Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

AT THE FAIRMONT

After the war they met in San Francisco. Bernice waited for him at a hotel on Nob Hill for five days before she got word that his ship had arrived. It is those five days she thinks of, not the reunion itself, which even then she knew was less the beginning of a new life than the start of a long end to the only one she’d ever have. She thinks of the park across the street from a cathedral and the hours she spent sitting with her hands in her lap. It was April and cool and she sat there coatless, not waiting, her mind drained, enjoying it, the days away from the children who’d remained in Chicago with her mother. Men, older men, spoke to her and she didn’t discourage them. They talked about the weather. It was nice to talk about something and not care a lick about it. She can’t remember another time in her life, even during blizzards, when she ever had much to say about the weather, and yet there she was on a bench, in the chill wind, goose bumps on her bare arms, cheerfully saying things like “Who would have imagined it would be so cold in California, and here I am with no coat. My girlfriend Gloria warned me, but I didn’t believe her!” Words flung out her mouth like tiny birds in every direction, that’s how good it felt just to say whatever nonsense came into her head. Because the words themselves meant nothing. It was only the thrill of talking to strangers, men, old men in tweed and scarves, in an unfamiliar place.

“My husband’s in the Navy. He’s coming back from Tokyo, Tokyo, can you imagine? He wrote that if you took the street signs away it looks just like State Street. He says the department stores are even bigger than ours. We’re from Chicago! My husband sells insurance!”

And one or another of the tweedy men would nod respectfully, but even then they could sense, she knew, that she was only talking to fill the air, the space that separated her bench from theirs.

“Ah, yes. Your husband is a true hero.”

“And at home he’s just a scared old tubby!”

And then, unlike talking about him, unlike being genuinely proud of him and half-pretending not to be, suddenly there he was, Seymour, the flesh and the body of him, sharing her bed at the Fairmont. His chatter from the bathroom.

“This head’s bigger than my entire quarters. Can you beat that?” His voice echoing, booming off all that shiny porcelain. “What a life, what a life.” And what surprised her most was how unvoracious he was. She’d prepared herself for him to be voracious, to leap on her with his usual frenzy, burrowing his head into her neck like an excited gopher, and jabbing, jabbing. She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. After two years away he was lean, tan, and wanting to be held — held? — and that first morning after that first endless night of his tenderly cooing (My darling, my precious darling), she’d kept inching away from him across the sheets, his fingers gently kneading her upper arm, until, sometime after dawn, she dropped off the bed. Thunked right down to that thick white Fairmont carpet. It was embroidered with roses, and she ran her palm over one of them as Seymour, confused, peered at her from up on the mattress.

“Man overboard?” he whispered playfully.

“Come here,” she said.

And he rolled off the bed right on top of her, and his weight, though there was less of him than in the past, had crushed her, and yet this was more like it — and there on the floor things got back to normal for a while, and soon he was sleeping again, his snoring low, that familiar snuffling, and she lay there with him still half on top of her. Again, she ran her hand over the carpet roses. She looked up at the ceiling with the naked cherubs holding up the latticework at the corners and thought, home, soon enough home, the children, his work, his office, a blessed secretary.

All that came after. It was those days alone, the wind in the trees, the church rising, not an old church, a new church, not especially beautiful, but welcoming in its way, though she never went inside, only watched the people come and go, in and out, through the big doors. The polite old men on the other benches, in their scarves, weren’t old. She knows this now, of course. They were at most in their early fifties. But then she was, what, twenty-eight? Something so peaceful in that waiting that wasn’t waiting, and what Bernice finds herself doing today is mourning those five days as she mourns so many things, including Seymour, dead three years this June.

The day before she got word of Seymour’s ship, one of the men had asked her for a drink and she’d accepted with the blithe unhesitation of those days, of that city — a city she hadn’t seen much of aside from the hotel and the park, and yet all the lingering hours had at least earned her a temporary place inside its rhythms. What made things even more exciting was that it really could have been any of the men on the benches in the park. It just happened to be Anthony who came to her out of the joyous blur. You could love someone simply because he stepped forward and spoke.

And she’d said, “Why shouldn’t I have a drink?”

After a couple of glasses of wine and some dancing, he’d escorted her up to her room at the Fairmont.

“You move so well,” he said.

“Well, I used to be a professional. A chorus girl, actually. Now I’m a frump. I teach ballet to snots.”

“Frump! I had you pegged as a dancer.”

“You didn’t have me pegged as anything.”

His eyes roved her body and she’d pulled him inside the room.

And now, even now, a hotel room in San Francisco in the morning light. Those weightless days. A man, an insignificant man he would have seemed to more significant men who do nothing but judge their significance in relation to other men. He’d told her he worked in an architect’s office but that he wasn’t an architect, only a draftsman. It wasn’t lack of brains or talent, he just preferred to draw. Buildings themselves meant nothing to him, only the renderings mattered. He lived with his mother. Years later he sent her a drawing, a portrait of her, in the shape of a cathedral. Bernice’s face was at the top of the steeple. He was kind about her nose. The contours of her figure were sleek and aerodynamic. The twin columns out front were legs, her legs, the ways her legs used to look, and they wore golden ballet shoes. She hadn’t known what to make of it. She stuffed it in the bottom of a drawer. But these days, the drawing, too, has come bubbling back. She thinks about digging it out but fears finding other things she doesn’t want to be reminded of. If it even survived the last move, that drawing is in some box in the basement. Someone might find it one day, one of the grandkids maybe, and not know what to make of it either.

They were still in bed when the bellhop knocked on the door with the message. It was after three in the afternoon.

Two men, two days, one bed. I’m a walking scandal! A private joke she told herself for years. Bernice sits down by the window in this quiet house and looks out at Seymour’s tomatoes and cabbages. In spite of her lack of encouragement, they continue to grow like gangbusters. A man named Anthony, his bony shoulders, his nimble probing fingers. And before, each time, he’d asked permission, “May I?” How long dead himself?

You may.

And she thinks of the furniture in that room at the Fairmont, how ugly and solid and useful it was, the most prominent piece, by far, being a massive green high-backed chair. It was some kind of joke in terribly expensive leather, an absurd throne built for a giant. Anthony was appalled and fascinated by it. Seymour too had thought it hilarious. He posed on it wearing only skivvies and his peaked officer’s hat. But Seymour laughing about the chair was of course different and by then she was through with it, the chair, the room, San Francisco.

