How We Are Hungry

CLIMBING TO THE WINDOW, PRETENDING TO DANCE

THREE HOURS on I-5 so far, straight as a tightrope, and every twenty minutes or so he sees one of those birds. Always near the roadside, on bent fenceposts or hopping in the gray flossy grass, they look like crows but with breasts a militant strain of orange. They come with an eerie regularity, ten already, and they are alone. Fish, approaching thirty and driving eighty, doesn’t know what to call these birds. They are wretched birds.

It’s a merciless drive from San Jose to Bakersfield — you’d think it was Iowa or Texas if you couldn’t, faintly, sense the sea air coming over the western hills. Inland like this, it’s hotter and more humid than Fish, who grew up in Illinois, wants California to be. Heat echoes off the road in liquid waves, cars heave with asthma, and Fish’s penis is sticking to his thigh in a way that seems irrevocable. It’s actually a decent drive for a while — all those velour hills by the dropping of a barn-red sun — but then the road just goes, moaning its way south, and it’s so straight you want to kill it all and chop your goddamned head off.

Fish tells himself, audibly, not for the first time, that he would kill his cousin Adam if he had the chance and could get away with it. As children, he and Adam were made to think of each other as brothers, because their mothers were close and neither of them had a male sibling.

They looked nothing alike.

Adam was an only child, while Fish has a younger sister, Mary, married now and with two sets of twins, all of them freckled and insane — they jump on visitors like dogs. Adam lived in Aurora and Fish lived in Galena, so they saw each other only once a month and in the summers went on uneventful canoe trips in lower Wisconsin, passing in their quiet canoe groups of sharp-toothed kids, poor, wearing bandannas and white rope bracelets.

Fish is driving to see Adam — there goes another one of those black birds, with plumage like a chest exploding— because Adam has tried to kill himself again. This is his seventh attempt, and now Fish knows he should have flown. San Jose, he’s almost sure, has a direct flight to Bakersfield, less than an hour in the air. Piss! Every time he finishes this drive he vows never again, and then two months later he’s here, punching the window, back soaked, left arm sunburned, cursing himself.

Five hours at least, this drive, plenty of time to come up with a plan, something to say. He tries to concentrate on Adam but finds himself constantly adrift and onto other subjects, like food and war. Years ago he thought he could have an effect on Adam’s life, but now he knows he’s a spectator, a parent watching a child’s sporting event, hands twisted into fists, unable to influence the outcome.

Fish passes a huge beef-processing plant, where a hundred thousand cows are kept so close they can’t move their tails enough to swat flies. There is no earth visible below their doomed hides. He rolls up the window, the stench vile, punishing. Those stupid cows, he thinks, born to die, born to be eaten, born to walk in their own feces. Jesus! It smells fetid, bloody and sweet, like human innards, if you could open yourself up and bring it all to your nose and inhale.

Adam doesn’t talk to his mom or to Fish’s parents, and he’s never had a job, none that Fish can recall, which in a way is impressive, how he’s been able to get by for so many years without any sort of legitimate income. There are people who do this, who divert just enough energy and funds and goodwill from those close to them to exist without anyone taking much notice; it’s like stealing cable, but on a larger scale. Fish has given Adam about twenty-two hundred dollars over the years, which he has used frugally — he is clever that way. He’s clever in every way, really, even in surviving so many attempts on his own life. Maybe he’s unkillable, Fish thinks, and he suddenly snorts out loud at the thought.

Fish’s other cousin, Chuck, a tax lawyer in Charlotte with the face of a priest, rose-colored and surprised, says that Adam looks about forty now, though he’s only twenty-eight. The drugs do that, Chuck says. Chuck should know.

Fish hasn’t seen Adam in almost a year and now he’s afraid to. If Adam looks old, it means Fish is old and they’re both old, everyone’s old, and— Damn, another one of those birds. There must be a name for those things.

Adam’s hope, Fish is sure, is to be the shape-shifting mystery spot in the life of his family and friends. The problem is that Fish has never had a fascination with people who try to kill themselves. Maybe if he took more of an interest in the concept, Adam wouldn’t keep trying to prove how intriguing it is. With the resources they required of everyone around him, Adam’s life and his attempts on it were a kind of vacuum, into which he pulled the good air around him, and everyone close to him — took their words and possibility for joy. And yet in most ways Adam is nowhere near as strange, for example, as the guy who delivers Fish’s mail, a man named Kojo.

“Short for Kojak?” Fish asked when they met. It was a dusty day, windy, the sun like a planet of sand. The mailman laughed. He laughed for about ten minutes over that one. Fish was flattered, then he was scared. Kojo liked to laugh, laughing in a big, unconvincingly expansive way, but he didn’t like to wear the postal pants. He always wore the shorts, no matter how cold it got.

