Leaving the Sea: Stories

Watching Mysteries with My Mother

I don’t think my mother will die today. It’s late at night already. She’d have to die in the next forty-five minutes, which doesn’t seem likely. I just saw her for dinner. We ordered in and watched a mystery on PBS. She kissed me good night and I took a taxi home. For my mother to die today, things would need to take a rapid turn.

My mother has her share of health troubles. She lives alone, which increases the likelihood of death. I could wake to a phone call and learn that she died shortly after I left her tonight. I’d like to say that the odds are against my mother dying today, since so much of the day has already passed. She needs only to survive at home, in her bed, for less than an hour, and then she will have lived through the day, proving me correct. But I don’t know enough about odds. It would seem to me that the underlying premise of death—the death of an old woman alone in her apartment—is that it does not participate in man-made conceits like odds. People are often said to beat the odds. But then, perhaps, whoever keeps the odds—if he or she is intelligent—must account in advance for the odds being beaten and adjust the odds accordingly. Odds keepers cannot be ignorant of the claim that the odds are often beaten. This must disturb them. And then would they not adjust the odds, in order to make the odds more accurate? I don’t know. Odds should be odds, and they should never be beaten. If they are, then the odds are incorrect and should be changed.

If my mother knew that she only needed to survive for under an hour—in order not to die today—would her chances of living increase? If I phoned her now and told her to hang on, so that she didn’t die today, would her odds change? In other words, does it increase our chance of survival if we consciously try to live? It wouldn’t seem likely, not that she’d even pick up the phone now. It is late at night. She is tired. She was even tired at dinner. When we watched our mystery, she fell asleep. The phrase for people of a certain age, in certain circumstances, is nodded off. My mother nodded off. I paid her the courtesy of not seeming to notice, even though I watched her sleep under her blanket on the reclining chair she loves. I noticed how her hair no longer moves, not even a strand of it, no matter what position she is in. She woke up throughout the broadcast, and she actually grasped more of the plot than I did. It is possible she’d seen this mystery before.

The people who work in kitchens, in castles in England, at least in the mysteries my mother and I watch, are far more intelligent than their employers. The kitchens are vast stone rooms with gorgeous pots hanging from hooks. Sometimes the difference in intelligence between employer and servant is striking, a fact my mother relies on for her solutions to the mystery.

I understand, of course, that these mystery stories are invented, but I also understand that the people who invent them are hopelessly bound to what they’ve seen and heard. As much as these people might dream of a kind of pure fabrication, imagining out of whole cloth an utterly new Victorian British society in which petty domestic crimes take place, they cannot do it. They hew, like it or not, to what has already happened, to what people have already done, and what people have already thought. In this case, working-class characters are functional geniuses compared to the slow-thinking, wealthy, overfed people who rule them. The popularity of their shows depends upon it. I depend upon it. My mother depends upon it. Even if, at times, while the shows play in her living room, she sleeps.

People are reluctant to admit that they have slept, particularly, perhaps exclusively, when they’ve done so in front of witnesses. Just when it would seem impossible to deny, people deny that they nodded off. A point of pride is perhaps involved. So I never confronted my mother with the fact that she had slept through the second act, even though I watched her sleeping, arguably more than I watched the mystery. Why would I harass her with the truth? I do my best not to watch my mother when she is sleeping. I think it is impolite. Yet sometimes I fail. When she is awake I do not get to watch my mother so carefully, for such extended periods of time. If it is impolite to stare at someone while they sleep, it is more so when they are awake, aware of your scrutiny. It is not only more impolite, it is essentially impossible to closely look at another person for a long time while they are awake. A code prevents it. I would never think of following her around, staring. I am generally aware of the things I should not do.

And yet the crime is the same: staring at another person. Awake or asleep should not matter, but clearly the fact of being seen while staring at a waking person aggravates the transgression. If a third person could be in the room while my mother nodded off and I stared at her, and this third person—not my father, obviously, oh, God, no—witnessed me staring at my sleeping mother, has my offense thus escalated? I do not know.

When I think of her sometimes forgetting her medicine, forgetting to eat much more than a rice cake, neglecting to drink water, I must wonder if my mother could live longer if only she tried.

Servants in the kitchen, especially the daftest ones who appear idiotic in the first act, end up being the most devious. Look out for the stupid ones, my mother will shout, whenever we watch a mystery. She wags a finger at me and smiles.

I try to get her to drink water and she says the water tastes awful. She feels she’s drinking water that someone soaked his teeth in, even if I have only just drawn the water from the tap. It tastes like a stranger’s mouth, she’ll yell. As if the water would be acceptable if only it tasted like the mouth of someone she knew. A person’s determination cannot—can it?—have too much to do with when they die, unless they are choosing to die, which is another topic. If determination played a role, allowing people to deliberately live longer, death would undergo a fundamental change, and people would exert their will in disruptive ways, living so long it would antagonize their families. I do not like to imagine the kinds of things that would happen in such a world where people could delay their own deaths.

On the other hand, there is a long history of people who, without moving a muscle, have fought for their lives. A person inert in a hospital bed, rigged to bags and lines, is referred to as a fighter. Upon observation, no visible fight can be detected. But a will to live is cited in these situations. The family, gathered at the bed, can detect it. Even when their loved one dies, they say she fought so hard. She was such a fighter. She put up an unbelievable fight.

Such circumstances have always concerned me, and not just tonight, as I wonder about my mother’s resolve to live at least until tomorrow, whether or not her resolve, as discussed, even comes into play.

If I am the patient in the hospital bed, and I am urged, even by a stranger, to fight for my life, will I know how to do it? It simply is not clear, has never been clear, how exactly one fights for one’s life, with no tools, no weapons, no training, no information whatsoever.

Even the doctors, standing there personally watching me die, will not tell me a thing about what I can do on my own, right now, to extend my life and not succumb to what is killing me. Why is this information kept secret? A stranger might cheer me on, exhort me to dig deep and fight—and I say stranger because I did not marry and my brother and sister have passed. A stranger would, by necessity, attend my bed. Or no one. No one is more likely. Why would a stranger stop in my room, stand at my bed, and exhort me to live? What kind of stranger does things like that? And if the answer is a good kind of stranger, I must wonder if it is then my duty, not tonight, because I am busy, but sometime soon, to enter a hospital at night and find a patient alone in his or her room, preferably a patient on the brink of death, and urge them to fight, and fight hard? I should strive to be a good stranger, is that not correct?

My mother, if she were able, would attend my bed, and possibly even urge me to fight for my life, although I cannot picture her issuing such a command without laughing. It is her stated idea that many things we know and say and feel are ridiculous. I would think that by the time I am in my hospital bed being urged to fight for my life, my mother will be dead. She will have already fought for her life and lost. But now, on the brink of death herself, though not today, I don’t think, I fear my mother is similarly in the dark. If I asked her to fight for her life, assuming a calamity brought her to the hospital, she might politely agree, if she could even speak, but to herself she would be forced to admit that she could not carry out such an action. The technique is beyond her. It has been beyond everyone in our family. None of us possess the skill to fight for our lives. One by one we pass away. If the known people of the world were ranked according to their ability to fight for their lives, my family would not score well.