“The children,” she’d said, louder than she intended, as if the children were anywhere near. A grown man back from war, bouncing up and down on that colossal chair, his hands mincing like an excited puppy. “Seymour,” shouting now, “the children!”

ROMAN MORNING

A large flat, in the neighborhood of Via Trieste, many closed doors, room after room. We’re solidly bourgeoisie, Rocco said as he unlocked the gate. If there was a convention, we followed it. My father was a doctor before — Rocco stopped. Well, you’ll see. And it was true. The first thing you noticed walking in the front door was layers of writing scrawled across the walls, in pen: small, purposeful writing, phone numbers, names of old friends, names of products. (In the bathroom, vertically alongside the mirror, Nivea, Nivea, Nivea.) But mostly they seemed to be jumbled sentences. Faulkner wrote on his walls, I said. Faulkner wasn’t out of his mind, Rocco said. At least not completely. My father wanted to be a great researcher, he dreamed of making groundbreaking discoveries. The last thing he wanted was to see patients, with their ailments, their complaints, their smells. But that’s what he did. And he never received the university appointment he always wanted; he was only a family doctor. After work he’d close himself up in his study for hours. His specialty, he said, was childhood diseases, the mumps in particular. But it was never entirely clear to us what exactly he was trying to find. He must have thought we wouldn’t have understood. A few years ago I visited my parents after my son was born, the first grandchild, and my father shuffled over to me in those paper slippers he always wore around the house, holding a fat book. Have a look, he said. It was Who’s Who. My father wanted me to know he’d been listed in Who’s Who. Everybody’s listed in Who’s Who. You pay a little money, they give you a little entry. My lonely father. The only one who ever believed in him was my mother and this only seemed to frustrate him. It was her job to believe in him. What he craved was the recognition of other people. And even my mother, over the years, began to doubt him. A half century of him shutting himself in his study with his medical texts in English. In the morning, he saw patients at his office. He was a fine doctor, an excellent doctor, but there are many excellent doctors. My father wanted to stand out, to be known, and this whole place is built on this unfulfilled ambition. Always, he had to be different. Every one of his friends married Italian girls, so my father found himself a German wife. And although she spoke excellent Italian, she rarely left the house. As a child I remember her being here — always — but there was some part of her, the corner of her eye, let’s say, that was somewhere else. When she finally had to put him in a home, the first thing she did was move back to Bavaria. She said she wanted to be closer to her parents’ graves. Now when she visits my father, she stays in a hotel. I am supposed to be selling the place. I have to have it painted, obviously.

I think of waking up in that quiet flat, Rocco still asleep, and wandering around all those rooms laden with heavy furniture. Doors opening up into still more rooms, those walls and the chains of words, a mind trying to hold on to something, anything. But it all keeps falling. My train won’t leave for another couple of hours.

EISENDRATH

The same scene as in Act I. Eight o’clock in the evening. Behind the scenes in the street there is the faintly audible sound of a concertina. There is no light.

Eisendrath finds himself early on in Act II of The Three Sisters. He’s on the stage of the New Players Community Theatre in Covington, Kentucky. It’s opening night, the high-school gym. How he got here isn’t important right now. Neither is the fact that Eisendrath hasn’t acted since an eighth-grade production of Little Mary Sunshine, and even then he was only one of a chorus of five singing forest rangers. The last time he was in Kentucky was five years ago, before his life imploded. His lines, what in the fuck are his lines?

Masha Prozorova Kulygina, who is facing him, now says something incomprehensible after a long and seemingly meaningful pause.

MASHA: What noise there is in the stove right now. Not long before Father’s death there was a howling in the chimney just like that. The very same!

Eisendrath is, at least he is supposed to be, the irredoubtable Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, forty-three, formerly the Lovesick Major, a man with two children and a wife who frequently, even once during the play itself, tries to poison herself just to spite him. A gallant who breezily says, Two or three hundred years from now, the world will be inexpressibly beautiful and all this suffering will have been worth it. In Act III, a place we will not reach tonight, Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin for his voice, his speeches, his theorizing, his misfortunes, but even now, in Act II, Eisendrath can see this love in her eyes. The woman playing Masha is not a great actress, but she’s trying, and she’s not unsubtle, and she’s even a little beautiful in exactly the way the three sisters are beautiful: weary, resigned, fatigued by expectation. If only they could make it back to Moscow. Everything will be different in Moscow. By day Masha is Susan Stempler and she works eighty-hour weeks in Customer Service at Bank One across the river in Cincinnati. She has yearned to act since she was a kid, and here she is — and here is Vershinin, a glib character if there ever was one, and he has suddenly and irrevocably forgotten all his lines, and apparently who the hell he is, even.

Eisendrath tries looking at the scars in the wood of the stage, at the audience, which is nothing but a black muddle. He can feel the hot breath of all the people wafting on his cheeks. He stares back at her, at this Masha who is taller than he in flat shoes, who is miserably married to the jolly ignoramus Kulygin, the schoolmaster. This will be the longest moment of his life, not because time stops, but because it continues to stomp forward and onward like the triple-named soldiers of Vershinin’s own platoon, who pound through the back rooms of this play. Eisendrath’s fear is so palpable at this point it could almost be mistaken for drama. A man in one of the back rows begins to cough ravenously, and his boomings echo as if the entire gym is at the bottom of some canyon, and still Masha locks her exhausted, sorrowful eyes on Eisendrath, eyes that of course are also Susan Stempler’s, begging him to say something, anything, anything at all, just move your lips. We’re about to move from glitch to fiasco. How fast we sink. Eisendrath looks down at his uniform as if there’s a clue in the olive jacket the volunteer costume designer (also playing the crone Anfisa) picked up at the army surplus. Vershinin has a few medals pinned to his chest, not many. This is to show that in spite of his many years of loyal military service, he’s never been much for valor. The Lovesick Major’s head is too much in the clouds. Eisendrath looks around at the set, at the drawing room, at the old but solid, not yet ratty furniture. Weird. It’s all vaguely familiar. And though there’s no chance whatsoever that his lines are lodged somewhere in his brain — Eisendrath is not even certain he’s ever even read this play — he almost feels like settling down, right here in this little gymnasium. Sweat and tears course down Susan Stempler’s cheeks, and her eyes, desperate now — this, the one thing I’ve ever wanted. Can’t you speak at all?