He came into Fish’s house once for a beer, and he drank with his mouth all around the bottle, as if fellating it. Then he unrolled his sleeve and showed Fish a skin graft he’d got—just for the wack of it, he said. “Took some skin from my lower back and put it on my arm.” The pores in the new skin were smaller and the surface was smoother, less weathered. There are doctors, Kojo said, who’ll do anything for the right money.

A week later Kojo brought Fish a collage, the kind junior-high girls assemble, with phrases cut from women’s magazines—“Only Best Friends Know!” “Quiz: Are His Pals the Real Deal?”—pasted over pictures, cut from books, of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet flying kites together, walking through the woods at night, among the trees with muscular trunks.

Fish attracts these people. In high school there was an older guy, a senior when he was a sophomore, tall and bent backward. He had a huge, almost perfectly square head, and he wanted Fish to drive cross-country with him, though they’d talked only once, briefly, while they were watching the girls’ swim team practice.

“I like butterfly,” the guy had said. His name was either Brendan or Brandon or Stuart.

“Butterfly’s good,” Fish had said.

That had been their conversation, all of it, and two months later a breathless Brandon appeared, grinning, forehead wet with concentration, when Fish was walking out to soccer practice. “Don’t say no, Fish. We’re gonna head out and fuck this fucking school and drive to Florida. Fuck this fucking fuck!”

Fish, not wanting to say no, just said “Sorry,” and followed the rest of the team over the hill, to the upper field, rectangular but sloping on every side, like a freshly filled grave.

When Kojo presented the collage to Fish, insisting that he open it there in the doorway, Fish didn’t know what to say. He shook his head in a kind of awe, then thanked Kojo and made plans to see him three weeks hence — they’d have a beer at the end of the month, just tear it up, yeah — then, the next morning, Fish got himself a post-office box.

Fish is driving, slapping himself to stay alert, and he’s counting, to be sure it’s been seven times for Adam. One: the wrists (with an small saw on his thin, paper-white arms). Two: poison — he drank floor wax, first pouring it into a tall clear glass. Three: the gunshot to the stomach. Or the side of the stomach — the bullet grazed him and went through his window and into the Episcopal church next door. No one was killed or hurt, but Adam felt so bad about it that, four, he stabbed himself in the leg with a cleaver. Five: he tried bringing a hair dryer into the tub with him, but it was suicide-proof, apparently — it turned itself off, leaving Adam shivering, the water having gone cold while he’d got up the nerve. Six: what was six? A car driven into a tree? There was debate about whether that one had been intentional.

This time, two nights ago, Adam, half drunk — he was always impaired when he tried these things — jumped off a motel roof. At least that’s what Chuck heard from the paramedic who found Adam, unconscious in the parking lot, splayed like a buck on the hood of a truck. It was about forty feet down, Chuck said.

Adam could have jumped into a dry gorge a few blocks from the motel and he would have died for sure — the dropoff there was about a hundred feet. Instead, he fell four stories, into the courtyard, broke his collarbone, cracked his left leg, bent his spine.

The road is quiet. I-5 is split, a narrow valley between the comers and the goers, so Fish, his brain marshy and his eyes glazed, can see only the cars that are heading in his own direction. Fish likes to see the faces of people going the other way, to construct stories about them, wish them well or ill, but this is nothing, this drive — this is sorrow. It makes you want to freeze the world and shatter it with an ax.

This morning Fish’s pillow was soaked and his blanket was halfway out the window; he woke up hearing machine guns and screams. Not unusual, but this time he was on the plane, not watching it. It hadn’t taken off yet. There was something wrong, the air of the world had shrunk in on itself and then the men burst in. They pulled guns from a compartment and started shooting, endlessly, from the front to back, everything moving too slowly. Fish was in one of the last rows, listening to the shrieking, constant but undulating, and he was planning, clenching and unclenching his fists, looking around, between seats behind and in front of him, for a couple of people to come with him and help him end this. The fact that he was alive to hear the suffering meant that he was meant to stop it.

Through breakfast Fish was still operating under the blurry assumption the attack had been real, but CNN said nothing about it. Still, he was down, foggy, feeling remorse. He was crushing aluminum cans in the driveway, distracted, nerves shot, when Chuck called from Charlotte and described what Adam had done.

“I’m not going this time,” Fish said.

“I can get there four days from now,” Chuck said. “Do one day before I come. Make sure he’s not paralyzed. Check that they have him in a real room and everything.” Two years ago, after No. 3, Chuck arranged insurance for Adam, an expensive plan, and was frequently checking to make sure he was getting his money’s worth.

