Ghost Lights

1

The walls were kittens and puppies. Like other pet facilities he had seen — even the Humane Society, where he had taken Casey when she was six to pick out a kitten — the kennel trafficked in a brand of cuteness he could not endorse. He had nothing against pets; in theory, the more pets the better, although he personally did not own one. Not in the sense of unchecked proliferation, feral cats mating all over the place, etc., but in the sense that cats were good, dogs were good. No argument there.

But he did not see why this high regard for pets, his or anyone else’s, should be represented by photographs of puppies with word balloons emerging from their mouths — balloons that contained supposedly witty sayings that were, in fact, stupid. There was no call for dachshunds dressed up as the Blues Brothers.

Susan’s name had been on the list of emergency contacts for this particular dog. When its owner failed to pick it up after several weeks the kennel had finally called her. Instantly she felt guilty; she should have thought about the dog far sooner, she told Hal. She had forgotten the dog, forgotten all about it.

What was wrong with her? she asked him insistently.

Now here they were, come to pick up her missing boss’s dog — the dog of a man who had vanished many weeks ago into a tropical jungle — and the woman at the front desk was worried for the dog. Not for the absent owner, no. She was interested only in the dog’s situation.

Hal glanced over — surreptitiously, he hoped. She was a heavy, lank person with bleached hair showing black at the roots and a kind of jowly gray pallor that bespoke ill health. Neither dog kennels nor the Humane Society were typically staffed by so-called beautiful people, in his experience. They were staffed by committed pet lovers, and frankly these committed pet lovers put less than average value on appealing physically to their fellow men.

Or maybe they sought out the company of pets in the first place because they did not enjoy the company of said fellow men. It was understandable — a form of relaxation, perhaps. Even if he himself was not a committed pet lover per se, a committed a.k.a. professional pet lover, he could appreciate that. As to the lank half-dyed hair, greasy pallor, etc., they were probably caused by a philosophy. Hygiene and style were aimed at winning the favor of others, after all, and the committed pet lovers already had the respect, or at least the gratitude — which might even be preferable, in the eyes of a committed pet lover — of peers and strangers alike. They were monks and nuns, in a sense. Monks and nuns of the pets.

The dog woman held up a rubber banana printed with a smiley face and squeezed it. It squeaked.

“She’s not eating well. I recommend a chew toy. It could ease the transition.”

Susan, on the other hand, was worried not about the dog but for the dog’s owner, her boss. She was fond of this employer far beyond the livelihood he provided, which might no longer be forthcoming since he was gone from the United States and possibly also dead.

She had confessed she was afraid of this. She had leaned over in bed and whispered her fear in the small hours of the morning. She was afraid her employer, to whom she had grown close — in the kind of unequal, crypto-friendship for which such relations occasionally allowed — would never return from the tropics, where he had disappeared some weeks ago while ostensibly conducting some routine business.

Hal was strongly ambivalent about the employer, known for some no-doubt-pretentious reason simply as T. For starters, he refused to refer to the guy using a single letter. He called him by his last name Stern, though seldom to his face. But Susan would brook no criticism. Ever since the boss guy’s girlfriend died — for which Hal had sympathy, of course, but which still did not sanctify him — he could do no wrong in her eyes. To her he had become almost a son surrogate.

“Just sign these and we’ll release her into your custody,” said the dog woman abruptly, and shuffled papers. Susan was shaky, emotional, and clearly the dog woman was uncomfortable with this display. She handed Susan a clipboard and a pen. “She’s all up to date on her shots, see? Two months ago, 08-05-94 it says here. And the leg’s healed pretty well where it was amputated. The name and number of the vet he uses are on the card here. Wait a minute and I’ll make you a copy.”

She turned and disappeared through a doorway.

“It’s a three-legged dog?” he asked Susan.

“She was run over.”

“I didn’t know it was a dog amputee.”

Susan seemed to be trembling. He pulled her closer and held her. First the man let his dog run around in the street till she was hit by a car, then he flew off to Central America and left her in a kennel.

Quite nice.

After a minute Susan pulled away. While she busied herself rummaging around in her purse he wandered over to a door marked RESTROOM. He often escaped to bathrooms when he was in public, stood at sinks and gazed into mirrors. Bathrooms were the respite. What would he do without them? From when he was a boy, gangly and shy, he had found comfort here.

Slowly he washed his hands, let the warm water run. On the wall behind him was a mural of clouds, with stylized dogs and cats jumping among them. In the mirror he saw himself with a flying poodle over his head.

The three-legged dog deserved to be happy, as did they all. But a three-legged dog was not a four-legged dog. A three-legged dog had to mean more upkeep, with the addition of pathos. . of course, this right here was the kind of impulse Casey despised. She hated pity and railed against it, in particular the presumption that pity implied and the way it had of raising one person above another, subjugating the injured and then elevating them to make up for it. Injury is not a moral state, she had said to him once when she was angry. People think disability makes you a better person — on the inside you must be some kind of martyr, they figure, since on the outside you’re wrecked. But losing the use of your legs does not make you the Dalai Lama, she said. So the pity, which people usually reserve for things that don’t threaten them, is bullshit.

He accepted this, from her perspective, but pity was a fact of life when it came to dogs with amputations and when it came to the paraplegic. There was nothing in his life that had hurt him more than what happened to Casey, the shock of which would never fully recede; so he and Susan already had, occupying the central space in their lives, a victim — the only victim, the closest victim possible. They did not need a canine victim too. They were decent people but they were not cut from the same cloth as the kennel employee. They were not caregivers first and foremost; they didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Hey! Let’s go nurture something.”