I will hold my mother’s hand and ask her to please hang on. She will want to please me because she has always wanted to please me, and so she will agree to fight for her life, to please me, but when it comes to actually fighting for her life she will be baffled. She will have spent her entire life having no control whatsoever of what happens inside her body, with her blood and cells and bones, not to mention the organs and nerves, and now, eighty-six years into this seasoned indifference, allowing the insides of her body to conduct their own affairs, she will be urged to suddenly pay attention and control her body to such a degree that it does not die. How could anyone ask this of a frail old woman?

In the nature films the behavior is clear. When their lives are threatened, animals shoot through the grass, faster than they’ve ever run before, sometimes shitting out of fright, or they turn and crouch, meet the attack. When they fight for their lives there is compelling evidence, whereas people are meant to fight for their lives without moving, without showing the slightest effort. A strictly internal struggle, not even detectable by medical machinery.

The scullery maid often has a confidant. The confidant might be a beautiful homosexual man, who has his own tricks to play. Someone on the staff has access to the secrets of the wealthy family they work for but at the same time feels too much allegiance to betray them.

I must wonder if I am terribly wrong to think my mother will not die today.

Someone who could easily address the question of odds is my father. He was a statistician by profession. A probablist is the official term. The question regarding the odds of my mother dying today would be an elementary one for my father and his colleagues, most of whom came from India. A fertile country for mathematicians, my father reportedly said. Or, perhaps, only for probablists. My father passed away, so he cannot address the question, and I cannot refer to my father’s publications, some of which I have here with me, because they do not treat matters as elementary as these.

My mother’s odds of dying increase every moment of her life. Right now, sleeping in her bed, she has never in her entire life been in greater danger of dying. So it would seem to me that I shouldn’t be so secure in thinking she will not die today, not that I am particularly secure anymore, if only because it is more likely than ever that she will die right now. This statement, whenever I make it, will be true for the rest of her life. It will be true even if I do not make it. Even if I do not think this thought—that the danger my mother faces has never been greater—it will be true, which suggests to me that there are then likely many more thoughts I have not had, some of which are true. Many more. A tally of the thoughts I have not had would be impossible. Surely some of these thoughts I have failed to think bear down directly on the matter of my mother’s life and death. Of the many things I have failed to think, and within that category those thoughts that are also true, which of them, if only I could think them now, would reveal to me more about my mother and her prospects for survival today?

And, if I should not be secure in thinking that my mother won’t die today, it occurs to me that I would do well to return to her now, so that I might enjoy her company for her last moments alive.

You see, I aim to do what is right with regards to my mother and her last living days.

I need to consider this more carefully, though. By this reasoning, I would never be able to part from my mother again, since whenever I left her I would be doing so at the direst moment in her life when she was more likely than ever to pass away. This will be true, assuming my mother lives through the night, whenever I see her again. I would say good night, wish her well, and depart knowing that her risk of death was increasing while I walked away, while I left her apartment building, nodding to the doorman, and then walked the quiet side street to the busier avenue where the taxis gather. It would be difficult not to wonder at such times what kind of son walks away when his mother is in ever-greater danger of dying. Who does that? Kisses an old woman at her door, his own mother, knowing the whole time that she has never been in more danger?

It would appear that I do that. Every time I have left her, I have done that. If she lives through the night, I will do it again, take my leave knowing that even though yesterday her risk of dying was terribly high, today it has grown worse. It worsens as we speak, and still I must say good-bye to her as if I don’t care that she is in increasing danger of dying.

I did it to her as a child, too. I said good-bye and went to school. I said good-bye and went to camp. I said good-bye on a Saturday morning and who knows when I came home. When I did this, I left my mother dying. In doorways, in kitchens, in living rooms, on lawns. Sometimes even when she was sick with a cold in bed, I said good-bye from the bottom of the stairs, just as her chances of dying had peaked. I said good-bye and went to college, when she was even more likely to die. And when I came home to visit, it wasn’t long before I departed again, leaving her to die. Just as tonight, after watching a mystery on PBS, I said good night to my mother and left her at home to die.

We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.

The castle is always the same castle. Despite the mystery, despite the show, despite the cast, despite hundreds of years spanning different periods of time, it is always the same castle. A castle acquired for this purpose, perhaps, rented out to anyone needing to make a British mystery. Once there were real people living real lives in this castle, just as we, living in our own homes, consider ourselves real, with real lives. And if we consider that one day our own homes, as with the castle, will be used exclusively for the filming of television shows about people much like ourselves, it gives us a certain feeling about the destiny of our homes, where people hired to portray us will scamper about reciting sentences to each other, while off-camera the contemporary men and women, with up-to-date perspectives on life, devour unimaginable snacks and laugh at what simple, blind fools we must have been.

It is not untoward to believe that at some other location, so many years from now, an old woman and her only son will sit and watch this television show, or whatever it is called then, enjoying their dinner, not saying much, one of them sleeping, the other one looking on, waiting for her to wake up and declare something wonderful.

I am tempted to say that it would serve me right if my mother died today. Because I have chronically abandoned her, each time at the height of an ever-increasing danger, from the moment I could first walk, in some sense it would serve me right if she died. I would get what was coming to me. Her death, today, would be fitting. A comeuppance. However, when I think this through, and realize that I would deserve it if my mother dies today, it occurs to me that her death then becomes contingent on behavior I have or have not produced. Her death is a payment in response to behavior of mine. She cannot die unless I am fully deserving, although since I have been deserving for some time now, from a period beginning right after I was born, my mother has enjoyed a lengthy period in which she could die and I would be found deserving.

I am helpless then to wonder if there is someone in the world who would deserve it if I died. If, for instance, a person’s death occurs as a punitive measure to some other person, as my mother’s death, should it occur today, would certainly seem to me, then whose comeuppance is it when I die? Is there, for each of us, a culprit who will have had it coming when we go?

Well, of course, not every death needs to serve as a punishment of others, even while an attractive ecology is suggested by such a theory. So many things would suddenly be explained. Yet some deaths—my own, for instance—might be independent events, not designed as rebukes or scolds for anyone on earth. Deaths not really meant to trigger guilt in anyone. Deaths perhaps not meant to cause any feelings. Self-contained events without impact. Certainly the ecology of death would need to sustain variety in this regard. Or not certainly. I have no authority on this matter. There is the slight possibility, additionally, that the person for whom my death, when it does occur, is a comeuppance, will never learn of my death, never know that it served him right or that he had it coming. He might be in another part of the world, distant from the news sources that could alert him to my demise, if any news sources report the event. He might live out his days never knowing that I died, thus avoiding, forever, his comeuppance.

The butler, these days, is kindly, having endured long decades being stereotyped as cruel. Always now the butler is bottomlessly kind to everyone concerned.

It is perhaps the phrase, “The butler did it,” that guarantees now, on the PBS mysteries my mother and I watch, that the butler will never have done it. The butler is now too nice to have done it. On the other hand, the current blamelessness of butlers, in mysteries such as these, suggests that the perfect villain must now again, or soon, be the butler. My mother explained once to me that the key to solving these mysteries, at their outset, is to identify the least likely culprit. Often this person ends up being the villain. She said that of the many revelations she’d had in her life, this was among the saddest, since it cruelly ruined any mystery she ever watched. Figuring things out, she said, is such a sadness. You didn’t really know your father, she said, but he wasn’t very hard to know. And that was the problem. What do you do once you know someone?