Chuck doesn’t know Adam as well as he pretends, and thus his benevolence can be less complicated than Fish’s. He never shared a bedroom with Adam. He never found Adam’s crusty tissues stuffed, like brains displayed in a jar, in a curvy blue bottle he’d won at a carnival. He never caught Adam rubbing down Mary’s legs after track, his hands wrapped like tentacles around her calves.

Fish is driving a rental car. He called the place where they pick you up in a sedan wrapped in brown paper. He called at about noon and they said they’d send the car over at two. Between twelve and two, he waited in his house. He watched baseball on TV. He put in a videotape of him and his father running in a Chicago marathon. His dad was wearing the brace he wore during those years, and he has a mustache. When he sees the camera, he turns around and runs backward. Then Fish’s mom drops the camera and the tape ends. Adam was no athlete. There was a game Fish played with him — it was Adam’s only good toy — where tiny metal football players move around on a field vibrating below them. It was a strange device, because you couldn’t really control the little bastards — you just watched as the field sent them jerking around, crowding together or falling alone.

Fish watched some of the national aerobics championship. He closed all the cabinets in his house and, using his new drill, tightened all the hinges. He walked to the stationery shop to see if he could buy Adam anything. They didn’t have much. He got a card congratulating him on his Bat Mitzvah, thinking that it was funny, knowing that Adam, who had to be told when to laugh, wouldn’t get the joke.

Outside, it was summer. He bought a glass-blue Sno-Kone, wrapped in the same weak waxy paper they’ve been using for a hundred years, from a tiny man with a cart. He held it gingerly between his fingers. It was glorious, really too perfect to change. He didn’t want to eat that ice — it was so right, that blue dome, like a tiny lost moon he could hold in his hand.

It began to melt, so he ate it in gulps.

He returned home, thinking maybe he should wait another day, or even two. The sooner he got there, really, the sooner Adam would feel well enough to leave the hospital, and the sooner he’d try it again. The longer Adam was in the hospital, probably restrained in some effective way, the better. He was content, Fish was sure. Adam was always content in a hospital.

At two-thirty, Fish called the rental place and they said they were on their way and could he give them his address again. He did, and waited.

At three o’clock, he called the place again and it was a new guy on the phone. New guy said he had no record of Fish’s reservation. “You know,” Fish said, “that’s messed up. I’ve been waiting forever and I have to get down to goddamned Bakersfield.” New guy sighed and said he’d look again. Then he got back on the phone and said that he was sorry, that he’d found the reservation posted on the bulletin board.

“Someone,” he said, “put it up on the board without telling anyone else.” He was directing this to some nameless offscreen coworker.

“Sure,” Fish said, “but isn’t that what the goddamned board is for, so you don’t have to tell everyone about it?” Fish wanted a look at that office. “Jesus,” he added. “That’s really fucked.”

“Well, I am sorry,” new guy said.

“I have a friend in the hospital, motherfucker.” Fish was surprised; he hadn’t contemplated that sentence. He realized that this was one of those moments when one’s impatience— or was the word rage? — was being misdirected. All the same, he thought he’d very much like to beat the new guy till he whispered.

New guy told Fish someone would come get him soon, and then hung up. Fish went into the tiny yellow yard in front of his house and took the croquet wickets out of the grass. They’d been sitting there for three months, since Mary’s kids had been over. They couldn’t play to save their lives, those kids. They didn’t care about the rules, either. They just hit the balls like monkeys, squawking and swinging and running into the street.

Now it’s seven o’clock, with two hours to go. This drive mocks our conceptions of time. This drive could kill anyone.

Adam’s mouth curves too much. He’s never been able to smile without smirking, or listen without sneering. It isn’t his fault, really. He just has too many muscles there, in that area around his mouth. Most people are born handicapped.

He moved away, to Baltimore, just before high school, so Fish didn’t see him much, but one summer, right after Adam’s parents separated and he and Fish were too old for camp, Adam stayed with Fish’s family in Galena. At first he slept in the basement, next to the dartboard and under the tiny window half-full of soil. When he complained about the ticking and groaning of the water heater, he was moved to Fish’s bedroom. It was a small room with a single window, over Fish’s bed, painted shut, the lower corners covered in stickers with holograms and google eyes.

That summer, when Adam played football with Fish’s friends every Sunday at the muddy round park at the end of the frontage road, he tackled too hard and argued too much. Fish apologized for him. Everyone figured he was just intense, had something to prove, like the kids who’d tried out for the team but missed the last cut. Adam, though, was different, less in control, less focused on the outcome of the game.