They were only parents.

Other parents, whose children had not been hurt, could never know how parenthood could be extended infinitely on the heels of such an event and become a domed universe, a closed universe beneath the opaque dome of the accident. Even the stars were not visible anymore.

The Milky Way, he thought suddenly. The Milky Way was out there. Not only that — a hundred billion galaxies, some with a trillion stars.

Shifting away from the blurry spiral arms that could not be fathomed, he gazed at the tiles on the wall beside him, their creamy blandness. At a certain moment — oftentimes at the crossroads between youth and adulthood — a change of position occurred between the self and the world. As a child and even a teenager he had felt small, looking up at the rest of it all as a monument, but then suddenly he was older and part of the architecture, its tangibility and the impulse behind it, its failings and its strengths. The heavy installations had lost their majesty and seemed temporary, even shoddy, with a propensity for decline.

At the same time he had felt himself fading in and out of the installations like patterns of sunlight or lines of insects; according to his mood he might be a partner in their solidity, a detractor or an opponent, but he had passed from outside to inside and become culpable for the world.

That was the price you paid for the feeling of inclusion: the buildings, the grids of cities with their roads and subways, their storefronts and systems turned approachable, even trivial. The two of you were locked in an interdependence in which you were both always decaying. .

He had been bred to feel like an insider, no doubt — had grown up in an affluent Southern California suburb in the wake of the war, though the fifties and sixties were the time he remembered. It had been a pleasant blur of a youth. Sun on the lawns, his mother and father sitting at a thick pine table in the evening by lamplight. Braided placemats, soft butter in a dish and green beans in a bowl. The gentle sheen of the wood.

Time was like the table when he tried to recollect his childhood — vague but solid, fingerprinted and warm.

“Hal?”

It was Susan, on the other side of the door. She often lost him in bathrooms.

“Coming. Just a second,” he said, and dried his hands on a soft paper towel. He had read a pamphlet that said the softest and thickest towels and toilet rolls were made not from woodchips but from the ancient giants: you wiped your ass with the history of the world. . what was different for him and for Susan too, for anyone whose life had been interrupted, was that after that ascension to the citadel he had suddenly been ejected again. He’d been ejected from that communal life of achievers, the life of regularity. He had found himself there, in the span of the arches and the rise of the walls — that quick belonging, those years of lockstep — and then, with the accident, he was outside again forever. His own childhood and Casey’s merged in his recall, encased in a golden glow; at the moment of her paralysis the childhood turned into a lost paradise, and so it would remain — for as long as he lived he would not be able to shrug off the sense of this loss. It left him with the sear of heartbreak and the pressure of resentment.

You worked, of course, to get clear of that resentment, to give it up like an offering. But it was a struggle that did not end. One day you felt it rise from you and disperse, you felt an upsurge of freedom, but the next day it settled on you again.

He existed, in fact, half in the moment of her childhood, suspended for all time. The memory dogged him with such persistence that he wished he could replace it with one that was less glowing, more tarnished and scuffed. The shine of her lost joy was blinding.

Of course the memory was not the childhood itself but a vision of it he had created without wishing or trying to — a memory as unchanging as the accident itself, formed almost at the same moment, or at least at the moment when he was told, in the hospital, that the damage was permanent. At that instant a barrier was thrown up between what was and what should have been, a future for his little girl that had never been permitted. The childhood memory was a bridge between them, between then and now, which had to stay separate to be bearable. But there it shimmered, with a deceitful, sly nostalgia.

The dog woman came out from the back office trailing the dog on a sturdy brown-leather lead. No cheap and functional nylon for Thomas Stern. But Hal had to admit he took to the animal right away. She walked gamely, hopping with her hindquarters; she wore an attentive expression and wagged her tail.

He glanced at Susan: her eyes were filling with tears.

“Let me,” he said softly, and reached out to hold the leash.

Susan knelt down and petted the dog, put her arms around it.

It was all Stern’s fault. Stern had been an imposition on the family from start to finish. First he was an imposition on Susan, demanding her full-time loyalty as the caretaker of all the most trivial details of his gainful enterprise; into their quiet home had come long discussions of his youth and conscientiousness, even his overpriced wardrobe and alleged charisma. The latter of which was a myth Hal saw no reason to believe.

As a husband he had been forced to endure this intruder in his house constantly — not his physical presence but the daily, dull news of him. Many times he had wished that Susan was employed in an office with more personnel, for the sake of a little variation in her bulletins from the workplace. He himself was stationed in an office whose very size kept him from getting on oppressively intimate terms with any of his colleagues.

Then he had imposed himself on Casey — who knew how, Hal did not open his mind to the permutations, but he and Casey had been close, briefly — and now, missing, possibly even deceased, he was imposing on all of them.

• • • • •

The mutt sat in the back seat of the car, her ears forward, watching and listening. Hal drove.

“If she sheds a lot we can spread out a blanket back there,” he said.

Susan gazed out the windshield.

“Casey might want her,” she offered after a few minutes.

“Maybe she could have the dog some days but not all the time. That would be easier.”

But strangers might laugh at them. Someone might laugh to see the girl in the wheelchair, walking a tripod dog.

He did not say this, of course.

