How We Are Hungry

QUIET

THE LAST TIME I told this story, I ended it with a conversation I had with the nickly shimmer of the moon on a black lake on the Isle of Skye. It went like this:

“You are a lucky one, Tom, to have Erin and others like Erin.” The voice of the nickly reflection of the moon was not as deep as you might expect. It was a singer’s voice, though, a tenor, one that loved itself without reservation.

“Thank you,” I said. “I feel blessed.”

“I often think of coming down to live among you, to make a big mess of it all,” he said. “It always looks so messy, and I think I might like that.”

“It is messy, I guess.”

“It looks awfully messy. It looks almost impossible to survive, to tell you the truth. The pain of it all.”

“It’s not all that painful,” I said.

“But Tom,” it said, “the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone’s pendulums swinging, to and fro, and always you’re getting hit by someone else’s swinging pendulum. You’re minding your business, but someone else’s pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.”

“That happens, yes.”

“I saw you and Erin by the shed.”

“Oh.”

“I was there.”

“That makes sense. I saw you, too.”

“I watch you often, Tom. I have time on my hands. Time is different to me than it is to you.”

I was still thinking about what the nickly shimmer had seen. He, however, was warming to the sound of his thoughts.

“I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.”

Three days earlier, at the airport, I was stunned that Erin had actually shown up. That she’d really come. That she had a car. “And you can drive on the other side? Do they do that up here, too?” “They do. I do.” She looked good. Pale. She had a long nose, bent a bit, seeming almost broken, working in perfect concert with her exquisitely thick chocolate hair, hair like it had been brushed a thousand times by magic elves.

I have always been the good friend. I have been harmless, listening, waiting.

“You look so much better,” she said to me.

“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what she meant.

I had flown out for a long weekend, and she and I planned to drive to the Isle of Skye. We hugged and I groaned into her sweater, pulled back and looked at her more. Her eyes still the blue of oceans on maps. She still had dark freckles, almost spots, really, round and discrete, sprayed over and around her nose and cheeks. I depended on those, and loved her old coffee-colored jeans, flared a little, faded over her bold, assertive backside — she’d been in a college production of a play about Robert Crumb’s women. Such a triumph she was — and so how had I, with my shapeless torso and oily neck, been allowed to get so close? I stood and bounced on my toes and tried not to sweat or scream or lift her and carry her around on my shoulder.

Edinburgh was raining and dark at noon. I was baffled that Erin — Erin Mahatma Fullerton — was so confident here, when she’d left me and D.C. only a year before. That she could drive on the wrong side of the road with such confidence.

“You’re incredible,” I said, about her driving. “How do you not mess it up? How are we not dead?”

“I guess I’m just used to being good at everything.”

She was good at everything. I couldn’t remember anything she couldn’t do well. I wasn’t jealous about this. I was not threatened. I should be able to just make a statement like that without being judged.

She drove with her hand on the wheel, not really gripping it, her wrist resting on top. I reached over and squeezed her knee.

“This is so weird,” she said, then laughed by throwing her head all the way forward. It was the first time I’d seen her do that.

“I know,” I said. “But good, right?”

“Yeah, good. It’s good.” She laughed again the same way. Each time she did this she almost hit her face on the steering wheel. It was a new and fake habit — at what age do we stop acquiring affectations like that? I hoped she wouldn’t do it again, because if she did I would have to ask her to stop.

We’d met at a protest, or on the way to one, a confused and desperate event. It was supposed to be an anti-IMF/World Bank march, but had been fashioned into an action against the potential bombing of Afghanistan. This was in September.

Blocks away I first caught sight of her pants, violet-blue, and followed her quickly and asked if she were heading to Freedom Plaza. She said yes. She was friendly enough, accepting my companionship for the walk there. She said she was curious only, didn’t want to get too close to the demonstration, being an employee of the Treasury and all.

I laughed. Was she serious? She was. What was her area of work? She worked as a liaison between Treasury and the IMF. I laughed again. I’d never met anyone from Treasury.

“Hold on,” she said. She stood, her knuckle on her lips.

I stared at the knuckle on her lips. Something happened then that should not have been possible: a tiny bird alighted on her shoulder. Erin was unsurprised.

“Well zippety-do-da!” she said to the bird. “Isn’t that strange?” she said to me.

The bird departed and Erin led me through a short cut. Under a marble archway and through an outdoor mall we walked. I dipped my fingers into a small fountain, the water too warm. We passed a Cartier shop on the right as the sounds of the protest became louder, somewhere above our heads. Before us were a set of polished steps and to our left the park. I followed her.

There was something experimental about her, I thought, physically. She didn’t seem to have a left arm. We walked down the steps, and I was on her right side, so I wasn’t in a position to know more.