My father and his colleagues from India, as probablists, must have been considered master odds keepers, the most gifted of the people in the world who keep odds. Had they not passed away, I could turn to one or the other of them now with my questions of odds, but since they have passed away, they no longer keep the odds. Well, have the Indian probablists passed away, along with my father? Even if they have, there are, no doubt, successors. Each field of inquiry creates successors who desecrate and then improve upon the work of their mentors, and the mentors soon pass. No matter how masterful the mentor is, there is a successor waiting in the anteroom. There must be new Indian probablists, probably several new Indian probablists every year, a stream of successors flying in from India. Even my father must have had a successor, after he passed. Someone succeeded my father, the master odds keeper, whose gift I never got to witness. My father must have bequeathed his odds to this successor, who now keeps them. Even if my mother and I do not know this person’s name or his whereabouts, we can safely believe that right now there is, at large in the world, a successor to my father, keeping what my father once kept. When my mother dies, though not today, and then, eventually, when I die, will the successor to my father be considered our survivor, even if we did not know him? The thought offers some comfort.

Physicians who sign autopsy reports, listing a person’s cause of death as unknown, attribute their momentary ignorance to the blind spots of science, which will one day come into view. Eventually every cause of death will be known, in most cases well before the death. It is only that we now live in a curious time when some things cannot be known until after they happen. One imagines that years from now this will be viewed as a touching limitation to our way of life: having to wait for something to happen, like a mother’s death, in order to know about it. People won’t be able to imagine being so docile and patient as we are today, obsessing over the distinction between old-fashioned notions of before and after. They will love us tenderly for waiting around for our mothers to die, for being victims of time, but they will also feel superior to us, and some of them will make a cogent argument that in many ways we were not so different from animals in our ignorance, worthy of tremendous respect, but animals just the same.

If my mother did die today, she would not—I am nearly certain—be discovered until tomorrow. Tomorrow, at the earliest. To be discovered today, someone other than her son would have to think, out of nowhere, late at night, right now, to ring my mother’s doorbell, and then, receiving no response, would need to summon the building superintendent and gain entrance to her apartment. Aside from the unlikelihood, which is considerable, this would take time. Tomorrow would have come before this person had even reached the super. The super’s phone might be off. Perhaps there would be an option to page the super, but it is doubtful the super would respond fast enough, with a key, in order for my mother to be discovered today.

It is bewildering to consider that while these mysteries are being filmed, there are young men and women standing off- camera, wearing contemporary clothing, holding contemporary views of sexuality and ethics, grinning behind their hands at the sad animals strutting in front of the camera.

Even if the super picked up right away. In addition, there would be other explanations for an unanswered doorbell, and the super would have to be mindful.

There is often a young girl in the wealthy family, unbearably beautiful, in league with the servants.

It is late at night and most people are asleep. Old people go to bed early. If my mother has gone to bed, which I hope she has, and fallen asleep, which I hope she has, it is likely she will not hear the doorbell.

The girl is the sole object of sympathy from the wealthy classes, suggesting that not all rich people from the old days were evil.

The super would make this same argument, would be reluctant to use his key to gain entrance to my mother’s apartment. He would want some proof that something had happened. The worry of a neighbor could not count as proof. Blood under the door would be proof. But even if she had died, it is not likely there would be blood under the door. Proof would be very hard to come by.

A constable always comes, but a constable never solves the crime. No body, no crime, my mother sometimes shouts from her chair.

The super would be justified in wondering why a neighbor, in the middle of the night, had decided to ring the doorbell of an old woman, demanding entrance to her apartment. This is not a neighborly action.

There is a pecking order regarding who can answer the door, such tasks being left usually to the footman.

The super would make a case for waiting until morning, thereby guaranteeing that even if my mother died today, she would not be discovered until tomorrow.

If, on the other hand, my mother were to die loudly, creating some commotion, and neighbors were to hear, it is possible they would reach her in time, not to save her life, necessarily, but at least to discover that she died today. To find her today, leaving very little surprise for tomorrow. There would be my own surprise upon receiving the terrible phone call alerting me to the unfortunate event inside my mother’s home. Many people would know of my mother’s death before me, a thought that does not please me. I feel that such an event would be mine to know about first, which I realize is the explanation often given by murderers—they wanted to be the first to learn of an important event, and the only way to be in that position was to cause the event itself, so they killed people, thus learning of the event before anyone else. But my motive in this respect is altogether different. To some of these people my mother’s death would be old hat by the time I found out. Other people in the area may have died in the intervening hours, displacing my mother in their thoughts. On the world stage many thousands of people would have died after my mother, yet before I was alerted. If she fell on the stairs and cried out. If she collapsed from some mishap to her circulation. Perhaps instead of crying out, my mother would have the strength to dial her phone. She might lack the energy to cry out loudly enough to be heard. Screaming requires a terrific summoning of muscle. It scares me to think that one day I will be too weak to scream when I most need to scream. I will produce only small sounds, barely audible even to myself. If, crawling on her hands and knees, severely disabled from a circulatory event, my mother reached the phone and dialed it, she could conduct a quiet conversation, alerting the party on the line to the circumstances. Help would be called, and help would come.

The question of discovery becomes complicated here. If, for instance, my mother is able, by telephone, to alert the party on the line to her medical situation, dying shortly thereafter, does this information constitute adequate discovery for the later determination that my mother died today? I think not. I think the remote party on the line can learn that the medical crisis began today, precipitating my mother’s telephone call, but unless she died while talking on the phone, before midnight, it would not, from this evidence, be possible to definitively declare time of death. Even if she, because of death, dropped the phone, the remote party, unable to see her, would lack definitive proof that she suddenly died in the middle of the conversation. The remote party might only conclude that my mother could no longer speak or make sounds, or, also, move, because the remote party would hear nothing if indeed my mother, against the odds, died today. There would be silence. But silence is not enough.

If I want my mother to survive, as I continue to say that I do, so she is not discovered dead in her apartment, should I not hire a companion for her? If people who do not live alone ultimately, per the studies, live longer than people who do, and if I have not rescued my mother from living alone, is it not the case that I am enabling her to die sooner rather than later? This would be a factor I could control. This would be me fighting for her life, since my mother cannot, as established, fight for her own life, just as none of the people in our family, of which we are the two surviving members, can. And if one living partner increases the life of both parties, would not two living partners add that much more time to my mother’s life? Unless there are diminishing returns. But, even so, returns are returns, however diminished, and one must guess that the more people who reside with my mother, the longer she will live. The reasoning hereafter becomes troubling. At what point does it end? Can I continue to acquire companions for my mother, thus sustaining her life perhaps well past her natural point of demise, adding companions to her entourage each day so she never dies? The logistics collapse around such a project.