They lapsed into silence until he turned into the grocery-store parking lot. They had to buy dishes and dog food.

“I’ll stay with her,” said Susan, so he rolled down the windows, crossed the lake of pavement and went into the store alone.

In the dry-goods aisle, where he gazed at brands of dog food, hypnotized and vacant, he felt himself floating back. It was the chief pitfall of any time he spent alone, anywhere from minutes to long hours. At work he did not drift so easily, because work occupied him. It commandeered his attention in a way that offered relief.

Casey had picked out a white kitten at the Humane Society and that was the last time he remembered being in a pet food aisle — although he must have bought cat food in the succeeding years, of course, after the kitten had grown into a cat, but he did not recall this. The cat had finally died shortly before the accident, of a kidney infection. But the first day of the kitten, with his six-year-old Casey in her blond ponytail, he had walked up and down an aisle indistinguishable from this one — it might even have been this one; they might have walked here together — holding her small hand.

He looked down at his own hand, which had flexed suddenly as though feeling the imprint.

Casey had gazed up at him and asked him why kittens didn’t eat people food. His thoughts flicking briefly over slaughterhouse by-products and rendering and bone meal and carbolic acid and what “gourmet lamb entree” was code for, he told her smiling that kittens just liked cat food better.

Such was the duty of fatherhood, he had thought to himself, neatly satisfied at a simple task well accomplished, and reached for a bag of Purina.

Standing in front of the bags again, red backgrounds with head shots of golden retrievers, cocker spaniels, he wished it had all been so easy, even if it was a lie and a facile one too. What he would give now to be able to hand her such a lie in place of the life she had. Anything. He would have no qualms at all, not one. He would lie through his teeth if it would do any good. If only lies would suffice.

• • • • •

There was a libertarian in his office. It happened fairly often.

This one believed carmakers should pay for all roads. He was a hefty man in his thirties and his face was red with anger as he sat in the seat across from Hal’s desk; understandably, in a way, since his house had been seized by a revenue officer.

The case was closed, but he had hammered on the bulletproof glass door.

Hal made a gentle case for public roads — a gentle and inoffensive case, he felt — but still the libertarian looked at him through narrowed eyes as though he were a damnable liar.

“The way I see it, the tax system is what gives us our freedoms. The freedom to move, for starters. I mean, what would happen if every man had to build his own roads? Or if every single mile of road was a toll? You could try looking at it that way.”

The libertarian’s narrowed eyes were already glazing over. Tax protesters liked to talk, often, but once someone else took a turn at talking they felt a nap coming on.

Roads were easy as a soapbox because no citizen could cling to the belief that roads were built for free. On the roads where they drove they felt free, of course — they drew in a sweet breath of independence and let it out again happily. Americans loved to drive, discovered in driving both a splendid isolation and the shimmering mirage of connectedness.

But how did they come to drive on those roads, those slick long roads that gave a view of mountains or valleys, of suburbs or cities? They paid for their vehicles, of course. Hal had never yet met a protester who believed the cars themselves should be free, handed out like candy at Halloween to all and sundry from a benevolent car-giving source. A typical protester did not blame car manufacturers for charging money, for he held private enterprise in high esteem. He blamed the government for charging for its myriad services, but private operators could rob him blind in broad daylight, all in the name of liberty.

Hal’s own father had been wary of government programs. Possibly this was why Hal had an affection for libertarians, albeit patronizing. Most of them had a chip on their shoulders, a heavy chip. It was as though, when they were young, a schoolyard bully had terrorized them, and in the memory of that bully an idea of Big Government had come to be encoded.

But government is only a bully, he liked to tell them, when it needs to be for the common welfare. . crime was another arena where government took a stern and paternal hand, and most tax protesters did not mind this a bit. When it came to crime — a matter far more serious, in the eyes of your average protester, than say education or poverty — protesters were all about government. Also they had no argument with the government when it came to the commissioning, manufacture and deployment of vast arrays of weapons, both conventional and nuclear.

According to your typical tax protester the potential oblivion of all things living was rightly the province of government, but not so a measly ten- or fifteen-percent garnishment of their salary.

It was not the mandate of the Service, of course, to psychoanalyze or proselytize. It was not the purview of the Service to take taxpayers under its wing and baby them. It was the task of the Service simply to evaluate, assess and finally collect. But Hal often chose to engage personally despite the fact that, under the law, he was not required to do so or even, frankly, encouraged.

In truth, no matter what facts and figures he marshaled to defend government, the protesters were never converted. Simply, they cherished their right to direct fear and loathing at government bureaucracy. It was a God-given right, and one they insisted on exercising to the fullest. All he could give them, in the end, was an impression of having been listened to and reasoned with. Though they stoutly resisted reason — it was another God-given right to be unreasonable, indeed to hate reason almost as much as they despised government — they might not forget that he had made them a cup of coffee.

“Let me get you some coffee,” he said to the libertarian, who was jiggling one foot. “Milk? All we have is that powdered dairy creamer.”

While he was in the hallway pouring the coffee the libertarian might notice the pictures on his desk, of Susan in a dress and Casey in her wheelchair. Casey hated the picture and accused him of pandering, but he genuinely loved it and in any case could not bear to have earlier pictures of her around.

His coworker Linda came up behind him at the coffeemaker. Her large round earrings were like Christmas tree ornaments. “Hal,” she said, reaching for a tea bag, “the papers room is a mess. Where are the 433-D’s?”