I leaned forward and confirmed that there was no left arm swinging, no left hand at her side. I was growing more certain that she had only one arm. A large black minivan stopped in front of us, and in the window I saw her reflection clearly. Four cops or agents in riot gear stepped out, hulking, sullen, and Erin was missing an arm. The effect wasn’t something ruined or feeble, though, was somehow harmonious — not a handicap but just a viable variation. Instead of allowing her one sleeve to dangle, she’d sewn it at the shoulder. Or the manufacturer had. It was seamless. She saw me looking. She turned and walked.

Did people look at Erin strangely? It depended on their angle, first of all. Those who could grasp and be certain that she was missing a limb might cock their heads or pause briefly. Not out of revulsion. It was more like simple surprise, as when you see identical twins, adults, dressed alike, or a cat on a leash. I wanted to be closer to her because she seemed like the future to me, like a new sort of person, a new species. When I was thirteen I’d had a friend, half French and half Vietnamese, who had given me the same feeling of satisfaction — bridging the gap between my world and the one I thought was new.

On the peripheries of the protest was a smattering of TV cameras, trolling. We watched while demonstrators wandered into and out of the plaza. It wasn’t clear if the protest was beginning or ending or in full swing. The energy was mild. The ratio of protesters to those documenting them was roughly one to one.

“You don’t seem very happy,” she said to me.

This made me happy. I smiled. I felt like a bird that had landed on her shoulder. She was unspoiled land on which I could settle. I could bring everything I had.

I asked her if she worried about losing her job, if she was caught on film. I put my knuckle to my lips.

“Not really,” she said. “There are lots of jobs. There are so many things to do. Too damned many, really. It might be time to move anyway. This town is choking me.”

She laughed with her eyes closed. I laughed and watched her. I knew then that I would get her a job where I worked, that she and I would become closer, that I would know the things I wanted to know about her.

We sat on the curb.

Near us a bearded man’s sign said “Friend of the Earth.”

Erin pointed to him. “He’s a friend of the Earth,” she said.

A couple walked by, young and holding hands, wearing black handkerchiefs over their faces. Erin’s face darkened. “I have to get out of this country for a while,” she said.

That was more than two years ago. Now, in our small plastic-smelling car we skittered around Edinburgh’s glowering black fortress. Up the hill and through the castle’s parking lot running and squealing in the rain and once within the thick stone walls we took a tour elucidating the history of the country’s crown jewels. We made very, very funny jokes about these crown jewels, and the role of the peasant women in protecting and hiding them. We watched footage of Scottish soldiers from WWII, maybe it was WWI, though most of the film involved the soldiers standing around smoking pipes. The old speedy film made them seem nervous, their movements bird-like. There was a long stretch of the soldiers in kilts, dancing two by two, arms hooked, on an outdoor stage, presumably to entertain their colleagues. Spinning, twirling, sometimes with one hand above their heads, sometimes one over their bellies— it’s hard to explain.

“They don’t teach soldiers to dance like they used to,” Erin said.

Every man in the film was dead by now. When I was very young I couldn’t watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust. I hugged Erin from behind, and she stared at my hands linked, loosely, over around her waist.

I knew that she had not been content since moving to London. Her worries, though, came from home. She was getting news from her family and felt helpless. Her favorite cousin, a marine, was in Kabul. Her parents were still married but were seeing other people; her mother was dating a retired man who held the Stop sign at a school crosswalk. He sat on a lawn chair when between trips across the road.

“I always assumed he wasn’t all there,” Erin said, about the man, whose name was Jedediah. “Not retarded, you know…” She made a face that looked like a zombie’s. She scratched her temples and crossed her eyes. Now the man was sleeping in her mother’s bed.

I’d never been interested in someone like Erin before. She had an MBA, which I didn’t understand — MBAs generally or the fact that she’d wanted one. She knew menus and cheeses and Caribbean islands named after saints. But she was very strong and even reckless. She had quit her job in D.C. and now she was here.

She wanted to start an ex-pat community in London, or Scotland or Ireland. Or Norway. She hadn’t made up her mind, and was auditioning possible locations — somewhere, she said, “where all the churches aren’t covered in scaffolding.” Skye was among the candidates. She’d just been to Montenegro and was disappointed. “I expected more mustaches,” she said. “Mustaches and fedoras.”

I had the feeling that she’d overromanticized the idea of living elsewhere, but I didn’t tell her this. We stepped through the castle museum, so many old things behind new glass. She complained that she was losing friends to substances and babies, that she was fighting, over the phone, with everyone she knew in the U.S. She was convinced she was right each time, but still, she wanted to know if she seemed insane. I told her she was perfect.

“I’m always on your side,” I said.

“Fine. You stay close, and together we’ll systematically remove all the crazies from my life.”

The car didn’t have a CD player but Erin had an adapter that connected her portable disc player to the tape deck. While she drove us down the hill and into the town, I hooked everything up, only to find that the wires wouldn’t stay connected without some kind of adhesive.

“Hold on,” she said.