He broke a guy’s leg once. The weekend was warm; there were about twenty playing. One guy had borrowed cones from his construction job, and they figured they could have a proper game, with a kickoff even. So they split into sides and booted the ball. They started running like madmen at each other, and a boy named Catanese, older but spindly, everywhere elbows and knees, caught the kickoff, the ball delivering a thump to his concave chest.

He was running for the sideline, when Adam burst through the pack unblocked and just flew, for a frozen second almost perfectly horizontal, and finally spearing him, his shoulders plowing into Catanese’s legs. There was a crack like a broken bat, and everyone cheered because Catanese was barely out of the end zone and his team would be screwed for field position. But then Catanese went red, blood swimming in his face, and he was holding his leg, one hand on either side, gently, like it was too hot to touch. He recoiled from it, screaming, out of his mind, feral.

The leg, the tibia, was snapped in two. It was a battlefield kind of gore, the bone poking through his corduroys like a stick through a garbage bag.

“You see that, what I did?” Adam said. Fish had found him up the hill, by the new playground, hiding in a chute. He thought Adam was going to brag about hitting Catanese so hard, but instead he said, “Why the hell would I break some kid’s leg? What the hell is wrong with me?”

Fish told him that it was an accident, it wasn’t his fault, it was football, a violent game, so what. Now Adam was pulling on the skin under his chin, grabbing it and pinching it. “I shouldn’t play tackle,” he said, pulling harder on his chin. “The craziest thing is that I’ve thought about something like this happening, you know?” Here he adopted a meaningful whisper. “I knew this would come to pass. When I get hold of someone I just get too… I feel like I want to tear them in half, know what I’m saying? Like I want to run through and get a bunch of people near me and then explode.”

Fish nodded. Adam seemed to be horrified and proud and enthralled all at once. He had an aura that wasn’t right, the wild glow of a scientist who’d discovered a formula that could kill millions.

The ambulance was loading Catanese now, and had pulled right up onto the field, which everyone thought was great; that had never happened before. Fish walked with Adam across the grass, now black and wet, without saying much. The light was almost gone, so they headed home, afraid of the night that would soon bring Monday. Into the house, through the mud-room, past Fish’s parents playing Pong and up the stairs, Fish quiet, now running his fingers over each baluster, while Adam talked, sighed, touching nothing.

Fish finds a parking space under a wide wall of the hospital, pink-bricked and bisected by the kind of steel ladder you see on water towers — a fire escape, maybe. The grounds are lavish, or seem so in the dark — cobblestone paths winding around willows and palmettos, sprinklers hissing. As Fish is walking in, a man in institutional blue holds the door for him.

“I assume you’re a visitant?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Fish says.

“Of course you are. You have that radiant look.”

The man giggles and Fish says thank you, unsure whether or not to encourage him. He says thank you, tells the man, an aide of some kind, where he’s headed, and the aide, in his scrubs and with plastic bags around his shoes, walks Fish all the way to the Nursing/Trauma Unit. “I’d just confuse you otherwise,” he says. Fish isn’t sure if that’s an insult or what.

Adam is in Room 318, on the far side of the building. Fish hopes he doesn’t have a roommate, because the roommates in hospitals are always deformed and either too sick or not sick enough to be there in the first place. They listen to conversations and make judgments. But when he gets to the room there’s no roommate, just a twig of a woman, owlish and sallow, sitting on a chair near Adam, eating a brownie.

Fish waves hello to the brownie woman and walks around to Adam. He lies flat, with a neck brace on, staring at the ceiling. Fish puts his face in Adam’s line of vision.

“Hey,” Adam says, surprised.

Fish grunts.

Adam doesn’t look forty. He looks twelve. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and his face isn’t wrinkly or strung out or gaunt. With his freckles and the cap, he has the aura of a kid who’s just had his tonsils out.

“What’s the hat?” Fish asks. It bears a minor-league team’s logo, a beaver holding a bat he’s apparently been chewing on.

“What are you doing here?” Adam asks. His eyes open a little more, catching the glare of a car’s headlights in the parking lot.

“Who gave it to you?” Fish says.

“One of the nurses. Ronnie.”

“Do you get to keep it, or is it just for here?”

“I don’t know. I think I can keep it. Did you drive down?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. Thanks, man.”

“That’s a bitch of a drive,” Fish says.

“I know,” he says with what Fish considers an appropriate amount of awe and gratitude. “Sorry. Thanks.”

On his mobile table are remnants of dinner or lunch or both — uneaten tapioca and two tangelos, and beside them a little tilting pagoda of Tupperware. The lady with the brownie has finished with the brownie and is now cleaning her nails with a thumbtack. Fish nods to Adam and jerks his head toward her. She has a hospital I.D. tag clipped to her blouse.