“New stack,” he said. “Beside the obsolete forms? Second shelf. On your left.”

Protesters often rejected reason without even pinning down what it was they rejected, he thought as he tapped in the dairy creamer. They understood in the most nebulous terms the difference between argument and debate, or even raw unquestioning instinct and rigorous logic. Finally what they cherished most, he thought — and he made these generalizations only after decades of service — was their relationship not to morality or individualism but to symbols.

The symbols had about them an aura of immanence, and to the symbols many protesters cleaved. It was often not one symbol for them but many — say a flag, say an eagle, say a cross; say a pair of crossed swords. The symbols were richly pregnant, pregnant with a meaning that would never be born.

It never needed to be.

Against a symbol there could be no argument.

“Here you go,” he said, in his office again, and handed over the coffee mug.

•

His colleagues in general were not believers like him but cynics. They were cynical about their jobs and cynical about the tax code; they were cynics about human nature and about civil service. Indeed his own deep convictions on the subject of taxes and government would likely have been objects of their ridicule if not for the fact that, due to Casey’s paralysis, he often got a free pass on everything.

And it wasn’t simple pity either. Everyone came to know illness in the course of their lives, everyone came to know death, and somewhere within this grim terrain was the situation of Casey, Susan and him — a situation in which people beheld the inverse of their own good fortune. In Casey they saw a lamb on the altar: there others suffered for their sin. If they did not believe in sin they tended to be superstitious at least, believing her affliction filled some kind of ambient bad-luck quota that might otherwise have to be filled by them.

He reorganized a taxpayer file idly. The dog had slept at the foot of the bed last night, where she’d whined until lifted, and left short white hairs all over the red quilt. He did not like these hairs but he had liked the feel of the dog on his feet while he was falling asleep. In the morning, as he was pouring coffee into his travel mug before leaving, Susan had called Casey from the wall phone in the kitchen. “We have his dog,” he heard his wife say, watching the dog lap at her new water bowl, and then, “No. Still nothing.”

A knock on his office door.

“Come in,” he said.

It was Rodriguez, who wore his pants belted high.

“Hey, man,” said Rodriguez.

“Hey.”

Often a single habit of an otherwise unremarkable person, such as wearing high-waisted pants, struck Hal as tragic.

“So you coming to lunch? It’s Linda’s fiftieth.”

“Fiftieth,” said Hal. “Whoa.”

With the pants tightly cinched right below his rib cage, Rodriguez limited his options. Figuratively speaking, Rodriguez shot himself in the foot every time he got dressed.

“Who woulda known, right? She doesn’t look a day over sixty-five,” said Rodriguez, and laughed nervously.

“Thanks for thinking of me. I have an appointment with my daughter at lunchtime, though,” said Hal regretfully. It was his standard excuse, but in this case a lie and thus in need of fleshing out to have the ring of truth. “She’s in the market for a new car. I have to go with her to a dealership to talk about conversion. You know — hand controls, wheelchair loader. You’d be surprised how many of those mobility-equipment folks try to rip off paraplegics.”

“Oh man,” said Rodriguez, looking pained. “You kidding?”

“Yeah,” said Hal. “I am. They’re all right. But she needs help with the process.”

Rodriguez was not a real cynic but wore the guise of cynicism to fit in. His attempts at sarcasm had the air of a strained joke, and from the rare moments when he allowed his actual persona to reveal itself Hal suspected he was secretly and painfully earnest. The earnestness and the high-waisted pants were connected, of course. Intimately. Anyone could tell from looking at his beltline that the cynicism was a juvenile posturing. But Rodriguez was a guy who could watch comedians on TV make fun of nerds simply by wearing their pants belted high and laugh heartily along with the crowd, never suspecting that their target was him. Essentially he had a blind spot — as everyone did — but Rodriguez’s blind spot was in the public domain, like Casey’s paralysis.

“Sure, man. Too bad though. We’re going to that place with the kickass enchiladas.”

Hal had a weakness for Rodriguez. And he presumed that his own sincerity — mainly his devotion, which had become known to his colleagues only by dint of their collective involvement in taxation, to the quaint idea of a wise and kindly government — would look practically jaded next to the near-cretinous gullibility of Rodriguez.

But this genuine, earnest persona of Rodriguez, being kept in lockdown, was never allowed into Gen Pop long enough for Hal to be certain.

“Eat one for me, OK?” he said in what he hoped was a tone of finality. “With New Mexican green chiles.”

“No way,” said Rodriguez. “Those chiles’d be repeating on me.”

“Jesus,” said Hal, and waved him away. “Enough said then.”

Rodriguez retreated with a swaggering manner, as though his remark about vomiting into his mouth placed him firmly within the pantheon of the suave.

•

At one o’clock Hal drove west, partly because he was committed to his fabrication and partly because he wanted to pay his daughter a visit. Casey had recently relocated from her Soviet-style tenement in the Marina to a pleasant building dating from the thirties or forties, rare for Santa Monica, with large, airy rooms and arched doorways. He was delighted with the move, which signaled a rise out of apathy. Calla lilies grew in profusion beneath the front windows.

She had a new job in telemarketing. Difficult to see how selling timeshares in Jamaica could satisfy her in the long run, but for now at least she had a steady income. He should have called before he left but if she wasn’t home, fine: he had to get out of the office anyway.

The freeways were open and before long he had parked on the street and was walking around to the back door. Through an open window he heard her voice—“Uh huh. And what do you want me to do then?”