She stopped the car at a small market on the back end of the castle and ran in. It was the first time we’d been apart since the airport, and it was too soon. I put my hand on the leather where she’d been sitting. I wanted it to be warmer.

She jogged back to the car grinning like she’d stolen something The door opened, rain and wind scrambled in loudly, and she came inside. The door closed behind her with a clump.

“Guess what I just bought?” she asked.

I guessed: “Tape.”

“Riiiiight…” She was twirling her index finger in the air, pulling more words from my mouth, like winding a yo-yo. It drove me half-mad with desire.

“Special tape?” I ventured, wanting to take her face and squeeze it and lick it.

“Not just tape. Scotch tape.”

“Right.”

“Get it, Scotch tape?”

“Oh.”

The rain pattered.

She pulled it out of the white paper bag with a flourish. I widened my eyes, trying to seem impressed.

The tape was yellowed, an amber sort of color. It looked like the tape we’d used in grade school, before they invented good tape.

“It looks old,” I said.

“No, no, this is the best. They invented it, these people! Probably up there, in that castle. A bunch of monks, took them centuries.” She was desperately trying to get some tape from the roll but it wasn’t attached to any standard tape dispensing device. I wanted to help but knew she’d ask me if she felt she needed it. That was the rule.

In a few seconds she was done assembling, wrapping the tape around the adapter and the walkman. But the tape wasn’t sticking. It fell off immediately. It was like paper. It was not tape. It had no adhesive qualities whatsoever.

I laughed and then stopped. She was angry. She peeled off another strip and tested its stickiness against her fingers.

“It’s not even sticky,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

She started the car and pulled out.

“This is Scotch tape, right?” she said. “God damn it.”

Up through the highlands at dusk. Throughout the electric-green hills were great white stones flung like teeth.

“I see this and I think glory,” I said to Erin, loving the sound of the word glory, and hoping it would impress her in some way. I was driving now, and soon realized that driving on the wrong side wasn’t very difficult.

“I’d love to live here,” I said, trying to sound dreamy.

“You can’t live here,” she said. “There’s nothing here. No work.”

“I could telecommute.”

Silence from Erin.

“If you were here,” I started, then dropped the thought.

She gave me a fake smile. I soaked up every ounce of it.

When I met Erin I was working at a statistics-processing firm, a small shop founded by a one-time major league pitcher named Dean Denny. He was a side-armer, goofy and mustachioed. After retiring at thirty-two, he’d run for office, lost, spent ten years as a lobbyist for everyone from Exxon to Greenpeace, then started the American Institute for Statistical Studies. The firm was located in a converted Victorian in Alexandria, catering to the nonprofits in D.C., some federal agencies, and those who wanted influence at either or both. The other two staff members were Michael and Derek, Michael being Dean’s son and Derek being Michael’s old friend and the former personal assistant to Alan Simpson, senator of Wyoming.

Two months after meeting Erin I secured a job for her at the AISS. I was afraid she’d hate Michael and Derek, that they would drive her away. For their own amusement, they had recently removed one letter from the firm’s name and had made business cards with A.S.S. on them. They were chucklers, they were assholes. They called me The Turtle.

Then Turtle-man.

Then Yertle.

Then Yentl. Then Lentil.

Finally they went back to Turtle.

They were funny and loyal. They laughed about Dockers but then wore pants shockingly close to Dockers. Sometimes they’d wear baseball caps to work, the bill carefully bent in an upside-down grin, the edges frayed. Their footwear was always perfect — old Nike hiker’s low-tops in earth tones, or white bucks flawlessly faded and scuffed. They dressed the way certain Cape Coddish catalogs tried to dress their models, but these two were better at it, effortless about it, tucking one side of their shirts in just so, their clothes worn in but never threadbare—

It sounds as though I was paying attention to their wardrobe but I don’t remember it that way. You know these men. They’re fine people, they know right from wrong. I had a strong feeling that, in a pinch, they would do more for me than I would for them. It was more in their blood; they were not people who would think twice.

The American Institute for Statistical Studies was the only one of its kind on the East Coast and therefore we were the best at what we did. We were the people who took the statistics— how many people injured on the job each year, how many boys fondled by priests every decade, how many cats declawed in urban areas every week, anything — and, among other services, extrapolated those numbers into the frequency per day, per hour, minute, whatever seemed most grievous. We knew all the pertinent figures—525,600 minutes in a year, 31,536,000 seconds — and so could always figure out how to make whatever issue or trend seem as menacing as possible. Three million squirrels poisoned by processed food a year is one thing, but if the public knows that one such squirrel dies every twelve seconds, well then, the reasoning goes, you have a populace motivated to act.