“She sits here with me,” he says. “They’ve got someone in here all the time so I don’t do anything.” It’s clear that Adam is happy they think he’s such a serious customer, such a dangerous man. Fish looks over at the brownie woman to see if she’s listening, but she isn’t; she’s watching a movie on Adam’s TV — Fred Thompson is playing the president, and is wearing that dissatisfied look he uses. Fish stares out the window. In the parking lot, the cars are colored copper by the light from above, the lamps bent over them like tall thin saints over babies. He sees his rental and misses being inside it.

Adam is holding a little tube with a button on it.

“Is that for morphine?” Fish asks.

“Yeah,” Adam says.

“So you try to jump off a building, and they give you morphine — an unlimited amount?”

“No. I can only get a certain amount each hour. They’ve got it figured out.”

Fish knows it’s just a matter of time before Adam starts telling him why he jumped off the motel roof, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Oh, if only it were interesting! he thinks. But it never is. “I wanted to hurt myself,” he will say, “I don’t know why.” Nothing of any interest will get said by either of them. Adam will say, “I feel so dark sometimes” or “It’s like I see things sometimes… through a dark water.” Adam wants Fish to understand, but Fish isn’t interested, and, besides, he’ll call Adam on where he stole that dark-water part—The Executioner’s Song, Adam’s favorite book — and remind him of a hundred ways the two of them, Fish and Adam, are equal in this darkness. They’ve seen the same things, they have the same urges. Adam will concede this, and will begin apologizing for everything, and for too long. He’ll be too contrite, too docile, and Fish will want to step on him.

But at some point they’ll start making plans for when Adam is discharged. This is the only part that ever interests Fish: the steps from here on out. Fish will get inspired, laying out what will happen in the first few days, the weeks after, every move for years. First, a different apartment in a new city, away from the therapist-criminals in Bakersfield who keep prescribing drugs, every conceivable drug, for Adam. Then a menial job while doing some kind of night school, and finally a woman, older, hardened, wise, but warm — who will tie him to a pole in the basement when he needs it. Or what he really needs is a man. He needs a burly man, a hairy gay man who goes to bear bars. He’d give Adam love and respect but also be paternal, stern, watchful enough to save Adam from himself.

“So how’s Mary?” Adam asks.

“She’s good,” Fish says.

“Where’s she living now?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“She’s my cousin. You can’t tell me where she lives?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s got little kids, Adam, and you’re a guy who shoots himself and jumps off roofs. Fuck you.”

For a second Adam looks hurt, or pretends to look hurt, then he closes his eyes. Fish fears that he’s just made Adam feel more unique and menacing — precisely what Adam wants.

His chin is brown and tied together with black straight string, spiked along the suture, as if spiders had been sewn into his face.

“Ow. Don’t,” Adam says.

Fish is touching the stitches.

“Why not?”

“Stop it, prick.”

“How many?” It’s like a cactus or something. The stitches are amazing.

“Twelve. Get the fuck away.”

Fish gives him a look.

“Sorry,” Adam says. But he has no rights here. After five hours of driving, Fish is allowed to touch what he wants. Fish remembers the card and drops it on Adam’s chest. Adam tries to look down at it.

“You have to hold it up. I can’t see.”

Fish opens it and shows him the front. It’s an elephant surrounded by Hebrew letters, with “Happy Bat Mitzvah” written below.

“A Jewish elephant,” Adam says.

“I guess so,” Fish says.

Fish used to like hospitals. Waiting rooms in particular. When his last girlfriend, Annie, had her appendix out, he was at the hospital for thirty hours and had a pretty good time. He met people, learned things — there was some strange collegial vibe that night. Three of them played cards and Fish won a hundred and twenty-two dollars on a straight flush from a guy whose brother was getting a finger reattached. He’d been drilling a hole through his son’s wall, thought the kid was selling crystal meth and wanted to catch him. That had been a good night.

But with Adam he doesn’t want to stay. Fish looks at the clock. It says 8:40. He’ll leave at nine, he decides. Then he’ll call Annie to see if he can stay with her for the night. Annie follows local politics and has ridiculous lips, full like balloon animals, a voice lower than his. The last time Fish saw her she scratched his head so masterfully, in circles so convincing, that he thought he was rising, ascending. They talk often enough, and she lives in L.A., and he figures he’ll drive over after, not for sex or even romance, just for a place to rest where there’s breathing other than his own, where he won’t have to leave the TV on all night. If she’s not around he’ll drive back to San Jose tonight. He could do it. Through the night is easier.

“Does your mom know?” Fish asks. He knows that Adam’s mom doesn’t know, because Adam told Chuck that if she found out he’d do it for real next time.