Panic rises in the wings and then a voice, shouting disguised as a whisper:

WINGS: Are you superstitious?

VERSHININ: Are you superstitious?

MASHA: Yes, I am superstitious.

WINGS: That’s strange. (Pause.) You’re a splendid, wonderful woman, splendid, wonderful. It’s dark in here and I can see your eyes shining.

VERSHININ: That’s strange—

(Masha shoves her hand in Eisendrath’s face, and so he kisses it, Susan’s hand. It tastes of sweat and Jergen’s.)

VERSHININ: You’re a splendid, winderful woman. It’s dark and I can hear your eyes shining.

(Masha walks over to the other side of the stage, plops in a chair, crosses her feet.)

MASHA: It’s lighter over here.

Eisendrath tries to move closer to the light, but he can’t, his feet won’t budge, and perhaps thirty seconds pass, maybe even a minute, and he does not hear the wings begging, nearly shrieking now—

WINGS: I love you, I love you…

VERSHININ:

MASHA: When you talk to me like this, for some reason I laugh, though I am frightened. Please don’t say it again… Say it again. Go ahead, I don’t care.

(Masha covers her eyes with her hands.)

WINGS: I love your eyes, I love the way you move…

VERSHININ:

MASHA: Say it! I don’t care! Say it!

VERSHININ:

A play is a fixed planet, and Eisendrath has fallen off by now. But even this doesn’t matter anymore. Love? How would he know it if he saw it? He’d stroke Susan Stempler’s now drenched face if he could reach her, if he could ever reach her.

WOMAN IN A DUBROVNIK CAFÉ

Do you remember her? It was sunny. Her hair was pulled back and sunglasses rode the top of her head like another pair of darkened eyes. She had white cream on her face. She talked about her father, her mother, her tabby cats, her white-bearded cats, her Siamese. She said she was afraid in London now.

“I’m not a bigot, but when it gets to the point, you don’t see a white face for blocks—” She stopped abruptly and reached for your hand. “Such exquisite hands. Do you play piano? My father played beautifully. He was English. Mother was a Serb. Father met her while looking for oil near Novi Sad. He left her when I was ten. Mother didn’t kill herself right away. She let a reasonable amount of time pass. We lived in Shrewsbury then. I went with father to the funeral. He said Good-bye, Netty to the casket and then shoveled dirt and rocks on it. She has a large headstone. Mother’s family were very cosmopolitan Jews. They read the paper on Saturdays, drove. Hard to believe now when you read what barbarians the Serbs are. Tony Blair’s dumber than toast. And your Clinton’s truly disgusting. My cousin Anna a barbarian! If you could see her in the little dresses she used to make. I just came from Novi Sad. They’re walking around like they’re already dead, waiting for more bombs to drop. Yes, there are still some Jews left in Yugoslavia. Would you like a chocolate? My father didn’t hate my mother, he just, well, tired of her, and that’s a crime really, because it’s laziness. A man who played Bach like that whispering good-bye under his breath at her grave like she was going somewhere on a train. Would you like more coffee? The waiter knows I’m Serb — that’s why he ignores us. He can hear it in my accent. I really should speak English here. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for so much. Isn’t it funny to be so sorry for things? You two are quite nice. Normally, I loathe Americans. You know, my brother moved to someplace called Rockville in Washington, D.C., and I tell him over e-mail that I’ll visit him over my dead body, and let me tell you, he won’t come mutter over my grave, because I’ve left instructions — cremation within twenty-four hours of my demise. My lawyer has the papers. They’re fully executed. I’ll be taking up no more space here after I’m gone. Things are crowded enough as it is. I say, when it’s over, let the flames announce it. Bring me to the fire — don’t you fresh faces agree? No trace.”

REVEREND HRNCIRIK RECEIVES AN AIRMAIL PACKAGE Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1963

A slant of rain against the one small window. As there was rain those three days she was here and he had imagined her clothes strewn across this little office. Why lie? There were moments when his lust made it difficult to breathe. The thing he wanted most was her mouth. He thinks of how it scowled at him. Yet her eyes claimed the opposite. There was kindness in them, a kind of dampened kindness. As though her eyes were battling with her mouth over which face to show him. What is more advantageous, ferocity or gentleness? He remembers wondering whether this struggle stretched into other regions. Imagined her torso white, its lower half a gorgeous hellfire of blue and orange.

She worked with an international charitable organization of some sort. The UNESCO office in Prague had arranged for her visit to Brno to facilitate “cross-cultural exchange,” which was a permissible, if dubious, exercise in the eyes of the authorities. She was an American living in Geneva. He’d learned English in London during the war. Over the course of two days, they had had long talks in this office, talks she thought were illicit, and in a way they were. Any candid conversation with someone from the West carried some risks, but this was years before the Soviet invasion and Barbara Hoffman’s questions were so quaint—Reverend, is it true they’ve outlawed your God? — that they couldn’t possibly have attracted the attention of anyone but the most bored of informants. Barbara Hoffman was thrilled danger lurked and so chattered on, at times looking furtively from under her shaggy eyebrows at the window ledge, as though she expected, any moment, the ghost of Stalin’s giant head to rise above the sill.

He interrupted. “My God? I beg your pardon, Mrs. Hoffman. What about yours?”

“Is He still here? I thought he was long gone. I no longer believe. I suppose I used to, must have outgrown it. Two days ago, I met with a couple of decrepit rabbis in Prague and felt nothing. Isn’t that sad? All those years of being something and I come back here to what — the old country? — and I can’t muster any kinship. They just looked like poor, tattered souls, not family.”

“There are so few Jews left, of course.”

“All the more reason I should have been moved, no?”

“What moves us is a complicated question.”

“I’m not making you uncomfortable, Reverend, am I?”

He’d waved her away with a doorlike swing of his small, hairless hand. A short, gregarious woman in white heels. She sat across this very desk and watched herself through his eyes. She saw a bold woman willing to reach across the great chasm to provide aid and comfort to a poor Lutheran pastor in poor, oppressed Czechoslovakia. So he told her stories, some of them even true, detailing the hardships of running a church in such times. The limitations on what services he could offer, the constantly changing and arbitrary laws, the threat of spies, the disastrous plumbing in the rectory. To get a decent plumber to come to a church you have to know someone in the Politburo! And she’d listened to his boastful anecdotes about the whispering, nudging, and yes, I’ve had to do a bit of bribing here and there. He’d spread his arms wide, not exactly knowing why, but trying in his way to say, I embrace not only the misery of myself and my people but of mankind! “Of course,” he’d said quietly, “I’m insignificant.”