Given our physical proximity, the four of us knew an inordinate amount about each other. We could hear, if we chose to listen, every word spoken by any of the others, on the phone or otherwise. We quickly became protective of one another but especially of Erin, who we pretended needed our shielding. She had been raised as an only child outside of Asheville — she had the faintest accent — and now she felt, she often said, as if she’d inherited three brothers. When she first said that, after we’d been working together for a few months, we three coveted it, being thought of as her brothers — it prompted Derek, at least, to start lifting weights. But it made anyone’s romantic pursuit of Erin seem against nature or God. We’d all had, before that point, intentions of varying severity. My feelings for Erin were confused. I loved her.

She noticed things about me. When I sat across from her, at any meal, she would find a time, after looking at me for a few seconds, to make a declaration. “You have minnow-shaped eyes,” she said. “You smell clean. Like a little boy,” she said. It didn’t matter what she said, I was always grateful. “You have something below you,” she said to me, eating a hoagie one day, prying open my every pore and reading my every memory. “Like a bunch of teeth waiting to come through.”

I wanted to love her heroically, selflessly — to honor her and defend her, and punish people who looked at her stump in a way that displeased her. But soon I realized that she had more than enough suitors, and at least a few of them would be better for her. They all seemed to be quiet, uncomplicated men, who were usually older and who invariably looked older than they were, and wore wool. But occasionally we glimpsed an “old friend” or an acquaintance from this gym or that band — she went to a lot of shows — and these men caused us concern. These men were thinner, unshaven, wore boots.

She spread her attention between the three of us with maddening equability. We usually all ate together, but occasionally, in a casual but calculated rotation, we ate with her alone. For a time, Michael and Derek stepped into an area where they were permitted to make ribald jokes about her missing arm. I never followed, nor did Dean. Derek she allowed to call her Lefty, but at some point Michael lost his license to kid her about the arm, I don’t know how. I rejoiced.

Michael, Derek, and I, each unsure of the others’ intentions and of our own, agreed, drunkenly one night, never to touch her, not even in a state like the one in which we currently found ourselves. Everyone had their intimacies, though. Derek took her on motorcycle rides, Michael taught her how to roast a pig. I was the one — either because she loved me more or because I was the least virile — she told about her men.

She claimed never to want to talk much about them, but she did, with little provocation. Hearing their names, or the nicknames she gave them — Fingers, Señor con Queso, Mr. Robinson — made me uneasy; it was clear that many of them were still lurking nearby, and that she was not adept at or willing to cut them loose. She lamented the fact that she seemed to attract men who wanted to extract something from her. She used this word, extract, often, when talking about these unnamed men. I considered her flawless, though I wished she were more careful, or better able to keep herself out of the path of these bad men. The bad men, I told her, were not always obvious at first, though I wasn’t sure that was true.

“I can’t worry about the intentions of everyone I know,” she said.

“Wrong,” I said. “You have to worry about their intentions. Within three minutes of meeting any man, his intentions toward you are decided, completely.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said.

Stopped at an outcropping, a mist swirled around us as if it were going to leave a genie in its wake, and when it lifted, I hugged Erin, my front to her back. I buried my head in her neck. She accepted this, and turned to face me, and then held me with a quick intensity — and let go. She knew I was weak and stupid. But when she released me, I pulled her into me again, and indicated with the tenacity of my embrace that I’d like to hold her for at least a full minute or two, binge on her now, and thus be left sated. I was overcome: I coveted her and the world in that order.

I kept a close eye on the side of her head, to see if she would turn her face toward mine. If that were to happen I would kiss her for a short time and then stop, and then laugh it off, pretend that we were just being dopes. I would kiss her long enough to satisfy my curiosity about kissing her but briefly enough that I could dismiss the kiss — ha ha what a riot, couldn’t matter less.

But it would always matter! I would always think of this time, of these hugs, of a kiss, should it come. I would catalog it and reference it frequently, and I hoped that in the short term gorging on this kind of platonic affection would prevent me from doing something more drastic later. Faced with a radiance like here, a clear air of rightness, it took so much work to avoid doing something wrong. We held each other for three minutes and then pulled away and I kissed her head while she stared into my neck.

We got back in the car.

It was 8 o’clock and underwater blue when we rolled over the bridge to the Isle of Skye. There was fog, a hazy condensation that cast everything in gray. We had a map, but it was much too vague and soon we were lost. There was a profound sort of quiet to the island, and I wanted nothing more than a small warm inn, with only one room left, no doubles, sorry — so we’d have to share a bed.

We stopped at a small bed and breakfast, with a sign saying “Mrs. MacIlvane’s”, to ask about a room. There were luminaria guiding visitors to the door, a huge and scarlet door, with a knocker in the center fashioned from antlers. A large pale woman, who looked so much like Terry Jones in drag that I almost laughed, opened the door. I wanted her to speak in a chirpy falsetto but her voice was surprisingly nuanced, smoky even.

Erin asked if she had any rooms, and I saw that the woman hadn’t noticed Erin’s missing arm. Erin had a way of standing, which she’d used — she told me later — the first time I’d met her. It was an undetectable three-quarter stance, giving people a bit more of her right shoulder than was customary.