“No. I don’t think so,” Adam says.

Adam’s father died a few years ago, a botched bypass, and now his mother lives in Australia. She went there with a man she’d met in a community-theater production of Fiorello! He played the lead, though he was six feet four and blond.

A nurse comes in. She’s Filipina, young. Her nametag says “Hope.” Fish feels an urge to say something about her name, in light of her working in a hospital and all, but then figures she hears that often enough.

“That’s a good name for a nurse,” he says. What the hell.

She takes Adam’s blood pressure. Fish watches, loving how quickly the armband fills with air, how tight it gets. That device always looks like something illegal.

“How’s your pain?” she asks Adam.

“Good,” Adam says.

The nurse takes the Bat Mitzvah card off Adam’s stomach and puts it on the side table, next to a jar of denim-colored tools, like lollipops but with foam starfish tops. Cleaning devices, maybe, for swabbing mouths or other wet orifices. Fish thinks briefly about taking one of the lollipops and stuffing it up Adam’s fat fucking nose. He almost laughs at the thought of it.

Fish leaves while Adam is drifting in and out, his face blank, almost beatific. During a brief moment when his eyes pull open, Fish tells him he’ll check in again tomorrow.

The night is sharp, all the lights crisp, and Fish drives to the motel where Chuck said Adam had been staying. He’s supposed to pick up Adam’s things — four bags’ worth. Adam had been living there for a month, after he was asked to leave his halfway house for skinning a chicken in his room. That’s what Chuck said, at least. If Adam did indeed skin a chicken, he did it only to say he’d done it. “Ask for Mr. Ali,” Chuck said. Chuck handled logistics. He was Adam’s attorney, benefactor, medical historian. Fish was someone who could drive down and pick up bags.

When he gets to the motel, a women’s volleyball team is checking in. He waits for twenty minutes while they decide who will sleep in whose rooms, and which duffels will stay in the minibus. Fish reads every brochure the lobby offers, and makes a tentative plan to see the Museum of Irrigation.

When it’s his turn Fish asks for Mr. Ali, but the woman at the counter, heavy-lidded and wearing a maize-colored sari, says he’s gone. “I am Mrs. Ali. Yes please?” Fish shows her the letter that Chuck faxed, asking for Adam’s stuff. Chuck insisted on ending the letter with “I trust that this matter will not present a problem.” Every legal letter Chuck writes ends this way. He loses half of his cases.

Fish can see the bags just behind her, in a narrow hallway with a cement floor. Two clear plastic bags sit there, alert, and two tennis bags, one covered in mud. Mrs. Ali reads the note, then looks up at Fish. It’s then that he almost cries. Water seems to fill his forehead; his eyes are just portals that show he’s drowning. What is she looking at? How much does she know? She must know. The ambulance picked Adam up here, and she or her husband surely packed and stored his belongings. She knew Adam as a flailer, as a leaper, and now knows Fish as someone lesser, someone who picks up the bags of people like Adam. Fish is now among the people who live in motels and jump off motel roofs. There’s a highway just above the motel, and on it people are passing this place at eighty miles an hour, wondering what happens in the filthy world below.

“I have to call Mr. Ali,” she says, and does so, using a receiver larger than her face. She gets off the phone with Mr. Ali and lets Fish into the hallway behind the desk.

“Thanks,” he says on the way out.

“All right,” she says, opening the door for him. “Good!” she adds, and after he’s gone throws the bolt, right to left.

Fish loads the bags into his trunk, and then remembers what he wanted to investigate. He has forgotten to look until now, and is suddenly thrilled. He walks over to the courtyard area to see where Adam jumped. But he can’t find a part of the motel complex that has four stories. There is just the one two-story building, in an L shape around the pool, and its roof is only about eighteen feet high. Dumbshit! Fish has figured it out. Of course! Forty feet isn’t Adam’s way, after all, but eighteen feet is. He jumped from this. Dumbshit! Coward! Pissfuck! Who jumps eighteen feet? Who does this? This is so wrong. There are too many things wrong everywhere for this kind of thing, this jumping from eighteen-foot roofs. Adam must have known that eighteen feet wasn’t far enough to kill himself, just far enough to break bones. And the only thing sadder than an eighteen-foot motel roof is the guy staring at it.

He goes back to the car and opens the trunk. He reaches inside one of the plastic bags, looking for something solid. Most of its contents are soft, clothes, and here and there moist, but he soon finds a trophy, a small one with a tennis player on top and someone else’s name engraved on it. Elsewhere between the folds of shirts and socks there is some deodorant, a handful of tapes, which Fish pulls out for the drive home, and a bottle of cologne called Together, which makes him laugh. Adam is the only guy Fish knows who wears cologne. The only other items of note are five belts, wound as one like a rattlesnake, and a ten-pound container of baby powder.