A good woman, perhaps not yet fifty, trolling around for something good to do in this world, and she’d landed, of all places, in this office. She was going to ship him a new mimeograph machine, paper, books, office supplies. Even a boxload of Bibles in Czech. At one point in the last hour of the second day, there was a lull in their conversation. Barbara Hoffman didn’t like lulls. But this particular moment she didn’t fill it; instead, she waited. Then she blurted out so harshly it was as though she’d stomped on his foot:

“I was married for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“Felt like a hell of a long time. At the end of the second week — we were still on our honeymoon in Ireland — he turned to me and said, ‘Well?’ And I said, ‘Well, what?’ For the life of the man he couldn’t think of anything else to say.”

Reverend Hrncirik couldn’t either. He gaped at her.

“And it didn’t rain in Ireland. The entire time I kept waiting. You never married?”

12/14/63

My dear Reverend Hrncirik,

Don’t think I have forgotten the happy days I spent in Brno. I’m sending along to you Alan Paton’s second novel. I wouldn’t say that it is as groundbreaking as the first; nonetheless, Paton continues to expose. This one is about a delicious creature called the Immorality Act, which prohibits contact of a carnal nature between the races. Contact of a carnal nature! Can you imagine the bureaucrat that came up with that particular phraseology?

The book is a paperback. On the front it says, “For the considerable audience that hailed Cry, the Beloved Country as a literary and popular masterpiece, Alan Paton has produced another novel of similar beauty, equal power, and even greater readability—The Denver Post.” Denver! Americans! Even their books are advertisements. To be barked at like that while you are trying to read. This one is called Too Late the Phalarope. He looks up phalarope in his English dictionary: Kinds of small, wading and swimming birds known for their timidity. He lays the book aside and straightens some papers on his desk. He’d planned to write some letters and to finish a report before Barbara Hoffman returned. And make no mistake, a letter is a return. Three sentences of one letter and the salutation of another — he crumples both. He picks up hers again and rubs the tissue-thin paper between his fingers. He raises it to his nose as if it might carry her scent. It smells faintly of dust. They’d gotten to talking about books. She’d loaned him one she’d just finished, a book with such a beautiful title, Barbara Hoffman had said, it made her want to plant it in a garden. He’d read Cry, the Beloved Country in one sleepless night, in a fever. In a bleary — and theatrical — moment at 4 a.m., he’d knelt and kissed the book. How else to honor such a man, such a pastor, as this black Father Kumalo? Reverend Hrncirik had been so shamed that the next day he’d jibbered at Barbara Hoffman… “Unless all the churches, mine, the Episcopalians, my Lord, even the Catholics, everybody, regain consciousness”—He’d stopped himself and slapped the book on the table. “Ah, but what’s the incentive for this? Churches sleep now, as we slept before. Ask your rabbis in Prague. For every Bonhoeffer there’s a thousand men like me.” He gazed around his tiny office, but he was really looking beyond it, at the crumbling altar of his church, at the weary streets of his city, at his people walking, bundled.

He talked on, ignoring her protests. “And this Father Kumalo? He’s enough to make you abandon forgiveness as any sort of answer. When you see it only twisted, increasing paralysis. They heap tribulation. He forgives. They heap. He forgives. It isn’t supposed to work like this.”

“An old story,” Barbara Hoffman said.

Reverend Hrncirik laughed. “But remember, even Christ chased away the moneychangers. That old man? He’s almost monstrous in his patience. No anger, only love, as his son hangs.”

“What are you suggesting, Reverend?”

“I don’t know.”

“That forgiveness doesn’t always work?”

“Keep it between us.”

Barbara Hoffman laughed with her eyes. “In this sense, I agree with you. Perhaps the only answer in a place like South Africa is brute force.” She paused. “But — the West, with our obsession with Communism. We only have the capacity to understand one evil at a time. Besides, the South Africans are such good capitalists.”

Ah, Communism! He smiled and wrapped his throat with both hands, mock strangling.

Now Barbara Hoffman didn’t laugh. She only looked at him, Why haven’t you touched me, Reverend Hrncirik? Why haven’t you reached across your desk and touched me?

They both listened to the rain.

I heard Paton speak in Belgium in November. He said he had little hope for a peaceful solution in South Africa. Perhaps he is coming around to facing the inevitable. You may have heard that after his last trip abroad, his passport was seized by his government and he is no longer permitted to leave the country. A quiet man, but a powerful one. Please tell me all your news and if you received the promised shipments…

On the evening of her last day she’d asked him to her hotel room for some chocolate. “Swiss.” She laughed. “I smuggled it over the border.” And he declined with a bow, making it clear there was nothing wrong with the invitation in an academic sense — it wasn’t as though he was celibate, he’d had other women over the years — but he wouldn’t accept her offer, anyway. What was it he wanted to punish her for? For being as lonely as he was? He remembers feeling simply tired, or rather, he remembers that he had an expectation of being tired later. I’m exhaustible, he thought. I am a man whom things exhaust before they’ve even happened.

Now, this afternoon, he thinks, I could have listened to her voice. I could have just watched her lips move. He was a man who nursed all the proper notions, beginning with his bedrock belief that to restrict belief is to oppress God and that such blasphemy is fathomless. But his actions, his actions, amounted to begging help from plumbers and electricians. He thinks of Father Kumalo hiking up the mountain, that old man feeling his way in the dark with a stick. There are no small heroes. He looks around his office at the stacks of requisition forms, at the old bronze clock, at one of his gloves lying on the floor. He exists. This church exists. Will it ever be enough? He drums his fingers on the book. Who’s the timid bird? He thinks of the uselessness of being a man people don’t want to even silence, much less kill. He laughs at how beyond him it all is. A man without the courage to love, where would he find the courage to stand up. Against what? A shadow darkens the cloudy glass of his door window. Slowly, like a much older man than he is, he rises. His parishioners always lurk like that. Always, they hover in the corridor. Why won’t they knock? He sits back down. He won’t open it. Wait, whoever you are, wait. Let you wait. Let the old widows wait. Let the man from Pardubice with the sick daughter wait. Let Jesus himself wait. Reverend Hrncirik slumps in his chair, allows her image to tunnel into his stomach, sink down his legs. He’d gone back to his room that night and masturbated slowly, with the light on. He fingers the soiled handkerchief in his pocket and wants to do it again now, even almost gently, like he did that night. But not with that impatience at the door, not with this book on the desk, not with her letter silently — what? Asking? Goading? Forgiving?

