Leaving the Sea: Stories

What Have You Done?

When Paul’s flight landed in Cleveland, they were waiting for him. They’d probably arrived early, set up camp right where passengers float off the escalators scanning for family. They must have huddled there watching the arrivals board, hoping in the backs of their minds, and the mushy front parts of their minds, too, yearning with their entire minds, that Paul would balk as he usually did and just not come home.

But this time he’d come, and he’d hoped to arrive alone, to be totally alone until the very last second. The plan was to wash up, to be one of those guys at the wall of sinks in the airport bathroom, soaping their underarms, changing shirts. Then he’d get a Starbucks, grab his bag, take a taxi out to the house. That way he could delay the face time with these people. Delay the body time, the time itself, the time, while he built up his nerve, or whatever strategy it was that you employed when bracing yourself for Cleveland. For the people of Cleveland. His people.

They had texted him, though, and now here they were in a lump, pressed so tightly together you could almost have buckshot the three of them down with a single pull. Not that he was a hunter. Dad, Alicia, and Rick. The whole sad gang, minus one. Paul considered walking up to them and holding out his wrists, as if they were going to cuff him and lead him away. You have been sentenced to a week with your family! But they wouldn’t get the joke, and then, forever more, he’d be the one who had started it, after so many years away, the one who had triggered the difficulty yet again with his bullshit and games, and why did he need to queer the thing before the thing had even begun, unless, gasp, he wanted to set fire to his whole life.

So he strode up as cheerfully as he could, but he must have overdone it, because his father looked stricken, as if Paul might be moving in for a hug. He could have gone ahead and hugged the man, to see if there was anything left between them, except that he was going to behave himself, or so he’d pledged, and his father seemed thin and old and scared. Scared of Paul, or scared of the airport and the crowds, where disturbingly beautiful people and flat-out genetically certified monsters swarmed together as if they belonged to the same species. Maybe that was what happened to a man’s face after seventy: it grew helplessly honest, and today’s honest feeling was shit-stoked fear, because someone’s son had come home and his track record was, well, not the greatest. Paul understood, he understood, he understood, and he nodded and tried to smile, because they couldn’t really nail him for that, and they followed him to the baggage claim.

In the car they didn’t ask him about his trip and he didn’t volunteer. His sister and Rick whispered and cuddled and seemed to try to inseminate each other facially in the backseat while his father steered the car onto the expressway. Alicia and Rick had their whole married lives to exchange fluids and language, but for some reason they’d needed to wait until Paul was there to demonstrate how clandestine and porno they were. They had big secrets—as securely employed adults very well might. Plus they wanted Paul to know that they were vibrantly glistening sexual human beings, even in their late thirties, when most people’s genitals turn dark and small, like shrunken heads, and airport trip be damned, because they couldn’t just turn off their desire at will.

Alone they probably hated each other, Paul thought. Masturbating in separate rooms, then reading in bed together on his-and-hers Kindles. Ignoring the middle-aged fumes steaming under the duvet. Just another marriage burning through its eleventh year. What’s the anniversary stone for eleven years of marriage? A pebble?

Paul sat and watched the outskirts of Cleveland bloom in his window, as if endlessly delayed construction projects held professional interest for him, a village of concrete foundations filled with sand, rebar poking through like the breathing tubes of men buried alive.

His father took the exit onto Monroe and the woozy hairpin up Cutler Road, which Paul had always loved, because of the way the light suddenly dumped down on you as you pulled above the tree line. The city stretched below them, the whole skyline changed since he’d last visited, ten years ago. The old stone banks—Sovereign, Shelby, Citizens—squatted in the shadow of new, bladelike towers that weren’t half bad. They were tall and thin and black, hooked at their tops, and were either sheathed entirely in charcoal-tinted glass or simply windowless. Someone had actually hired real architects. Someone had decided not to rape the Cleveland skyline, and there must have been hell to pay.

It was still a good fifteen minutes to the house. The time for basic small talk had passed, so maybe it was okay to try big talk. Someone had to break the silence before they died of it, and Paul figured he might as well address the elephant in the room. Or the elephant in the car, or whatever.

“Mom couldn’t come?”

“Oh, Paul, she wanted to,” his father said, eyes dead on the road.

“She wanted to and you prevented her?” Paul said, laughing. “You held her down?”

“No, that’s not it.” His father frowned.

“Mom’s resting, Paul,” his sister said from the backseat.

“She’s excited to see you,” Rick added, in a voice too loud for the car. Big Rick the Righteous. The peacemaker. Telling folks what they want to hear. Making folks feel better since 1971.

“Thank you, Rick,” Paul said, without turning around. “Now I know who to ask when I need to find out what my mother really feels.”

Rick was right. Paul’s mother was waiting in her robe when he came in the door, and she rushed up, hugged him, kissed him, smothering him with love while Paul stood there holding his bags.

“Oh, Paul!”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Paul!” she cried again, grabbing his face, tilting back to see the whole huge mess of him.

She looked so small inside her robe.

“You shaved! You shaved it off!”

“I did,” Paul said, stroking his chin, smirking.

He suddenly felt proud. This was his mother’s great gift—to make him feel good about absurdly common things, like grooming.

“Oh, my goodness, you are so handsome.”

His mother was crying a little. She couldn’t hug him enough.

“Pauly!”

This was nice. This was really nice.

“Morton, do you see how handsome your son is? Do you see?”

She studied Paul again, and he found that he could meet his mother’s eyes and it did not feel terrible. He smiled at her and meant it. He wanted to pick her up and run out in the street.

His mother would never, thank God, see him or his abused, overfed body for what it was. Even Andrea, at home, had to admit that Paul was not exactly handsome, per se, though when she was being affectionate she told him that he looked serious. He had a fair-minded face, she would say.

“Morton?” Paul’s mother called again.

Concern flashed across her face as she realized that she’d been left alone with Paul. The panic of someone trapped in a cage with an animal. Zookeeper, let me out of here! Paul felt bad for her, his poor mom, stranded with him, when who knows what he might do?

Paul’s father must have gone to the kitchen. Rick and Alicia had run upstairs to fuck, or whisper some more. Or whisper and fuck and hide while poor Mom dealt with Paul, as always. They’d done their time with Paul in the car, and now it was Mom’s shift. This was how it would be for the whole visit, the three of them playing hot potato with fat Paul.

She fussed at Paul’s coat zipper, then adjusted her robe, but there was nothing to fix and no one to groom and they’d already hugged. She was panicked. She wheeled and hurried into the kitchen, calling, “Come, come, you must be starving,” then fled from sight.

Paul waited with his bags.

“Where do you want me?” he yelled. He needed a bathroom and he wanted to change his clothes. “Where am I, Mom? What room?”

His mother didn’t answer; his father was gone—resting, probably. Everyone in his family was constantly needing to rest, but never from physical exertion. Always from the other kind of exertion. Resting from him, Paul the difficult, who latched on to your energy center with his little red mouth and sucked it dry. You’d think that, given how long he’d steered clear of Cleveland, they’d be rested by now.

Alicia appeared at the top of the staircase, wearing a long T-shirt. She was disheveled and flushed. That hadn’t taken long.

“You’re up here, Paul,” she said, and he followed her, climbing the soft, carpeted stairs to his old bedroom.

His parents lacked Wi-Fi in the house, which figured, because old people hated the Internet. But they probably hated the Internet because they only had dial-up, and had to crawl through the USA Today Web site, which never fully loaded, with videos that never played, and click on e-mail attachments that took hours to download, so why even bother? The upshot was that Paul couldn’t really get on to any of his sites. He had a few JPEGs buried deep on his hard drive in a folder called “old budgets.” He brought the pictures up on the screen of his laptop. To be safe, he locked the door of his room, and then he settled in to try, sitting on the chair that his dad had painted red for him decades ago. He’d been back in his childhood house, what, all of ten minutes before his pants were at his ankles and his little person was out, lonely from the long flight, looking for friction. But the pictures on-screen reminded Paul, for no good reason, of people he knew. Civilians, instead of anonymous, Photoshopped nubiles. Civilians who had suddenly become naked, who were visibly uncomfortable in their poses, who seemed to want desperately to get dressed and head home to make pasta for someone. Paul’s sad man was cold and small in his hand, and nothing was working.

He had tricks for situations like this, a way to will himself into something passing for readiness, at least enough to travel to the other side, because stopping halfway through was tough to live down. He could have used a splint, Popsicle-sticked the little fucker until it stood, but that was when Alicia knocked and he jumped up and pulled on his pants, figuring there was about a 32 percent chance she’d know what he’d been doing.

“So,” she said, when he opened up, crossing her arms in the doorway. He guessed that this was the only cue he was going to get that they should have their little talk—brother and sister, adults now, believe it or not.

Alicia used to be forbidden to enter his room. In high school Paul had made a chart of those who couldn’t come in: Mom, Dad, and Alicia, their names in large block letters, plus, in smaller letters, Nana and that whole crowd. Fucking Nana and her skeletal friends, geriatric narcs who kept wandering upstairs to spy. Posted on his door as if he hadn’t also delivered the information verbally, numerous times, when admonitions were his preferred mode of rhetoric. What a man he’d once been, ordering everyone around. And they had obeyed! Never in his life would he command so much power again.

All signs of Paul were gone from the room now. Blush-colored paint reddened the walls, the punched-in holes spackled up and painted over. New floors—linoleum intended to look like wood—new furniture, sanitized air pumped in to cleanse the place of the errant son. It looked like a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking. It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they’d had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.

“How are you?” Alicia asked, and it seemed like she was really trying, for which bless her, because they had days to kill and might as well be friends.

They closed the door, sat on the bed. God, she looked old. Her face was slack and tired, and her eyes were muddy, as if she’d rubbed them all day and then poured red wine in them. But who was Paul to talk? He upsized his clothing almost every year and had moved on to the big-and-tall shop, which still carried some good brands. If his face remained smooth and babyish at forty, without the friendship-defeating beard he used to wear, with his shirt off he was shocking to behold, and he knew it. Shocking was maybe too strong a word. Actually, no, it was fitting. He had small, thin shoulders and from there his body spread hard and wide, into a belly that spilled around to his lower back. A second belly in the rear, which might be why he ate so much. Two mouths to feed.

Paul said that he was fine, and Alicia looked at him intently, asked if that was really true. Paul insisted that it was, it really was, but how was she, and how were things with Rick, and did they like Atlanta?

“We live in Charlotte,” Alicia said, stiffening. “We moved three years ago.”

Of course he knew that, had been told that, but it wasn’t like Alicia’s e-mail address had changed or anything, and you didn’t send things to people by mail anymore.

Paul assessed his sister and couldn’t really tell, because she wasn’t exactly a slender woman. Maybe she was technically showing. Some women hide it well. So he asked. He knew they wanted one, and what harm was there in asking?

“No,” she said, a bit too cheerfully, which was weird, given the thoroughly public way she and Rick had always demonstrated their urge for children of their own.

“It’s getting late, though, right?” This he knew. This was information he was quite familiar with. The sun starts to set at forty.

“We’re okay with it,” Alicia said. “We really are.”

Which was what you said when you weren’t okay, so he would drop it. But to himself he couldn’t quite drop it. Who was broken, his sister or Rick? Who was flawed and rotten on the inside? Or was it both of them, which was maybe what had attracted them to each other in the first place? Maybe there was a dating service for the barren. Sexually on fire, but fucking barren. Of course he knew how they’d met. He’d been there. In this very house. And Rick had been his friend. In high school they’d once almost gone camping together.

If Alicia’s childlessness troubled her, he knew she wasn’t going to show him. He was last on her list for candid disclosures, displays of vulnerability. Human feeling. Not for Paul. He was going to get a censored Alicia, and that was probably what he deserved.

“Can I ask,” she said, “if you have someone?”

She seemed genuinely hopeful, so earnest that Paul overlooked the strangeness of the phrase “have someone.” He admitted that there was someone, there was, and her name was Andrea, and we’ll see, won’t we? Isn’t that all you can ever say, even thirty years into a marriage, not that he would know? We’ll see how it goes?

“Oh, Paul!” Alicia cried. “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

It was pretty wonderful, he admitted, really wonderful. It was hard not to smile and sit there feeling crazily lucky. Maybe this would be easier than he had thought.

But when Alicia pressed him for details, including the precise occasion on which he had met this mysterious woman, the fucking GPS coordinates for this highly improbable event, not to mention a photo, a photo of the two of them together, it was clear that she didn’t believe him, not even remotely.

Paul veered the conversation to their parents. The common, if chewed-up, ground they shared. How were they? et cetera.

“You know, Dad is Dad,” Alicia said, shrugging. “He had me washing dishes the second we got to the house yesterday. I’m his little slave.”

“You could say no, you know.”

Alicia looked at him coldly. “No, Paul, you can say no.”

“Yeah, I guess. But they don’t even ask me. I don’t get to say no.”

“Ha-ha.”

“And Mom?”

“She’s doing so great. She’s really amazing. She’s such a fighter.”

Paul squinted. What did this mean? Whom had she fought? Paul had never even seen his mom get mad. He tried to put the question in his face, because he felt odd asking—how could he not know if something had happened to his mother?—but Alicia moved on to the party, the stupid family reunion, which crouched like a nasty-faced animal on Paul’s horizon.

The reunion was tomorrow night. Cousins and uncles and grandparents and all the people they had bribed to love them. The whole family tree shaking its ass on the dance floor. A Berger family freak-out. Getting together to bury their faces in buffet pans and lie about their achievements.

“What are you going to wear?” she asked.

Paul said that he might not go.

“What do you mean you might not go? Isn’t that why you’re here? You can’t not go—everyone’s going to be there. What are you going to do, stay home and beat off?”

So she knew.

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“We’ll see? Jesus, Paul, you are such an asshole.”

There was a time when she’d have been afraid to say even this, the obvious truth. Paul might have responded with heirloom breakage, a dervish whirl through his sister’s valuables. The truth was he was too tired to break anything. You needed to be in shape. So chalk that up to some improvement between them. By the time they were eighty, there was no telling how evolved they’d be.

“I know,” he admitted. “I’ll probably go. I’ll try to go.”

“Goddamn. Don’t do us any favors.”

At dinner that night, the questions came, and Paul tried to suck it up.

“How’s business, Paul?” Rick boomed. Everyone else at the table shrank, as if someone had thrown up and they didn’t want to get splashed. Probably Rick hadn’t been at the family meeting where they’d decided to go easy on Paul, lay off the hard stuff. Like, uh, questions.

“Let’s not set him off,” his father had probably advised. “Let’s nobody get him going. It’s not worth it.”

His mom and Alicia must have nodded in agreement, and now Rick had steered them off the plan, going for the jugular, the crotch, the fat lower back.

“I don’t know, Rick,” Paul answered. “Business is fine. You mean world business? The stock market? Big question. I could talk all night, or we could gather around my calculator and do this thing numerically. Huddle up and go binary.”

He wished for a moment that he belonged to the population of men who asked and answered questions like this, who securely knew that these questions were the gateway for nonsexual statistical intercourse between underachieving men.

Rick was confused, so Alicia jumped in.

“You know what he means, Paul. What do you do for work? What’s your job?”

“I cash Dad’s checks and spend the money on child sex laborers down at the shipyard.”

His mother put her hand to her mouth.

Perhaps there was something about sitting at this table that had made him take the low road so hard and fast. The table, his room, that red chair, the house, the whole city of Cleveland. The blame could be shared.

“Paul,” Alicia warned.

“Yeah, I know. Fine. I haven’t taken Dad’s money in years, Alicia, if you must know.”

He stopped to eat and everyone else was quiet, looking at him. He’d promised himself that he’d try harder, and already he wasn’t. He took a breath and looked at Rick, and Rick blinked, waiting.

“I work at a cabinet shop, Rick. We make custom kitchen cabinets. I operate the tenoning jig.”

That wasn’t so bad.

Rick, alone, burst out laughing, because cabinetmaking was one of the funniest things in the world, maybe, or because he was one retort behind and he wanted to be sure he got the joke this time. He looked around for company, but no one else was laughing.

“You do what?” he said.

Suddenly, Paul’s father leaned in, intensely curious. Mr. Tuned Out had gotten his little button pushed. He stared at Paul, and Paul couldn’t tell if he was excited or angry. “You’re a carpenter?” he asked, in absolute wonder.

“Woodworker, actually, Dad, is what it’s called. Fine joinery and that sort of thing. Huge difference. Carpenters, well, you know. I don’t have to tell you.”

Paul stopped himself. What a thing to say to a man who used to build houses, a carpenter before he became a big contractor. But fuck it. His dad had been retired forever. Didn’t even work in his own shop anymore, probably. And there was a big difference between a woodworker and a carpenter. That wasn’t his fault.

“Shit, though, Paul,” Rick said. “Pretty good money in that, I bet, with so many people redoing their kitchens. Is it union?”

Paul admitted that it was, and Rick whistled with a show—slightly false, Paul felt—of admiration.

“Nice. Nice. Right? You could support a family with that, am I right? If you wanted to?”

Rick winked for everyone to see, and what a person to wink, with his failed seed. Why would he be turning the screws on Paul when he had nothing to show for himself?

“I do, actually, Rick,” Paul whispered, looking down at his food. He couldn’t believe he was telling them. “I do support a family.”

He smiled and wanted to say more, to fill in the blanks, but they looked at him as if he were the strangest creature they’d ever seen. And maybe he was, but did that mean he couldn’t have a family?

It was his mother, though, who did it. Such concern in her face, such pity, as if to say, Poor, poor Paul, who still needs to lie to us, and what did we ever do to create this man? He’d hardly begun to tell them, and yet she seemed so sorrowful looking at him like that. So he asked about dessert, and she brightened, jumped up, crowing from the kitchen about the best blackberry pie in the world. You had to try it. And who wanted ice cream, and, Alicia, could you help clear?

Paul’s cell phone rang while they were watching television. He took the call outside, as if the reception were better in the yard. They were probably relieved that he’d left the house.

“Hey,” Andrea said.

“Oh, my God, hey.”

It was so good to hear her voice.

“So how is it?” she asked.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He took some deep breaths. He just needed to talk to her and get grounded.

“You’re lying.” She laughed.

“No, no,” Paul insisted. “It’s fine, everyone’s fine. I mean, it’s weird to be here. The city is different.”

“Yeah? Different how?”

She was so good. She really wanted to know. She wanted him to tell her everything, and he wanted to, and if he had more time he would, but who cared what was different about Cleveland? It didn’t matter. He missed her is all and he told her that and she sounded happy.

“How’s Jack?” he asked.

“I just put him down. He’s such a sweetie. He actually asked to go to bed. He stood and waited by his crib for me to lift him in.”

“Oh, my God,” Paul said. “The little dude.”

“I know.”

“Give him a huge hug for me.”

“Yeah, I will,” Andrea said. “At five thirty in the morning when he wakes up I’ll hug him and tell him Daddy misses him. Then I’ll make coffee and wait for the sun to come up and wonder how the hell I’m going to get through the day.”