A crowd employed to accompany my mother would need to be paid and fed, they would need to be lodged, and then, at certain times, such as when I visit for dinner and television, the crowd, at my command, would need to disperse, so I could be alone with my mother and enjoy her company. Together we’d sift through the takeout menus, making a show of choosing, of looking at the entrees for the Afghan place, and the delicious side plates offered from the Turkish place, but settling, as we always do, on Italian, which is what we both love, getting our pastas, requesting extra bread, and sometimes, but not always, sharing a salad. If we are feeling wicked, I will draw up stools by our chairs so we can, as we say, eat and watch, and more and more we are feeling wicked. And yet, when I dispatch the crowd and give my mother only the lone companion, me, am I endangering her, creating a sudden withdrawal from the people who were saving her life? Is this not another way of killing her, making me a murderer? She has thrived with a large population of life-extending companions, and now, her selfish son sends them away so she can die sooner, in exchange for a private moment—even though they hardly speak—of which the selfish son has had far more than his share? He is her son and he has kept his mother to himself his whole life, even when his brother and sister briefly lived, and his father the odds keeper briefly lived, vying for the attention that was always aimed first at him, as if through a bright, golden cone, but all he ever did was say good-bye to her, nearly every day of his life. All of those paid companions, waiting outside—blocking traffic, because there are thousands of them by now, he has spent his last penny on them—the companions crowded together looking in the window at mother and son, eating dinner in front of the television set, wondering how he could do this to her, leave her alone like that. What kind of son is he?

Someone always has a past, and someone’s past is always returning, ruinously. The past, in the mind of the person who had it, is terrible and shameful, but to the television viewer the terrible past this person had is only ever endearing. The illegitimate child is one of the more common shameful pasts dramatized on PBS. This plot troubles my mother. She does not care for it. Once she said that all children are illegitimate, and I laughed, but she shot me a look. Illegitimate children grow up into illegitimate adults, only to die and become illegitimate corpses, buried illegitimately. Soon she fell asleep and I learned that the illegitimate child, who was an heiress, had taken a scullery position in the very mansion where her unwitting family lived. My mother woke and angrily declared, seemingly out of nowhere, that this girl would be the first suspect in the episode, and she would be shamed and abused and shamed again, but in the end they would discover that she did not do it. There is always a first suspect, quickly forgiven. Nowadays there are several suspects who wind up innocent. That’s what you want to be, my mother advised, pointing her finger at me. The first suspect. Be the first suspect. The first suspect never did it.

If my mother did die today, she would die while I was writing. Years from now someone might ask me what I was doing when my mother died and I would have to answer that I was home, writing. This scenario implies that I will one day meet someone who will take the familiar with me, because there is no one presently in my life who would think, I think, to ask me such a question. Does a stranger, even a well-intentioned one, ask such a question? I would have to meet someone who would, quickly or slowly—I’m fine with either—gain enough familiarity with me to pose this personal question. Perhaps this man or woman would be someone with whom I would grow close, even though I would be an older person by then with little to offer in terms of romantic maneuvers. We’d pose each other questions on couches, chairs, park benches, beds, in cars and on buses and sometimes walking through fields, or so I imagine, seeking to overcome each other’s defenses, hoping that personal questions, asked and answered, would come, over time, to pass for intimacy, but wondering, sometimes, if that’s even how it’s done, and if that doesn’t somehow seem too strenuous a method of getting someone finally to love you.

This question of what I was doing when someone died, however, does not seem to be asked about the death of unremarkable citizens. We only seem to ask after someone’s whereabouts when it comes to the death of celebrities. So I can perhaps count on the odds that—even if I do gain a companion in my life going forward, an event that I would welcome—I won’t be asked what I was doing when my mother died. No one will have to know, unless I volunteer it. Odds are. Unless, in my eulogy, which I would have to write very quickly, I declare my whereabouts when she died.

It’s often the young, wild-haired simpleton, whose accent is more cockney than the others, indicating the deepest possible underdog. She assists the cook and the cook treats her poorly. Everyone treats her poorly. Her very employment is a matter of charity. They underestimate her. Not my mother. Early on, even during the opening credits, my mother wags her finger and says, Look out for that one!

What I will be able to say, without lying, is that when my mother died I was at home thinking about her, since in order to write about my mother I must first think about her, and in that sense she is very much in my thoughts. In order to increase the chances of this being true, it would seem that I should not stop writing, or at the very least thinking, about my mother, at the risk of thinking of something else and then having her suddenly die.

If, for instance, I get up from my chair and become distracted at the refrigerator, deciding that I’d like a taste of cold yogurt, and then for those moments cease thinking about my mother, I run the risk that she will die, alone, in no one’s thoughts, while her only son ate from an open container and stared into nowhere, thinking, for a moment, of nothing.

I cannot let this happen.

Episode after episode, watching mysteries with my mother, I look out for the wild-haired simpleton. I watch the wild-haired simpleton, waiting for her to strike, and yet her endgame is slow, her long play is invisible, so much so that by the time the credits roll the wild-haired simpleton has yet to pounce. She is frequently back where she started, working in a kitchen, having come to nothing. She has nowhere to go, and nobody loves her, and the wild-haired simpleton herself, with her soft, gray teeth, seems incapable of loving anyone else. My mother nods and says, Don’t write that one off.

The credits have rolled, the show is over. The contemporary people standing off camera with their up-to-date views on the world have wandered away to go home. The actress portraying the wild-haired simpleton resumes her normal, highly educated accent, yanks the tangled fright wig from her head, returns to her trailer to shower and put on her smart clothing. My mother, though, watching the credits and smiling, looks at me with sharp eyes.

Next time, she promises. That one isn’t done. She’s got more fight in her. She’s a fighter, that one. She’ll get them next time.

The Loyalty Protocol

The phone call said to come alone, but he couldn’t just leave them. Perhaps they’d been called, too, and didn’t remember the procedure, which would only figure. His father was not good with instructions. Worse, his father was fatally indifferent to what people said. Other people spoke and the man’s face went blank, as if any voice but his own was in a foreign language. Perhaps his father had not heard the phone. Or maybe he mistook the message for a prank and hung up.

Later, his helpless parents in tow, Edward could explain the mistake, if necessary. By then it’d be too conspicuous to leave them stranded in the road while everyone else left town.

Owing to the roadblock that would be set up on Morris Avenue, Edward parked at Grove and Williams and trekked through muddy backyards to the apartment complex. He cursed himself, because he’d have to lead his parents back the same way, down a wet slope where his car would be waiting. In the many configurations they’d rehearsed at the workshop, somehow he had not accounted for this major obstacle: herding his parents in the dark down a steep, wet slope.

His father was awake and packed already, wandering through the apartment. When Edward walked in, his father started to put on his coat.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Not coming, I guess,” his father said.

“Dad.”

“You try. I tried already. You try if you want to. I’m disgusted. I’m ready to go. Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this?”

“Did they call you?” Edward asked.

“Did who call me?” His father was on the defensive. Had he even slept? Had he been up all night, waiting?

“Did your phone ring tonight?” Edward asked, trying not to sound impatient. There were cautions against this very thing, the petty quarrels associated with departure, which only escalate during an emergency.