Call these the meditations of an overweight junior lifeguard watching an empty lake, up in this chair lording over nobody. The last swimmer gave it up hours ago, late-afternoon September, the day gray and lingering. The lake is nearly motionless. The waves curdle up the shore like frosting. I think of what it might be like to actually have something to do. Guard, my child. Oh, guard, my daughter, oh, guard, do something, do something — and so, stiffen the sinews, summon the blood, dishonor not my mother. Into the breach I catapult, out past the buoys designating the authorized swimming area, and execute the Lost Buddy Drill, except this time there’s a body. I dive down, down, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and I feel my way in the dark water, across the smooth, scalloped bottom of the lake, and search for an obstruction, the soft inert peacefulness of the drowned. Come up, breathe. Do it again. Count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and all I want is to feel flesh, all I want is to break the surface with the booty, haul in the girl alive — alert the media — as people, my people, watch from the beach. Hail the chubby Adonis. No one will drown on his watch. This job — and how much else? — is one long unrescue. I’m in charge of the blind sand, of the lake, my lake, now churning, now seething, as the wind picks up, as the gray day lingers.

MILLARD’S BEACH, 1986

WAUKEGAN STORY

She completed the forms and submitted them, along with a thick sheaf of notarized documentation. Long hours of doing what she had always done followed. Days of the same. Work: cleaning, cooking, marketing, washing, reading, teaching, correcting, preparing lessons. But really what Maritsa was doing was waiting, so even what was the same took longer now. One day she burned her maps in the oven, watched them ignite through the greasy little window. Still, she was waiting. Then the idea of hoping (because what is hoping if it isn’t waiting?) became so abruptly foreign it scared her. She didn’t need it anymore. The embassy of the United States had sent her a stamped paper.

Maritsa used to place her hands over America. Even with her fingers spread, she couldn’t cover it all. Michigan’s flat hat, Florida’s backward chicken leg. California always longer than her own thumb.

She took her seven-year-old, Damyan, and renamed him Danny, although she insisted that his name would always be Damyan. He didn’t mind. SWAT teams and Chicago Bears, the boy couldn’t get enough. Her husband, Lyubomir, stayed behind in Sophia. He was a doctor and he had to close his affairs as well as transfer their tiny, despised flat. Of course, he wasn’t going to be a doctor any more than she was going to be the schoolteacher she had spent the last twelve years of her life waking up and being. And what are they going to think of me there, my English being so atrocious? They’ll think I’m illiterate, a moron.

“And Damyan? You’ll steal his chance?”

“Don’t hide behind the boy. It’s you—”

So she left Lyubomir, and for months, the two of them sent letters back and forth across the ocean. In one letter, his pen ripped through the paper. He wrote that he had become a man with a wife who insisted the only way to leave a flat she hated was to move to America! Maritsa replied: It isn’t the flat, it’s everything. It’s the neighbors, it’s the Dancescus flushing, it’s the snoring, it’s Razvan and Sabina’s fucking we have to listen to. Can’t you understand that people shouldn’t have to live like this — especially now? And always, Damyan. The unimaginable opportunity. Damyan the American! What lies! And I’m a man who let it happen! They laugh at me, don’t you see, Maritsa? They’re all laughing.

And some nights he’d wake her up just before dawn, a call they couldn’t afford, and pant into the phone like an exhausted horse.

When she felt confident enough with her spoken English (she’d studied it for years, but talking to Americans was another matter altogether), she finally told the kind, stubby-fingered man at the gas station grocery who she was and what she was doing here. He spat laughter, not cruelly, only in shock: A refugee? To Waukegan? This armpit? Come on, love, sell me something else.

Well, not a refugee in a technical sense, but she didn’t want to explain her classification and the label made it easier. She’d won a lottery and the INS placement office in Washington, D.C., had found her an apartment in what was left of this city on Lake Michigan, too far from Chicago to say she lived in Chicago.

She got a job with a maid service. Every morning she and three other women were driven in a van to clean houses in Lake Forest. Lake Forest! Now here was America! Her first morning in the van, another girl, a Jamaican, had nudged her and said, “You won’t believe me.”

“What?”

“The women, they clean the houses before we get there.”

“What?”

“Not a joke. They clean like lunatics, these women. Oh, you’ll scrub their crap inside the toilet bowls, yes, and worse, but a lot of the work is already done before you walk in the house with the bucket.”

Cleaning for the cleaning ladies. Maritsa found this preposterous lie to be absolutely true. So it wasn’t the work that was difficult. It was only that these houses, houses as big as banks she roamed around with her tank-sized vacuum cleaner, sapped her energy in other, less definable ways. It was a kind of fatigue. She’d never imagined that proximity to wealth, unfathomable wealth, could make her so weary. She found herself not even wanting it anymore.

English classes were held Tuesday and Thursday nights at the local grammar school. She sat squeezed, her knees jammed against the bottom of a tiny desk, and repeated after the teacher, whose name was Gilda Petrocelli. Not Mrs. Petrocelli or even Mrs. Gilda, only Gilda, and she had fat pink cheeks that made her look like a talking porcelain doll. She also had a husband who kept constant watch, prowling outside class, stalking the little halls like a giant in squeaky shoes. Often Gilda’s husband stuck his face in the narrow, crisscrossed wire window and breathed until it fogged. It was hard to tell if the husband’s problem was anger or sorrow or fear. Gilda had told the class that before she began teaching Advanced ESL, she’d been a librarian. But that’s all in the past now, she said. She said it like all that cataloging and shelving had been like fighting in some forgotten war. And maybe it had been. Teaching school had certainly been like that. Those terrible dangling feet, every morning those pairs of relentlessly staring eyes. Gilda was particularly concerned about pronunciation. She always spent the last five minutes simply saying whatever words came to her, in alphabetical order. Pronunciation holds the key, she’d say, grinning and holding up a cardboard cutout with a drawing of an old-fashioned skate key, to successful integration. These are words you know, but you must master how they sound. She spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable, directing them to watch her mouth.

Appetite. Butcher. Curriculum. Despondent. Evaporate.