While the woman was telling us her son was home and occupying the one available room, the man of the house, round and with a leftward brush of gray hair, came up behind her and kicked the back of her knee, throwing her balance off. She turned, slapped his shoulder and they both grinned, bashful and proud, at Erin and me.

“You’ll have a bit of trouble finding a room tonight,” the man said.

“A load of birders up this weekend,” his wife said. “Someone said there were puffins here, so they’re all in search.”

“Are you birders?” the man asked.

“Yes,” said Erin. “Completely.”

“Well, I’m sorry about the room,” the man said. Now he was starting to close the door. “We’d invite you in, but you’d be sharing our bed.”

“And we don’t do that anymore,” the woman said, out of view, laughing. And the big scarlet door closed on us.

Driving aimlessly, we speculated about their sex life. At some point I said something to Erin about her possibly wanting to have a three-way with the older couple.

“Sounds like you wanna go bump in the night with Terry Jones and her husband.”

I think that’s what I said. It was a joke, but I delivered it wrong and it sounded nasty.

Erin said, with all the cheer available in the world: “No thanks. Not this time.”

I asked her what she meant by that.

“Nothing.”

“So you’ve had a threesome!”

She was quiet.

“Erin! You dog.”

More quiet.

“Who with?”

Nothing.

“Tell me. You have to tell me.”

A sigh. “It was nothing. It was weird. Forget it. You see any more places to stay? On the map? I don’t want to have to go back to Kyleakin.”

This exchange was itself a level of intimacy we’d never had. When we’d shared stories before, it had always been voluntary — titillating but unchallenging. Now I was pushing her and I felt we were very close.

“Tell me who! Another girl, or a couple or what?”

“I don’t know. Just stop.”

“Who were they? Anyone I know? I bet it was two guys!”

We were having such a good time. At the same time, I felt like I was sticking my head ever-deeper into an oven.

“It was nothing. It was weird.”

My mouth dried and I pretended to keep smiling. Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads? I was inviting a permanent, violent guest into my home. He would defecate on my bed. He would shred my clothes, light fires on the walls. I could see him walking up the driveway and I stood at the door, knowing that I’d be a fool to bring him inside. But still I opened the door.

“You know I won’t stop until you tell me,” I said, still trying to be jocular.

A fog threw itself over our car and Erin turned on the brights.

“Who was it?” I asked, knowing. Almost knowing, as my eyes adjusted to the dim light now between us.

“Where is this coming from?” she asked. “Why are you obsessing?”

She looked in the side-view mirror and then rolled down the window to readjust it. I already knew I was right.

“Tell me,” I said, hushed.

She stopped the car and turned to me. “You’re being an ass. I thought you knew.”

“Let me drive,” I said.

We both got out silently and passed in front of the car, steam rising from the hood, our faces in the headlights white and terrified.

I drove faster. She was execrable. They were villains, the three of them. Vermin in Dockers. And liars. I closed my eyes and no colors appeared.

The black road devoured our headlights. I wove left and right with the double lines; they toyed with me. I couldn’t imagine a time when I’d want to talk to her or to them again. It was almost a relief.

“Tom.”

I didn’t answer. I’ve wanted to be in a war. Or a box. Somewhere where I would always know what to do.

I didn’t want to be in Scotland. Just getting off of Skye would mean something, having that bay between us. I’d go to Muck or Eigg or Benbecula or Rhum. How was it that I’d known? Far before she’d given me a hint I knew. I decided that yes, I wished she’d lied. I didn’t like her face anymore. It had reddened and dropped — she almost had jowls, didn’t she? Who was this person? She was an animal.

Two flashes of white and a boom and something black and two eyes — we hit a living thing. Erin gasped quietly, and I immediately had the strangely satisfying thought that she was so cowed by her sins to stay silent during a car accident. She couldn’t scream.

I stopped the car.

“A dog, I think,” she said.

I backed up. In my side-view mirror, a black mound marred the road, resting precisely on the divider. The brake lights were not enough to illuminate it. I turned the car around to shine the headlights on it. It was not a dog. It was a sheep.

Its wool was black and its eyes were almost white but also gray and blue. They reflected the car’s lights flatly. There was blood coming from its mouth. Its head was twisted. Oh God, said Erin.

There were two white sheep by the side of the road. They were speaking to the dead black sheep. They made tentative steps toward the middle, where the black one’s body lay. They wanted the dead sheep to get up and get going.

Erin and I both said Oh my God, oh my God, look at that. I thought, for the first time in my life, that the known science of the world was going to be changed by something I had witnessed. This communication between sheep, this cognizance of mortality, was surely unaccounted for.

“Should we pick it up?” Erin asked.

I considered this.

“No. It’s in the middle,” I said. “It won’t get hit anymore — it’s not in anyone’s way. We should leave it.”