The tone struck him as wrong for telemarketing. Of course she was a novice, she might not have it down yet. Casey had a nice voice, low and husky, which to him had always seemed tomboyish. It occurred to him she was probably, in fact, talking to her new boyfriend, a man from the support group, and he felt sheepish. For the so-called differently abled, privacy was a chronic problem.

He rapped on the window and waved to her inside; she turned, wearing a telephone headset, smiled, and mouthed at him to wait. He nodded as she rolled into the next room and out of earshot.

He was used to waiting: he waited for her often. Sitting down on the ramp, he gazed out at the backyard. Behind a small patch of grass, the usual deep and lush L.A. green that looked fake but in fact merely represented an extravagant level of water use. . but here she was, already.

“I hear you got yourself a new cripple,” said Casey from the back door. It was automatic and had swung open silently. “I’m so jealous!”

“Hi, sweetie. Hey, you meet any of the neighbors yet?” he asked, and stood.

Good if someone close by was looking out for her.

“Dad, please. I mean I know your little girl is coming out of her shell finally, every day is a blessing, rise and shine and like that, hell, I’m full-barrel on the positive attitude. But I didn’t get a lobotomy. I don’t roll around to the neighbors smiling and doing the meet and greet.”

“A lobotomy wouldn’t have that effect,” he said, and went up the ramp and inside.

“So the three-legged dog thing, it’s like a classic empty-nest syndrome, child-surrogate deal. Am I right?”

She went ahead of him through the kitchen, where an electric teakettle was whining. She switched it off and poured.

“You want a cup of tea? I’m having peppermint.”

“Thanks. I’ll just get a glass of water I think,” he said, and moved around her.

“I knew this couple that when their basketball-playing kid went away to college — and this guy was like seven feet tall — they went out and got a dog two days later. Thing was though, the dog was a hundred-and-sixty-pound English mastiff. Came up to their chest level. True story. Remember Cal Shepard? From Samo?”

“The kid that drooled,” he said, nodding.

“Cal Shepard did not drool. He was a popular jock. That was Jon Spisiak.”

“A kid that drools in high school,” he mused, shaking his head. He stood at the open refrigerator looking in. It was almost empty. “You don’t have bottled water?”

“And I wouldn’t even say Jon drooled per se,” she said, and gestured at a white watercooler in the corner. “It was more like he had extra saliva. Oh. So Sal’s coming over, by the way.”

“The new boyfriend from group? This is great. I can submit him to the rigorous screening process.”

“He’ll fail. I have to warn you.”

“Of course. They always do.”

“But more than usual. Trust me.”

“What. Is he a protester? A militia member?”

“He used to be a cop. Now he wears fatigues and sometimes a balaclava.”

“Guy wears a balaclava in L.A.?”

“He took me up to Tahoe once. He wore it then. A black one. He looked like a paraplegic ninja.”

He was following her into the living room, where a leather couch and chairs surrounded a low glass table.

“What, he wants to keep his face hidden?”

“I dunno, Dad. Ask him yourself.”

“I can’t ask him about the balaclava if he’s not wearing it.”

“OK. I’m like officially tired of this subject.”

“Touchy!”

She spun her chair slowly and stopped, picked her mug out of the cup holder. He sat down opposite.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Anyway. I look forward to meeting him.”

“So T. still hasn’t been heard from.”

“No. And I think it’s time your mother moved on.”

Casey blew across the surface of her tea.

“I realize she’s loyal,” he went on. “But who knows what’s happening with him. You know? It could be anything. Maybe he had legal trouble she never knew about and a secret account in the Caymans. Right? Change will be good for her. Something new.”

Casey nodded and sipped.

“It’ll be hard,” he went on, and drank his water, “for her to know how long to wait before she makes key decisions, lets people go. There’s that young guy that works there, that she hired a while back. And then the financial situation. I say find a good lawyer and pass the buck.”

“She filed a missing persons report,” said Casey softly. “And she’s been calling the embassy every day.”

“The U.S. embassy? In Belize?”

He heard the front doorbell ring.

“That’ll be him. The father of your grandchild.”

“What?”

“Kidding.”

“I’ll get it,” he said, and rose.

As usual she was right; as soon as he pushed the button to open the door he knew the guy was a loser. Tamped-down anger, free-floating rage.

“Hey, welcome,” he said affably, and stood back.

“Who are you?” asked the guy.

“My father,” called Casey from within. “Hal, meet Sal.”

“We rhyming,” said Sal flatly, and rolled past him with no gesture of greeting. Hal had seen his share of bitter disabled guys and was inured to it — more or less preoccupied with this new information about Susan, he realized, turning from the door as it closed. His wife who was consumed with anxiety about the real-estate guy. The extent of her affection for Stern, the transparently maternal attachment, if examined by a professional, would likely prove rooted in some psychopathology related to the accident.

“I should get back to the office,” he told Casey, and extended a hand to Sal. “It was nice to meet you.”

Sal did something with his own hand that looked like a gang sign. A poser, thought Hal, as he stooped to kiss Casey’s cheek. Understandable, but hardly deserving of respect. Before he was paralyzed he had been a cop, likely a swaggerer and a bully since almost all of them were, but now that he was spinal-cord injured he identified with the same underclass he used to dream of bludgeoning.