At night she’d coo to her sleeping Damyan, but really more to herself, that where you are is in your mind, that it’s got nothing to do with maps. That if you aren’t in Waukegan in your mind, you aren’t there. Do you hear me, little man? This isn’t Waukegan, it’s the Horn of Plenty…

October and she’d walk the wet streets to the gas station grocery for sliced cheese and a magazine. She’d look at the potholes full of oily water and the broken windows of the abandoned paint factory that stretched three city blocks. The buildings of Sophia were beautiful in their corruption; headless, handless statues gazed down from countless ledges. Her city was streets of crumble and scaffolds. True, there were newer buildings in Sophia, cheap flimsy apartment blocks built in a day and a half, like the box she’d moved into after she got married, but she didn’t think of these when she thought of the architecture of home. In Waukegan, the buildings were not new and not old, and no one bothered to say anything about them one way or the other. They’d been built to endure and then were just left.

The man at the gas station told her that the big boats still call at Waukegan, but not as many as used to. Afternoons, after work, and before Damyan got home from school, she’d walk down to the beach by the harbor. She’d listen to the halyards clack against the masts of the sailboats not yet taken ashore for winter. But she didn’t come to look at the boats, small ones or big ones. She’d go down there to watch the waves, white as they crushed into shore, yellow as they withdrew. Plastic detergent bottles bobbed in with the current and bobbed out again.

Always, Maritsa would tell herself, the first betrayal, leaving, will always be the worst. She was confused by her own choices and her own desires, and she’d look out the windows of the houses she cleaned, at the enormous leafless trees, trees that took almost all the space of the sky, and curse herself for not knowing what to dream. Is this an answer? A husband panting into the phone? Days wandering rooms of other people’s piles of things?

Damyan looked so unlike his father that people in their building used to whisper that someone else must have been parking in her garage. She’d been called a whore behind her back so many times that for years she’d felt like one. Honorary whore of a building that apparently needed one. Damyan was a pale, oval-headed boy, with little hair and large, fearlessly unblinking eyes. He wasn’t afraid to look at anybody, and often adults were put in the uncomfortable position of having to turn away from a child’s stare. He had all his father’s curiosity and none of his mother’s restlessness. What’s the difference between snot and saliva? Why do people say you can drink one and not the other? They’re both only secretions. I’ve tried snot and it’s possible, you can drink as much as you want. His father’s boy, already exasperating teachers on a new continent. He was also a courageous kid and knew he had to buck up for his mother in a place that wasn’t so much unkind to her as ambivalent. His mother had always been a woman people talked about, and not only because she’d always been the prettiest. Now, here in Waukegan, no one much noticed her, and that shamed him. He tried not to let her know. He kept silent. And some nights she’d sit on the floor of his room and rest her head against his mattress and ask, Is it Daddy? No. Is it home? No. Why won’t you tell me? The boy would dig his face into his pillow and feign sleep.

The second betrayal was named Ted. He was from Pakistan. His name wasn’t Ted any more than Damyan’s was Danny. I’m Ted, he’d said, Ted tired of correcting people. She almost laughed. “That’s not funny,” she said. How long since she’d laughed? A ten-minute break during class, the two of them leaning against a set of little lockers. He’d looked at her then from an odd angle, his head too far to the left. He looked at her as if he already knew her weaknesses and was mocking her for bothering to try to hide them. He spoke English; he only pretended he didn’t. “It’s my second language,” he said, “but don’t tell anybody that we speak English in Pakistan, I’m here for dates. Night school ESL is the United Nations of Women. Filipinos, Mexicans, Koreans, Somalis, where did you say you were from again?” All this she laughed at, quietly, the way she remembered laughing as a child at things she knew she wasn’t supposed to, pressing her fingers into her lips. She thought it wouldn’t be right to ask his real name, that it would somehow break the grip he was already beginning to have on her. He would always be Ted, even after he was gone, and he had smooth lips that she knew would soon kiss her places Lyubomir couldn’t have imagined.

Which is what happened, for three months, but mostly they watched television and ate bag after bag of sour-cream-and-onion Doritos. They’d talk about how fat real Americans were compared to TV Americans, except for Roseanne and her husband. (Why aren’t their kids fat, though?) They’d sit and wonder whether they’d bloom out like sandbags after they got their citizenship. Ted was a small man, half the size of Lyubomir. She could have picked him up and tossed him. They’d talk about how stupid the shows were, and how this stupidity, which was genuine stupidity, was something to laugh at, but also to be wary of. All the dollars in the universe, Ted would murmur, and this is what they do with it.

One night, after two in the morning, the two of them on the living-room floor, naked beneath a thin blanket, the TV light casting a gray pallor over the furniture, the volume down so low all they could hear was faint laughter, and suddenly the child in the bedroom begins to shout. Amid all the unrecognizable words, it was possible to make out: Dyado! Dyado! Ted’s first thought was that it meant father, that the crafty boy knew the only way to rid his mother’s house of this interloper was to cry out at the worst possible moment. After she’d buttoned her shirt and gone to the boy’s room, he’d remained on the floor, motionless, a couch cushion beneath his head. Maritsa. She told him she’d been named after a river. He tries to picture a river quietly gurgling through a snow-hushed forest in a country that he will never see. Yet he’s never had any talent for conjuring trees or woods or rivers, and the image gives way to her face.

Now she is back from the boy’s room, settled under the throw, her head next to his on the cushion. She rubs his wrist.

“Hey.”

“What was that about?”

“It’s all right.”

“His father?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Only a nightmare.”

Maritsa told him a strange thing then. She spoke in his ear. In the dream, Damyan had been shouting, not for Lyubomir, but for his grandfather, her father, a man who died before Damyan was even born. He was warning him about a truck. A famous family story. The kid must have heard it a thousand times.

“My father was hit by a truck, but he lived. The story is always told this way. After the war, Dyado got hit by a truck on Ravoski Street. He was flattened — he never walked again — but he didn’t die. The Slavs couldn’t kill him, the Germans couldn’t kill him, the Russians couldn’t kill him. Not even a truck.”

They lay in the silence, the TV light crawling, then retreating, across the walls.

Later, years later, Ted will think of that night. A woman named Maritsa. The two of them on the floor. Her boy shouting in the night, warning a man already long dead. Dyado, the truck! Are warnings ever timely?

Damyan stares at his mother. They’re at the post office mailing letters. Her mascara makes her eyes look too wide open.

“What is it?”