And now a woman is walking across the lot toward Fish. Every part of her is moving — her ankles, unsteady in heels; her arms swinging; her head, which jitters with each step, as if it, too, played a part in her propulsion. Her features are mismatched — small chin, wide nose, the icy, almost clear eyes of a wolf. She’s wearing jeans and a denim jacket, with pointy blue velveteen boots and the streamlined, utilitarian body of a tomboy teenager.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” Fish says.

“What’re you doing?” she asks. “Coming or going?”

She reminds him of the South somehow. He thinks of Kentucky and doesn’t know why. Is she nineteen or thirty? Fish can’t tell.

“I’m packing this stuff up,” he says.

“Then?”

“Then I’m driving down to see a friend.” It’s after ten and he hasn’t called Annie yet. If he calls too late she won’t let him come over.

“Can you give me a ride?” the woman says. “I’m trying to get to San Diego.”

“Oh. Yeah. See, I’m not going that far.”

Behind them, a truck parks and sighs.

“I can get out wherever you stop.”

He looks at her to see if she has a gun or a crowbar. He wants to help, but more than this, he wants to leave. Not long ago, at a gas station in Daly City, a tall man in a straw hat told Fish that he didn’t have any cash, and could Fish spot him twenty dollars — he’d give Fish a personal check in exchange. Fish figured he’d be less than human if he said no, so he said yes. The man had a car, after all, and was wearing a sports coat, so this was just a small transaction between solvent citizens. The guy put his home phone number on the check and everything. But the check bounced.

Fish had only wanted to help the man. He spent that first day thinking he had helped him, believing in the community of souls, in Daly City or anywhere. And then that man took it away. He reached inside Fish and took that from him.

Fish gets in the car and unlocks the passenger side. He moves a Jack in the Box bag and a milk carton and now the woman is sitting in the passenger seat, a few inches from him. She picks up the map from the floor, folds it quickly, expertly, and puts it in the side compartment.

“Thanks for this. You’re sweet,” she says, giving him her hand in a royal way. “What’s your name?”

“Eddie,” he says. Her hand is cold. He doesn’t know if he should kiss it or shake it. He doesn’t do either, just holds it for a few seconds and lets it drop.

“That’s weird,” she says. “My brother’s name is Eddie. Was.”

Now Fish considers giving her his real name. Instead, he says, “He changed his name?”

“No, he died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” she says.

Fish pulls out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. No worries. He wants to tell her how much he hates that expression, but doesn’t. “Don’t worry” makes sense, is a pat on the arm, a reassurance from one person to another, but “No worries” implies there aren’t any worries anywhere in the world, and that’s just not true.

They get on the highway. Fish asks her name. Her name is Wendy.

“Where’re you going?” she asks.

“Redondo Beach, I think.” That’s where Annie lives. Near the beach, with a futon, in a cave of an apartment next to the garage of a family of five. Her place is full of small glass figurines of mythical animals, ears pinched while the glass was molten— hippogriffs, hydras, satyrs, a tiny sphinx the color of cantaloupe.

“My ex lives in Redondo,” Wendy says. “He’s married now. She had four kids. Two of them Downies.”

“Huh,” Fish says. She is staring at him. He wonders how he looks in profile.

“So what were you doing at the motel?”

“Nothing. Getting stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Just some stuff. Friend’s stuff.” Somehow that sounds shady. But he lets it go. She seems impressed.

Wendy pushes the radio scan button a few times, and finds the “Oooh-oooh, Jackie Blue” song.

“I love this song,” she says, and slaps her lap loudly. She leaves her hands there, grabbing her thighs as if to keep them in place.

“So do you party?” she asks.

“What?”

“Do. You. Party.”

“In general? I don’t—”

“You know. Party.”

He’s lost. He gives her a pleading look.

“You and me, party, handsome. We should go party somewhere. We could stop and get a drink and stuff. Or a room. Get some weed. Whatever.”

Fish finally knows. Shit. Normal women don’t call men “handsome”—only waitresses and prostitutes do that. It’s a shame, though. “Handsome” is such a beautiful word.

Fish gives her offer some thought. Her thighs have his head lunging. But it would cost too much, right, spending time with a woman like this? He doesn’t know. How did I get to my age without knowing how much things like this cost? But he can’t. He never takes off his shirt with people he doesn’t know. She’d see the hair on his shoulders and his hernia scar, much more sinister than it needed to be and she’d think he was a bad package, that the hair and the crooked smiling scar were proof he needed to pay for the kind of company she could offer.