“I don’t know, Eddie. Our phone doesn’t work. I’m ready to go. I’m always ready. We’re down there almost every night. Why not tonight?”

Edward picked up the phone and heard an odd pitch. More like an emergency signal than a dial tone.

“You don’t believe me?” his father said. “I tell you the phone doesn’t work and you don’t trust me?”

“I trust you. Let’s get Mom and go.”

His mother was in bed, sheets pulled over her face. It felt wrong to sit on his parents’ bed, to touch his mother while she was lying down. Standing up, he could hug and kiss his mother with only the usual awkwardness, but once she was prone it seemed inappropriate, like touching a dead person. He shook her gently.

“C’mon, Mom, let’s go. Get dressed.”

She answered from under the sheets, in a voice that was fully awake. Awake and bothered.

“I’m too tired. I’m not going.”

They’d been told that, at times like this, old people dig in their heels. More than any other population, the elderly refuse to go. They hide in their homes, wait in the dark of their yards while their houses are searched. Often they request to die. Some of them do not request it. They take matters into their own hands.

But there were a few little things you could do to persuade them, and Edward had learned some of them in the workshop.

“Mom, you don’t know what you’re saying. You really don’t want to be here, I promise you.”

“See what I told you?” said his father from the doorway.

“Tell him to shut up,” said his mother.

“You shut up,” his father barked. “Don’t ever tell me to shut up.”

“Shut up,” she whispered.

They waited in his parents’ room, where he’d come and snuggled as a child, a thousand years ago, and he couldn’t help siding with his mother. It would be so wonderful to fall back asleep right now. If only.

“Mom, if you don’t come with us, who knows where you’ll sleep tonight. Or you won’t sleep. I can guarantee that you won’t like what will happen. It will be horrible. Do you want me to tell you what will happen?”

He could hear his mother breathing under the sheets. She seemed to be listening. He paused a bit longer for suspense.

“I could spell it out for you. Would you like me to do that? I have to say I’d rather not.”

Something wordless, passing for surrender, sounded. Edward left the room to give her time and it wasn’t long before she joined them in the front hall, scowling. She’d thrown a coat over her nightgown and carried a small bag.

“Okay?” said Edward.

They didn’t answer, just followed him outside, where the streets were empty.

“Where’s your car?” his mother grumbled.

He explained what they’d have to do and they looked at him as if he were crazy.

“Do you see any other cars here?” he whispered. “Do you know why?”

“Don’t act like you know what’s going on,” his father whispered as they trekked out. “You’re as much in the dark as we are. You have no idea what’s really happening. None. Fucking hotshot. Tell me one fact. I dare you.”

When they reached the hill and had to navigate the decline, his mother kept falling. She’d fall and cry out, landing on her rear end in the grass. He’d never heard her cry in pain before. His father was beside her holding her arm, but she was the larger of his parents and when she stumbled his father strained and couldn’t hold her up. He lost his temper and kept yelling at her, and finally, softly, she said she was doing her best. She really was.

“Well, I can’t carry you!” he yelled.

“Then don’t,” she replied, and she stood up and tried to walk on her own, but she went down again, with an awful cry, sliding through the mud.

In the car she wept and Edward felt ashamed. This was supposedly the easy part.

The gymnasium was crowded. A motor roared, which must have been the generator, because they would have lost power at this point. They signed in, then looked for their settlements, divided by neighborhood. This was the drill. Edward would have a different settlement from his parents, which he’d tried to explain to them, but his father had trouble with the terminology.

“It’s not a settlement,” he’d said.

“Okay, I agree, but that’s what they’re calling it.”

“It’s ridiculous. We’ll be staying there for what, a few hours, not even, and they call it a settlement? A settlement is a place where people stop and stay. You know, people live in a settlement.”

“Dad, I don’t think it really matters. I think what matters is you find the area where you’re supposed to be and then go there.”

“But it won’t be the area where you will be, am I right?”

“That’s right. But I’ll be nearby. I’ll be able to check on you and Mom.”

“You don’t know that, though, Eddie. How could you know that?”

When Edward brought his parents to their settlement, he could not get them admitted. A young woman he knew as Hannah had the clipboard. After scanning her pages, she shook her head.

“They’re not on my list.”

“They live in this neighborhood.” He gave her their address, their apartment number. For no real reason he gave her their zip code, the solitary zip code for all of them.

In the crowd that had already registered were several of his parents’ neighbors, huddled against a wall. There were retirees from his parents’ building. Neighbors who knew his parents. This was the right place. He waved, but no one saw him.

Hannah stared from behind her clipboard. He could sense the protocol overwhelming her mind. A street address, recited anecdotally, was no kind of evidence. Anyone could deliver that information. Edward was only a man talking.

“Do you want to see their driver’s licenses?” he asked, a bit too curtly. Not that he’d brought them.

“No. I want to see their names on this list, and since I don’t, I can’t admit them. I have the most straightforward job in the world. If you have a problem you should discuss it with Frederick, but something tells me I know what he’ll say.”

From under her shawl Edward’s mother said, “Eddie, it’s okay, we’ll go with you to yours.” She sounded relieved. That would solve everything and they could be together.

Edward looked at Hannah, who simply raised her eyebrows. She and Edward had once been on a team together at the beginning. She had seemed nice. Very smart, too, which explained her promotion. Unfortunately, Hannah was impossibly striking. He had been so desperately compelled by her face that he had instantly resolved never to look at her or show her any kind of attention. Everything would be much easier that way. It was troubling now to discover that Hannah ran his parents’ settlement. Was this how things were now? Had everything shifted again? It meant he’d have to see more of her and regularly be reminded that she would never be his. She would never kiss him or get undressed for him or relieve his needs before work or stop trying to look pretty for him, which was the part he liked best, at least when he played out futures with women he’d never speak to. When someone like Hannah, not that there’d ever been someone like Hannah, let herself go and showed up on the couch after dinner in sweatpants and a long, chewed-up sweater. It was unbearable.

Edward knew that he shouldn’t do this, but Hannah would have to understand. He broke character and pleaded with her.

“There’s nowhere else to go. Can you please take them? Please? Is someone really going to come by later and match each person to a name on your list?”

She hardened her face. She wasn’t going to drop the act, and she seemed disgusted with Edward for having done so himself.

“Did they get a phone call?” she asked. Even this question seemed beneath her.

He started to answer, figuring he could lie, when his father blurted out that their phone was broken. How could you get a phone call with a broken phone?

“I assumed they did,” he confided to Hannah. “That’s the truth. Why wouldn’t they get a call? Look, their neighbors are here. People from the same building. Why would my parents have been left out?”

At this last question she looked at him flatly. Why indeed.

“They’re not supposed to be here,” Hannah said. “You shouldn’t have brought them. You might consider…” She seemed reluctant to say what she was thinking. “At this point you’ve made a serious mistake and you need to decide how to fix it with minimal impact on the community.”

She glanced pitilessly at his parents, then muttered, “I know what I would do.”

Edward figured that he knew what she would do, too.

He leaned in so he could speak into her ear. “Are you carrying?” he whispered. “Because if you are, and I could borrow it, I could kill them right here, and it would be a lesson for everyone.”