“I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll do the morning shift all next week.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, Paul.”

They talked, but not about Cleveland, or the Berger psychosis, as he referred to it when he was home with her. They talked about little stuff that didn’t matter, but soon Andrea’s voice drifted off in a way that meant something was wrong, and of course he knew what it was, because it had been wrong for a while now, and it was his fault.

“And,” he said, which is what he called her. When they were good, he called her “And How,” which wasn’t very funny, but as far as he could tell she liked it. Or at least she didn’t seem to hate it.

“And, honey, I wish you were here with me.”

She breathed into the phone, and Paul stood on his childhood lawn in Moreland Hills waiting for his wife to speak. Even when she wasn’t speaking, even over the phone, he loved her desperately.

In cold tones she finally said, “I wish I were there, too, Paul. Me and Jack, to meet your family. Did you tell them?”

“I did,” Paul said. “I mean I told my sister about you and then at dinner I did. I tried to.”

“You tried to.”

“I just got here. I landed a few hours ago. It’s been intense. I’ll tell them more. I want to. How could I not tell them about something so great?”

“Because maybe you don’t think it’s great? Because you’re ashamed of us. Because you didn’t tell them when you met me, and you didn’t tell them when Jack was born, and now you still haven’t told them.”

“And.”

“I’m sorry.” She sighed. “I don’t mean it. You know I don’t.”

They made up, saying the reparative things, but it went only so far. Andrea assured him that everything was forgiven, except when he hung up and went inside it didn’t feel as if everything, or even anything, had been forgiven.

Inside, from the hallway, he watched his family watching TV, until his mother looked up and saw him. “Paul, come,” she called. “Come sit.” She opened her arms to him.

The Berger family reunion was being thrown in the conference room of the Holiday Inn downtown. Paul put on his nice shirt but left it untucked because his belly showed too much. There was a lot of grooming in the house, hectic and nervous, as if they were all going on dates.

When he couldn’t stand it anymore, Paul went to wait in the car.

They parked downtown. The long black towers were lit up, so they did have windows after all. What amazed Paul was that the windows were round, like portholes on a ship. From a high floor in one of the towers, looking out your window, he imagined, would be like looking out from a cruise liner and seeing only air. Air and tiny buildings, tiny people below.

When they walked into the reunion, Billy Idol was on the stereo. The song “White Wedding.”

“Seriously?” Paul said to Alicia, looking around at the few other Bergers who had also arrived on time. The very old Bergers, wearing woolen suits and standing in a circle, whom he wouldn’t be talking to tonight. They held fishbowl-sized cocktails and soon it would be their bedtime.

“Seriously what, Paul?”

“Can we do something about the playlist?”

He tapped his foot, scanned the room. Would his cousin Carla be here? Not just a kissing cousin but a third-base cousin. Third base on more than a few occasions.

“Do whatever you want. There’s the DJ. But please remember that people have been planning this party for months while you’ve been, what was it, down at the docks having sex with children. Right?”

It was so stupid to fight about it, and as the song thumped and shook the room with its black acoustics, hysterical and threatening, Paul had to admit that he’d really always liked it. Kind of totally loved the song, even though he had never admitted this to anyone. It was possibly a great song.

It’s a nice day for a… white wedding-uh.

The Berger cousins arrived, and with them came their spit-polished children, ready to destroy the world and have someone clean up after them. Soon packs of kids ran wild, sweating and flushed in their fancy clothes, following some ancient order of clan logic that baffled Paul. Occasionally one of them would be yanked from the pack and forced to run a gauntlet of ogling older Bergers, who poked and kissed and hugged him until he broke free and returned to his friends, half-raped and traumatized.

The kids made the whole thing okay, Paul thought, because you could stand alone and watch them without being seen as a pathetic wallflower, unable to navigate a party and make conversation with your own miserable flesh and blood.

Paul set up shop at the drinks table, sucking down glass after glass of sparkling water. He was chewing on ice when he heard his name.

“No way,” some enormous man was saying. “You are fucking kidding me! Paul, you bastard.”

Through the fat and flesh and alcohol-swollen skin Paul saw Carl, his father’s brother’s son. Carla’s brother, actually, which begged questions about naming strategy. Or, really, about basic mental competence.

“Dude!” Carl yelled. “I thought you’d written everyone off. What’s up?” And he threw open his arms for a hug.

Paul leaned into Carl’s heat and musk. He would hold his breath and do it, because maybe Carl had hugged Carla today and Paul could get a contact high.

A scrum of kids crashed into them, then tore off laughing. An intentional attack on the overweight forty-year-olds at the drinks table? Paul and Carl watched them go, hug deferred.

“You got some of those?” Paul asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Carl said. “Afraid so.”

They caught up, if that’s what you called crunching twenty years into a reunion sound bite, and Paul found it easy to tell Carl about Andrea and little Jack. Carl blinked and maybe he was listening to Paul or maybe he didn’t care. Soon Carl was scanning the room, looking behind Paul as he spoke, raising his chin now and then at someone going by. Little smirks of hello from Cousin Carl, working the room while standing still.

“It was hard going for a while there,” Paul said, and Carl smiled and fist-pumped to someone across the room, doing a little bit of air guitar, then grabbed Paul by his shoulders.

“Dude, it was amazing to see you. I’ve got to go feed Louis or I’m going to catch serious hell.” And then Carl was gone and Paul went to the back of the drinks line, which was now very long, to get himself another glass of water.

Paul danced. He danced with his mother, who was beautiful in an emerald-green dress. When his mother tired, halfway through the first song, he walked her to their table and grabbed Alicia, who looked okay, too, and they danced to Marvin Gaye and Def Leppard and Poison and then, with Rick joining them, to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

It wasn’t bad to dance. Dancing was better than not dancing. He was tired and sweaty and he felt good. Finally he collapsed at the family table, where his parents were already eating, along with some relatives he must have met before. They stared at Paul as if he were bleeding from the face.

“What do you say, Dad?” Paul shouted. “Are you going to dance?”

His father studied him. They all did.

“Paul here is doing quite well,” his father said to everyone at the table. “He’s become a professional woodworker, doing joinery at a high-end cabinet shop.”

“It’s not really a big deal,” Paul mumbled.

“It is, though,” his father said. “It takes years of training and a whole hell of a lot of skill to be a real woodworker.”

“It’s kind of automated now,” Paul said quietly. “They have jigs.”

“It’s great that they hired you,” some old man said, getting in his dig. Meaning he’d have never hired Paul.

“Used to be you had to cut twenty sets of dovetails to even get asked on a crew,” his father said.

“Wow,” Paul said.

“Twenty sets. By hand. Using a Jap saw.”

“I could never do that,” Paul admitted.

“No?” his father asked.

Was he leering at Paul? His own father?

“You’re a mortise-and-tenon man. My word. Those are even harder, though, right? Makes dovetails look easy. Or do I have my information wrong?”

“I do those, but, like I said, there’s a jig.”

“So not by hand?”

“God, no, Dad. No way.”

“I’d like to see one of these jugs sometime. You’ll have to show me. Show me how the whole thing works now that everything’s changed.”

Paul looked at his father, and at his mother, who was chewing her dinner with the care of a professional taster, and he looked at the other relatives around the table, who carried with them a narrative of Paul that he could never, no matter what, revise. A narrative that favored the outcome, a father with unexplained bruises after an argument gone really wrong, rather than the supporting architecture that fucking deeply informs single events—accidents!—that somehow get out of control. These people would have to die for Paul to be free. Which was bullshit, he knew. It was Paul who would have to die.

“I’d love to do that, Dad,” Paul said.

His father regarded him across the dinner table with a face that no longer showed any fear. Who are you? Who are you, really? his father’s face seemed to ask.

Paul excused himself to get another drink. He asked if he could get anything for anyone while he was up, drinks or food, but they were fine, they said, and waved him off.

From across the room, he saw his cousin Carla. She was circling a table of kids like a waitress, and she was still utterly lovely. What a girl she had been, and now she looked the same. Exactly the same. He watched her, amazed, wondering which kids were hers, or if, fuck, they all were, but he couldn’t stand not saying hello right away, so he ran up to her.

Carla beamed. Paul beamed. They said holy shit and hugged tight. She was small in his arms, so little and warm against his body, whereas Andrea was big, and taller than him, and incredible, of course, in her own way. This wasn’t knocking Andrea. He loved her. But Carla was tiny! Oh, my God. It felt good to hold her.

Paul wanted to get her alone, but that was ridiculous. They held hands down at their waists. Carla talked fast, smiling, radiant. She said that things were great and she lived in the Twin Cities. Just one of them! She assistant-nursed part-time at the children’s hospital and she had three kids and she’d finally gotten her master’s in something that Paul didn’t make out. It was hard to hear. It was loud and horrible and dark in there, and it was so hot that everyone stank. Plus he wanted her to himself.

“Let’s go have a cigarette,” Paul suggested. “We can sit on the steps out front.”

He didn’t usually smoke, didn’t even have cigarettes, but Carla followed.

Together they sat in front of the Holiday Inn, watching the valet wait for cars to pull up.

Carla laughed out of nowhere.

“What?” Paul said quietly. A voice inside him, very far away, was telling him, unpersuasively, not to seem so engrossed. It was unbecoming to fawn.

Carla covered her mouth, shook her head. A gesture of amused disbelief.

“I’ll never forget something you said to me, Paul. I still remember it.”

“What did I say?” He was proud in advance of this terribly clever thing he’d said as a kid. So clever that Carla had never forgotten it!

“You said, ‘What is a cousin for if you can’t put your finger in her vagina?’ ”

Paul closed his eyes. “I did not. Please tell me I didn’t say that.”

“Oh, you did.” Carla laughed. “Several times.”

He shook his head. “I am so sorry. What an asshole.”

“You were bad!” she yelled, and she slapped his leg, laughing.

He nodded. “I was bad. I think I still am.”

“Oh?”

Carla took this as flirtation rather than self-pity. Whatever Paul had once been—the rogue, troubled high schooler, doing stupid shit and justifying it with arcane philosophical arguments—he wasn’t those things anymore. No way.

“You still coming to blows with Daddy Morton?”

“No.”

Paul chuckled and shrugged it off. A real conversation was out of the question, and that was probably for the best.

“So,” she said. “Wife, kids? Wait, no, let me guess. You’re gay. You’re gay! Is that what you mean by being bad? Oh, my God, you’re not gay, are you? Jesus, Paul.”

The old Paul, the Cleveland Paul, would have said, Should I finger you to disprove it? But tonight’s Paul, new or old, disgusted with himself or just tired, tried to smile. He didn’t have to uphold any principles in front of a shitty hotel with a woman he’d never see again. Though hand sex with a cousin occupied an unassailable place in the erotic universe—he’d stand and testify to that if he had to, and he felt sorry for anyone who hadn’t tried it.

Paul looked up at the black tower with the shining portholes, the bright, glowing orbs rising into the sky like spotlights. He said how cool the tower was, how unusual. It was unlike any other building he’d seen.

Carla made a face and said, “Blech.”

“What?”

“That’s our hotel,” she said.

“It’s a hotel?”

“Yeah. We didn’t want to stay there, but there were no rooms anywhere else. I guess they can’t get any guests, so it’s empty. I kind of hate it, to be honest. It’s weird. But it’s cheap, and that’s good, because this trip cost us a fucking fortune. Holy smoke.”

“Oh,” Paul said.

They both looked at it again. If Andrea were here, she’d get it. Or maybe she wouldn’t. How could he know?

“Well, I guess I should be heading inside,” Carla said, and that was that, a big flameout.

“Yeah, back to the Bergers,” Paul said.

The Bergers. His mother and father. Alicia. Rick, who wasn’t a Berger in name but loved the Bergers more than the Bergers did. Paul’s son, Jack, was a Berger, too, of course, one of the youngest, and so was Andrea, even though she hadn’t changed her name. He could have been strolling through the reunion right now holding Jack and showing off Andrea to everyone. But the idea had been to test the waters. Even Andrea had agreed that Paul should visit Cleveland alone first. And when she’d said this he had been so relieved that he’d had to hide it from her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want his family to meet Andrea; it was that he didn’t want her to see him here. Him with his family. That was the concern. The Paul of Cleveland, with his mean tone and low aims. She’d hate him forever.

Just then an ambulance pulled up and some paramedics tumbled out. They sprang the stretcher and pushed it right at Carla and Paul, stopping to hoist it over their heads and carry it up the steps, into the Holiday Inn.

Paul and Carla watched it go.

“You think that’s for a Berger?” Paul cracked.

“It’d better not be,” Carla said. “If Beaner choked I’m going to rip my husband’s heart out.”

She disappeared inside and Paul remained on the steps, thinking maybe he’d call home. Or maybe he’d cross the street to the black hotel and ride the elevator to the top so he could look through one of those portholes. Except what was so special about that building, anyway? He’d forgotten.

That night, before getting into bed, he set his alarm, packed his bags, scheduled a car service. It had been easy enough to change his flight, but all they’d had was one leaving at 4:00 a.m. It didn’t really matter. He figured he’d sleep for two hours, then wait outside for the car, so that no one else would have to wake up. This way he’d skip the good-byes. With luck he’d be home by late morning. He could dismiss the sitter, take Jack to the park. He couldn’t decide what would be better, leaving Andrea a voice mail or surprising her when she came home from work.

Rick walked into the bathroom while Paul was brushing his teeth, then backed out, apologizing. Through a foam of toothpaste Paul told him it was okay, waved him in. This would be their peaceful encounter, Rick sitting on the toilet lid waiting for Paul to spit and rinse.

“That was fun tonight,” Paul said.

“It was so great.” Rick shook his head. “And the toasts, oh my gosh. Amazing.”

The toasts. Paul must have been outside.

“What your mom said. I mean, I choked up. That was just…”

Paul could only agree. What his mom said. Never in his life had he seen his mother make a toast.

“I love family,” Rick said. “All of that family, together.”

“Oh, hey, did someone get hurt tonight?” Paul asked.

Rick looked confused, as if this were one of Paul’s trick questions.

“I saw a stretcher go into the hotel,” Paul explained. “I thought maybe something happened.”

“Hmm, no,” Rick said. “I mean, not that I know of. But I was dancing it out pretty hard.”

“Okay, that’s good,” Paul said. “Tell my sister good night.”

“Will do, buddy. Good night yourself.”

The two hours of sleep didn’t happen. Paul lay awake and looked at the clock until eventually it was time to wait outside for the car. He crept downstairs with his bags, dropped them at the door. He’d get a drink of water in the kitchen, maybe grab some fruit for the trip.

At the kitchen table, shuffling an amber colony of pill bottles, sat his mother. She didn’t hear him come in, and he startled her.

She clutched her robe, looked past him into the dark hallway. Why was it that he still frightened her?

“Pauly, what are you doing?”

He mumbled, wishing he hadn’t come in. His car would be here in a few minutes, and now he’d have to say good-bye.

His mother noticed his coat, figured it out, and he couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved. Why not both?

“I have to get back,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Paul, for what? Stay with us. Why do you have to go?”

She could not possibly want an answer. But maybe it was ugly of him to assume the worst. Maybe this was it. His sweet mother was sitting here asking. He would tell her.

“I’m a father, Mom. I’m married. We have a little boy. Jack. We call him Jackie. He’s two, Mom. He’s already two!”

His mother cried.

“Pauly, it’s okay, honey. I don’t know how else to tell you, but it’s okay and we love you and we will always love you, and I wish you believed us. You are our little Paul, always.”

She reached out to him across the table and he took her hands.

“But, Mom, it’s true.”

Had he really lied that much? Was his credibility gone forever?

“Sweetheart, I know it is. Of course it’s true. I would love to meet him, I mean, to see him. What was his name, your boy?”

Oh, God, did he yell. He yelled the most awful things. He hit the table, stood up too fast. Something fell over, and now his mother truly wept, and she threw her arms up as if he were about to strike her. But why would he hit his own mother?

For years he would attempt to dismantle this moment. It was among the most useless activities a mind could pursue, the revision of shit that had really fucking happened, yet somehow it became the activity his mind fell into the most.

He heard his name, barked by his father.

His dad was here now. Why not Alicia? Why not Rick? Get everyone together.

“Paul, you will not do this. Not to your mother.”

His father trembled, ready for battle.

“I’m not, Dad. I’m not doing anything.”

Paul backed away, giving his poor father courage.

“Go on now, Paul. Please go.”

“Okay, I will. I’m sorry. I was telling Mom something. About my son.”

“We believe you, Paul. We really do believe you. The woodworking, the family. We do.”

Together they nodded up at him. Tell him what he wants to hear and maybe he’ll leave. Were they even his family? Was this even his home? Or maybe they did believe him, and this was simply what it felt like to be believed. It felt wrong—it felt like nothing.

Paul determined that if anyone asked him, in the years to come, he’d say that if you’ve ever scared someone, even accidentally or as a joke, that person will flinch when he sees you. Even if you did it because you yourself were scared, because you were small-minded, or small-hearted, or because you had small aims and should never have been let out of your cage when your little life began. You might not notice it, but the people you have scared will flinch, on the inside. You will have to cross the street and give those people a wide berth. It is the most considerate thing to do. Just let them pass.

He left the house and rode the car service through the dark streets of Cleveland to the airport. He’d fly home, take the shuttle to his apartment. When he’d settled in, maybe he’d write his parents a letter. Put together a photo album, Xerox the marriage and the birth certificates. Would that suffice? He’d tie up a bundle and mail it to them. In their own time, they could examine the evidence of their son’s new life. They could do it without him standing there. Paul would send proof and then he would wait. He’d be many miles away, where he could do no harm. At their leisure, they could examine the parts of their son that would not hurt them.

I Can Say Many Nice Things

Fleming woke in the dark and his room felt loose, sloshing so badly he gripped the bed. From his window there was nothing but a hallway, and if he craned his neck, a blown lightbulb swung into view, dangling like a piece of spoiled fruit. The room pitched up and down and for a moment he thought he might be sick. The word hallway must have a nautical name. Why didn’t they supply a glossary for this cruise? Probably they had, in the welcome packet he’d failed to read. A glossary. A history of the boat, which would be referred to as a ship. Sunny biographies of the captain and crew, who had always dreamed of this life. Lobotomized histories of the islands they’d visit. Who else had sailed this way. Famous suckwads from the past, slicing through this very water on wooden longships.

A welcome packet, the literary genre most likely to succeed in the new millennium. Why not read about a community you don’t belong to, that doesn’t actually exist, a captain and crew who are, in reality, if that isn’t too much of a downer on your vacation, as indifferent to each other as the coworkers at an office or bank? Read doctored personal statements from underpaid crew members—because ocean life pays better than money!—who hate their lives but have been forced to buy into the mythology of working on a boat, not a goddamned ship, separated now from loved ones and friends, growing lonelier by the second, even while they wait on you and follow your every order.