Outside Hal passed the suitor’s conveyance, a battered hatchback in gunmetal gray that featured a bumper sticker calling for the rescue of POW/MIAs. It was parked half on the driveway and half on the lawn, and the right-side tires had ripped up a fresh track in the turf.

Law-enforcement officers were not his favorites among the varied ranks of persons who chose a career in public service. He recognized that the job carried with it certain personality requisites, such as a predisposition to violence, and that the demand for violent enforcers was embedded in the system, as was the supply of violent offenders. By some estimates, one out of twenty-five Americans was a sociopath.

And that was higher than anywhere else on the globe: this great nation was a fertile breeding ground for psychos. Or rather, as the economists would put it, the U.S. of A. had a comparative advantage in antisocial personality disorder.

And hey: these guys had to have incomes, just like everyone else.

At the very least one in fifty.

Casey, of course, could not be dissuaded from her choices, having become stubborn and intractable after the accident — a development he had come to accept for the strength it lent her. This boyfriend choice, like the others, had to be left to play out. Still it was difficult to believe she had been on the telephone with the cop-turned-homeboy using that tender voice. Slipping behind the steering wheel, Hal repressed a shudder.

Remember: she is grown up. He often had to remind himself.

Also, she carried pepper spray when she went out at night. She had taken a course in disability martial arts.

Susan had to be frustrated, he reflected, driving. She likely felt responsible for what had happened to Stern. This feeling of responsibility was completely irrational, of course, but he knew it well. When regret was strong enough, guilt rose up to greet it. Maybe she thought she should have kept Stern from traveling alone; maybe she thought she should have persuaded him into therapy or grief counseling. Not that this would even have been possible.

They should talk more, Hal and Susan. They lay down to sleep at different hours, they rarely went out, lately there had been more distance between them than he wanted.

An old lady with a walker stepped out in front of his car; he swerved and hit the curb hard.

• • • • •

The car had to be towed. He called Casey, and Sal came to get him.

“I appreciate this,” he told Sal, mildly humiliated.

Sometimes a sociopath helped you out.

They drove together to a rental car agency, Hal shooting sidelong glances at Sal’s hands on the controls. The fingers bore small tattoos between the knuckles, which he was relieved to see were small plantlike designs rather than, say, LOVE and HATE. Looked like pot, possibly. There was a stale smell in the car — sweat, grease and cigarettes. He cracked the window, then rolled it all the way down. The dash was covered in stickers: rock bands, possibly, to judge by the graphics. Of course the names were unfamiliar to him. Blood, skulls in cowboy hats, sheriff’s badges and guns, tigers and poppies and roses and faux-Gothic lettering.

Some of the paraphernalia was Mexican, some American, but all of it was equally encoded. Loud music played, a polka beat with electric guitar and an accordion. A narcocorrido if he was not mistaken: he had learned about these on National Public Radio. They celebrated drug kingpins.

Sal was moving his head to the beat and seemed to be muttering the lyrics.

“So your Spanish is fluent?” Hal said loudly, and smiled.

Sal nodded and flicked his fingers against the wheel, still mouthing.

“You grow up in L.A.?”

“East. I used to be police,” said Sal. “L.A.P.D.”

“Casey told me.”

“She tell you I got shot by a friendly?”

“She didn’t tell me that part.”

“Yeah. This little kid, his first day on the job.”

“Jesus,” said Hal, shaking his head. “That’s. .”

“Fucked-up shit,” said Sal, and went back to hitting the steering wheel and jutting his head forward in an embarrassing rhythm. Thankfully they had already reached the car place.

She has to be kidding, thought Hal as Sal screeched out of the lot touching his forehead in a mock salute.

He called the office from the car-rental counter. He had to take the rest of the day off, he said: car accident, and half the afternoon was already gone. Then he tried Susan’s office and got the answering machine.

He wished he could go back to Casey’s apartment, but that was inappropriate and would come off tedious and doting. Also very possibly Sal had gone back there also. No, he had to make his own entertainment. He would drive home in the rental and relax, take the dog for a walk.

•

His street was silent — neighbors dispersed to other parts of the city, in their compartments of earning. The branches of trees were still, there was no breeze at all, and pulling into the driveway in the rental car he had a curious impression: nothing was moving.

The car shifted into park, he sat beneath a giant maple. The leaves had turned red. After he turned the key to shut off the engine, even he was still. He concurred in the stillness of the scene, half by choice, half by temperament. There was a kind of soft suffocation in it. . time, he thought, passing forever in front of him and not passing at all.

A young man was coming out the front door. It was Robert, who worked with Susan, shrugging on a jacket as he closed the door behind him.

“Robert!” he said, but since he was inside the car the sound of his voice was trapped. He opened the car door and Robert glanced up from his feet, startled briefly before he smiled. Hal stepped up and shook his hand.

“Hey,” said Robert. He was handsome — far nearer to what Casey should have for a boyfriend than, say, Sal was. Although Robert, like Tom Stern, erred on the side of a prep-school caricature. No doubt he had rowed for Yale. “Hey! Yeah! So how you doing, man? I’m here on courier duty. Susan’s working at home today.”

“You looking for a new job yet?”

“I am. I wish I wasn’t.”

“I know. Unfortunate.”

“It’s a tragedy, is what it is.”

“You don’t think maybe he, you know, chose to leave? Numbered accounts, like that?”

“Hey, you gotta think that way. Right? Being the IRS and all.”

“Occupational hazard, I guess.”

