s room there was a body on the bed. She dropped the candle. Tipped wax onto her bare foot. “Elliot?” she said. But when she got the candle lit again it wasn’t Elliot, of course, and it wasn’t Alan, either. It was the sleeper. Versailles Kentucky. The one who looked like Alan or maybe Lindsey, depending on who was doing the looking. A rubber vise clamped down around Lindsey’s head. Barometric pressure.

She dropped the candle again. It was exactly the sort of joke Alan liked. Not a joke at all, that is. She had a pretty good idea where the other sleepers were — in Jason’s apartment, not on the way to Pittsburgh. And if anyone found out, it would be her job, too, not just Jason’s. No government pension for Lindsey. No comfy early retirement.

Her hand still wasn’t steady. The match finally caught and the candle dripped down wax on Versailles Kentucky’s neck. But if it was that easy to wake up a sleeper, Lindsey would already know about it.

In the meantime, the bed was up against an exterior wall and there were all the windows. Lindsey dragged Versailles Kentucky off the bed.

She couldn’t get a good grip. Versailles Kentucky was heavy. She flopped. Her head snapped back, hair snagging on the floor. Lindsey squatted, took hold of her by the upper arms and pulled her down the dark hall to the bathroom, keeping that floppy head off the ground. This must be what it was like to have murdered someone. She would kill Alan. Think of this as practice, she thought. Body disposal. Dry run. Wet run.

She dragged Versailles Kentucky over the bathroom threshold and leaned the body over the tub’s lip. She grabbed the iguana. Put it on the bathroom floor. Arranged Kentucky in the tub, first one leg and then the other, folding her down on top of herself.

Next she got the air mattress out of the garage, the noise worse out there. She filled the mattress halfway and squeezed it through the bathroom door. Put more air in. Tented it over the tub. Went and found the flashlight, got a bottle of gin out of the freezer. It was still cold, thank God. She swaddled the iguana in a towel that was still stiff with Jason’s blood. Put it in the tub again. Sleeper and iguana. Madonna and her very ugly baby.

Everything was clatter and wail. Lindsey heard a shutter, somewhere, go sailing off to somewhere else. The floor of the living room was wet in the circle of her flashlight when she went back in the living room to collect the other iguanas. That was either the rain beginning to force its way in under the front door and around the sliding glass doors, or else it was the canal. She collected the three other iguanas, dumped them into the tub, too. “Women and iguanas first,” she said, and swigged her gin. But nobody heard her over the noise of the wind.

She sat hunched on the lid of her toilet and drank until the wind was almost something she could pretend to ignore. Like a band in a bar that doesn’t know how loud they’re playing. Eventually she fell asleep, still sitting on the toilet, and only woke up when she dropped the bottle and broke it. The iguanas rustled around like dry leaves in the tub. The wind was gone. It was the eye of the storm or else she’d missed the eye entirely and the rest of the hurricane as well.

Light came faintly through the shuttered window. The batteries of her emergency radio were dead but her cell phone still showed a signal. Three messages from Alan and six messages from a number that she guessed was Jason’s. Maybe Alan wanted to apologize for something.

She went outside to see what had become of the world. Except, what had become of the world was that she was no longer in it. The street in front of her house was no longer the street in front of her house. It had become someplace else entirely. There were no other houses. As if the storm had carried them all away. She stood in a meadow full of wildflowers. There were mountains in the far distance, cloudy and blue. The air was very crisp.

Her cell phone showed no signal. When she looked back at her house, she was looking back into her own world. The hurricane was still there, smeared out onto the horizon like poison. The canal was full of the ocean. The Splinter was probably splinters. Her front door still stood open.

She went back inside and filled an old backpack with bottles of gin. Threw in candles, her matchbox, some cans of soup. Padded it all out with underwear and a sweater or two. The white stuff on those mountains was probably snow.

If she put her ear against the sliding glass doors that went out to the canal, she was listening to the eye, that long moment of emptiness when the worst is still to come. Versailles Kentucky was still asleep in the bathtub with the iguanas who were not. There were red marks on Versailles Kentucky’s arms and legs where the iguanas had scratched her. Nothing fatal. Lindsey got a brown eyeliner pencil out of the drawer under the sink and lifted up the sleeper’s leg. Drew a birthmark in the shape of a battleship. The water in the air would make it smear, but so what. If Alan could have his joke, she would have hers, too.

She lowered the cool leg. On an impulse, she lifted out the smallest iguana, still wrapped in its towel.

When she went out her front door again with her backpack and her bike and the iguana, the meadow with its red and yellow flowers was still there and the sun was coming up behind the mountains, although this was not the direction that the sun usually came up in and Lindsey was glad. She bore the sun a grudge because it did not stand still; it gave her no advantage except in that moment when it passed directly overhead and she had no shadow. Not even one. Everything that had once belonged to her alone was back inside Lindsey where it should have been.

There was something, maybe a mile or two away, that might have been an outcropping of rock. The iguana fit in the basket on her handlebars and the backpack wasn’t too uncomfortably heavy. No sign of any people, anywhere, although if she were determined enough, and if her bicycle didn’t get a puncture, surely she’d come across whatever the local equivalent of a bar was, eventually. If there wasn’t a bar now, then she could always hang around a while longer, see who came up with that bright idea first.