And yet, when Fleming thought about it, this welcome packet, fucked up though it was, even though he hadn’t read it, most certainly had more readers than he did. More people, for sure, read this welcome packet than had ever read any of his books or stories. This welcome packet commanded a bigger audience, had more draw, appealed to more people, and, the kicker, understood its cherished readers better than he ever would with his sober, sentimental inventions of domestic lives he’d never lived, unless that was too flattering a description of the literary product he willed onto the page with less and less conviction every time he sat down at his laptop.

Maybe he’d actually learn something about writing if he read the welcome packet. Maybe in his class he should instruct his students not to write short stories but to write welcome packets.

The room spun and he clutched the bed. It would be two straight weeks of this seesawing, punctuated by mind-raping workshop sessions in a conference room, and the occasional blitz of tropical sun if he could stand it. He had planned to get in shape for this trip, just to medicate a minor quadrant of his self-loathing apparatus, but when that hadn’t happened, when instead he had fattened further, he bought new T-shirts, one size larger than last year. He looked okay in them. Not really that bad. He would just make sure not to take one off in public. Even in private, actually, he had cut down on the nudity. These days the shame had followed him indoors.

Would an oceanside room have made much difference? The brochure—which he had read, so he could fantasize in advance about where he would be sleeping—had called his room a gorgeous interior cabin, as if deep within a cruise ship was the fat, dripping heart you fought toward with your fork, where the treasure and sex and delicious food was hidden, and not just the exiled lodging for hired instructors on boats with a so-called educational component.

He was talking out loud in the darkness. He could do that because he had no wife with him in the bed, no baby in the next room. They stayed home, thank God, even though Erin wanted to come with him, wanted to bring the baby, made a case that it would be so fun for little Sylvie, even though little Sylvie had not shown an aptitude for fun, or, well, happiness in general. Don’t blame the baby, though! Don’t blame the baby, you monster! He wouldn’t, if he could help it. The baby would be blameless. Cute little thing.

Anyway, if he’d brought them, and paid for them, because their passage was not included in the deal, they’d be going home in the hole, financially. Don’t let’s go home in the hole, he’d sung, trying to be funny. Erin didn’t laugh, because that wasn’t actually even the line from anything, and that wasn’t how jokes worked. If he went on the cruise alone, he’d calmly argued, strictly to discharge the obligations of his employment, and not to have fun, absolutely not, they wouldn’t be in the hole. Near it, maybe, clawing the surface of the world as their legs were sucked under, but not yet fully in the hole. Erin looked at him with her sharp face and her knife-chopped hair, bangs of razor perfection, chastising eyes and bones—the whole of Erin so fatally sharp that he was silently criticized by her appearance, criticized for more or less everything he’d ever done, even things from before he knew her, finally rebuked by the mere sight of her, and she didn’t have to say a word. Now that was power. That was a serious wife. Somehow, or probably because of this, he was still stupidly, weakly in love with her, even if more and more it seemed that he wasn’t fully sanctioned to touch her, a restriction instituted without any discussion he could remember. Perhaps in private she had feverishly quilted a force field around her body, stitching the damn thing by hand, and now it was finally complete. It didn’t hurt to touch the force field, it just made him feel not wholly terrific. Erin seemed to know, anyway, that when they didn’t have the fun she dreamed of it wouldn’t be Sylvie’s fault. You can’t blame everything on a baby. Or maybe even anything.

Yet one day, he figured, years from now, sitting across from each other at a lawyer’s office downtown, if that’s even how these things worked, they would blame whatever came to mind. Babies, houses, jobs, each other, themselves. Or maybe not. Maybe they’d be fine. Hard to say.

So he was alone, with nothing much to account for except, of course, the morning’s reading, the prep, the prep, the prep, and then the fucking horror of holding a class on this ship.

But he was so lucky! This was so great! How amazing to go on a cruise. His colleagues had stood around pretending to be jealous, and he’d held his ground pretending to deserve it, swallowing his dread. He had no choice in the matter. His student evaluations stank and he hadn’t done much university service. Service being the word for sitting in rooms with profoundly powerless people exercising a kind of hypothetical problem-solving, as if anything they ever said, anywhere, would ever get implemented ever. Really ever. There was a Zen purity to the enterprise. Circular effort, in a vacuum, in outer space. He needed to engage in more of this, and somehow he needed to improve his student evaluations. Wouldn’t this trip be a chance to collect a batch of raves from his little cruise-goers, who would surely be more susceptible to joy, with the sunbathing and cocktailing and theme dancing, and therefore be more likely to pass on that happiness to him?

Or are the happy even more protective of their mood, having finally arrived at bliss, clinging to it and in no way inclined to transfer such riches to the likes of him? Maybe so. But this time he had a strategy. Some old-fashioned hoo-ha from the school of please don’t hate me. He would get his students to praise him by stroking their egos so hard, relentlessly stroking the shit out of every region of their egos, even the heretofore untouched areas of their egos they never knew they had, stroking them down sleek and smooth, that the students would curl up and mewl like stuffed animals with robotic voice boxes, purring and saying gaga and dada and yes, please, give me some more.

Not, you know, that he saw students as beasts or babies or stuffed animals or anything like that. These were real people! Like you and me! They fucking actually existed for real!

Up on deck nothing was happening. It was dark. The ocean, the sky, the ship. Sweet hell, the silence was nice. Whatever waves had gripped them earlier were gone. Everything was still. Not even the waiters were awake. Something was doing in the kitchen, though. A light burned under the door. Powdered eggs were getting mixed in water by a big, industrial paddle, maybe. The frozen planks of scored sausages, ridged like washboards, were getting knifed into singles.

He sat by the pool, leaning against the railing, because the deck chairs weren’t out yet. The boat felt steadier now that he was outside. They’d left New York Harbor yesterday, so where were they now? He had no idea how fast they were going, or how you would begin to calculate their whereabouts, and it didn’t really matter. They were on the Atlantic Ocean, which was nuts. They were fucking at sea, and in a few hours it would be time for the workshop. It was, actually, pretty great. Surrounded by dark space and dark water and nothing real. A fairly delicious portion of wind pumping off the sea at the perfect temperature. He wanted to thank someone for that and say, Nice going. You nailed it. Perfect use of wind in this setting. My compliments. Erin would, of course, really love it here, on her way to the islands, the occasional dirty coast threatening in the distance. Hot, salty air in the afternoon, stinging her sunburn. She’d be out on the deck early—not this early—swimming laps before the kids took over the pool with their savage games. The bashing, the mayhem, the vampire aggression. Even little Sylvie, if you could keep the fast-crawling gal on a leash so she wouldn’t splash overboard and disappear forever, even Sylvie, his daughter, wrapped in so much flotation she’d look like a life raft, would very certainly, if he had only let her come, have had lots and lots and lots of fun on this boat.

He was supposed to have ten students but he only counted nine. Nine of them leaning forward on the conference table, staring at him, waiting. When he looked in his briefcase for the roster, the one document he actually needed, he couldn’t find it.

Probably it was in there. He had to pee. The room lacked a clock. His chair was no good, and somehow he was sitting at the seam between two crooked tables, which called for awkward pedaling with his legs, and that didn’t bode well. Already he’d sweated through his T-shirt into the button-down he thought he should wear. Everyone waited. They weren’t dressed up. His glasses were smudged. The students wore bright shirts made of parachute material. Cruise clothes. Was this even the right class?

Fuck it. This would get worked out. He said hello and welcome, making the obligatory referential comment about how ridiculously weird it was to be studying writing on a cruise ship, of all places, which no one laughed or smiled at or even acknowledged facially. Perhaps they didn’t know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?

Really, anyway, Fleming insisted to them, location shouldn’t matter, because this was serious work they were doing, and this was a serious class, to be done anywhere. If possible, they should, you know, forget about the outside world when they were in here and focus on literature.

Their faces were grave and their eyes, already, seemed to be closing.

So, great. His first lesson to them was to ignore the outside world, which he’d just said had nothing to do with real literature. Splendid advice for writers. And it would be fairly easy to follow inside this airless kill box. This was going very well.

They went around the room and said their names, along with some other data he’d requested—favorite books and writers, past classes taken—which they surrendered with quiet hostility, as if they were corpses who had been fed some rejuvenating pulp that would allow them to release a few more sentences before dying again. You brought me back to life for this? their bodies seemed to say.

The first story they considered was by Timothy, who had an amazing beard. This didn’t disguise the fact that he was no older than twenty-two. Even if it had been a white beard, even had he walked with a cane and maybe pushed along an IV bag on a gurney—like a child playing an old person in the theater—this boy would look young. Yet somehow he had raised a beard of Bunyan density, and the sight of it reproached anything facial Fleming, maybe thirty years the boy’s senior, had ever attempted.

In Timothy’s story an old man sat on a bed and thought back on his life, which featured some activities he regretted, which he would now tell us about in great length. The end.

A woman named Shay started the critique. She shrugged, said she had trouble believing it, and then paused, failing to elaborate.

That did rather sum things up, Fleming thought. Sort of a brave piece of thinking. Maybe true of almost everything created ever: paintings, books, houses, bridges, certain people. None of them are finally believable, when you really think about it. But, well, there they are. Whole schools of philosophy had fought with that one. Looking at Shay, and the confidence she projected, it was clear that belief was her holy grail and she probably rarely found it. She didn’t believe this, she didn’t believe that, it was all so unbelievable. Many years from now Shay would be dying somewhere nonspecific—Fleming’s imagination couldn’t piece together a good deathbed location—and she would declare that she couldn’t believe it.

Did Shay want to suggest anything Timothy could do to make his story more believable? Fleming asked.

“No. I don’t believe in meddling with other people’s art. No way. And I don’t want anyone to meddle with mine.”

Well put, and good on you, he thought, but then what the fuck are you doing here?

He almost said, Okay, so what do other people think of that? The classic workshop whirlpool everyone might happily drown in for a while. Let’s all go down together! But he stopped himself, because that would be like asking, Who else thinks that we have no purpose here? And even if he verged toward the affirmative himself, he’d better pull this ship back to dock pretty fast.

How come a ship metaphor, when actually on board a ship, seemed embarrassing, even when kept to himself, whereas on land it was perfectly acceptable?

Relying on experience, Fleming waited. It was about the only trick he had when he was in the gladiator pit. Ride out the silence. Stare the fuckers down. Someone else in the room was likely to find the pause unbearable before he did. And, sure enough, up stepped Timothy’s defender, Rory. Cheerful, permissive, simple, friendly, handsome, healthy, well adjusted, insane: someone who should never have become a writer.

Rory thought the story was great. So great! That man, on that bed. Wow. Rory could just see and feel him there. The whole thing was so real and he wouldn’t change a thing. This was perfect stuff. It almost could have been a movie! Rory smiled, and it was clear that no one had ever disagreed with him, ever. Or, more likely, people had disagreed with Rory but he wasn’t aware of it. The bliss it must be to be Rory.

So the poles had been set, approval and dismissal of Timothy’s story, and now it was Fleming’s duty to string critical latticework between them, ricocheting between praise and criticism until everyone had gotten their money’s worth. Later, Timothy could pick from this web of provocative suggestion as he got going with his revision.

Slowly the workshop roles emerged. There were the miniaturists, who wanted to look at a certain line on page 5 and wonder if maybe it shouldn’t be airlifted earlier, which might seismically alter the story and bring the whole thing scarily to life. Mightn’t it? There was the person who said that the story really began halfway down page 2. Apparently these people were everywhere, even on boats. The your story starts here people. What about saying that the story begins right after it ends, right here, on a page you haven’t written yet, and then throw a balled-up piece of paper at the writer? There was a young woman named Britt who felt the story should be switched from first person to third. First person, to her, at least in this story, allowed confessional overtones that seemed to let too much self-pity creep into the story, which defeated a reader’s ability to care for this man. If he feels sorry for himself, she explained, it makes it harder for us to. Not bad, Britt, Fleming thought, keeping his face neutral. A strange dose of reason on the high seas. But her comment was ignored and then there was the person who confessed that this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it. He’d better pass. He wanted to pose this response as an apology, like saying he was sorry, he didn’t read French, so what could he do? I’m sorry, man, your shit isn’t my thing.

Ah, one of those guys. The one from last semester had been named Sean. This one, the cruise version, was Carl. Exempted from value exchanges because of his immensely idiosyncratic place in this world. Not really his world, just a world he is grumpily visiting. That’s what Carl should have said: I’m sorry, I have to pass, I’m not actually a human being. Whatever Carl’s real thing was would be a closely guarded secret until he turned in his own story, and everyone—or so it usually went—once they saw it, would strain to detect the slightest difference between Carl’s writing and the work of the peers he’d spent so much effort distancing himself from.

Fleming jumped into the discussion and said that Timothy was brave to write about something so distant from his life, and for this he should be commended. Brave or silly, though, he wondered? Often it was hard to know the difference. To the students he said this was powerful material. A man who will die soon, wondering what went wrong in his life. And he’s alone. His mistakes have left him alone. He’s done this to himself, it’s his fault, there’s no one else to blame, and yet we somehow, potentially, feel for him. It’s really tragic. Cheers, really, to Timothy, because this stuff is big. But could the story maybe, who knows, use a scene? Sometimes an actual scene carries feeling really well, at least if that’s the goal here? Possibly not. Possibly not. Expository narrative can be really, important pause, interesting. Can anyone think of examples of this?

Of course they couldn’t, and he panicked, because suddenly he couldn’t, either, even though he’d once taught a whole class on the subject, “Tell Don’t Show,” one of those kill-the-father courses that resulted in a literary body count of zero. But no one seemed to care. They didn’t want examples. The era of illustrating a point was long gone, which made teaching easier, if lonelier. Years ago Fleming would tackle a discussion to a halt, to recommend books, even while his students would look suddenly unplugged, drained of life, because Fleming hadn’t just changed the subject, he’d made them forget their names and why they were there. He would describe the plots of these books, their styles, their techniques, why they were important, and no one ever made a note, even to write down an author’s name. They would blink at him, waiting for his seizure to flare out. In his evaluations, Fleming would learn that students viewed these endorsements not as the kind of resource sharing that universities were meant to enable, but as digressions, beside the point. Stalling, one student called it. And so instead he talked and talked and talked about Timothy’s story itself, devoting more language to it than it contained, a body of criticism outweighing a work that would never be published, trying to praise Timothy without alienating his classmates, most of whom sensed that the story was muted and unreal, an exercise. But Timothy couldn’t be shut down here, Fleming knew. He needed to be encouraged. Get the young man on his back, lift up his shirt, and rub that fucking belly. And yet at the same time Timothy’s classmates could not think their teacher was an idiot pushover who simply praised whatever he read, particularly writing like this, because then what was his praise worth if it ever actually came their way?

Fleming danced the tightrope, throwing coins to each side of the line. If Timothy did not actually purr out loud, at least he seemed content. Fleming’s neutrality in the end must have only made him seem spineless. A politician of the classroom, pleasing precisely fucking no one.

There was time at the end for Timothy to ask questions, and he just thanked everyone. He really appreciated it, nodding through that wondrous beard, rubbing his hands together.

“No questions? That’s it?” Fleming asked.

“I mean, yeah,” said Timothy, sitting back, pleased. “I wrote that story in like two hours so I’m surprised anyone liked it at all.”

Lunch was a buffet. Fleming loaded his plate with pasta, rolls, salad. What he wished was that he could take the food to his room. The walk would be long, the elevator ride conspicuous. He’d have to carry his plate through telescoping dining rooms, up carpeted stairs, then out across the sun-blasted pool deck and along the railing, where you had to practically tiptoe single file or else go overboard. By then his shame would be complete, his food cold. The package he was on didn’t include room service, which meant eating above decks, and that risked eating with students. Or being seen eating alone by students. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

They found him at the kiddie pool, on dessert. There was pretty good-looking pie here, so he’d gone with a piece of chocolate cream. The kiddie pool had a shaded canopy so he could eat without getting reamed by the sun, which was on a tear today. Large men his own age with very different lives stood shin-deep in the pool holding barrel-sized drinks, their shoulders boiling and blistering like the surface of a distant planet.

“Hey, Professor Fleming.” There were maybe five of them, hovering awkwardly. Writers in the sun. Just asking to get shot.

“Hey, guys, sit.” He welcomed them as if this were his own little porch.

They pulled up chairs and sat and looked at him, waiting again. He couldn’t really eat chocolate pie under that kind of scrutiny. Jesus, he thought, did he have to keep entertaining these monsters, even though class was over? This was break time, which meant he needed to replenish his stores of fraudulence for the next round. How else could he summon his artillery of deceit without some pretty serious alone time? He needed a different body to wear around when he wasn’t in the workshop. Or, at the very least, a T-shirt that read: I’M OFF THE CLOCK, BITCHES!

“So what do you think of class?” one of them asked. This would be Franklin, the quiet one with translucent skin. Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren’t.

“I should ask you guys that, right?” Fleming tried to smile through a mouthful of chocolate.

He knew he shouldn’t do this, but he couldn’t help it. It was like asking Erin if she loved him, the conversational sugar he sought out like an addict. What was she going to say? It looked so desperate, so helpless. Maybe because it was. Class had hardly started and here he was groveling for student approval.

“Seriously,” he said. “Does class seem okay?”

They burst out laughing and looked at one another. A merry laughter, he supposed, but still. Already with the knowing looks! They’d hardly even met and here they were being conspiratorial at the fucking kiddie pool.

“We never know when you’re joking,” explained Helen, as if they had discussed this issue at some length. Maybe Helen was the spokesperson.

He smiled. As in when did they not know? What was the phrase that was either funny or serious? Let’s get out the transcript and take a goddamn look. He had yet to joke with them a single time that he could remember.

Here’s a clue, he should have said: I haven’t been genuinely funny in a very long time.

They were back at it in the afternoon. The story was a pastoral, with a nameless man walking through the landscape—the powerful, moody landscape—thinking. The writer, George, was older than the others. He had a large, sad face and he was bald. These men were everywhere. The cattle in our lives we hardly even see. Slowly they are herded into the dark shed to be killed. Fleming hoped he didn’t look like George, but he suspected he looked far worse. Older, sadder, balder, one of the cattle who’d gotten out alive, survived the air gun to the head. A little bit soft of brain, but holding his own. To look like George would be lucky, probably. If he went home looking like George maybe Erin would be intrigued. She’d smile and throw her arms around him, yelling, “Sylvie, your handsome father is home!” The force field around Erin would lift. Love would surge through the house, and people in the surrounding neighborhood would fall to the floor in sympathetic orgasm. Just because Fleming was slightly less fat.

On the first page of his story George had written a note for the workshop:

“Hey everyone! I can’t wait to meet you. Thanks so much in advance for reading my story. Your time means a lot to me. I’d love to hear what you think. Best, George.”

“I don’t know,” said Franklin, cautiously. “It doesn’t seem like anything happens.”

“Can that be okay?” Fleming asked, eyeing the room for a taker. “Do things need to happen?”

Franklin blinked little crumbs from his eyes. He seemed to decide the question was not for him but for the group at large. He retreated in his chair, started to doodle. He must have been exhausted from that amazing opening comment.