She was stone-faced. That wasn’t funny. “There are people behind you. I have a protocol to run.”

Don’t we all, Edward thought. But his protocol, to keep his parents safe, could not be achieved here.

“Okay, well, thanks for your help,” he said, sneering. “Good teamwork. Way to go.”

She kept her cool. “So you want me to make a mistake, arguably a bigger one, because you did? Let’s say your mistake was an accident, which possibly it was, although I can’t say. I’m guessing you’re not an imbecile, although this is only a guess. You want me to consciously break the rules. You want your error, a stupid error, if you ask me, to beget other errors so we’re both somehow to blame, even though I do not know you and have no responsibility for you? How does that do you a favor? How does that help you? At this point you need to fall on your sword. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that.”

Why was it so much worse to be shamed by an attractive person? Somehow he felt he could handle this critique from anyone else in the world.

Just then the lights switched on in the gymnasium and a hush fell. Frederick, leader of the readiness workshop, walked in with his wireless microphone. Everyone watched him. He stood at center court, tucked the microphone under his arm, and started to clap methodically, as if he were killing something between his hands. Soon everyone was applauding, moving in close to hear what Frederick would say. The drill, apparently, was over.

He thumped his mic, said Hello, Hello, and everyone fell silent. He was such a cock, Edward thought. An impossible cock.

“So,” he said, in his quick, high voice. “Fair work tonight. Not terrible. We made okay time. Maybe we’re a half hour slow, and I don’t need to tell you what that means.”

“Boom!” someone yelled from the crowd, to an eruption of laughter.

“Boom is right,” replied Frederick. “But it’s not funny.”

The laughter stopped.

“We would have lost people. A certainty. I would have faced a decision, a certainty, even as some of you drove up in your cars. Some of you wouldn’t have made it. You’d have watched us leave and, believe me, you would not have been permitted to follow. I won’t spell that out. You’d be alone now and it would be getting colder. You’d wonder how much gas remained. You’d wonder about the power grid, the water supply, the food supply. You’d determine, correctly, that you know nothing about these things. Nothing. You’d need a leader. Or would you? Maybe you could decide things as a group. You’d start to quarrel. You’d divide. It would get colder. This is supposed to be the easy leg. We didn’t even do the highway drill tonight. Do you know how much time we’ll lose on the highway?”

“Too much!” the crowd yelled.

“That’s right. The highway is an ugly variable. There’s a reason we have not shared the details with you. The highway. We cannot find a way to speak of it that is not disturbing. Whereas this”—Frederick gestured into the gymnasium—“this you can control, down to the second. Which means I’d like to see us shave off that half hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. We need breathing room. We need to join our settlements without panic, with time to kill. Next time we do this I want time to kill. Tonight we had no time to kill. And you know what?”

Someone from far in the back of the gym shouted, “What?”

“I’m disappointed,” Frederick said. He shut his eyes. The gymnasium seemed to groan.

“But do you know what else?” Frederick asked, staring from his expressionless face.

No one responded.

“I’m proud as hell of you. Every single one of you.”

Except me, thought Edward. He was pretty sure that Frederick wouldn’t be proud of him.

They broke out in groups for the critique and Edward sat in a circle with his settlement. His parents, because they weren’t meant to be part of tonight’s drill, were dismissed. Since they had no way to get home, they were probably waiting for him outside.

The group leader for Edward’s settlement was Sharon, and she led them through the discussion. Everything was not well. Edward, she pointed out, had not registered, even though he was here in the gym. Explain that. Did he have trouble finding them? Was something wrong with Edward? Was he perhaps injured or confused? A check at the medical tent and then personal observation had confirmed that Edward was fine. Edward didn’t register with his settlement because he’d brought outsiders with him, and these outsiders had turned out to be a serious liability.

“It’s as though we’ve never discussed anything. It’s as though this workshop never happened,” said Sharon. “We fought the interests of the group. In real life this might have turned unthinkable.”

“I hardly think…” Edward started.

“Hold up, Eddie,” warned Thom. “You don’t talk during your critique.”

“What’s a possible consequence for Edward?” said Marni.

Geoff jumped in. “I think we should do something humiliating to his parents. That’s much more disturbing, because he’d have to see them get hurt. I think that’s a good punishment. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime; it is the crime. I mean, I don’t want his parents to be seriously harmed, necessarily, but there’s nothing worse than watching your parents, who are defenseless, get hurt in some way.”

Everyone laughed. Everyone except Sharon, who glared at Edward.

“Okay, guys, I get it,” said Edward. “If there’s ever a real crisis, I’ll be sure only to look out for myself. Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Unfortunately, Edward, this is not about you learning a lesson,” said Sharon. “I’m glad your colleagues think it’s funny, but this is about deterring others from suddenly deciding they can bring friends with them on an evacuation.”

“My parents aren’t my friends,” he said. “They’re my parents. I thought they’d gotten a call, too. I didn’t realize some people didn’t get called. Who here with parents still alive wouldn’t have done the same thing?”

Some hands went up.

“Yes, Liz?” said Sharon.

“Me,” said Liz, putting her arm down. “My parents are at home right now. It would never have occurred to me to bring them along.”

It wouldn’t have even occurred to her, Edward thought? How do you get to that place? He didn’t even like his parents, but he brought them along. Was that kind of thinking out of date? Had everyone evolved?

A few people echoed this. They’d left their parents behind.

Good for you, Edward thought. This could easily have been the real thing. Wasn’t that the point, that you never knew? You murderous fucks.

“Does anyone think it’s strange,” Edward ventured, “that our parents weren’t called tonight?”

“Honestly, Edward,” said Thom. “This is the second time you’ve spoken during your critique. We shouldn’t have to warn you about this. You can’t learn from what happened tonight unless you’re completely silent now.”

“I thought that what I learn doesn’t matter,” Edward snapped. “Isn’t this about you learning not to be like me?”

“No chance of that,” said a young woman on the opposite side of the circle, who stared at Edward so defiantly that he looked away.

On Edward’s way out, Frederick broke from a mob of admirers and grabbed his arm.

“Edward, a word.”

He’d never stood so close to Frederick, never had a private audience with him. As much as he disliked him, he couldn’t deny how compelling Frederick was. Impossibly handsome, confident, with the figure of a small gymnast. This was a person for the future.

“What you did tonight was arguably brave. You demonstrated a priority for love and loyalty. You protected two fragile people who had no other savior, even though technically they were not in danger and would have been much safer at home. Technically, we may have decided that they were a danger to you, and yet you went to them anyway, endangering everyone else. You made a choice, and on the individual level, that choice was courageous and selfless, even if at the level of the group you risked our entire operation. If those had been my parents, may they rest in peace, and I didn’t have my years of training, and I also didn’t have sophisticated instincts and survival habits, it’s possible I would have done the exact same thing. In other words, if I were you, and knew next to nothing about how to keep people alive today, tomorrow, and the next day, I might have brought my parents here tonight as well. It is completely possible. It’s precisely because I can relate, however abstractly, to what you did that you won’t see any lenience from me. Not a trace. On the contrary, you will meet great resistance from me, and if you do anything like that again, I promise I will hurt you. But I want you to know, face-to-face, how much I admire you.”