“Ted doesn’t come anymore.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She looks past the top of her son’s head, through the slits in the blinds, at the pieces of cars flinging by. You chased him away. Anyway, it wasn’t love. I’ve ruined your father. She says nothing.

The boy waits, looks at his mother, and knows she will keep taking walks, alone, even after his father comes, if his father comes, and that the walks will have nothing to do with her friend from English class, or any other man, including his father. Still, he tries to be kind.

“Maybe he’ll come back,” he says.

LUBYANKA PRISON, MOSCOW, 1940

A tired man, when he laughed, he seemed absolutely alone on earth.

— ILYA KAMINSKY, “TRAVELING MUSICIANS”

They beat him with the sawed-off legs of a chair until he admitted to being an agent of the French intelligence services. To his interrogators, Babel wrote, “If you are fundamentally flawed, then perfect this flaw in yourself and raise it to the level of art.” Did they have any idea what he was trying to say? What was he trying to say? His trial lasted twenty minutes. Nothing was especially comic about any of it, but he of all people thought he should be able to find something. Will this be my last failure? Tragedy is underdeveloped comedy. An Irishman said that. Of the two guards escorting him to the place against a shiny white wall — it must be someone’s job to clean it — he noticed the smaller one to his right, his immaculately groomed beard and his breath like sweetly rotting pears. Of the guard on his left, he noted only that he was more ape than man, which struck him as an uninspiring observation. His own feet, he noticed them also. One was very cold and one seemed to be on fire. The guard on his left, the big one — Babel imagines his wife’s small, chapped hands. The guard on the left will rub them tonight, the sad nooks between his wife’s dry fingers. This ape. She’ll ask: And today? And he’ll say, Nothing much. A little Jew in glasses, twelve or so others. Come closer, won’t you ever come closer?

FEBRUARY 26, 1995

A Chinese restaurant in a strip mall off I-495 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, just across the road from the huge, white, boxlike Showcase Cinemas. Seitz looked out the window and watched the cars leaving the parking lot. The restaurant was dark. Each table had its own light, a small round bulb behind a red shade. Seitz thought: Our own sad moon. He listened to two ladies chat in the next booth.

“No kidding. Every day she goes home to make dinner for a man who’s been dead seventeen years.”

“Like my cousin Aurelia, long conversations with her cat. She talks and talks and then pauses while she listens to the cat.”

His food arrived. Seitz ate slowly, as was his habit. He always looked closely at each bite of food before he put it in his mouth. There was a commotion. The waiter and the manager ran back and forth between the kitchen and the men’s room, both of which were in the back of the restaurant. They tried not to shout. A hushed panicked way of whispering. Ten or so minutes later, the police arrived, followed immediately by the paramedics. The cops asked everybody, seven people in total, a family of four, the two ladies, himself, if they would please step outside and wait to be questioned. Bring your coats, please. There was one table with a plate of half-eaten food and a full beer but no diner.

Out on the sidewalk one of the ladies said, “See, Marion, something’s always happening. Last week, the flat tire and running into Cindy Donatello after how many eons? Not that she’s still not haughty.”

Seitz and the waiter leaned against a parked car and watched more cops arrive. These upper-level cops, or so Seitz imagined that’s what they were, moved languidly, confidently, like they did on television. He wondered if they sat around all day waiting for things like this, like actors in their dressing rooms.

“Not that cold,” the waiter said.

“Actually not,” Seitz said. “Unseasonable.”

The waiter assured him that what had happened had nothing to do with the food. “I’m not saying it’s especially great,” the waiter said.

“What happened?”

“Guy got whacked in the men’s room.”

“Tonight?”

“Only once or twice in the head,” the waiter said. “But enough.”

“Dead?”

“Totally.”

“And nobody heard?”

“Hand drier was on. The thing sounds like a plane landing.”

A cop came up to Seitz. “You a patron?”

“Patron?”

“Could I ask you a few questions?”

The cop led him to one of the squad cars. They stood by the hood. The sun was down, but the parking lot lights remained bright. The squad car was still running, which added to the sense of excitement. Seitz explained that he’d been on his way home from a sales call in Kittery, Maine, when he’d gotten hungry. He’d never been to the place before, just passing by. Hadn’t heard a thing.

“What do you sell?”

“Hardware.”

“Wrenches, hammers?”

“Computer hardware.”

“Oh, right, right. What’s your name?”

“Donald Seitz.”

“And your address, Mr. Seitz?”

“One twenty-nine Florence Street. Malden, Mass. 02148.”

All Seitz knew about Lawrence was what he read in the papers, that it was a city on fire. This was in 1995, and Lawrence was the arson capital of the country. Building by building, block by block, they were burning the old mill town down. Seitz thought of waking up in the night and seeing the sunrise glow at the wrong time of day. He could see the attraction, almost the love you had to have of old buildings, these red-brick New England monstrosities, to want to see them turned to ash. Think of the heat you need to burn brick. Of course, out here by the highway, you couldn’t see the city at all. Out here wasn’t Lawrence or anywhere really. He thought of the dead man. He thought of his unfinished plate of food.

The manager apologized to everyone personally and handed out coupons. The family and the two ladies walked to their cars. Then Seitz, too, left for home.

Murders weren’t uncommon in Lawrence, but they weren’t an epidemic, either. This one wouldn’t have made the Boston press had it not been for the novel way the man had been killed. Slaughtered like a veal calf in a bathroom stall during business hours. The metro section of the Boston Herald ran the story for a couple of days. After that there wasn’t anything more to say. The bathroom window was found open. Police concluded that the killer must have come in and out the window. The murdered man was named Patrick Laplante. Unemployed, the Herald said, long history of drug-related arrests.

Seitz drove the forty miles back to the restaurant a week later. He was a man who redeemed coupons. Why not? It’s like money in your pocket. A few days later, he drove up again, though he had no business in Kittery or anywhere else north of Boston. At first the waiter and the manager, Mr. Lee (who turned out to be the owner), said they knew nothing more about the Laplante murder than he did. But after a while they started telling him things. The waiter said there was no lack of suspects.

“One detective told me that he was thinking of putting up a wanted poster offering a reward for anybody who didn’t have a reason to off Patrick Laplante. He was a runner, a little old for it. He never advanced beyond street level distribution. The word is he was skimming more than an acceptable amount off the top. Both the other runners and the chiefs wanted him over with.”