Timothy jumped in. “It’s landscape porn.”

Everybody laughed, except George, who seemed bewildered. Was this a compliment?

“What’s landscape porn, Timothy?” Fleming asked.

“It’s just masturbatory images of mountains and lanes and creeks and desert and there’s no drama to any of it. It’s not a story,” said the young bearded man who himself had not written a story.

“Like, what if I described a teacup for five pages? Would anyone care?”

More laughs. George was scribbling notes, as if this was the most helpful critique he’d ever had. But what could he possibly be writing? Fleming wondered. Story is no better than description of a teacup?

“Okay,” said Fleming, looking at George across the table, determined not to mention the French New Novel, which by now had grown quite forgotten and old, and perhaps should be renamed the French Old Novel, or the French novel that recently died but that once mattered to a few people he knew, themselves also old. “But maybe instead of diagnosing what it is and isn’t, let’s try to talk about the experience of reading it, and maybe see if that discussion might be of use to George.”

This the class didn’t much want to do, and Fleming carried the weight of the thing. Frankly it was George’s fault. He had written some passable description, at least sort of, and he’d made the whole thing pretty moody, but, it was true, nothing happened. Could this, Fleming ventured, be the descriptive intermission in a story that hasn’t been written yet? Perhaps we are only looking at the thigh of the beast. We can say nice thigh, but beyond that we are in the dark. His metaphor was out of hand, running amok. Maybe they hadn’t noticed.

Britt alone picked up on Fleming’s desperation, while George transcribed the discussion ever more furiously, and she tried to help, reminding everyone of the inherent drama of landscapes and how charged they could be, how story resides in the land—had she really just said that?—and our best stories come from our relationship to nature.

“That’s your opinion,” snapped Shay, suddenly bothered.

Britt didn’t flinch. “Right,” she agreed, cheerfully. “Am I meant to be representing someone else’s opinion?”

“Do what you want,” said Shay, apparently not sure if Britt’s response was an insult.

Carl made a cat sound, clawing the air, hissing.

“Oh, shit,” said Rory, and he suddenly seemed at a loss with no friends around to high-five.

George raised his hand, usually taboo for the writer, but Fleming seized on it. Saved by the sad sack.

“This is really incredible,” said George. “Thank you, everyone. I really appreciate it.”

So this was George’s shtick, thought Fleming. He was a professional thanker.

“I guess,” said George, “I have one question for you all, given the remarks.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“If this was set in a city, instead of out west,” asked George, hopefully, “do people think that would make it better?”

Britt followed Fleming out after class. He wanted to stand in the sunshine, look at the sea, maybe let the salty air purge his face from the worrisome things he’d said, and lash him for the helpful things he hadn’t.

They were at the railing and the boat was really hauling ass. But when he didn’t look at the water they suddenly seemed not to be moving. Behind them a terrific whooping arose from the pool, where kids had lined up at the slide, zooming down the bright chute into the water. How amazing if he could get an hour alone with that pool, guarded from spectators, streaking down the slide, exploding against the water, only to pull himself back up the ladder to do it again.

“Why’d you start with two men today?” Britt asked.

“What do you mean?” Dear God, what did she mean?

“The class is half women and you could have discussed one of each today, a man and a woman. Wouldn’t that have been more fair?”

He had no answer. He’d given no thought to this.

“It’ll balance out,” he said, trying not to look at her.

Britt struck a puzzled look. “It seems to indicate clear bias on your part, to let two men go first, and I don’t see how that won’t disrupt the balance of the class going forward, if the women collectively feel that you do not think highly of their work. So much so that you’ve delayed its discussion in favor of the work of two men who hardly seem—in my opinion—talented enough to have gone first. I just wanted to pick your brain about that.”

Very crafty, little Britt. Let’s solve the problem of your bias together, you old, sexless fossil. I care about you and want to help. Now drink this poison and lie back while I chop at your expired genitalia. That’s good. Even though you’re going to jail, I still care for you.

Britt had pale hair, wore no makeup, and seemed so at ease with him it was disturbing, like one of those precocious children who is only friends with adults. Even Erin adopted a more formal tone than this, seemed a stranger to him sometimes when they spoke. He liked Britt. Clearly the feeling wasn’t mutual.

“Look,” he tried to explain, though he had no explanation. “Going first, as you call it, is no big deal. Certainly it’s not a privilege. I’d say it sucks to go first, actually, because no one knows each other, we have no rapport, and we’re not at our best, critically, yet. We haven’t vibed as a group. People who go first are at a disadvantage, actually.”

This sort of sounded half-believable to him as he said it.

Britt took this in, winching her eyebrows as she formulated her rebuttal. He braced himself.

“So today, if I’m hearing you correctly, you were punishing Timothy and George by making them go first? You deliberately put them at a disadvantage? Perhaps I misread your bias. Maybe it’s men you have a problem with. I will say reverse discrimination is no less worrisome. It is, arguably, more hidden, more sinister.”

“Sinister?” He sighed, starting to protest, but Britt bent over, laughing.

“Oh my God, I totally had you!” she shrieked. “You totally believed me! I wish you could see your face!”

Fleming had seen his own face enough times, in this life and the next one.

Britt threw herself into him, spasming with laughter, claiming she really had him going.

“What?” he said, quietly, trying to push her away, even though the contact felt good. “Which part was a joke?”

Britt grabbed his arm, tugging down on him while she recovered from her fit of laughter. “You are hilarious,” she shouted. “Oh my God, you are so funny!”

She kept crashing into him as if she couldn’t stand on her own. Was he meant to hold her up? People would be watching. This no longer felt good.

“You thought I was one of those insane feminists,” she gasped. “You actually thought that!”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he snapped. “Not insane. Maybe it was a reasonable point. Am I not supposed to believe what you say?”

Just then Helen found them, walking up with a sly smile on her face.

“Hey, you two,” she said. “What are you guys up to?”

You two? You two? And here was Britt pulling on him and laughing as if they were together. He extricated himself, again, but Britt threw an arm around him and told Helen it was nothing, a silly joke, and they were just hanging out watching the ocean go by. Wasn’t the ocean amazing?

Helen looked out at the water, frowned, and carefully agreed that it was. It seemed she was on the fence about it. This ocean, she told them, reminded her of a story, in fact, a very long story, slowly told, that got hung up in a complicated preamble about the first time she had told the story and who was there and why it had been a sort of hard story to tell. Apparently it still was. The old story about a story trick. An act of sheer violence to its audience. Fleming wanted to turn to dust.

He begged off, saying that he needed to go work, which wasn’t true. He had no intention of doing any writing on this boat, but maybe there was something good on cable. Or something bad on cable. Or maybe the wall in his room was doing some interesting shit that he could stare at while he held his balls. Anyway it was clear that if he wanted to escape his students—yes, yes, he wanted to—about the only place he could do that was in his room. But as he left the pool area he heard Britt shouting his name. She caught up, breathless. It was just that she was curious what room he was in, on what level, because such-and-such was her room number, on the such-and-such level, you know, just in case, and was he going to be around at the bar later?

Fleming told Erin about it over the phone. This was the best way to defuse all prospects. Confess before it happens, then it won’t happen.

“It was so awkward. And on the first day! Right on the ship railing where everyone could see us.”

“What am I supposed to say?” asked Erin, sounding tired. “That it’s cool a student is attracted to you? Good for you?”

“No, of course not. I think it’s funny. I mean, me. She can’t really be attracted to me.”

Erin let that one go. Apparently she agreed.

“Okay,” she said, in the classic way she ended her phone calls. As in, Okay, I’ve had enough, this is over.

“Well, I miss you,” challenged Fleming. The phone was sweaty against his head. He wanted out of this conversation, too. But it seemed dimly important for them to exchange intimacy.

Nothing.

He broke. “You can’t say one nice thing?”

“I can say many nice things.”

Just not to you, being the implication.

“All right, well, I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry.”

“How can you apologize if you don’t know what you did?”

Here we go.

“I’m not sure how, Erin. But I apologize, I really do.”

“We’ll talk when you get back.”

“Let’s talk now.”

“I really, really, really, really can’t.”

Really? he wanted to say. But he couldn’t honestly blame her, because he didn’t want to talk, either.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Fleming said. “I hope you feel better.”

Fleming was asleep when someone knocked on his door. He tried to ignore it. What time was it, anyway? The knocking persisted. It was a quiet knock, which he found sort of queer, because there was nothing polite about being woken up in your cabin. Ever since he’d boarded this ship he’d been systematically chased into a corner as he searched for privacy. Now they’d found his corner, too, and he was left with—and here he modulated his interior voice into something menacing—nowhere to hide. He laughed out loud. Clichés like this were perfectly acceptable when you thought them to yourself, particularly in theatrical voices.

The knocking continued. The knock of someone who knew he was in here. The knock of someone who wasn’t going away. The knock, no doubt, of a crazy if highly attractive person named Britt. A powerful, yet subtle knock. Tomorrow in class they should critique knocking styles. He hadn’t told Britt his room number, but it wouldn’t have been hard for her to figure out. Maybe when she saw him in his big-and-tall sleep shirt, a ring of hair puffing up from where his sleep mask was, maybe then her resolve to seduce a corpse would, as they say, wane.

It wasn’t Britt. At the door stood one of the ship people, a young man in a strange white suit holding a clipboard. The purser, perhaps.

“Mr. Fleming?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay, good,” and he checked off something on his pad. “Is there anyone else in there with you?”

Peering in, snooping, the little perv.

“No,” said Fleming, hesitating. Why did he feel nervous if it was true? Oh, because maybe it wasn’t? Because maybe Fleming had been up to some evening blood sport without knowing it, partitioning his overdeveloped psyche in order to, uh, tolerate the unbearable moral strain of his secret passions: abduction, captivity, taking his pleasures from people wearing hoods. How amazing if it were true. How dull that it wasn’t. Fleming was fully, finally alone. If he had a secret life it was a complete secret.

“Do you want to come in and search?” Fleming offered. Come on in my cabin, smell my sleep.

The man looked at Fleming with alarm. “No, no, that’s fine, thank you.”

Fleming had behaved like a suspect when there obviously hadn’t been a crime. Maybe he wanted to get arrested. Maybe that was the only way off this boat.

As the purser left, Fleming asked what this was about. You don’t knock on someone’s door in the middle of the night without explaining yourself.

“Just a head count,” the man said.

“A head count.”

“Don’t worry. We’ve counted you. You’re here. We’ve got you.”

At breakfast the students were buzzing. Someone had gone overboard, they speculated. The ship’s crew had been to their cabins. They were trying to figure out who was missing. Perhaps, Fleming thought, this was the only good thing about the Midwest. You couldn’t go overboard. Except for the lakes. There were the lakes. The virtues of the Midwest shrank back to zero again.

Franklin was chiding Carl, who sat there grinning, looking otherwise like sheer hell, as if he hadn’t slept. Come to think of it, Carl had on the same outfit as yesterday.

“I saw you at the bar all covered in sex,” teased Franklin. “How many heads did they count in your cabin, you little faggot?”

Carl nodded proudly, gave a lazy thumbs-up.

Fleming must have looked pale, because Franklin grabbed his arm.

“I can call him that because he’s not one, and I am.”

Sort of like if I called you a writer, Fleming thought. Oh, except that wasn’t fair. Be nice to these people, he reminded himself. And he knew that his assessment of others had never borne out over the years, with the least likely of his students always, always, enjoying the most success. In fact, he had better be nicer to Franklin. Franklin would probably be hiring him someday.

Class went okay. Britt’s story was disappointingly good. Talented writers can also be sexy little nut jobs who play mind games on boats. Her story described seven or eight different houses, which the narrator had lived in from birth until her death as an old woman. The writing was cold and beautiful, executed with severe control, and Britt leaped through the years of her narrator’s life, changing continents, changing marriages, until the narrator was alone again, inside a house not so different from where she was born, thousands of miles away. It was effortless, formally original, and Fleming was a little bit jealous.

Rory didn’t get it. “I guess,” he said, uncomfortable, as if he had never said an unkind thing to anyone in the world, “it might have been more interesting if it was the same character who lived in these houses, rather than so many different people of different ages in these different places. I couldn’t keep track of them, and I wasn’t sure what held them together.”

Shay cracked up laughing.

“What?” said Rory, blushing.

“Nothing.” Shay smiled, drunk on schadenfreude. “That’s awesome.”

“It’s the same narrator,” sneered Carl, who still looked debauched and exhausted from whatever he’d done last night. Not too tired to trounce the dumb blond man across the table, apparently.

Fleming felt that this called for a vote. “Did anyone else think there were many different narrators throughout the story?”

No one else raised a hand.

“Anyone?”

At lunch, arranging his papers, Fleming found the class roster. There were indeed supposed to be ten students in his class rather than the nine who had been showing up. The missing student’s name was C. L. Levy. He e-mailed the university office from the ship’s public computer terminal, which was embedded in a wall of foam-colored naval ornaments, as if long ago pirates stood here and checked their Facebook pages, yelling to the next pirate in line to wait his fucking turn.

A reply popped into his inbox a few minutes later, saying that all ten students were paid in full. No one had canceled at the last minute. No one had written in for a refund.

That was a lot of money to be paid in full, only to not board the ship, or to board the ship and not attend class. In the afternoon workshop session he asked his students if anyone knew of this C. L. Levy, but none of them did. “Man or woman?” asked Helen, thoughtfully, as if that might determine her answer. He didn’t know. “Alive or dead?” she asked. And that he didn’t know, either. They seemed to think that C. L. Levy was just another writer he was recommending to them. Professor Fleming was stalling again.

After dinner Fleming went to the front desk to see if C. L. Levy was on board. Of course they couldn’t give out that information.

“Isn’t there a passenger manifest?”

Yes, there was a passenger manifest, but it wasn’t for passengers.

Back in his cabin, Fleming told Erin about it on the phone. The missing student, the possibility that someone had gone overboard last night, and the ensuing head count that woke him up.

“Huh,” she said.

“Weird, right?”

“I guess. I mean it’s not really that weird. It’s normal for them to do a head count. Is that what you said was weird? Or was something else weird?”

Dear Jesus, what was going on between them?

He took on the overly patient tone she hated. Explained it slowly. Offered a short course on the uncanny for his wife. Theories and origins of strangeness. And then, when he was done, Erin had been proved right, again without speaking. None of it seemed particularly weird. When you put it that way.

“I feel concerned, that’s all.”

This surprised Erin. Had he never expressed concern before? “I don’t know why you’re telling me. If you were really worried, wouldn’t you have done something about it instead of calling me?”

“Okay, I won’t talk about this to you anymore, I promise.”

“Oh, you’re going to pout now?”

“Gosh, Erin, I still haven’t stopped pouting from last time. But I have more pouting saved up after this pouting is finished. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when the new pouting starts.”

She hung up.

On the way out of his room, Britt was waiting for him in the hallway, waving a black glove.

The little stalker had found his room.

“How come you’re not writing?” he asked, as if he’d run into her in public somewhere. Some cheerful patter, instead of screaming his head off in fright.

“How come you’re not, Professor?”

Did Fleming have this to look forward to every time he came and went? Could he get a new room? He’d sleep in the fucking lifeboat if he had to. He’d play it off cheerfully, using the deep reserves of cheer he stored in his infinitely sized happy place. He had cheer to goddamn spare. Maybe he’d get another room just to stash his extra cheer. How other people, Erin most of all, shook off moods, or, more impressively, pretended not to have them in the first place, was entirely beyond him. Except what wasn’t beyond him? Was there anything?

“What’s going on with the glove?” he said, like a person to whom this was really happening. “It’s warm out.”

“Well, I’m glad you asked.”

Britt gave him a weird smile. There was food in her teeth. He didn’t know her well enough to mention it. Thank God.

“This, sir, is a brand-new glove. I just took it from its package.” Britt flopped the glove against her face—a gesture of, what, self-harm?—then added, blushing, almost too quiet to hear: “No one has been pleasured with it yet.”

Fleming studied the glove, leaned in, and pretended to sniff it. “That you know of,” he said, in his scientific voice.

Britt laughed. “You are funny. We’ve been debating this. I’ve had to defend you. They think you’re so serious. But you’re not! You, my friend, are catching on.”

She swished the glove at his face and he leaned away from it.

“I am catching on, Britt. You might try that glove on someone else. Go throughout the longship, trying it on every young oarsman.”

“But I don’t want to go throughout the longship. I have traveled far, good sir. I am home now. I have found the owner of the glove.”

She baby-pouted up at him.

“No thank you, Britt.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing!”

“True,” he said, walking off.

And neither did she. What Fleming was missing was a home and family and self that had never quite come to be, which was maybe why he was on a boat now with strangers, pitying himself. How could you miss something that hadn’t happened? There was a certain feeling at home with Erin and Sylvie that sometimes, rarely, despite the prickly ways they fought, swept through them, for reasons he could not understand, little gusts of unexamined happiness when he and Erin smiled at each other for no reason and when they stretched out on the rug and played blocks with Sylvie and when Sylvie would roll over and suddenly yell “Pants!” kicking her naked legs in the air. A serious call for pants from his young daughter that made them laugh so hard. That’s what he missed, but it stood alone. Had it really even happened that way? And if something like it happened again, who knows, Fleming or Erin or both of them would react differently, would look away from each other, embarrassed that they’d suddenly been caught living while poor Sylvie shrieked with joy under the cold gaze of her functionally dead parents.

From the house phone outside the restaurant Fleming dialed the ship’s operator and asked to be connected to the room of C. L. Levy.

“I have no such passenger,” said the operator.

“As of when?” asked Fleming.

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you ever have a passenger by that name?”

“You mean ever on the ship? That’s not really something I can look up.”

Oh, but you fucking can, you master of the database. “I mean up until yesterday. Was there a C. L. Levy yesterday and now there is not one today?”

“But we haven’t put into port yet. No one has left the ship.”

Fleming paused. “It does stretch the imagination,” he admitted. He pictured C. L. Levy, just a shadow, standing on the ship’s railing, tilting out of sight. They say you can’t hear the splash. He bet to hell you could hear the splash. Something that awful could never be silent.

“Sir, I apologize, I’m not sure I can help you.”

“Thank you,” said Fleming. “I understand.”

But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t, and he couldn’t. The encounter joined too many others in the bottomless gunnysack he lugged around for situations that didn’t, maybe never would, make sense. He’d become a bit of a collector, but was the material worth anything? Everything unbelievable in his whole life that had nevertheless still happened. It would need to be probed for secrets.