When he got outside, his mother was asleep in the car, his father leaning on the door.

“I bet you’re expecting an apology from me,” said his father.

Edward was tired. He said that he wasn’t, that he only wanted to get home. He had a big day tomorrow.

“Because I didn’t do anything wrong,” his father continued.

“I know that, Dad.”

“It doesn’t really seem like you know it.”

“I do. I would like to go home now, that’s all.”

“Okay, go. You’re the one who screwed up, anyway. We don’t need your help. You should be ashamed of yourself. Go straight home. Your mother and I will walk.”

“You’re not going to walk.”

“Katherine! Katherine!” his father shouted into the car, banging on the window. “Wake up! We have to walk home. Eddie refuses to drive us.”

“Dad, get in. Please. I’m driving you home. Don’t worry.”

“Because we wouldn’t want to put you out.”

They waited in the line of cars revving to leave the high school parking lot. Some people took these evening drills—hellish and deeply pointless as they were—as valuable social encounters. So Edward and his parents sat in traffic—his mother asleep, his father grinding his teeth—while athletically attired settlement leaders strolled up to cars and leaned against drivers’ windows, chatting it out. Running the drill backward, doing the blow by blow, reliving the night because the crisis protocol training was all they damn well had in their lives.

Edward didn’t dare honk. These glad-handing semiprofessional tragedy consumers would turn on him, attack the car, eat his face. Or, worse, they’d stare at him and start to hate him slightly more, if that were possible.

His father, on the other hand, hadn’t noticed that they weren’t moving.

“That Hannah is a Nazi cunt,” his father said.

“Dad, you can’t say things like that about people.”

“She’s a Nazi cunt with a tiny cock.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“What, you don’t agree? You don’t like her, either. Tell me you don’t agree.”

“I don’t agree. She’s in a tough position. She’s just doing her job.”

That set him off.

“Just doing her job! Gandhi was just doing his job.”

“Gandhi?”

“Not Gandhi, that other one. That other one!”

His father was in a rage.

“Which other one? Hitler?”

“The one with the stick. With the blowtorch that reaches across fields down into bunkers. The one who had that huge set of keys! Like a thousand keys on that goddamn monstrous key chain. The one with the small gun they have in the museum in D.C.”

“Mussolini?” he guessed.

“Fuck you!” his father yelled. “Goddamn amateur!”

Edward locked the doors of the car.

“I’m not sure I know who you’re talking about,” Edward responded carefully, “but I know what you mean. You really don’t like Hannah. I get it.”

“Bullshit. You know exactly who I’m talking about. You learned about him in school. I remember you coming home one day saying you wanted to be this motherfucker, this dictator, for Halloween. Imagine how your mother reacted to that.”

His mother. If this had really happened, how would she have reacted? She probably would have cheerfully gone along with it, fitting little Eddie with a large key ring and a blowtorch, sending him off into the neighborhood to gather candy. At the moment, though, his mother had the right idea. She was snoring softly in the backseat.

At Edward’s office the next day, a receptionist fell from her chair and died. The paramedics set up a perimeter around her desk while colleagues from the office looked on, whispering. Edward tried to keep his employees calm. He ran a modest shipping firm where nothing like this ever happened. Why wouldn’t the paramedics touch her, even if it was clear she was dead? Their fear did not bode well. What was the protocol? One of them squinted through a monocle at her body. The others pushed back her cubicle partition. They took pictures and air samples and questioned the coworkers who sat nearby, but they stayed away from her.

The paramedics consulted a radio, then turned to question Edward and his employees.

Had anyone touched this woman? Her clothing? Her hair? Her skin?

No one answered, but of course they had touched her. Edward had still been in his office when she collapsed, but he understood that they’d tried to revive her. They’d loosened her clothing, breathed into her mouth, pounded on her chest. The usual hopeless tricks, taught by sad specialists at adult education centers. And, one year ago, at this very office, for a reasonable discount. Were you not supposed to touch someone who died?

A few hands went up, and these people were escorted to a private office.

“What’s going on?” someone yelled. “Where are you taking them? What are you going to do?”

“Calm down, they’ll be fine,” someone else answered, and this set things off.

“How do you know? You don’t know anything. You have no idea what’s going on.”

The paramedics announced that the office would need to be cleared. Everyone out, quickly and safely, and this quieted people down. They were to please follow their evacuation drill. Employees could wait across the street in the park. They wanted to be able to see everyone from the window.

For what? Edward wondered to himself. So they can take aim?

It would be a little while before this was resolved, the paramedics explained, so people were free to get coffees if they wanted to. Edward hung back until most of his employees had filed out. It was really not appropriate for a paramedic, or anyone, for that matter, to tell his employees to take a coffee break. But he would let it go.

He introduced himself as the boss and asked what was going on, what did they think?

They stared at him.

“Because we thought it was an aneurysm,” he went on. “Except she’s so young. A stroke, maybe? At any rate, it’s horrible. Was it a heart attack? Probably not. What do you guys think?”

When they didn’t answer he continued to theorize out loud, naming ailments. They were leaving him stranded. He couldn’t handle this conversation by himself.

“Sir,” said a paramedic, “we’ll have to ask you to leave with the others.”

“Okay,” Edward said. “But do you know how long this will be? I need to know what to tell my employees. We have kind of a crazy day ahead.”

It was true. Edward had five job candidates to interview after lunch, and he had been planning to spend the morning in preparation.

The paramedics shook their heads and stared at him again, as if they were baffled that Edward expected them to stoop to a conversation with someone like him.

Edward wasn’t finished. This was his office, and they were sprawled out in his chairs, and they’d moved and probably broken office equipment he’d paid for, while completely ignoring him. Or, at the very least, failing to take him seriously.

“It’s Kristina,” he said.

Again they looked at him in their odd way, like doctors standing around at a morgue.

“Kristina is her name,” Edward said, gesturing at the dead woman. “She’s from Ditmars. I hired her about six months ago. She went to college…I forget where. She was a terrific employee. Here’s her emergency contact information, if you want it. But maybe you don’t want it. Maybe you guys don’t care. Maybe this is simply too boring for you and that’s why you can’t speak. You’re bored. Well, her name is Kristina. Show some fucking respect.”

One of the paramedics stood up.

“Sir,” he said, gesturing at an officer holding a cell phone. “This is Deputy Arnold Sjogren. His sister was a close friend of Kristina’s. We know exactly who she is, we grieve her passing, and now we are doing our jobs. The longer you stand here yelling at us, without any facts, the greater risk you place yourself in. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I personally do not require a lesson in respect. We are risking our lives today, and you are not. Who should be showing respect to whom?”

It was cold outside, not yet ten in the morning. Kristina must have only just started work when she died. In truth, Edward reflected, she had been a detached figure in the office, a kind of ghost. When she was trained, including a short session with Edward himself—since he tried to impress upon his new employees the larger aims of the company—she seemed indifferent. He felt obliged to act excited about his life’s work, even if it sometimes exhausted him.

Across the street stood his employees, shivering and coatless, holding their arms. Others huddled together, crying.