“Seriously, I considered it for a minute or two. But nah. He’s basically a good guy. And I mean there are projects we’re right in the middle of. I’m talking, with him not being here? Like literally millions of dollars are getting washed down the drain.”

“Have you met my daughter?” asked Hal, aware this was a non sequitur. When he hit the curb something had jarred him — he thought the shock of the crumpling fender had torqued his neck, possibly. Suddenly he was feeling lightheaded.

“Casey? Sure. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. .,” said Hal vaguely, and all at once they were awkward. “Anyway. Good luck with the job search.”

Inside he heard the shower running. A sealed manila envelope lay on the dining room table, along with the mail. The dog must be upstairs with Susan. But climbing to the second floor, he shivered with a passing chill — the house felt wrong. He and Susan needed to go away somewhere, he thought: since the accident they never traveled much, fearing Casey would suddenly need them.

“Susan?” he called, and the dog came galumphing out of the bedroom.

“In here,” came her voice, and he went into the bathroom, where the mirrors were steamed.

“Ran into Robert on his way out,” he said to the shower curtain.

“Uh huh? What are you doing home, honey?”

“Car accident.”

She pulled back the shower curtain. Her face was flushed; she looked lovely.

“You OK?”

“Maybe a little headache. No big deal. But I have a rental.”

“No one was hurt though?”

“Zero casualties.” He reached out and kissed her. “You smell so good.”

“It’s the shampoo.”

He wanted to go to bed with her. He held her and kissed her more, water falling on both of them.

“Oh, Hal, not this second,” she said. “I’m all wet.”

“That’s fine with me.”

“Later. I promise.”

He let her go and stepped back, his hair plastered.

“You look cute,” she said, and swatted the wet mat of it before she pulled the curtain closed again. He gazed at the blur of her form through the blue plastic, which was covered in raised dots. He could barely tell what she was doing. One of her arms stretched up and back again. Had she put a hand up to adjust the nozzle? Her movements were shrouded. Equally she could have been reaching for a razor. She could be anyone, seen through this filter, doing almost anything. She was unknown to him.

“So what happened, exactly?” she asked through the curtain.

“I swerved to avoid a pedestrian.”

He turned around and went into the bedroom, sat down on his side of the bed. The stillness from outside was with him here, ongoing. In the doorway stood the dog, watching. Their bed linens were still wrinkled and mounded from the morning; the triangle of sheet he sat on was warm. She must have been napping. But then, when Robert arrived, she would have risen. Why was it still warm now?

Maybe the dog had been sleeping there.

Hal’s stomach felt nervous.

In a minor panic he pulled back the coverlet, checked the sheets. Nothing, of course. Paranoid.

Usually — only on weekends of course — she took a brief afternoon nap on her own side of the bed, just as they kept to their own sides at nighttime, but it was warm on his side today. Still, it was a trivial anomaly. A young man coming out of his house at midday and for this he was suspicious? He had turned into a middle-aged cliché. Suddenly a blip in the routine had become a conjugal violation.

He stood and began to straighten the blankets, unthinking. The dog lay down, head on paws, in the hallway. He finished with the coverlet and the pillows, hospital corners because he kept on perfecting them mechanically, at the same time struck by the phrase: cuckold. But someone had to do it. The bed had to be made. A bed unmade in the afternoon seemed decadent, even ugly.

When it was accomplished he turned toward his nightstand. The alarm clock had fallen on its face; he set it upright again. Otherwise the order was usual — all of it familiar except for, wait, a very small piece of plastic.

It was minuscule, a triangle maybe three millimeters long with a couple of scallops along the edge, and shiny black or maybe even dark green. It could be anything. He thought about this, his heart racing. He held the dark piece of plastic between thumb and forefinger. A small scallop, a small serration.

He was paranoid. He should seek help.

In the meantime, it was an itch that had to be scratched.

With difficulty he deposited the fragment on the nightstand again, careful not to drop it on the carpet and thereby lose it, and went back to the bathroom, to the nearest trash can. Susan had the shower radio on — a song about coming to a window, which he seemed to recall was sung by an annoying yet strangely popular lesbian.

The air was hot and moist and heavy and he couldn’t see even her blur through the curtain now. Good, for his purposes.

Quickly and furtively he pulled the can from beneath the counter and looked inside. Balled-up tissue, mostly; a Q-tip was visible. To stick his hands in the trash can would be openly desperate. Yet he did so.

Nothing hidden in the wads of tissue but an empty aspirin bottle. He put it down and washed his hands, let his breath out softly.

Still.

He went back to the bedside table and carefully picked up the fragment. He did not let it go.

“Going out for a soda, back in five,” he called out.

He stepped over the dog and took the stairs two at a time. There was a drugstore on Wilshire. He kept the fragment pressed between the pads of his fingers, pressing it hard even as he grabbed his keys with the other hand, strode out the front door and got into the rental car. He pressed it hard all the way there, strode purposefully to the back and was face-to-face with a wall of condoms.

But his findings were inconclusive. The piece was small, its color indeterminate. It might be one brand with certain specifications or it might be another. He held it up next to the packages and leaned in close, squinting despite the fluorescents in the hope of seeing more precisely. It might be none of them. Plainly. Abruptly he smelled something familiar from antiquity — what was it? Yes: benzoyl peroxide.

A pimply boy leaned past him and grabbed a single Trojan.