Out on deck it wasn’t dark enough to hide. His students would be roaming the ship, drinking, waiting behind fake bushes so they could jump out at him when he walked by. The stars were close tonight. Not just exquisite pricks of light leaking through a tear in the fabric of some other world, to quote a writer he loved. These stars seemed to have fallen too low. They looked shapeless and dirty. Cast outs, perhaps, from the world of finer stars that knew enough to keep their distance. Or maybe the ship was climbing, lurching straight up out of the water like a slow rocket. He could close his eyes, feel the air rushing down on him, and believe that. Why was that so easy to believe, and it wasn’t true, yet what was true was so finally impossible and unconvincing? The stars—close and dirty and shapeless and false, the sort a child might draw, and what did children even know?—were not credible. The sky, the whole night, his conversations. These things did not fucking ring true anymore, they needed work. What happened to him needed to be revised until he could find it believable. Or, he needed to be revised. Fleming. He needed to change himself so what was real did not seem so alien and wrong. Do you do that with tools, with your hands, with a bag over your head? Do you do that by standing on the ship’s railing at night? Fleming would tuck himself over behind the pool, behind the games floor, where the sun umbrellas were rolled up, stacked, and chained. It was a kind of bed. It wasn’t so bad. The dark night was a kind of room, and it would do better than where he’d been. This was the perfect place to miss out on the next head count, should it come. No one would find him here, at least until morning. They could never check off his name. Maybe that was what was called for, for the next head count to go around, for the ship and its rooms to be searched for its living, viable people—its human beings!—and to be finally, once and for all, counted out.

The Dark Arts

On a dark winter morning at the Müllerhaus men’s hostel, Julian Bledstein reached for his dopp kit. At home he could medicate himself blindfolded, but here, across the ocean, it wasn’t so easy. The room stank, and more than one young man was snoring. The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which hadn’t kept certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst: animals strapped to breathing machines, children smothered under blankets. In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized by the glow of their cell phones. The evidence of sex failed to show on their faces.

Julian held his breath and squeezed the syringe, draining untold dollars’ worth of questionable medicine into the flesh of his thigh. He clipped a bag holding the last of his money to the metal underside of his bed. His father’s hard-earned money. Not enough euros left. Not nearly enough. He’d have to make a call, poor mouth into the phone, until his father’s wallet spit out more bills. Under his mattress he stashed his passport.

He left the hostel and took the stone path down to nothing good. This morning he was on his way, yet again, to meet Hayley’s train. Sweet, sweet Hayley. She would fail to appear today, no doubt, as she had failed to appear every day for the past two weeks. More and more it seemed that his lovely, explosively angry girlfriend, who only rarely seemed to loathe him, wouldn’t be joining him in Germany. Even though they’d planned the trip for months, googling deep into Julian’s unemployed afternoons back home, Hayley pinging him sexy links from work when she could. A food truck map, day treks along the Königsallee. First they’d destroy England and France, lay waste to the Old World, then drop into freaking Düsseldorf for the last, broken leg of the journey.

It was going to be a romantic medical tourist getaway, a young invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. Hayley promised to break bitter pieces of German chocolate over his tongue as he stared at the ceiling and wished his life away. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment up at the clinic on the hill.

Treatment, well, that might not have been the word. His was one of the doomed conditions. An allergy to his own blood, he not so scientifically thought of it. An allergy to himself, was more like it. His immune system was mistaken, fighting against the home team. Or his immune system knew exactly what it was doing. These days autoimmune diseases were the most sophisticated way to undermine yourself, to be your own worst enemy. In the States, with such pain and such striking blood work, they merely soaked you in opiates and watched the clock. They dug your hole and wrote your name in stone. Not so in Germany, a shining outpost on the medical frontier, where out of wisdom, or denial, or economic opportunity, they tried what was forbidden or unconscionable elsewhere. And for a fee they’d try it on you. Massive doses of it. You could bathe in its miracle waters. You could practically get stem-cell Jell-O shooters at the bar on Thursday nights. So long as, you know, you waived—yes, waived—it good-bye. Your rights, your family, your life.

It was not such a terrible trade. The clinic brandished a very fine needle on Julian’s first day. It gleamed in the cold fluorescent light of the guinea pig room, and they sank it into his back. From his wheezing torso they drew blood and marrow, his deep, private syrup—boiled it, then spoon-fed it back to him until he sizzled, until he just about glowed. Of course the whole thing was more complicated than that, particularly the dark arts they conjured on his marrow once they’d smuggled it out of him. They spun it, cleaned it, damn near weaponized it, then sold it back to him for cash. Zero sum medicine, since he’d grown it himself, in what Hayley, digging into his ribs, had called “The Julian Farm.” Except the sum was a good deal larger than zero. He might as well have eaten his own arm or sucked elixir through a straw punched into his heart.

Back home he’d tried it all and felt no different. The steroids, the nerve blocks, the premium plasma. He ate only green food until it ran down his legs. Then for a long time he tried nothing. He tried school, then tried dropping out. Now he was trying, in his midtwenties, his old room in his father’s house, which Hayley always said impressed her. The courage it must have taken for him to decide to really live there with his father. Maybe. Through it all, though, he was mostly trying Hayley, as in really, really trying her, and he could see how very tired she’d been getting. Imagine that you’re the girlfriend of a long, gray, twentysomething man who is ill in a way that no one understands. Or is he? It was Hayley who’d pushed for this trip, so Julian could finally have a shot at the new medical approach they’d read so much about, a possible breakthrough with rare autoimmune disorders.

In Germany they treated you with yourself. You were guilty of hiding your own cure inside of you, you selfish fuck. They salvaged and upgraded it, then returned it to you with a vicious needle while you trembled in your chair. After a few weeks you’d be better. Hmm. In his wellness fantasies, Julian always pictured himself scrubbed clean, nicely dressed, suddenly funny and charming. All better, in every goddamned way. Maybe even a name change. Of course throughout these treatments, as he’d discovered, your frowning doctors hedged and balked and shat caveats, until the promise of recovery was off the table, out of the room, nowhere near the building. But at least on the way toward oblivion you got to, you know, feed on yourself, suck your best parts free of promise. You got to try the finest of what medicine did not legally have to offer.

This morning he ducked the stares of shopkeepers, who guarded their doors against him, the pale American who spent no money. They must have come to recognize his sickly figure by now. What was left of it. God knows they’d gawked. To Julian it seemed they could see right through his clothes, and they were not amused. You’d need more than clothing to hide a body like his. You’d need a shovel, a tarp. Tarps were designed to cover men like him. This is what you call a person? This is not a person. Tombstone inscriptions like this just came to him. He had a certain gift for the form.

The shopkeepers—little men protected by bibs, youngsters with ghostly mustaches—stood and stared as Julian snuck down the street. Was this friendliness? Was it love? Julian could only walk faster, wincing until they released him from eye contact. Had anyone, he wondered, ever studied the biology of being seen? The ravaging, the way it literally burned when you fetched up in someone’s sight line and they took aim at you with their minds? He wanted to summon a look of kindness and curiosity in return, a look that might forgive his miserly ways, his trespass on their ancient, superior city. But his face, as no one had ever needed to tell him, lacked the power to convey. He’d stopped trying to use it for silent communication, the semaphore you performed overseas, absent a shared language, to suggest you were not a murderer. Such facial language was for apes, or some mime troupe in Vermont. Mummenschanz people who emoted for a living. He ate with his face and spoke with it. Sometimes he hid it in his hands. That should have been enough.

It took him just one sucking sprint on a cigarette to reach the train station, a domed building in rust-colored stone. After a few mornings inside, braving the crush of travelers who reeked of chowder, he figured he didn’t need to enter the dank space just to wait for Hayley. A granite ledge opposite the station offered a perfect view of the decamping passengers. Every morning locals poured from the building wrapped in hemp and straw. The fancier ones wore the waxed canvas coats of hunters. Occasionally an American or two spoiled the tasteful palette with vacation colors, releasing high-strung moods as if by megaphone: I have arrived in your historic city and I am the happiest person you will ever know! Let me rub my joy on you! They shot into the town square like clowns fired from a cannon, mugging their snack-smeared faces at some imagined camera, dreaming of paparazzi.

No one disliked American tourists more than their own kind. Or probably they did. Probably there was widespread competition in this arena, hostility toward the first world animal spreading its lucre abroad. Julian could picture the American tourist problem resolving in a civil war, a snake not eating its own tail, but maybe doing something nastier. Giving it head, its snake jaws popped out of joint to apple bob the shaft.

It was only upon leaving New Jersey, flying east toward higher civilization, that the demise of his decadent homeland seemed so overdue. But some higher power, or some covert, stateless, ideological power, kept forgetting to stick the pig. America kept charging the horizon, its lancet drawn, a milky substance leaking from the tip, refusing to perish. Now he had to look at these muffin-tops from home ready to speed-learn German culture, their sneakers swollen like parade floats as they bounced around outside the Hauptbanhof, trying to keep warm in the bitter German air.

Two weeks went by like this. Trains rolled in from Paris, Salzburg, Dresden, Berlin, failing each time to spit from their insides the girl Julian had fought with in Strasbourg. A disappointment of trains. He and Hayley, in fact, had fought in several cities in the Western Hemisphere on this trip, a road show of freeze-outs and recriminations. For the most part they warred silently, with so much stealth that sometimes Julian wasn’t sure whether or not they were even quarreling. Even in bed, as she hobbyhorsed on top of him in pursuit of her sexual quota, with the focus of a child doing homework, grimacing when her time came, he wondered if she was mad at him. Their mating activity was hardly much sexier than a needle in the back. But at least he got to see her naked. Hayley could look so serious beneath her pixie haircut. She was too stubbornly self-contained, too confident, too okay with it all, which was decidedly not okay with Julian. A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. But Hayley had built a fire wall around her feelings and moods. There was no knowing her, and fuck you if you tried to pierce her privacy. You were a creep and an invader and you’d be rebuffed, then shamed. Hayley would fall quiet if Julian suddenly touched her hand, when all he wanted was to be touched back. That was the consolation prize available to the bottoms in a relationship, right? The mules, the dinguses, the shitbags? Touchbacks were supposed to be free. And she’d be clearly annoyed at the transparency of Julian’s desire when out of nowhere he pounced. Poking her to be cute, which was not, he knew, cute. Was there a subcategory of shit-eating grin, depending on whose shit you ate? He’d gone to a different school of etiquette, the school of no shame, the school of I need more from you. He’d been fucking homeschooled in emotional helplessness, scoring off the charts. By touching Hayley and waiting for her response, Julian could pursue the kind of emotional research you didn’t get to conduct in graduate school: dissertation-level inquiry into the limits of revulsion regarding people who ostensibly love each other. Which would always turn out to be a really stupid move. Hayley would snap and he’d feel his face burn, getting ready to be rubbed in something. She’d smell his need and it stank, it really, truly stank. Why did he always have to confirm a good thing, asking about it and asking about it, Hayley wanted to know? She told him to put his hellish thermometer away, to stop prodding her with his goddamned thermometer, obsessively trying to gauge how she felt so much that he kept ruining the mood.

Which proved that he loved Hayley. Somewhat. A lot. Awfully. God help him. First of all, she didn’t leave him, even though his salient feature as a man was his leavability. He created occasions for departure in others. Tombstone. And until now Hayley had hung in there. Her loyalty alone was an aphrodisiac, even though his medication sometimes gave him the useless crotch of a mannequin. Hayley also believed in Julian’s illness, found it true and real and even pretty damn interesting, a faith that had turned out to be rare. Julian’s father and Hayley and the occasional stranger on the Internet, where the ill go in search of each other, humping each other’s empathy slots. These were the believers. Even if, sometimes, maybe just a little bit, Julian did not really believe in the illness himself.

Hayley wasn’t coming. It was pretty obvious. Julian sat shivering in the chill, listening for the 9:13, the 9:41, the 10:02. He was tired. In winter he sometimes caught a fever. His arms and back burned hot, as if a flame were being held to his skin. This was the dying of the nerves, an Internet confidante had explained. Of course his immune system wanted him dead. It knew. It was making the call on behalf of the wider society. It was taking him out. In the larger project of the universe, of which he must necessarily be kept in the dark, his own existence appeared to be an obstacle. So the species makes an adjustment. Tombstone. It redacts.

No one else waited outside today. No one else was stupid enough to sit and freeze on a granite ledge in middle Germany, watching the trains come in. People here knew where their loved ones were. A loved one’s coordinates were simply available. Such was the nature, the very definition, of a loved one. People didn’t need to risk exposure and illness waiting outside and wondering, letting their minds work up end-time scenarios. The vanished, dead loved one. The disloyal loved one, licking a stranger in another city. They did not need to dream up future sorrows for themselves, a life lived without the loved one. Slap an ankle bracelet on your loved one if you must, must know where they are at all times, but solve the problem, he told himself. Get it done. Track your fucking people or cut them loose.

After the first trains of the morning failed to produce her, Julian stood at a café for a scorched espresso, then returned to his lookout to wait. Later, when Hayley still hadn’t come, he took shelter at the crepe stand, where they’d already cloaked the day’s crepes in black jam. A death bread, for two euros. The thousand-year-old remains of an old man, now just a wedge of tar. This is you in the future, you poor, rotting thing.

He wasn’t hungry. He was never hungry. But some dim sense of duty haunted him, his father’s voice, gentle and girlish, suggesting that food might help. Food, food, food. Please, Julian, eat something, his father was always saying, as if noxious, soon to be spoiled material from the earth was going to do anything but poison him further. For Julian’s whole life his father—small, kind, and so selfless Julian wondered if he had any needs of his own—stood at the stove and made pancakes for him, grilled cheese, oatmeal, eggs, burgers. Later, when the alternative care community had thrust nutritional strategies their way, when the Prednisone and Lyrica, the off-label intravenous immunoglobulin, and the chemotherapy worms had fattened and ruined and bleached and burned and defeated him, his father steamed bushels of kale. But Julian only ever picked at what polluted his plate, as if dissecting roadkill for shards of glass. His father, especially after his mother traveled underground to spend the rest of eternity inside a luxury coffin where no one could disturb her again, removed Julian’s untouched food and scraped it into the trash. Only to try again a few hours later, smiling and kind.

So now he thought that eating something might be smart, but the tourist’s gesture for plain crepe eluded him. Or the vendor enjoyed watching Julian pretend to scrape something foul from his hand. Scraping it and scraping it, souring his face to indicate his distaste for the jam, while the vendor grinned at him and winked, as if Julian were demonstrating something the two of them might do together later, in private. Why were these gestures always considered sexual, one hand doing something untoward to the other hand? Why wasn’t it seen as semaphore of the beginning of the world, God the creator digging life from the soil and brushing it off, sending it without a headlamp into the darkness? He might finally consent to play charades, maybe, if instead of celebrities the pantomime could be restricted to events surrounding the big bang. Religious scenarios. The cold narrative of physics. Reenactments from the very, very beginning of time. Very fucking very. And on the eighth day, God made his creatures so lonely they wept. Picture that charade, he thought. The people of this world weeping into their hands.

Julian was early for his transfusion. This was probably good, because he had to navigate a ritual confusion at the clinic front desk. It concerned the very existence of Hayley.

“You do not come alone?” the receptionist quizzed him, as per fucking usual. She rose from her chair, which gassed, and peered behind him. He stepped aside so she could see the emptiness.

“I do.”

As in, regardez how goddamn alone I am. See it once and for all.

There seemed to be no way to permanently establish the fact of his solitude. He shrugged at her and showed, via sneer, what he considered to be justified disgust. It made his face ache.

The receptionist failed to notice.

“You are not supposed to be coming alone,” she insisted, waving the form.

It was true. He’d agreed to be accompanied—they didn’t give a shit by whom—because the treatments left you weak, woozy. The treatments left you worse than that. Supine, prone, drooling, horny. Tombstone. Never mind how problematic that was, how much that suggested that treatment was the wrong word. The very, very wrong word. What should you call it when afterward you needed to be led from the premises? When, due to the obliterating immunosuppressants, which preceded the perfectly refreshing speedballs of marrow, the body lacks the power to remove itself? Probably they didn’t care, at this first-class medical establishment, if the body was dumped in the Rhine. Just get it out of the clinic. Did they call it the body? Did they ask each other, peeking from behind their German curtain: has the body gone? It is all clear, Ja?

He wasn’t racist, he was just tired. Anyway, he’d done fine most days without Hayley, weaving through the granite lobby after his treatment, baby stepping down the broad, white stairway overlooking town. On some days, well, at least once, he’d even felt strong and alert, with a fresh dose of doctored stem cells running through his blood.

Julian leaned in, showed his teeth. These were the gray teeth, he knew, of someone not threatening to bite you, but to crumble his mouth on your face, leaving bits of horrid ash.

“Would you like me to leave?” he hissed at her. “Because I will. Is that what you want?”

Ooh, boy. What a tremendous threat, to not follow through on his own treatment, which his father had already paid for! He really had her now. He’d backed her into a corner!

The toddler threatens the parent:

If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll refuse to eat this candy!

The receptionist sighed. She was a human being after all.

“This person exists for you?”

“Not just for me.”

“And you say she is coming?” The receptionist struck a hopeful tone.

Oh, God, he thought, let’s not be hopeful anymore. Where has it gotten us, really?

“No,” Julian said. “I’d say she is not.”

In the waiting room, once he’d been buzzed in, he shut his eyes against the wheezing shrieks of the ill. Or was that a computer, booting up like a Tasered horse? It was possible that no one within earshot was screaming, but shouldn’t someone be screaming right now? Anyone? In places like this Julian imagined death throes around every corner, a gowned man twitching on the floor while a crowd of doctors leg-blocked your view.

When he’d first arrived, the clinic wasn’t what he expected. The place lacked a porch with rocking chairs, where dignitaries convalesced deep in thought, staring out over a thundering gorge. Nurses did not come by with blankets to cover your lap. You did not take the clean, healing air, or hike up mossy trails into the mountains. Hadn’t the Germans pretty much popularized convalescence, established it as the solution to life among functional people? What a huge disappointment this place was, and if it weren’t for the illicit product, unavailable stateside, tombstone, he might as well have been home in New Jersey.

The Bensdorp Clinic seemed free of any kind of Bavarian mountain heritage. Convalescence here was presented as an essentially professional activity, like day-trading. The reception lounge was smartened up like a bank, the treatment rooms hidden in vaults. Photographs of athletic prowess, framed in metal, lined the hallways. Bodies performing impossible maneuvers, glistening, mostly nude. These images were hung, no doubt, to flatter the rumored celebrity clients, who must have had their own entrance, their own goddamn wing, because Julian never saw them. Rich and arthritic American athletes, willing to take injections of liquid horse penis or whatever into their stiff joints, able to afford exceedingly rare and hazardous attacks on their bodies. Sea sponge in the neck, cartilage-fortifying worms, administered via cream.

In the waiting room patients gazed at their phones or read or looked anywhere but at one another. A certain shame, along with the exhausted indifference of the dying, lingered over people going out of pocket on experimental health care, paying too much to keep feeling worse far from home. How humiliating to be seen like this, failing to rage, rage against the dying of the light. Failing even to fucking complain.

When his name was called, the technician led him to the semiprivate room where patients reclined in blue vinyl chairs, watching television they could not understand. Here they pretended, or didn’t, that their procedures were going to work. Even the hopeful tilted over their own graves, a boot at their back.