The two sheep looked toward the car and spoke to Erin and me. How could you? They brayed at the car. Don’t you have enough? You fucking monsters!

“Oh God,” Erin said, “now they’re talking to us.”

Both sheep stepped toward the car. Quickly they picked up speed and started jogging at us.

“They’re really scaring me,” Erin said.

I backed up. I backed up fifty yards. I stopped the car again and watched. One sheep was still talking to us and the other had turned again, had resumed talking to the broken black one.

We drove then, both of us now very awake. As we slowed through Portree, a small town of tall clapboard taverns and inns, shops of woolen goods, I was half-broken but only when I concentrated on it. Fuck those people. I moved my mouth when I thought this, and then I smiled. Erin saw me smile and she didn’t smile in return because she knew why I was smiling.

The hotel in Portree had been awarded too many stars — it was well-made and charmless. Twelve different newspapers fanned out on a heavily lacquered table in the drawing room, a robust fire chewing its cereal in the corner, the ceilings were vaulted and the beds canopied, but there was a sickly tint to the lighting, the smell of rain and frustration coming from the walls. The only softening touch was a cat, sleeping atop the bar. It yawned at me, showing its plasticine teeth.

We got a suite with two rooms.

“Tom,” she said as we stepped up the quiet stairs.

I didn’t answer her.

In the suite I closed my half from hers with a white sliding door. I changed and jogged down the steps alone, determined to claim the dining room as my own. Around my table, unspeaking couples were watching me and breathing into their plates. I looked out the picture window. The moon’s reflection was sketched loosely with chalk on the black flat bay. The silverware was too heavy.

I woke up to coughing. Erin stumbled into the bathroom to do it but that only made it louder, slapping against the tiled walls. The sun was just coming up. She blew her nose. I opened the sliding doors in time to catch her emerging from the bathroom, naked below her small T-shirt. With the bathroom door open, she was backlit in gold. She turned the light off and was black again.

“Sorry,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

I squinted at her. Her legs were thinner than I’d expected, softer. I thought of white glue.

“I feel like hell.”

I was thrilled. God had acted quickly. Erin was transformed: yesterday strong and quick-moving, now frail and sour. She threw back a shot of Nyquil and passed out.

I slid the doors and slept until nine. I wanted to be gone, but I worried about what the hotel staff would think of me leaving my one-armed friend alone, sick, while I flitted about the island. I left and told the man at the desk that Erin was resting, not to disturb her.

It was mid-afternoon and wet but my head was clear. It was more difficult to be angry at Erin while she was asleep and I was driving, away and alone. I was at Kyleakin, the tiny town of intersection with mainland Scotland, and stopped before the bridge ready to take me back over. I could leave her. I had a change of clean clothes in the car. A small group of buildings to the right, a small castle’s ruins just beyond.

I stopped at a hostel. Everyone in the common room was young and pretending to be poor except, to the left, in the cafeteria, a family of five, Russian, eating spaghetti while assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

At the counter, I asked about a boat.

“We have one rowboat.”

The boat, laying on the gray shore of rocks and sticks, everywhere black seaweed like the hair of a hundred dead mermaids, was overturned and silver. I untied the knot, righted it and dragged it to the water. I pushed it in and jumped from a rock, trying to keep my feet dry. The water here would be brutal. The tip of my right foot came into the boat wet, but otherwise I had done it. I was in the boat and it was moving from the shore. I was shooting out into the bay in this borrowed boat and I was alone and could be going anywhere.

But the boat was facing the wrong way. All I could see was the shrinking of that beach and those buildings. For a rowboat passenger all was adventure, facing forward, but for the rower it was work, the shoveling of coal in the furnace-room. I rowed until the hostel was vague and the castle ruins were a smudge. The water was smooth and the rowing easy. I was heading into the ocean.

I’d never owned a boat but now felt I’d wasted so many years. I laughed and laughed at the simplicity of it all, this boat, this water. I couldn’t believe how stupid it was. I could pinch all this between my thumb and forefinger.

I rowed for twenty minutes and then heard barking. I looked to the shore, for a dog running along the beach. But I saw no dogs. I turned around and found myself fifty feet from a pair of rock islands breaking the water’s surface, parallel, black, each the size of a bus. One was barren, but the one beyond it, about a hundred feet farther, was being busily evacuated by at least forty seals, platoons of seals, all barking and flopping and diving to get away from something. But what?

Oh.

I turned the boat and rowed away from the rocks; I felt terrible for upsetting them. I rowed quickly so they would return. I was halfway back to the shore when they began jumping back aboard their rock.

I turned the boat around again, heading back toward the seals. I wanted to see them, had to. This time I stayed low, rowing slowly, almost imperceptibly turning my head periodically to check my direction and the state of the seals. The seals were not acting in a uniform way. They wrestled. They barked, they leapt on each other. Some would dive into the water and others would appear, shooting from the ocean as if falling from holes in the sky. It annoyed me, exasperated me, all their movements, without sense, all their bumping into each other, their flesh rubbing and undulating, all their noise. I expected these animals to be orderly. Their bodies were sensical, their cells and veins were mathematical. Was not everything, on a cellular level, well-maintained, logical and unimproveable, like a honeycomb? At some point, though, up the developmental ladder the order is lost and there is this, the bouncing and barking, everything foul.