“Nah, I gotta get down to Redondo,” he says, as if deciding whether or not to see an afternoon movie. “My friend’s waiting for me. And his wife and my mom and everyone. Cousins.” His mouth is adding family members quicker than his head can count. “They’re probably all waiting up.”

“We can be quick, if you want,” she says.

Another orange-and-black bird appears, shooting across the road low and fast. Fish wants to ask Wendy if she knows what they’re called — thrushes? finches? Not that it would make any difference, knowing their name. A name is a diagnosis, and neither makes a bit of difference. He glances over at her; her shoulders are squared to him now, her chin lowered. “I’m not expensive,” she says.

Fish pulls off the highway and under a gas-station canopy; it’s bright like daylight and he thinks of Reno. Wendy has asked to use the bathroom, and here her skin looks blue, translucent, as if lit from within, and the humidity has lifted. Instead of using the bathroom, though, she heads straight to the pay phone, and while she’s on the phone she waves Fish away like he’s her father dropping her off at a concert. He leaves.

By the time he gets to a phone to call Annie, it’s too late. He wakes her up, or she pretends to have been asleep. Her first syllable is full of scorn, and he wonders if Wendy is still at the gas station where he left her, a few miles back. “You have to start thinking of other people, honey,” Annie says, now without anger, without anything, and hangs up.

He is back at the hospital twenty minutes later. It’s well after midnight, and he has no hope of getting up to Adam’s room through the doors. He parks his car in the same spot and calculates which window is his. He knows that Adam is on the third floor, and the two possible windows are on either side of the steel ladder. So he runs under the willows and through the palmettos and starts up.

It’s the left window. He can see Adam in the light of the TV. His twelve-year-old’s face is facing Fish now, eyes closed. The brownie woman has gone.

As Fish is about to tap on the glass, Adam opens his eyes. When he sees Fish, he’s disbelieving. He closes one eye, as if looking through a telescope, to be sure. Fish waves, and Adam, with his fingers only, waves back.

Fish hasn’t thought any further than this. If he had a specific message for Adam, he could mime it through the glass, but he doesn’t have that kind of message.

Adam mouths the word “How?” and points to Fish. Fish is about to mime climbing a ladder but realizes he can’t do this without taking both hands off the rungs. He tries it with one hand, but it looks more like he’s shopping, like he’s doing the shopping-cart dance. Adam doesn’t get it.

Fish shakes his head, wiping the board clean. He decides he’ll pry the window open and tumble in and talk. But the window frame is flush to the building. It will not give.

Fish knocks his head on the glass, twice. Adam smiles. Fish does it a few more times, just to entertain him. Adam pretends to be laughing a lot. It isn’t as great as either of them makes it out to be, but there isn’t anything else to do. Soon Adam yawns. Fish yawns. Adam’s eyes are flickering, so Fish gestures that he’ll see him tomorrow, rolling his hand like he’s creating a wave, the wave meaning tomorrow, rolling and rolling.

Fish drives to Redondo and checks into a Red Roof by the highway. He figures he’ll call Annie in the morning and then see Adam again on his way back north, and do something with all the bags after he’s gone through them and dumped the pills and anything else he doesn’t want Adam to have. He resolves to get him a real suitcase or two, something with a hard shell, sturdy. He can do that tomorrow.

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow he can put Adam’s stuff in the sturdy suitcases and take them to him, put them in the hospital room, lined up by the door so they’re there when he’s ready to leave. Adam can be a promising young man with neat sturdy suitcases. Fish will repack everything, put it all in two rows, pants on one side and shirts on the other, with the second suitcase holding the other things — socks and underwear and toiletries and belts, baby powder. Tomorrow he can do these things better than he did today. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

Fish’s Red Roof room is dark and he knows he’s being stupid. The walls smell like people, and he doesn’t deserve this, to be tricked like this again. He had made so many promises to himself that he would never waste himself, never again hand a pure intention, so much like a newborn, to someone so careless. He is done being fooled. Why would that Daly City man jack him on a bad check? It was such violence. He will not be the sucker. He doesn’t want to be a part of the world under the highway. No. Today was tomorrow and tomorrow was always the same. No, he’ll skip Annie and Adam and just get a shotgun now and go to that farm on I-5 and shoot a bunch of stupid cows. Ha ha! They wouldn’t make it, anyway — so many animals are built to die. Maybe cut off their heads and hollow them out and wear one as a mask. Yes! Just for fun. Just to do it. The humidity inside one of those big heavy heads — he’d love to see what it’s like in there for a second. His clean hair would be covered in blood, his face wet, filthy from the stuff he didn’t scoop out before he put the fucking thing on.