In transfusion chair number 3, Julian submitted to the usual pretreatment shenanigans. He confirmed his name and birth date, signing, yet again, a German-language consent form. A nurse-practitioner arrived to stick him for blood, filling a vial from his leg until it shined like a long, black bullet. She waved it at him and it foamed.

“You are okay,” she said.

“I am?”

“Yes,” she smirked. “I know this.” She tapped her head. A universal sign of certainty. He needed to remember to tap his head when he spoke, no matter what. He should always tap his head.

Yesterday he’d had a scan and some other tests, so today he was relatively in the clear, time wise. Today’s transfusion would only take an hour, the nurse told him, and then he was free. He’d have some daylight when he got out and maybe he’d wait at the train station. He didn’t have to pay for his seat on the ledge, licking his wounds, pretending to watch for Hayley. And if he returned to the hostel too early, he’d have to hide under his sheets until the blinding overhead lights were shut off for the night.

“Ready?” asked the nurse, and he nodded to her. He wasn’t.

She wheeled up the apparatus and switched it on. Inside its wire frame rested the clear bag sloshing with his new life, frothy and pink, and it produced a not-unpleasant hum.

He let his arm fall into the syringe basket and closed his eyes, waiting for the dreams that sometimes came on when the long needle, loaded with marrow, was raised over his body.

After his treatment, Julian’s father assured him from the lobby pay phone that money was not a problem. He’d wire it over on his lunch break, which meant Julian could get it later tonight. But how was he feeling, his father wanted to know, and how were his side effects, and was he able to sleep? Because you don’t get better if you don’t sleep well—tombstone—that’s just common sense, and of course the city must be tempting, the museums and the old opera house and the Latin food festival that opened last night, according to what his father had read online—what an exciting thing for Germany to be doing! his father said—but he shouldn’t go crazy, even though the delights of Düsseldorf must be so tempting. The delights! Is his hotel clean? He should take care of himself, and money seriously was not a problem.

This, Julian knew, was his father’s way of not saying that money was a problem, a very big problem, and that his father worried about it night and day, but never spoke of it. Never. Julian was simply allowed to lick money from his father’s body whenever he wanted to and his father had pledged to never cry out in pain.

They would find a way, his father said. He’d send more than Julian asked for, because worrying about money was the last thing Julian needed right now. He needed to heal. Was he healing?

Julian glanced at his needle-kissed arm. He pictured the German blood product sluicing through his body, trouncing free radicals, convincing his white blood cells not to eat through bone.

He guessed that he was healing. Quite.

“How’s Hayley?” his father asked. “She keeping you fed?”

Julian pictured Hayley prying his mouth open with her fist, pouring sauce down his throat.

“She’s fine,” Julian answered. No doubt this was true. Hayley was probably having a glass of wine, smoking, sitting at an outdoor café somewhere north of here. France, still? Berlin?

They’d spoken of Berlin in a vaguely flirty way, as if they might like each other more there.

“Is she with you now? Can you put her on?”

His father and Hayley and their whisper time. They were his armchair doctors, his medical curators, who earned their authority because they cared more about his health than he did. Julian was supposed to walk away after handing over the phone, to give them privacy, usually at Hayley’s place when he hadn’t come home for a while and his father was starting to worry. His caregivers needed to huddle and the patient was a nuisance.

“Oh, she went ahead to scout a good place for dinner. I’m starving.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” his father said.

How about that, having something you like to hear. For Julian it would be, what, exactly? Maybe something Hayley-related. Hayley saying something un-Hayley-like:

Hey, Jules, it’s me. I miss you and I’m on my way.

Would it be possible to hear that, or something like it, soon?

“Okay, Dad, well, thank you.”

His father breathed into the phone. He could tell, all the way from Germany, that at home in New Jersey his father was okay, maybe even smiling. He could feel it. This was something nice, too. It was very nice. It would do.

Shouldn’t he never, until the very second he died, stop thinking and thinking and thinking that he had a father who would do anything for him? What a crime to forget this. He was a criminal if he ever stopped thinking this for even a minute.

Julian thanked him again and tried very hard to sound sincere.

“I love you, honey,” his father said, and they hung up.

Julian took a shortcut to Old Town, up along Adersstrasse, dipping around the Graf-Adolf-Platz. Germany was deadly cold this time of year, the trees slick with ice, the grass so scarce it seemed the whole country had been poured in cement. The weathered stone, the weathered people, even the language was weathered. All around him flowed the gravest-sounding speech. It was genius, Julian thought, to create a language from strangled cries, deathbed wheezing. There was perhaps no truer way to communicate. If he spoke German he could sound solemn and serious. His inanities would escalate into parable. Everything out of his mouth would be a eulogy. German was the end-time language, the only tongue worth speaking on the last days. If the sun shrank and went cold, the world falling dark, everyone should squirm in the soil intoning German phrases. To honor the final minutes of the world.

Instead, Julian was stuck with whiny, nasal English, in which every word was a spoiled complaint, a bit of pouting, like children’s music sped up on the record player. In English, no matter what you said, you sounded like a coddled human mascot with a giant head asking to have his wiener petted. Because you were lonely. Because you were scared. And your wiener would feel so much better if someone petted it. How freakishly impolite, how shameful, to let these things be revealed by one’s language. English, a whiner’s tongue, a language for people who had to beg for sexual favors. At least overseas he didn’t speak much English. He didn’t speak much anything.

Julian ate no dinner. He found a wine bar and drank cautiously from a communal bottle of something red and sparkly, a kind of alcoholic soda. He sat in a sea of couches and every now and then some grinning celebrant poured a swallow into his glass and raised it vaguely at the others. A kind of listless cheers, offered to the room. Each time, Julian raised his own glass in response, nodding his head. Cheers indeed. When the bottle was empty, and he’d paid far more than he owed, he walked back down to the station and took his position on the ledge.

There was something fine about not looking out for Hayley tonight, a desire he’d pledged to destroy. He would take an evening off from feeling incomplete without her. Paid vacation. Nobody had to know that he wasn’t pining for her full-time. He’d done this shit on his own so far, and if Hayley had been here he would have tried to scrape her, day and night, for pity and understanding. She would have been empty by now, empty and seething, but he would have kept scraping, using a spoon, digging deep into her sweetest parts until they were long gone, and still he’d scrape at her, maybe until he could see through to the other side. He’d been doing fine without Hayley and he would do fine and he fucking was fine. He sat and he froze and he shivered, and it was perfectly terrific. Somehow he’d ended up with nothing to be ashamed of. He didn’t even know the train schedule tonight. A wonderful thing to be ignorant of. The trains could do what they liked. He had no good reason to be down at the station—what day was it anyway, and what time was it, and what was his name again?—and yet so far, since he’d arrived, this was his best night in Germany. He even felt sort of healthy, although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he even knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was supposed to feel, and on days like this, nights like this, treatment or not, it was hard not to be worried, a little bit, that some of the reactionary, conservative doctors whom Hayley had railed against at home, the ones who’d diagnosed Julian in the merely normal range, might actually have been right. He was fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick, at least when it came to conventional measurements.

This was just what it felt like, perhaps, to be alive.

Or so these doctors seemed to be saying.

Did other people, he wondered, feel this same way—listless, strange, anxious, dull, scared, you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives—and did everyone else just clench their jaws and endure it? Suit up for the day and fight it out on the streets? Were people barely okay and yet not running, as he did, to the doctor, again and again, and was no one discussing, out of some deep personal bravery, what they were so quietly and politely enduring?

For hours, it seemed, no trains came into the station. The tracks were quiet and the whole city was perfectly still, as if perhaps there’d been some agreement, deep in the brain of the city, that the machines would shut down at this hour, the vehicles grounded. Cars and trains and buses. A scheduled hiatus of activity on this clear, cold evening in Düsseldorf.

Down at the station, commuters still occasionally pushed out through the tall glass doors, locals mostly, pulling dark suitcases across the ice. How they’d come to town without a train was a mystery, until he realized that striding across the square, faceless in the darkening evening, were simply people who had arrived from elsewhere hours ago and waited inside, where it was warm, for someone to come and get them. These were the arrivals. Arrivals wait. Not all of them get met. They’d been staring out at the square all night as the tiny, fuel-efficient cars ripped here and there without them. Finally they must have realized that their rides weren’t coming, so they bundled up, took matters into their own hands, and walked out alone into the cold.

That night at the hostel, a visitor came to Julian’s bed. Some uninvited man crept under his covers, while he slept, and Julian woke up—suddenly, rudely, confused. This man was taking liberties. Before much could happen—before disgrace and shame and, who knows, the implication that he was even remotely okay with this—he’d fled to the bathroom.

His heart was blasting, his sleep shirt wet and twisted. From the bathroom, looking back out into the gymnasium, the air thick with sleep, there was no sign of anything. No man, no sounds, just beds and bodies and darkness. As if the stranger had vanished. Hands had been on him while he slept, but when he thought about it he kept seeing himself lying there reciprocating. He couldn’t piece it together. What in the goddamn hell had happened? He checked his body everywhere, testing. For evidence? Damages?

He’d been touched, that he was sure of. He’d been touched, it had happened, and now there was nothing to be done. He caught his breath, paced around the bathroom, splashed water on his face. He could shower, but he had no towel and it was too fucking cold, anyway. Someone had really been touching him. Now it was over.

He crouched in a bathroom stall, trying to think. Some scene in whatever he’d been dreaming—he’d been having some kind of intense dream, oh God—had allowed for this to happen, made him stay longer than he should have in bed. A bit too long, as if he’d enjoyed it. At first whatever was happening seemed perfectly okay, just unreal enough. He was holding on to someone. It wasn’t really a sexual dream, per se. It was more like cuddling. He’d been dreaming of cuddling, and not with Hayley, but big deal. That’s how it worked. You could date the whole world in your dreams and it was okay. You could, actually, date-rape the whole world in a dream, too. You could kill and clean up after yourself. Or not, you could leave evidence all over the world and get caught and go to jail forever and wake up crying. So fucking what? The point is, he was cuddling someone in his dream, and he was doing it in that squirming way, he had to admit, that he hoped might lead to more, and then he woke against a body and what were you supposed to do? There was no way not to respond. Anyone would. He was aroused, technically, but he certainly did have to pee. Usually after a pee that issue resolved. Usually. But he was aroused before the man had crawled into bed with him, so this was bullshit.

But was he? Oh, God. He wanted to cry foul.

In the morning he tried to explain the situation to the front desk. He spat his useless English and he gestured and he slammed his hand on the counter. They were only puzzled, behind the glass partition, by what he told them, as if to say: Someone tried to hold you and you fled? But why, sir?

He imagined someone calmly explaining: Don’t you know, sir, that this is why people stay at Müllerhaus?

Instead he asked about other accommodations, and they offered him a private room, for twice the money. Then, no, they withdrew that offer, because it seemed those were taken. The only available beds were in the Turnhalle, where he was staying, and if he would like to change beds, he could do that, for a fee. Maybe a bed in another part of the room? Maybe that would be better for Sir?

He lurked outside the hostel, watching the men light their cigarettes and head into town. They filed out silently, squinting against the day. Which one of them had done this? He scanned their faces and wanted to challenge them to have a dream like that, so sweet and comforting, very nearly a wet dream of cuddling, and then to wake up against a body—the heat, the moisture, the smell—this kind of thing is ancient and overpowering and we’re helpless before it—and not feel some slight rush of arousal. Really slight! You couldn’t do it. It could have been a dog and he would have nuzzled into it, feeling something. He might have given in and not cared. So what? Because it wasn’t really about the sexual parts of what lived and breathed right next to you. Man or woman or whatever. You were sort of aroused, if you got aroused, by something else. Not the person’s parts.

Oh, it was pointless. He realized, standing out on Schützenstrasse, once the men were gone from Müllerhaus and the locals had zoomed into the homes and shops that would keep them during working hours, that he was exaggerating his indignation. The whole thing was a wash. He was worked up for nothing. No one was watching and he was putting on the fucking Ritz, for God’s sake, as if there was something so terribly wrong with someone kissing him at night.

Was he really supposed to care at this late date who kissed him? Wasn’t it enough to be kissed by someone? What was the saying: beggars can’t be complete and total losers?

At a restaurant called Altstadt he ate a full breakfast of cold cuts and long potatoes. It was early but he ordered a beer, and it tasted so good he ordered another. He smoked and had a coffee and sat looking out the window at a small, distant piece of the Rhine. Then, on his way out, he realized he was still hungry and sat down again for a piece of chocolate cake. He pointed at it through the display case and they brought over, instead, a cake that turned out to be citrus and ginger, which he devoured. He had another coffee and could have sat there all day but he had plans to make and if he didn’t get moving, he was going to be late.

After his treatment that afternoon, Julian woke to a surprise.

“Your friend is here,” said the nurse.

Friend, thought Julian. Not possible. The word made him picture animals. Pets he’d never had.

“Your friend waits there now,” said the nurse, pointing up.

If he followed that direction, he’d leave the building and float through the sky before crashing to the ground. Head in this direction, sir, even if it takes you over a cliff. Waiting for you, maybe, will be someone who cares. Trust us.

Julian cleaned up in the patients’ bathroom. On the way out a nurse flagged him over to the doctor’s office, where his very own doctor, who he hadn’t seen for days, was hanging film in a light box.

The doctor greeted Julian and waved him over to a stool.

Julian, instead, stepped up to the light box. The scan was mostly black, a portrait of darkness.

“Is this me?” Julian asked. “My head?”

The doctor nodded.

“We are looking at your scan while you are here this day.”

Julian studied the doctor. He was trim and his skin glowed. Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.

“Well, we see something sometimes,” the doctor was saying, “in this kind of white blood person. The scan is really. This is why we scan. And,” the doctor continued, “we have this discovery to show you.”

The doctor pointed his pen at a scuff in the film.

“A little discovery. You can discover it here.”

The doctor traced the outline of nothing that was, perhaps, a shade lighter than the nothing around it.

Maybe Julian could see it. A very small shape, like a cloud. In his brain. Weather passing through. If you could draw a headache, this is what you would draw.

“This is a concern,” said the doctor, looking at Julian hopefully.

“Okay,” said Julian. “Where is it?”

That mattered, right? His entire personality could be explained by this cloud. A cluster of rogue cells pushes on a nerve, blocks a vessel supplying blood to the deep limbic system, and suddenly you’re funny, witty, and charming. That’s what a personality was, the blood thirst of rogue cells, a growth in the mind.

The doctor pointed again at the cloud.

“It is here,” he said, more slowly.

“No, I mean in me. Where is this thing?”

Julian tapped his head. Maybe it wasn’t in the brain itself.

“This is not our work.”

“You didn’t make this tumor?” Julian grinned.

“Well, tumor,” the doctor said, as if there might be some doubt. “We see a shape, yes? We do not make that name for it. We do not work on this kind of area? We do not fix this.”

“Does anyone?”

“Someone who must know what this is. Who treats the brain where you live.”

Yes, someone must.

“We will be sending this scan to your American doctor. And we think that the stem cell transfusions is not, for now, a good idea. Until this.”

The doctor pointed at the cloud and tried, again, to look stumped.

“This first. To understand this. Then, maybe.”

Julian was impressed. The doctor had devised a pretty good tombstone.

This first. To understand this. Then, maybe.

Julian laughed.

“What is it?” asked the doctor. As in, thank God this moron is going into denial now. He’s going to be one of those people who cracks jokes after getting news of a tumor. I will not need to wash his tears from my doctor’s coat.

“It’s just that, if you tell me it’s all in my head now,” said Julian, “you won’t be lying.”

“Aha. I see what you say. This is truly funny. But we will not be lying to you ever, Mr. Bledstein.”

Oh, feel free, Julian didn’t say. Lie to me all you want.

The nurse brought in the papers to terminate his treatment, seal off liability, severing connections between Julian and the clinic. He signed and signed and signed. His writing surprised him, his ability to do it. It wasn’t a language-blocking cloud, but, then, what was it blocking? What was it allowing? And how long had it been there?

The doctor, frowning thoughtfully, trying to make conversation, stood by.

“I am sorry we do not have a way to give you your money back,” the doctor was saying.

“I could help you,” Julian said, “if you want.”

“Excuse me?”

“I could show you a way to give me my money back,” explained Julian. “You know, how to transfer it back to my credit card. It’s not so hard.”

“Oh, you must misunderstand.” The doctor blushed.

“Yes, I must,” said Julian.

Outside the clinic, standing on the plaza steps in her long corduroy thrift store coat, nearly hidden by a plaid scarf, was Hayley. She gave him a shy little wave, sheepishly smiling, forgiving, forgetting, denying, all in one cute fucking face. How on earth?

“Jules! Oh my God, you took forever!”

“I took forever?” He tried to sound arch. Here his Hayley actually was. Jesus Christ.

“It’s freezing here.” She laughed.

She had a gift for killing off oddity, making shit like this—sudden encounters in foreign countries—seem routine.

Julian agreed that it was cold. Germany in February and all that. But he stood his ground. Specimen Hayley, trying to make good. How interesting. He’d see where this led. He probably had cancer.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look good.”

How nice if that were true. He’d never looked good, even as a baby. Even before he was a baby, when he was just somebody’s fear. Once he was only dread in the pit of his mother’s stomach. He was born sick, conceived by his parents as their sick little boy. Was there a sexual position favored by his parents’ generation that guaranteed they’d birth a forceless runt, someone who would desperately need their help his whole life? Hayley should be ashamed of herself. He looked good. Still, he had to applaud her strategy. Cheer, denial, exuberance. If only he could. Tombstone.

“Come here already!” Hayley shouted. “Come hug me, you stupid bastard. How are you? Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m seeing you.”

He succumbed to Hayley’s hug, giving little back. Whatever he had done, or not done, to himself, not just over the last two weeks, but over the years, too, had rendered him immune right now to the pleasures of her small body wrapped up in his, to her breath, to the way her hair got on his face. Even the warm kiss she gave. Immune, indifferent, cold. Once it had been his choice to resist these overtures. He used to watch himself taking the low road, hogging the lane, during Hayley’s flirtations with forgiveness. But no longer. It was like being hugged by a machine. He held his breath and waited for it to end.

“Oh, you,” she kept saying. “I missed you, you know.”

He didn’t answer.

“You know?” She nudged him.

Julian said they should probably start walking before they died. He didn’t want to die in Germany.

They walked through the icy streets of Düsseldorf, hugging the Rhine, stopping to sit and shiver on a cold metal bench at the Rheinturm.

Julian took Hayley through Old Town, along Carlsplatz, pointing out cultural zones with the indifference of a local. And he lied, effortlessly, about places he’d not even seen, like the Kunstakademie—looking at art was the last thing he’d wanted to do—even inventing a day trip to Cologne. Which he took last Wednesday? Or maybe Thursday? Hayley beamed up at him, her brave and adventurous American boyfriend, snuggling into his coat as they walked.

Hayley kept saying that she couldn’t believe she was here. I mean, could he, she asked Julian? Could he believe it? And he disappointed her by saying, that, well, yeah, he could, because she was supposed to come, wasn’t she?