Mr. Lee told him about the new policy. The door to the men’s room was to remain open at all times. No exceptions. It made things awkward, but what choice did he have? He also had the hand drier dismantled and brought back paper towels. “Supposed to save me money,” Mr. Lee said. “Damn thing ruins me.”

Seitz became a regular customer. He’d never been a regular before. With it came a kind of belonging he’d never craved, yet he found it wasn’t unpleasant. The waiter brought him a Sprite and a lemon without his asking. They must have thought he was an investigative reporter or a private investigator of some sort, a fiction he didn’t discourage by taking notes on cocktail napkins. Seitz never ventured into Lawrence itself. The restaurant and the land around it were enough. Enough for what? He wasn’t entirely sure. Looking out the window, Seitz thought about what used to be here. Woods? After that, farmland? That’s the way he always understood it, but how could anybody tell? The grass along the interstate was well watered, but whoever walked on it? Still, you couldn’t act like this place didn’t exist. Hadn’t something happened here, too, the ultimate thing?

Donald Seitz was a bachelor who in ten years had been with three different women, one of whom he loved. She was married when they met. She left her husband for him. Seeing how easy that was, she left Seitz a few months later. He’d always had a talent for not being lonely. He thought vaguely of his childhood, how his desire to be alone unnerved people. His mother once took him to a doctor about it. In particular, Seitz had always preferred to eat alone, at home. The Laplante murder changed this in a way that, again, he couldn’t quite explain. He found himself more and more intrigued by eating alone in public. He marveled at all the things he’d been missing. Think of all that can be snuffed out, irrevocably, while you fumble through your mu shu pork with plastic chopsticks.

Four months later Seitz was sitting in what had become his booth. A Tuesday night, around 8:30. In his reflection in the window he watched how the soft skin beneath his jaw tightened as he chewed, transforming his face into someone he’d never seen before. The waiter approached. Seitz smiled.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Of course not.” Seitz shoved his plate away.

“No, keep eating.”

The waiter wasn’t Chinese. He liked to show off the few words in Cantonese that Mrs. Lee, the cook, had taught him. The waiter’s eyes were droopy and his skin was pale in spots, red with pimples in others. Seitz took a pen out of his jacket pocket and uncapped it.

“I’d rather you not write this.”

“Not a problem.”

Seitz glanced up at Mr. Lee, who was watching them from his post behind the bar, a towel over his shoulder. He and Mrs. Lee often argued. They always tried to keep their voices down, but eventually their voices would reach such high notes their fights became operatic. Something told Seitz that whatever made them so excited never had anything to do with the restaurant. Possibility here as well, in the arguments other people have that we’ll never know the origins of or even understand. How much drama lost?

He smiled again at the waiter. “Call me all-ears,” Seitz said.

The waiter leaned forward. “It’s about that night — Laplante.”

“Yes.”

“I compromised the scene.”

“What do you mean?”

The waiter put both hands on the table and edged even closer. In the red moonish light, his face didn’t look as young as it did from farther away. He always looked twenty, twenty-five, but right now he could have been ten years older.

“I moved the body — just a little — but who knows? Maybe I wrecked the whole investigation. All I did was tug his foot and pull him off the seat. Any idiot could see he was dead. He hardly had a mouth or nose left to breathe out of. The guy really got clocked. I just wanted to give him some dignity.”

“Sounds like you did him a good turn, a human thing.”

“But with all this O.J. stuff, L.A.P.D. and contamination and all that, I just worry—”

“From what I understand,” Seitz said, “these cops couldn’t have found the killer if he left a trail of egg rolls to his house,” Seitz said. “What would a few inches matter in an investigation like this?”

The waiter laughed, but his eyes moistened. Tears?

“You don’t believe me.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

The large, pimpled face stared. Mr. Lee coughed. A couple were waiting to place their order. The waiter slid out of the booth. Seitz went to the men’s room and poked around, tried to feel something. What? An absence? The place was nothing but clean.

That night he went to a late movie at the Showcase. A comedy, a love story. Seitz was one of the few people in the audience. He watched the silhouettes of solitary heads in the darkness. He’d never been much of a moviegoer, too much noise and commotion. And they’d always taken him too far away. It would take hours to adjust sometimes, to return to being Don Seitz. After, he walked to his car and turned the key, but rather than unlocking the door, he locked it. I forgot to lock it? Maybe it was the movie, the surging out the exit door into the night, even a movie like this, a movie already half forgotten. He felt almost giddy. There was a tingling in his feet, his toes. He turned the key the other way and got in the car. After a few minutes of stillness, he adjusted the rearview and, in the great brightness of the overhead lights, met another pair of eyes.

“I’m not a reporter,” Seitz said.

“I know,” the waiter said.

“I’m not anybody.”

“I know.”

“Only curious.”

“Yes.”

Seitz looked out at the few scattered cars remaining in the vast parking lot. It looked like an emptied harbor. Tomorrow all the cars would be back. He wondered if he’d be burned or simply left cold.

LATE DUSK, JOSLIN, ILLINOIS

Even the shadows are green tonight. Deb watches the moon. It’s out early. Also, it is too hot for October and the crickets are confused. By October they are supposed to shriek less loudly. By October their hysteria is supposed to dissipate. By October there is supposed to be calm. By October — not this October, another one — she promised herself she’d be gone. She once said to Carl, If you were a real man, you’d get me the hell out of here. He just looked at her and scratched his cheek. He wasn’t a man to answer when spoken to like that. Not taking the bait was his specialty. If Carl were a fish, he’d live forever. Either that or he’d starve. But even she has to admit there’s beauty in this green, practically breathable light. The land stretching away into it. The power line towers also. Even the driveway. Even the shed. All coated. All still. Carl says the land is here for us to build on. Here for us to expand on. That’s what it’s here for. As soon as the fiscal year is through, he’s going to make an appointment to talk to the architect. The initial permits will have been approved by then and so—

Weather said a storm this afternoon but it never came. She likes to watch the storms meander this way from out beyond Dixon. The lightning like a jabbing finger choosing, choosing. Now the light itself is enough. Carl’s on his way home, singing along to the radio unless there’s a commercial. Sometimes he even sings to those. Carl, you stupid fuck. The land will bury you. This land, any land. Least any sane person would do is leave. How many times do I have to say it? Deb gulps the light, wishing she hated it, wishing she didn’t only want to stand here and watch it tonight, wishing for courage, stupidity, anything other than reverence. This strange, breathable light, this lifeblood light.