And my feet were wet. My ankles were wet. I looked down. The boat was sinking. It was only a few inches above the water, which was plowing cheerfully through a hole under my seat. I tried to row but the boat was done for, immovable. The hole was enormous.

To shore it was five hundred yards at least. I’d freeze before I made it. I realized with clarity that I might die here, and could think only of what the three of them would do the weekend of my funeral, reunited again. I left my pants and shoes and belt in the boat and jumped before I could guess at the shock to my chest. My arms flailed but soon found a rhythm and I swam for shore, the car keys in my mouth, the sun now gone and the wind coming in. I swam with a necessary fury. I swallowed the coldest water.

On the beach I rose and felt huge. The Russian children from the hostel saw me emerge and ran back inside. The world had tried to kill me but there were explosions within my chest and I’d won. I had reached shore and would soon be inside the car, heat heaving. I would change clothes and be new.

Driving back to the hotel I knew that Erin was just a human in this world — her foibles weren’t worth being angry about. She couldn’t control herself if she wanted to, and all I could do, as someone who was capable of survival in any circumstances, was to have charity for Erin. Like a rat, she would mate with whomever or whatever she shared a cage. I had no anger anymore. I wanted to embrace her, to forgive her, to stroke her like a pet.

I came home to Erin and wanted to celebrate. I entered her room as she was waking up and slithering to the bathroom to vomit. I watched her lower her head below the toilet’s rim, heard the sound of water being poured into water. I needed contact. I wanted her to see me alive. I wanted to eat her vomit — anything to put my mouth on hers.

“You awake?” I asked.

She was kneeling in front of the toilet.

“Not for long. Can you excuse me for a second?” she said, closing the door slowly.

“Sorry,” I said, and went back to my own room.

I watched Sky News at the bar and drank two drinks I’d never had before, both with whisky, which I’d always loathed but now felt was the only appropriate drink for someone like myself, someone who could save his own life. It was late in the afternoon when I checked on Erin again, sliding the doors and finding her dressed and looking almost normal.

“You’re up.”

“I am. I feel good.”

“I just heard you in the bathroom.”

“Yeah, but that was the last one. I’m empty. I feel good. I want to drive somewhere,” she said.

We drove.

We had the windows open and everything smelled wet, every blade of grass promising blooms. The roadsides were fenced and the sheep stayed clear. We got out three or four times by the coast, walking on wet brown paths to look down to the gray sea far below, past the hillside sheep and small white homes.

The rain came. The wind was strong and the air was scratched in straight lines, sky to earth. We got out once, at Moonen Bay, to walk on the shore of a small beach of large round stones, and were soaked in minutes. She spoke.

“Thanks for being good, Tom.”

I nodded. I shook, drenched. She knew nothing.

As the day went dark we found ourselves near the top of the island. I was driving and Erin was looking at the map. She had found a lighthouse she wanted to see before it got too dark.

At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.

I grabbed Erin around the waist and picked her up, throwing her over my shoulder. Look at this place! I wanted to say, but I chose to be mute, to punish her, perhaps. I put her down and she jogged away from me.

I caught up with her as she leaned against a rock wall, facing the teardrop lake. My eyes focused on a broken white rock cleaved with moss. Does the rock cleave, allowing the moss, or does the moss cleave the rock? She put her chin on my chest.

“This is nice,” she said.

“Where’s the lighthouse?” I asked.

“It must be beyond that.”

She was pointing to a huge outcropping, forty feet high, the shape of an anvil turned on its side. We followed a path as it swung down and to the right, sloping into the valley. The lighthouse couldn’t be seen. When the path leveled out we walked to a cliff — a drop of eighty feet to a rocky beach and a malevolent surf. The moon now was high enough to reflect on the lake in a nickly shimmer.

Where we expected the path to end and the ocean to begin, the path instead continued, down, through another smallish valley, at the end of which was the lighthouse, on what seemed to be the very blue-black edge of this world. Erin gasped. The lighthouse was not alone and small, but huge, and surrounded by a cluster of dark buildings. It looked like a penitentiary complex, with fences and guard towers.

“Let’s go down,” I said.

“You can go,” she said. “I’ll watch you from here.”

“I won’t go alone. But I really want to see it.”

“Sorry,” she said. “That’s too Witch Mountain for me.”

We turned and the wind swept into the valley, its motives suspect. We pushed against it and walked up the hill, toward the car. Erin’s jacket had no zipper or buttons; she held it closed with her hand. I pointed to a cluster of sheep far to our right. In the dark wind they looked ghostly, conspiring. They knew about the one we killed.