“I know, but it’s crazy, right?” she said.

Julian steered Hayley clear of Müllerhaus, but he kept it in his sights, a secret back door he could fall through. He didn’t interrogate her on her whereabouts these past two weeks, on the matter of who or what had detained her through the brighter, more exciting ports of Europe, and she didn’t mention it. She hardly spoke. Maybe they hadn’t fought and maybe they weren’t still, in some quiet, effortlessly Zen way, fighting right now. One day, people would swab each other with animosity sticks, and there’d be no way to hide it. Just as you could be tested for cancer, you could be tested for fury. Your anger would show, or your resentment, your detachment, your ambivalence, your reduced sexual attraction, no matter what you said or did. Your mood would be a chemical fact and if you lied about it then, poor, poor you. You’d be found out! Looking at Hayley, seeing her radiate, feeling her cozy up against him, it was ridiculously hard—in fact it was impossible—not to feel that this affection that she was suddenly smothering him with was meant for someone else.

Maybe that person shared his name, and looked like him—the poor fuck—but so what. Hayley wanted a stranger—you are dead to me, he wanted to say to himself—and Julian couldn’t help her. Instead of breaking up with your girlfriend, could you break up with yourself?

“So I talked to your dad,” Hayley said.

“Why?”

“Well…” She looked at him funny.

“Because I wanted to know where you were.” She punched him softly in the arm.

Maybe she wanted to say: play along with this, Julian, please, please, because this is how it works. I am trying so hard right now.

“You knew exactly where I was,” he said. “I’ve been right here the whole time. I’ve been at the clinic every day for two weeks. Where else would I be?”

“I wanted to know that you were doing okay, and, you know, where you were staying.”

“So you asked him?”

“I knew you’d have been in touch with him.”

“Yeah.”

“I can care about you, Julian.”

“I know you can, Hale.”

She could care about him in theory, and maybe in real life, too. But he must have migrated to some third place, because both of those territories seemed very far off to him now.

They crossed the Oberkassel Bridge, where the wind destroyed them, and finally Hayley admitted to being impossibly, horribly cold. And hungry. The poor thing’s nose was running and her face was red and she looked ready to freeze. Could they maybe head back now, she wanted to know? Would he mind so much if they left now?

“Where?” he said.

“To the room.”

“Room? There is no room.” Tombstone.

“At the Am Volksgarten. You know, where we…They had rooms. I didn’t know where you were and you weren’t checked in there.”

“Oh, are you Madame Düsseldorf now? What have you been here for, like eleven minutes? Plus, I have a place to stay. And there isn’t room there for you.”

“What do you mean?”

It took all of Julian’s strength to look away.

“I am perfectly lodged, thank you.” Tombstone.

“Would you please stop it?”

“I doubt it.”

“Jules, please. I want to stay with you tonight.”

He crossed the avenue where they’d stopped and she spoke his name, but not so urgently. This is what a favor looks like, he thought. Probably there was a favor being done right now. Except as he turned uphill and left Hayley behind, he had to wonder who, exactly, was actually doing this favor, and who was the fucking favor even for?

It was getting dark. Soon the hostel lights would go off. The men would tuck in and some of them would be snoring in seconds. The whole room would hum with desire, forty or fifty men trying not to be seen for a little while, even if they crept out at large, into the world. They required darkness for their work. This was where Julian belonged. He wanted to be in bed and ready. Maybe if he was lucky, his visitor would return. His visitor might give him another chance. This time he’d stay in his bed, no matter what. He would not bolt. He’d listen all night for footsteps. If none came, then perhaps he would be the stranger. He would find someone sleeping in the Turnhalle, someone who needed badly to be visited, and he would oblige.

Julian would reach out his hand and he wouldn’t say it out loud, but he could certainly think it. He’d been thinking it for so long now. Wouldn’t you like to join me? And wouldn’t that most perfect phrase serve as the prettiest inscription on the tombstone they would finally place, when the time came, over his grave?

Rollingwood

It’s still dark when the weeping erupts, so Mather knows it’s early. How early he isn’t sure, but he won’t be able to fall back asleep, so it doesn’t matter. He pulls the extra pillow over his head, tries to smother the sound, but it’s still there, the distant siren of the boy crying in the other room.

The boy is wedged under the machine when Mather goes in. The machine has run dry again, streaks of pink fluid smeared inside the hose, the tank in the crib issuing an exhausted wheeze. It’s a terrible design. Under the clouded tank is a cavity just large enough to conceal the boy if he crawls in, which is what he does when he wakes up too early and no one comes for him. So Mather has to wedge his fingers beneath the thing, which barely fits in the crib, anyway, and lift it just enough to grab the boy and pull him out.

Of course the boy has been crying. Crying isn’t really the right word for it. He has been explosively weeping, maybe for a long time, and when Mather picks him up and holds him close, the weeping escalates, the boy breaking down in Mather’s arms.

Mather tries to set the boy down in the dark kitchen so that he can make coffee, but as soon as the boy is released he bursts into sobs again. As usual, Mather talks to him, tries to calmly reassure him, but the boy’s crying is so loud that Mather cannot even hear his own voice. He sits on the dirty kitchen floor and gathers the boy in to try to soothe him, but the boy squirms from his grasp and goes on wailing, so Mather leaves the kitchen and shuts himself in the bathroom, triggering even higher-pitched cries from the boy.

When the doorbell rings to signal that Mather’s ride to work is here, he isn’t ready to go. The boy’s diaper was dry when he got up, which meant that he hadn’t had enough water, but Mather could not get him to drink anything. The boy twisted his head away when offered a bottle, so Mather tried to interest him in different cups, even his own coffee mug, which the boy usually tried to pry away from his hands. Finally, the boy took a few greedy gulps from the mug, with most of the water running down his chest. He wouldn’t eat the egg that Mather had prepared for him, but he did steal Mather’s toast, which he squeezed into a gummy mass in his fist while wandering around the living room, still half crying.

Now Mather has to quickly force the boy into his clothing as he struggles to get away. From the hallway, he grabs the same day bag he used yesterday, and the day before, packed with the same spare clothes for the boy and the same dry snacks that he never seems to want.

No one says hello when Mather opens the door of the car-pool vehicle. They have had to wait for him in the unlit garage, and he can tell that they’ve lost patience. There’s no car seat installed today, no space reserved for the boy, and he won’t hold still in Mather’s lap. The woman next to Mather is not amused when the boy throws himself across her legs, trying to crawl toward the window. She sits back, hands up, indicating that Mather must remove the boy himself. Mather apologizes and pulls the boy back, holding him tightly so that he can’t escape. This makes the boy shriek and squirm with surprising strength. But Mather does not relent. He has no real choice.

They pass the old bald hill and the spire, then get waved through at the Faraday gate, where they join the line of cars that form a single file to climb to the top. The little trees out the window are bare and the grass is colorless this time of year, but it’s a bright, clear day. Mather wishes a window was open, but he doesn’t feel that he can ask. No doubt someone decided, before they picked him up, that they’d ride to work with the windows closed, breathing one another’s stale air.

In the parking lot, overlooking the valley, the boy wants to walk under his own power, but there are cars pulling in and it’s too dangerous. Mather finds a little patch of grass for the boy to run around in. It isn’t much, and it quickly drops off into a steep decline, so he stations himself to keep the boy from running down the cliff. For a while the boy staggers around, grabbing little sticks, which he holds up to his father with pride.

When the work bell sounds, Mather lines up at the service entrance and waits his turn for the security check. The boy tenses in Mather’s arms as they approach the nursery, but when Mather hands him off to the caregiver, the boy does not let himself cry. Even at this age, he is trying to be brave. Mather watches through the high window as the boy is quickly placed on the floor of the playroom, in front of a bucket of blocks. The caregiver disappears into an office, but the boy does not seem to notice. He picks something out of the bucket and puts it in his mouth. Mather gives him a last look, then heads up the ramp to the elevator.

The boy is one and a half years old and his name is Alan Mather, and already he has dense black hair on his head. To Mather, Alan is a name not for a baby but for a grown man. When they were naming him, he had let the boy’s mother choose, thinking that he should pick his battles. She had been so sure about it, and Mather had found that he could not think of a single name that didn’t make him feel uneasy when he said it out loud. Mather has tried to call the boy “honey” instead, and maybe if he keeps doing so it will come to feel more natural. The boy has a quiet, wet cough and pink-rimmed eyes, and he’s already capable of sustained, piercing eye contact that his father can never quite match.

At his lunch hour, Mather takes his thermos and sandwich down to the nursery. The boy is in a crib, but he is not asleep. He has the same little foam object in his hand, and it’s been chewed to shreds. When the boy sees Mather, he starts to cry, but softly, as if he had already cried himself hoarse. The respirator in the nursery hasn’t been turned on, and when Mather checks the log to see if the boy has received his medication, there are no entries for today. The boy has the kind of asthma that keeps his lungs from properly lubricating, so he has to inhale moisture through a mask every four hours or his lungs will start to dry out. It’s not serious, the doctor told Mather, but he should try not to miss a treatment. The director of the nursery seemed to be concealing a smirk when Mather first introduced him to the equipment, as if Mather had simply brought in one of Alan’s favorite toys.

After Mather holds the mask to the boy’s face and the boy obediently inhales the wet air, his little brow wrinkled in concentration, they return to the patch of grass outside. Mather tries to eat while the boy sits in his lap, facing downhill. The boy wants to hold Mather’s sandwich, but when Mather lets him he won’t eat any of it, and when Mather tries to rescue the sandwich the boy squishes it into a ball. Mather isn’t hungry for the sandwich, anyway. When he hasn’t slept well, he wants only a sugared muffin with a Coke. His sandwich is cucumbers with olive spread, between slices of thin, black toast, and it smells like potting soil.

It’s a bright, clear day, and Mather can see all the way down to Rollingwood, the neighborhood where he grew up. He can’t see his old house, but he can see the street where it would be, behind a hooked cul-de-sac of narrow homes. His old elementary school’s clock tower rises out of the trees. The clock stopped at 3:15 a long time ago, and unless you stand beneath the tower you’d think the little hand had fallen off, because it’s perfectly hidden beneath the big hand.

Mather’s son won’t go to school there, because they live far away from Rollingwood now. Mather doesn’t even know where the public schools are in his new neighborhood. It’s not so much a neighborhood as an exit off the freeway, but it’s pretty, in its way, with circular grass parks and housing staggered down the middle. In the spring, it’s one of his favorite parts of town. Something about the absence of trees makes the light seem perfect. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll still be in the same apartment, at the same job, in the same city, when the boy starts kindergarten in a few years. But of course the boy will attend kindergarten wherever his mother is living at the time, so Mather isn’t even sure why he’s thinking about the schools in his neighborhood.

Mather points out landmarks to the boy—the old Rotterman Dam and the shipping depot built of natural black bricks—but the boy doesn’t look. He hangs on Mather’s outstretched arm and tries to swing from it. Mather stands up and swings him around and the boy laughs, but the laugh turns into a whimper, and Mather isn’t sure if the boy is frightened or happy.

After work, they take the bus to the boy’s mother’s apartment, but she isn’t home. She has repeatedly asked Mather to return his key, given to him during friendlier days, but it’s times like this that persuade him to hang on to it. Otherwise he’d be waiting forever on the narrow balcony of her building and the boy would be imperiling himself by trying to squeeze through the bars.

Mather lets himself inside and medicates the boy with the old ventilator in the living room, then looks for something to give him for dinner. There is only a chicken salad, so Mather spreads it on a cutting board and begins chipping it fine. The boy refuses the first spoonful, but Mather leaves the bowl on the coffee table, and after the boy has finished running around the apartment he discovers the mashed chicken and starts to awkwardly feed himself while Mather watches from his chair.

It’s late and dark when the boy’s mother comes home. She’s with her boyfriend, who excuses himself to the bedroom without even taking off his coat. Mather has done his best to accept the boyfriend, has always been cordial and said hello, but the boyfriend won’t look Mather in the eye and never stops to talk.

At these drop-offs, Mather and the boy’s mother, Maureen, do not say much. They confirm the next exchange and discuss Alan’s medication, what he’s eaten, how he’s sleeping. They stick to factual matters and flatten their tone of voice as much as possible, disguising their feelings. But today Maureen says that she needs to talk to him and asks him to sit down.

Mather hides his excitement. Maureen never wants to talk to him. Usually she seems disgusted by his presence, critical of how he fathers the boy, indifferent to anything Mather says that is unrelated to the boy’s care. It is as if she had stored up disappointment that she is determined to show him during the ten minutes they see each other twice a week. So for a moment Mather imagines that Maureen has grown suddenly tender toward him, even with the boyfriend lurking in the bedroom. She misses Mather, maybe, and would like to talk to someone who really knows her. Someone who understands, because they once went through a lot together.

Except that’s not it. Maureen needs a favor. She tells him that she can’t take the boy right now. She’s going away tomorrow.

“Okay,” Mather says carefully, wanting to sound cooperative. He’d love to do her a favor, because she thinks he is selfish. If he shows resistance, she’ll be upset and they’ll have another fight.

“Thanks for understanding,” Maureen says. “I appreciate it.” She gets up as if the discussion is over.

But Mather doesn’t understand. What is she telling him?

“I guess we need to wake up Alan,” Maureen says, and she heads for the curtained-off hallway where Mather put him to sleep in the portable crib.

“Where are you going, can I ask?” Mather says. He’s not sure why he sounds apologetic.

“To Robert’s hometown.”

Robert is the boyfriend. Mather thinks that Robert is lucky to be alone in a dark room right now. Maybe Robert is standing at the door, still wearing his winter coat, listening to them.

“Why can’t you take Alan? It’s your turn. He can’t go with you?”

“No. Alan can’t come.”

“Well, when are you coming back?”

“Really soon. I’ll call you. I’ll make up the days.”

“So you’re just going off in the middle of the workweek?”

Maureen looks at him sharply, and it’s clear that she doesn’t think she needs to explain herself. She picks up the boy and starts whispering to him, her voice losing its scolding tone, dissolving into singsong. She bounces and hushes him, even though he’s not crying.

The boy clings to his mother. When she bends over the couch to change him, he clutches her as if he were a baby animal, and she has to peel him away. She tells the boy that he will be staying with his daddy for a little while longer, and that she will miss him so much. She will see him soon, and they will do fun things and she will give him lots of kisses because he’s her little boy, isn’t he, and she wants to kiss him all the time. Should they go on a boat ride when she comes home? Does he remember the boat ride they once took? Would he like to do that again? That’s what they’ll do. She’ll come home and they’ll go down to the river and take a nice boat ride.

Mather stands there in the dark living room. There won’t be a boat ride. He knows that. She’s showering so much love on the boy that he will become dazed by it, then Mather will have to take over and the boy will be bitterly disappointed again. To Mather, these intense displays of love are what he must help the boy recover from. Fatherhood has somehow become about helping the boy not love his mother too painfully.

Maureen hands the boy off to Mather, and the boy registers the change for one perfectly quiet second, then screams. He’s never liked parting from his mother, and now they’ve woken him up late at night only to make him suffer the sudden separation. Mather closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. There’s nothing he can do. He’d like Maureen to seem more obviously guilty, but she shows no sign of having done anything wrong. It is, apparently, Mather’s fault that the boy does not love him with the same terrible desperation.

There’s no one else at the bus stop, and from what Mather can tell, after reading the posted schedule, the next bus will come in one minute, which is lucky for him, because the boy is not pleased, outside in the winter at night. Except when one minute passes, then two, then five, it becomes clear that the bus must have come already and now the next one isn’t due for half an hour.

Alone, which is what he was supposed to be tonight, Mather wouldn’t care. He’d sit on the bench and read, enjoying the cold night. But he has the boy with him, and the boy is fully awake after all his screaming and will be cold soon. This isn’t the sort of area where empty taxicabs drive around looking for fares. Mather calls information and gets the number for a car service, then speaks to a dispatcher. They can send a driver in forty-five minutes. Mather tells the man that it’s late and his baby is tired and hungry, and the man repeats that he can send a car in forty-five minutes. More like an hour, actually, to be honest—as if he were doing Mather a favor by lengthening the estimate.

Mather starts to walk home, carrying the boy, along the bus route, even though it’s less direct. He figures that the bus, when it comes, won’t cruelly pass him by if he stands in the road and waves. The roads are so empty that Mather wonders for a moment if something terrible has happened, and everyone is at home watching the news, knowing better than to go outside. He stops walking and listens. It’s the quietest he’s ever heard his city. The boy, too, seems transfixed, staring into the darkness. But then a bus rolls into sight and Mather stands right over the white line, waving. He doesn’t want to take any chances.

Maureen doesn’t call the next day, or the day after that, and then it’s the weekend. On Sunday, Mather’s parents visit, but they’re so tired they don’t leave their chairs. Mather’s parents have been to Lisbon, and they tell him of eating fish seared on the rocks at the harbor. The flat rocks are heated by torches overnight, and when the morning’s catch comes in a man cleans whole fish to order and lays them out, butterflied, on the hot stone, which is black and oily from the cooking. When you salt this fish, it’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten. You eat it with your fingers. Even the locals eat it, which, of course, is the best endorsement.

Mather’s father studies him for signs of enthusiasm.

Mather nods his approval and says that he’d love to try it sometime.

The boy goes to the front hallway and grabs his little white shoes, then brings them over to Mather. Then he carries first one, then the other, of Mather’s old maroon work shoes, dumping them loudly at Mather’s feet.

“He wants to go out,” Mather mumbles.

Mather’s parents smile with abstract pleasure but do not move.

When he doesn’t hear from Maureen by Monday afternoon, Mather calls and gets her voice mail. He would like to know her plans. The boy is doing fine, he tells her. He’s actually eating, and he gets up twice at night, but Mather downgrades this to once in his message, because somehow the extra night wakings might seem like his failure. He asks Maureen to get back to him so that he knows when to drop Alan off.

He gets no call the next day. The day after that, at work, the nursery is closed. The lights are off and the door is locked when Mather carries the boy over in the morning. Mather waits outside while his colleagues head upstairs. He calls the nursery number and gets no answer. He bangs on the dark glass. Finally, when he is going to be late for work, he takes the boy up the ramp to the elevators and brings him into the suite of offices.

Mather asks someone named Drew what’s going on with the nursery today. Drew has pictures of kids on his desk. He must have used the nursery at some point. But Drew shrugs and looks at Alan in Mather’s arms as if Mather has smuggled contraband into work.

“I’ll go see Ferguson, I guess,” Mather says.

Ferguson is the supervisor and maybe he’ll understand.

“He’s not coming in this morning,” Drew says, his face arranged in an unconvincing look of concern.

Mather heads to Ferguson’s office, anyway, and asks his assistant if he can see him.

“And you are?” the assistant asks.

“It’s just for a moment,” Mather says. “It’s an emergency.” He holds up the boy as proof. See my emergency.