Science, he scolded irritably as he made his way up the aisle, could easily discern the answer, with a microscope and maybe one or two more instruments. Science could plumb the mystery, could discern, for example, whether this had been part of a foil packet or simply plastic.

He was not a scientist, unfortunately.

What other form of packaging would there likely have been, in that location on the nightstand? Kleenex? It was not a piece of a Kleenex packet, though. Too thick, too solid. Crackers? No. Also no. The fact that she had been taking a shower right then, the warmth of the sheets. . he could ask her himself, but regardless of the answer it would be humiliating. Even the suspicion was destructive. He knew this. Better simply, on his own recognizance, to know. One way or the other. Robert: maybe he would test him. Go into the office tomorrow. Find a pretext to discuss marriage? Casually, in passing. Few specifics. Confide in Robert, ostensibly, about the pluses and minuses of marriage? The costs and benefits it might bring? On Robert’s face, as he listened, he would catch any sign of shame.

But this would not happen.

When he first met Susan, he remembered, stepping through the metal detectors and out into the parking lot, she was almost a hippie. The year was 1966. She was a teacher back then. Though she did not engage in politics much or smoke marijuana she had honey-colored long hair, wore all-natural fabrics and believed in free love. Shortly after they met she announced a plan to move into an intentional community called “The Eden Project” up in Mendocino. He had to work hard to dissuade her. She was young and idealistic and more than that she was romantically inclined, with a tableau in her mind of fresh air and fields of strawberries. A pure life, etc. He was idealistic too, but wary of stereotype and quite certain of what he wanted, namely for her not to move into an intentional community with a lute player named Rom.

In the end he won her over by arguing that the intentional community was elitist. He added to this an insinuation that it was also racist.

He smiled ruefully at the memory, recalling his earnest youthful idiocy and the forcefulness with which he had prosecuted his aims. He could still hear the discussion, at a party on the beach. She wore faded cutoff jean shorts and her legs were tan and slim. He had held her wrists in his hands and argued passionately that for her to move with the other well-meaning hippies to Mendocino would mean a “renunciation of society” that would lock her into a “white, upper-middle-class cultural ghetto” and ultimately augur “an abdication of personal responsibility.”

After that they had moved into a one-bedroom together — in a white, upper-middle-class neighborhood, of course. She cut her hair and he finished his accounting degree. Eventually the free-love notion faded.

Possibly now, however, the free love had made a resurgence.

He tried to remember how the free love had ended. They had argued about it on and off, but not with great engagement; Susan had always believed it more in theory than practice. She was shy by inclination and reluctant to let others see her naked. But she said the usual things the hippies liked to say back then about the limits of monogamy, such as “Why should the intimacy and joy of sex be reserved for one relationship?” and “People are not property.” Once, almost to prove her point it seemed, she kissed another man at a foreign movie — an individual she barely knew who was French, had body odor and smoked cloying cigarettes. This had provoked a minor drama in the relationship. But in due time the Frenchman retreated, as they were wont to do.

Still, he had never, he reflected, actually asked her formally to renounce the free-love idea. There was nothing contractual, there were no stipulations. He had merely assumed she had grown out of it. In a certain sense it seemed ridiculous now that the matter was unclear to him; most marriages did not allow for such ambiguity. Did they? On the other hand this was not ambiguity, exactly, rather it was an element they had forgotten, a corner left untucked. . it was like a religion that receded, leaving a vague memory of faith but few practical details. The religion had been overtaken by the day-to-day.

He had to admit: there was the possibility that quietly, in a private realm, she was still a believer.

The fragment was imprinted into the pad of his right thumb. He stood beside the rental car and flicked it off with his forefinger. It disappeared instantly; it was too small even to watch flitter down. . to tell the truth, he thought, unlocking the car door, Susan was probably right, or at least had been more honest back then than he had. He had been looking out for himself, frankly. He had known she was too good for him, but also felt that, having attracted her, it was more or less his sovereign right to retain her. Like a lost-and-found coin.

They got married, had Casey and were happy, the three of them. Time passed; the events were not important, only the feel of it. Then the accident happened. Somehow after the accident he had assumed they would always stay as they were, exactly.

In his own case he loved Susan steadily and took for granted that he always would. He had believed until now that she felt the same way. Also, when couples lost a child they frequently divorced, but something like the accident tended to lock you together like clenched teeth. At least that was what he observed in the parents’ groups. Sitting in pairs around the circle, on those hard, awkward chairs, many wives and husbands seemed to share nothing more than a sloping and gray defeat.

When he considered it, though: since the boss man went missing her interest had been diminishing. He had not taken it personally. He had believed she was preoccupied, and this, he thought, was still true. For whatever reason, he had seen, he was currently on the periphery of her life, or at least at the periphery of her attention. By itself this was not a problem; he was comfortable in the background. He often thought of himself on the sidelines, not at the center of the action, and the image was not unpleasant. For a long time there had been more pressing matters than his own needs or preferences; there was Casey first and always and then there was Susan’s job, where she considered her boss a virtual prodigy, a kind of urgent cause that required service.

Why the cause of real-estate profit should now command her fealty, when it had never before done so, he had not seriously questioned. Her sense of professional obligation seemed grounded in the personal, chiefly.

Backing up in the rental car — careful now, careful; he could easily have two accidents in one day — he considered the possibility that her preoccupation had been due not to Stern’s absence, as he had previously reasoned, but to the new chemistry of her small office in the awareness of that absence, a small office now inhabited solely by her and Robert.