“Let’s run,” Erin said.

We did, up the path, and reached a small supply shed and rested. I was hot with my own exertion, and out of the wind it was much warmer. Erin had her back and head against the building, heaving. The sign on the shed, now just above our heads, said BEWARE WINCH OVERHEAD WHILST IN USE.

I leaned into Erin. I held her very close, and then kissed her hair.

“Sorry,” she said, speaking into my chest.

“For what?”

“The lighthouse was my idea.”

“Don’t say sorry.”

“I am, though. I’m sorry in general,” she said.

Her face was red and rough; she looked so cold. I leaned into her again, and rubbed her back with my searching hands. The cold and her thighs had aroused me, and I was dizzy with the wind.

“Turn around,” I said.

She faced the shed, her back to me. I opened my coat and wrapped it around her, my arms joined at her stomach.

“Warmer?” I asked.

“Yes.” She did a quick shake to indicate her coziness, pushing herself into me. I was already hard. I assume she noticed, because she stopped moving.

I brought my mouth down to her ear and licked the top. She made no sound. I tightened my grip around her stomach and pulled her closer, throbbing against her. All was soaring, my head gone like buckshot. She reached around and rubbed my lower back, while I took her whole ear into my mouth and breathed hotly into it. She bent her knees and turned to face me.

“No,” I said, turning her around again. I pulled her pants down and then my own.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m so…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“What?” she breathed.

“I just want…” I was feeling around between her legs, searching for moisture. I plunged my finger in.

“Ah! That hurt.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I moved myself between her legs, passing just under her. It was warm, dry. I needed—

“Wait,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said. I found my way in and pushed. My cheek pressed into the back of her neck, her smooth hair in my mouth. I lunged further. She spread her feet, her hand above her, palm flat against the shed. I stepped back, hands on her hips and found my way fully inside. I felt huge within; it was so close, everything was. Her skin, exposed, was cold.

I opened my eyes and looked around and there were three sheep, not twenty feet away, staring, motionless. The wind scraped at the two of us, very small in the valley. The sheep did not move.

I couldn’t keep my eyes closed, couldn’t stop watching the sheep watch us. I was out of breath, I was frozen, dizzy. Without finishing I felt finished. I slipped out of her and stepped back. I buttoned my pants and backed away, in the path of the wind. The nickly shimmer of the moon sat blankly, doing nothing.

“Sorry,” I said.

Her back to me, she dragged her pants up over her thighs. “Don’t be sorry. That would make it weirder.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “This is so bad.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “It’s bad if we say it’s bad. It’s not bad. It’s fine.”

I wanted to help her with her pants but I knew she’d refuse. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to be cut to pieces and eaten.

“Erin.”

She slid down against the wall and sat. She squinted at me. “That hurt, Tom.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck!” she said. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck-fuck!”

“Sorry.”

“That hurt.”

“Sorry.”

“You should have at least waited.”

I wanted to throw myself over the anvil-shaped rock. Or I wanted to tell Erin that I wanted to throw myself over, so that she would feel for me, see my grief. We both sat for a minute, occasionally glancing at each other. I wanted to erase the road that had brought me to her.

I tried to touch her shoulder where her arm was missing. She brushed my hand to the ground.

“Shit,” she said. “This whole fucking year.”

In Erin’s room there was a cat. I’d seen this cat, in the hotel lobby, stepping gingerly along the granite mantle over the fireplace. It was very small and wailed when we entered.

“It’s hungry,” Erin said.

I didn’t agree. I thought the animal just wanted more than she deserved, that she was surely fed all the time, but I said nothing. I was glad that Erin was speaking to me.

Erin decided to go downstairs to get milk for the cat, and when she opened the door, the cat tried to leave with her. But Erin pushed it inside and closed the door.

We would feed the cat and love it, name it. I found food in the small fridge under the TV. Cashews. I opened the can and tossed cashew fragments on the carpet. The cat pounced and her head pecked at the nuts; she was finished in seconds. I dropped her another handful and she ate those. The door opened and Erin walked in with a glass of perfect white milk. I had never been happier than when she walked in. I would not be sent away, not yet.

Hours later, the cat was asleep, and Erin lay next to it, her eyes half-closed. There was purring. I felt content. Why does it give so much comfort to be responsible for someone’s sleep? We all — don’t we? — want creatures sleeping in our homes while we walk about, turning off lights. I wanted this now. I touched Erin’s soft head and she allowed me. She allowed me because she was tired. She seemed so profoundly tired. After Scotland I would not hear from her again.

As my fingers spidered through the strands of Erin’s hair, the brightness outside took my eyes from the room. The moon was striped by the blinds but I could see its nickly shimmer on the bay. It looked like aluminum foil, when crumpled and then smoothed with a thumb or the back of a knife. It smiled, eyed me with an unwelcome knowingness, and began to speak.