The assistant doesn’t look. “Your name?” he asks.

“Mather,” Mather says. “I work over there.” He gestures at the cubicle with his head. There’s a young woman working at his desk. Sometimes temps from the night shift set up at empty desks for their red-eye projects and have to move when the full-timers come in. He’s going to have to ask her to leave and she’s going to be annoyed, even though it’s his desk.

“How’s Friday at eleven?” the assistant asks.

“The day after tomorrow?”

The assistant is irritated. “That would be Friday, yes.”

“Could you please let him know I’ve had an emergency and need a personal day?”

The assistant eyes him carefully. “You’d better write that out yourself to be sure the message is how you want it.”

But Mather says that he trusts the assistant to get it right. It’s not very complicated.

At home, he phones Maureen’s office and the call is routed to a receptionist. Maureen is not available. But he’d like to know if she’s there, if she’s actually at work today. The receptionist repeats that she’s not available to come to the phone and would Mather like to leave a message?

He says that it’s about her son and would she please call him.

The boy won’t nap, but he doesn’t cry. He sits in his crib quietly, and Mather notices that his breath is coming heavily, with a faint whistling sound. Under the boy’s dark hair, Mather thinks, the scalp looks unusually red, and when he touches it the boy flinches. He gives him the humidifier mask and the boy takes hungry gulps of the wet air. When Mather tries to remove him from the crib, the boy protests, points back to his mattress, so Mather leaves him there, and the boy crawls under the tank of the humidifier.

Mather checks on him later and he is still awake, but he cries when Mather tries to pick him up. The tank is empty, so Mather rinses it out and fills it with more distilled water. The boy returns the mask to his face and Mather can hear a whinny in his breath now. Is he getting worse? The redness on the boy’s scalp has spread beyond his hairline, down his face.

Mather’s mother, before she retired, was a nurse, so he calls her.

“You worry too much,” she says. “Leave him alone. Children are remarkably strong. They’re much stronger than us. You never got sick, never once. You never caused us any problems.”

The next morning the car-pool vehicle does not come. Mather has been up for hours and is packed and ready to go. He’s lost track of whose turn it is to drive today, so he can’t even make a phone call. He’s been so grateful to be part of the car pool, since he has no car of his own, that he’s paid more than his share of the gas, to be sure that nothing goes wrong. He tries not to make trouble, particularly on days when he has the boy. But there’s no car today, and if he doesn’t leave right away he will be late for work.

On the bus there are no empty seats, so Mather stakes out a position for himself against a pole. The boy is pale inside his snowsuit. His face is dry and peeling. His skin seems nearly translucent. His cough is small and weak, and it could be that he’s dehydrated.

The bus lets him off downhill from the Faraday gate. With the boy in his arms, Mather hikes up the side of the road as a stream of cars pass them on the way to work. He sees some people he knows, but no one stops. He’s never hiked this road, and it’s much steeper than he would have thought. He’s drenched inside his winter coat, and the boy’s face is flushed, even though he’s not exerting himself. At the gate, Mather has to show his credentials and they ask to pat down the boy, who goes with one of the guards without complaint. He doesn’t even seem to notice that someone else is carrying him.

The nursery is closed again this morning. Someone has taped a notice to the door, but it’s since been ripped down, leaving the tape fastened over a shred of blank paper. Mather brings the boy up to his office and there are two temps sharing his desk. He stands there holding the boy, needing to put him down so that he can figure out what to do.

“All right,” he says to the temps, trying to sound cheerful. “I guess I have to get in here.”

He has no idea what he’s going to do with Alan today, but at least if he gets his desk back he can settle in and maybe make a play area for him on the floor.

The temps look up at him and blink. “We’re here until noon,” the young man says. Probably he’s in his early twenties, but he looks like a boy.

“Well,” Mather says, “you need to move to the conference room or somewhere else, because this is my desk.”

He shouldn’t have to say this.

“Mr. Ferguson told us to work here,” the other temp says impatiently, a young woman who is so striking he’s afraid to look at her.

The boy wriggles out of Mather’s grasp and sets off away from him, not even looking back, so Mather excuses himself to follow him, until they bump into Ferguson, who is speaking with some executives outside the conference room.

“Well, who do we have here?” Ferguson says, addressing the boy.

Mather leans over the boy, as if he needs to formally present him to his supervisor. “This is Alan,” he says.

“Alan. Is that right? Are you helping your father get his stuff, Alan?”

“My stuff?” Mather asks. “What do you mean?”

“I had a note that you were leaving.”

The executives standing with Ferguson smile at Mather. Ferguson smiles, too.

“No, no, no,” Mather protests. “I had to take a personal day yesterday. His mother is supposed to have him and the nursery was closed. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. I’m not leaving.”

“Well, that is a misunderstanding,” Ferguson says. “That contradicts the note I received.”

His face has clouded over. When someone like Ferguson exceeds the allotted time for encounters with employees in the hallway, he does not try to hide it.

“No,” Mather says. “I’m here, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay,” Ferguson says, and he looks down at the boy, who’s still in his snowsuit, pressed against the glass of the conference room. “But what about today?” Ferguson wants to know. “What’s your plan?”

What he’s going to do is check the nursery again, Mather tells Ferguson, because maybe they’ve opened it by now, and then he’ll be right back. But of course the nursery is still closed when he gets there, locked and dark, with no note on the window. He asks the security guards if they know anything, but they don’t. From the guard booth, they look over at the unlit nursery room as if they’ve never seen it before. So Mather has no choice but to go home with the boy in his arms, who is so light it feels to Mather that he is carrying an empty snowsuit.

At home he calls Maureen again, but her voice mail is full and she’s not picking up. Mather would try Robert, to reach Maureen, but if he was ever told Robert’s last name he can’t remember it now. Mather knows nothing about him, let alone where his hometown is.

There are a few of Maureen’s friends to try, but Alma is the obvious one, the loyalist, whose negative forecasts about Mather were always, according to Maureen, 100 percent accurate.

“If Alma is so smart,” Mather once asked, “then why is she fat and alone?” He wanted to think that this was an innocent question, prompted by irreconcilable pieces of information.

“Of course you’d ask that,” Maureen said, smiling. “Of course.” She always seemed genuinely happy when Mather was at his worst.

And of course you’d have no answer, Mather thought, back at her, in the unspoken way he often fought with her, but then Maureen did have an answer, at least about Alma’s weight. A gland or a duct or perhaps an entire organ had begun to work overtime, could not stop laboring inside Alma, as if there were always unfinished work to do. Or was it the reverse? The result was that incredibly pale skin Alma had and, yes, it was true, some extra weight. A depressed metabolism, because Alma actually ate less than the rest of us. But Mather didn’t even deserve to know that, Maureen assured him. He wasn’t even worthy of knowing that about Alma.

She picks up on the first ring, stating her full name, Alma Ryan, which everyone does at her office, a publishing house specializing in children’s books. Mather quickly says that it is him, and that she shouldn’t hang up, because this is about Alan, and does Alma know where Maureen is?

“What happened to Alan?” Alma asks in a careful voice.

Mather explains that nothing has, but Maureen is still not back and this isn’t like her and it’s causing problems for him. He’s home with the boy now when he needs to be at work. He might even lose his job because of this.

“I’m sorry to hear that your child is an inconvenience to you,” Alma says.

Mather curses at her, freely and at length, and Alma hangs up. Then he calls her right back.

“Alma Ryan.”

Mather explains that he is sorry and he needs her help. Alan is no inconvenience to him. Alan is his son and he loves him. Alma has to believe that, no matter what she thinks of him. But the boy needs his mother, too. Mather explains that Alan is too little to be away from his mother for this long, with Mather not even knowing where she is or when she’s coming back. Maybe Alma does not know the details, but Alan is not well. His asthma. This is not fair to Alan.

He explains this to Alma, but when he waits for her to respond she isn’t there. The line is dead. It is possible that Alma hung up as soon as she heard Mather’s voice. She doesn’t pick up again.

In the late afternoon, the boy won’t breathe through his mask. He covers his mouth with his hands and turns away. Mather tries to listen to his breath, but the boy won’t stay put. Still, Mather hears a whistle in the boy’s lungs, and he pictures them shriveling inside the boy’s small chest, as dry as paper curling up in the heat. He knows that if the boy would inhale the vapors from the mask his lungs would lubricate and he would feel better, but the boy is stubborn and the more Mather tries to press the mask over his face, the more he twists out of reach.

Mather reminds himself that it isn’t serious. The treatments are supposedly optional, meant to increase the boy’s comfort. It is only asthma. But the boy is pale and certainly too little for his age, and he sits listlessly on the rug after his nap, uninterested in the toy cars that Mather has arranged around him.

Mather schedules a sitter, and the next morning he shows her around the apartment while the boy clings to him. Mather demonstrates the ventilator to the sitter, but it is clear that she has already decided that it is too complicated for her to operate.

Mather was going to leave early for the bus stop, to be sure that he wasn’t late for work, but then his doorbell rings, and he runs downstairs to the car-pool vehicle, the boy crying behind him in the sitter’s arms. A proper good-bye would only have made it worse, and the boy will recover faster this way. In any case, Mather needs to go to work. This is how it has to be.

In the dark car, no one so much as looks his way. Mather wonders what happens day after day in this car before he is picked up that makes for such grim silence. They stare ahead while he settles in and buckles his seat belt, and for a moment Mather feels the enormous relief of traveling alone, even if there are mute coworkers pressed against him. He has no one to take care of and he can relax.

Mather lowers his window when they pull out of the garage, and the woman beside him huffs. He’ll consider himself scolded. They turn onto the Hills Parkway and the car picks up speed. Outside, it’s a flat, gray morning, but the air is warm, and Mather lets the wind cover his face. There are sweet, smoky streaks in the sky, the kind of clouds that scatter if a bird so much as flies through them. Mather almost feels that he could sleep, and he wishes the ride were longer. He’d love to stay in the car like this all day, driving around town, sleeping a little, looking out the window, doing nothing, while someone else keeps the boy busy at home.

The temps are at his desk when he gets to work.

“Okay, guys, break it up,” he says, wanting to sound jovial.

They’re engrossed in their work and don’t look up. It’s the same two temps from yesterday, and a third one leans over them, staring at the computer screen. They have coffees and food wrappers cluttering the desk, and Mather’s own inbox is nowhere to be seen. There’s hardly room for him to put down his briefcase.

“I’m back,” Mather says, this time more softly.

“We’re pretty hunkered down,” the young man from yesterday says. Mather isn’t sure, but the young man’s hand motion may be waving him away.

Mather says, “I can see that.” It’s important to stay friendly, extend an olive branch. He was a temp once. There’s no reason to lord his rank over them. “Would you guys like to take a minute to find another place to work?”

The young man seems to consider this but mentions their deadline and how settled in they are at Mather’s desk. He says that they’re good where they are, but thanks for the offer.

Of course it’s a misunderstanding, and a small one, but Mather feels that he hasn’t been at his desk in ages and he’d like things to return to normal. How long has it been since he’s had a normal workday? He looks around for some sort of backup, commiseration from the other full-timers, but his colleagues are hopelessly entranced by their computers. Unfortunately, he has to go higher up on this one. He’d have liked to avoid that, but the temps have given him no choice. Ferguson’s assistant tells Mather that his appointment isn’t until eleven.

Mather says, “I didn’t make that appointment. Remember? I need to see him now. The temps are at my desk and I have to get to work. It’s already after nine.”

“So are you canceling the eleven o’clock?” the assistant asks, crossing something out in his book.

“No,” Mather says quietly, “because I never made it.”

“Never made what?” a voice booms behind him.

It’s Ferguson walking in, acting as though he’d missed the beginning of a joke. Mather wonders if Ferguson ever gets tired, smiling like that. The assistant disengages, returns to his work.

“I never made an appointment with you,” Mather explains, realizing that this will only confuse Ferguson, but Ferguson has the ability not to show confusion, perhaps not to even experience it. A man like Ferguson can remain impervious to all messages beyond his own internal script, which drives him with purpose from room to room.

Ferguson pats Mather on the back.

“So you got rid of him, huh?” he asks.

“Who?” Mather says.

“Who!” Ferguson laughs. “The kid! You finally fobbed him off! Good work!”

“Oh,” Mather says. “I did. Yeah.”

“Just a quick thing,” he says to Ferguson, using a serious, professional tone.

He would like Ferguson, if possible, to resolve this situation with the temps, he says, because he needs to get back to work, and why does he always have to vacate people from his desk every morning? It’s stressful, if Ferguson wants to know the truth, and Ferguson nods with sympathy. The temps should have marching orders and time frames before they even sit down at someone else’s desk. Mather explains that it creates tension and it’s maybe not a great idea for office morale.

“The temps left at eight today,” Ferguson says, “as usual. But let me introduce you to our new team. We’ve made some pretty killer hires. Morale couldn’t be better.”

At Mather’s desk, Ferguson presents the three new hotshot employees, but Mather doesn’t listen to their names. Ferguson is boasting about the marketing initiative they took as temps and how they’re the first temps in a year to move up the ladder like this. Straight up the ladder. Fire at their heels.

The three of them, still caught up in the seriousness flowing from Mather’s computer, are flushed with Ferguson’s praise, as if they believe that soon they’ll be running the company. And somehow Mather is supposed to feel happy for them, which he tells Ferguson he is, but of course, this is his desk, where his unfinished projects remain and can’t the new team work somewhere else?

Ferguson says that he and Mather should go talk at the elevator. His voice is soft, and he tries to shepherd Mather away, placing an arm around him.

Mather imagines Ferguson obeying his internal voice: Walk employee to a quiet place. Present bad news in positive terms.

About the only way that Mather can have an edge on Ferguson is to hold his ground and force this conversation to happen right here. He can feel his coworkers pretending not to look at him.

Ferguson says, “I think the next step is a good strategy talk down in H.R. They’ll have a really tactical perspective on what might be next for you. It’s never a bad time to talk strategy. You think you’ve considered all your options, but you never have. There’s always something you haven’t thought of.”

Mather’s cell phone rings and he doesn’t recognize the number, but he feels he must pick up, even though the timing is bad. It could be Maureen calling from someone else’s phone. Maybe she lost her phone, which is why she hasn’t picked up for so long. Maybe she’s calling to say she’s sorry, and how is baby Alan, and can she see him soon?

Except it’s not Maureen, it’s someone with poor English, on a poor connection, who asks several times for Mr. Mather.

“This is he,” Mather says, as Ferguson and the new employees look at him with polite curiosity.

The caller asks again for Mather, and again he says, “This is he,” until it occurs to him that she doesn’t understand the expression.

“This is Mr. Mather. Who’s calling, please?” Without people watching him, he might have hung up already.

Mather figures out that it’s the sitter, and what she’s saying to him, over and over, is the name of his boy. She’s saying “Alan,” except with her accent it sounds like “Allah.” She has little ability to elaborate. Something is wrong with the boy. She needs him to come home right away.

Mather stays calm.

“I have to go. It’s my son.”

“I guess you can’t get rid of him that easy!” Ferguson laughs.

Mather rushes to the elevator, and behind him Ferguson calls out that business about H.R. again and scheduling an appointment.

“Strategy!” Ferguson shouts, as the elevator doors close.

It’s not until Mather gets on the bus that he realizes precisely what has happened. This is how it’s done. No doubt Ferguson took a workshop to learn the exact language. Perhaps he was excited to practice it on Mather. Firing is an opportunity, the start of something wonderful and new.

While Mather is on the bus, the sitter calls again, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s on his way, she has to hold tight, and he will be there as soon as he can.

His phone rings once more as he approaches the back of his building. This time it’s Maureen.

“Finally,” he says. It’s as if the whole crisis were over, simply because she has called. He’s not even mad, just relieved.

“Where are you?” Maureen demands.

“Where am I? Where am I?” Mather can’t believe it. “Are you kidding me? Where the fuck are you?”

Then he sees, across the parking lot, at the entrance to his building, Maureen talking on her phone. Robert is with her, and he’s got the boy. Next to them is the sitter, and even from here Mather can see that she’s crying hysterically.

“You left him with a stranger,” Maureen hisses into the phone. “I can’t go away for one minute. I can’t leave him with you for a single second. A stranger who knows nothing about children.”

Mather sees the full hatred in her body, how she’d like to crawl into her phone and kill him as she stalks around the parking lot.

“I’m right here,” Mather says. “Look up,” and he watches her uncoil.

Maureen sees Mather and takes the boy from Robert. They’ve got him wrapped up in his snowsuit, and he’s wearing one of those white stocking caps they give to babies at the hospital. Somehow it still fits him.

“We’re leaving,” she announces, and Robert falls into step behind her.

Mather approaches and the sitter rushes at him, frantic.

“I don’t give them Allah. They take Allah. It’s okay they take Allah?”

Mather tells Maureen to wait, to hold on, there’s a lot to talk about. She can’t just barge over and take Alan like that. She has a lot to account for.

“Really?” Maureen says, and she looks almost excited, as if she can’t wait to tear into Mather over this.

Mather wants to see the boy, and, when he approaches, Alan looks at him with his pink-rimmed eyes, crusty and dry in the corners, and his skin not so much pale as yellow. Mather goes to touch the boy gently—this is his little son, he would like to give him a kiss—and the boy cringes, nestling further into his mother.

Mather backs away.

“It’s okay, Mr. Mather?” the sitter says. “It’s okay they take him?” She’s acting like Mather’s only friend.

“You’re asking the wrong person, you bitch,” Maureen says. But Mather calms the sitter down and says, “Yes, it’s okay, don’t worry.”

“Leave my friends alone,” Maureen spits. “Don’t call my work. Don’t call us.”

Robert looks at Mather, and there’s not even malice in his eyes. Just boredom.

Mather watches them drive away and he goes upstairs, alone, to his apartment. It’s not even noon. He’ll start by doing laundry, all the boy’s clothes. He takes everything down to the machines in the basement, then upstairs he vacuums, opens the windows for air.

From the boy’s crib he removes the humidifier. What Mather will do is take off the tubes and soak them in a good, hot solution. The plastic water tank has to be soaked, too. The mask pulls easily from the hose and it still smells a little bit of the boy, his sleeping breath. When Mather puts it back together it will be as clean as new.

Later, Mather will go shopping and he’ll buy the boy’s favorite foods. He’ll stock up on distilled water for the tank. He’ll even lay in some candy, for those times when nothing else works. If it’s not too late after that and he has the energy, Mather will take the bus down to Rollingwood to the toy store he loved when he was young, if it’s even still there, and he will pick up something fun for the boy. There has to be something that Alan will love to play with, maybe a train table, which he’s too young for at the moment, though not really for long. He’s growing up. It’s not a bad idea to start thinking about getting the right train table built up in the living room.

At home tonight, Mather will lay the pieces out on the floor, and he’ll start building, because it could take a few days to get it done, and this way he’ll have a head start. He wants to be ready for next time. He wants to bring the boy in and present it to him and see the look in the boy’s eyes when he lowers him into place and pushes that very first train into view.