Edward and his employees—all fifteen of them, or it’d be fourteen now—were not accustomed to being outside together. It was Edward who made them nervous, and he knew it. He shunned the public spaces at work for this very reason, protecting his employees from the destabilizing effect of his presence, keeping to his private office whenever he could. What a kind service to offer, to keep them from having to see him up close. He tried to be nice and cordial, but it was true that in some deep way he had trouble thinking of them as human, with lives outside of the office. Was this bad, especially if he never showed it? He thought of himself as deeply empathic—if mainly toward himself. In theory he held a strong share of empathy in reserve for a stranger he had yet to meet.

His team was standing in the little patch of dirt that passed for a park. When Edward approached they fell silent. A broad swing set creaked on the other side of the square. As the boss, it seemed that he should speak. He should sum up, or lead them in prayer, or say something, perhaps, cheerful. Maybe it was too soon for that?

“Well, poor thing,” said Edward, finally.

“Did you call her family?” someone asked, and the others nodded, leaning in.

This alarmed him. Was he supposed to do that? How could he call Kristina’s family if he didn’t know the facts? At any rate he’d left the emergency contact card with the paramedics.

“They’re taking care of it,” Edward said, nodding up at the building.

But were they? He could feel his employees thinking that this was his job. He was supposed to take care of it, not some bland paramedics, inured to calamity. What if one of them had died, he imagined them thinking. Would Edward, their supervisor, neglect to call their families, leaving it to some rookie EMT who might not even be able to pronounce their names? What fucking kind of boss was he? Any one of them could have died today. They could die tomorrow, or next week. Could Edward be trusted to call their spouses or roommates or parents—to at least pretend that he cared?

After they stood there looking at their feet, someone volunteered that they’d been discussing how Kristina might have died. They focused on Edward again, and again he hated being in charge.

“Did you learn anything? What did they say?”

Edward shook his head. “I shouldn’t really comment,” he said, adopting an air of secrecy. “They asked me not to say anything. I’m sorry. I’d better not.”

Oh, was he something. For a few moments Edward’s employees could—wrongly! wrongly!—see him as a person with exclusive information, entrusted with a secret. An insider. And in exchange, what? What did he get for this lie? Well, for one, Edward would never forget what he’d said here today, how low he’d fallen. That seemed fair. A fair deal. He might as well bask in their awestruck sense of his power. Why not enjoy it for a while?

People started to drift off. Jonathan took a sandwich order, but when it grew too complicated someone suggested that they all go, and they looked at Edward expectantly. This was going to take a while. He sent them off with his blessing—explaining that he should really stay here in case they needed him—and he was left alone in the park, staring up at the window to his office, where, for some reason, the shade had been drawn.

The first job candidate showed up right on time, minutes after the hazmat truck and the mayor’s motorcade pulled away. Edward and his employees had only just been cleared to return to the building. The candidate, Elise Mortensen, was announced when Edward returned to his office, where he discovered that his documents had been disturbed. His filing cabinets were open. On his shelves the books had been tossed around. Did they think he was hiding something? A smell ran through the room, too, something floral that he hadn’t noticed in the outer offices. He didn’t have time to take stock of what had changed or to wonder what they were looking for in his office, so far from where Kristina died, when Elise Mortensen came in, adopting an exaggerated tiptoe, as if she were disturbing him, which she kind of fucking was, and asked where to sit.

Edward fumbled through the interview. He started with the dreaded opener Tell me about yourself, so he could collect his thoughts. Elise Mortensen seemed to have been waiting her whole life to answer this question and she went for it. She delivered a droning memoir that kept rising in tone, which assured Edward that it might not end until she died. He kept his eyes fixed on hers and established a pattern of interested nods, then withdrew his attention to the place where it rightly belonged. On himself.

Edward tried to piece together the morning’s events. What interest would the mayor have in Kristina’s death, and why would Frederick from the workshop be part of the mayor’s entourage? This was arguably the worst part of the morning, standing across the street watching the mayor exit his car, followed by business-suited staff whispering into their phones, and then, what the fuck, Frederick from the workshop, almost like a government official now, wearing his jumpsuit, carrying a duffel bag.

At that point Edward figured it was okay to bring his employees across the street so they could wait at the entrance. In truth it offered Edward another chance to discuss the situation with officials, perhaps reestablish his authority. This was his office! He paid rent here, and the death had happened during working hours at his business. And he, not that he wanted to broadcast this, was liable for what happened. But of course he was rebuffed at the door by a police officer, even while his employees looked on, knowing—how could they not know?—that Edward had no influence. No role to play. He was a bystander just like they were.

When the mayor came out, Frederick pointed at Edward in the crowd.

“There he is!” yelled Frederick, and the mayor’s entire entourage peered into the crowd, as if a rare animal had been sighted.

Edward froze.

“That’s the man!”

Next to Edward stood Philip, who returned Frederick’s greeting, said things were fine, considering, and what the hell, a tragedy, right, to which Frederick shrugged, pointing at the mayor with a knowing look. This wasn’t about him. Edward lowered his hand and stepped behind Philip, where it was warm and safe, waiting for the motorcade to leave.

There was a final interview that afternoon, and then he could go home. Edward thought he would die. At times like this, when he didn’t want to be seen by anyone in the office, and with the bathroom so conspicuous at the other end of the office, the entire staff watching him go in and come out, Edward peed in a jar that he kept in his drawer. He was sealing the lid when the last candidate was announced: Hannah Glazer. Oh dear God. The same Hannah, the settlement leader, who’d turned away his parents.

On his desk was her résumé, which he couldn’t focus on, but he willed himself into the conversation. As ever, it was difficult to look at her and be reminded of an enormous segment of life—the segment in which you were naked with a stunning person and she was not repulsed by you—that was not available to him. She wore tailored black clothes, her eyes clear and mean, and her hair was arranged in one of those old-fashioned styles, pasted to her head at the top and then curled out at the bottom. Quite lovely.

“What interests you about the position?” Edward started.

“You’re kidding, right?” Hannah said, glaring at him.

So he would have found no viable candidates today. A receptionist had died, and he’d have to interview for her replacement, and now he’d need to schedule another day of interviews for this position as well.

He had to hold up appearances, or else his appearances would turn deranged. “I’m not kidding, no.” Maybe they could keep this short.

“Are we going to be pretending today?” Hannah asked.

“Pretending what?”

Edward looked longingly at his window, wondering if he could get up enough speed for it to shatter if he threw himself against the glass.

Hannah stood. She spoke calmly, but she was seething. “I seriously question your ability to be fair here, given what happened. Last night I did my job. I did my job. And today when I very much need this position, a position I am ridiculously qualified for, here you are, mister fucking policy dodger, ready to dole out a punishment because I followed instructions in a difficult situation.”

“I’m sorry,” said Edward. “What punishment have I doled out?”

“Not hiring me,” she said. “I saw your eyes when you knew it was me. You knew you weren’t going to hire me.”

“That’s not true.”

It was, for the most part, true.

“I wonder if I could interview with someone else. Is there someone else on the hiring committee so I could be assured a fair shake?”

“Well, it’s only me. There’s no committee. This is my company. If I recuse myself from the interview, for my intense bias, my inability to evaluate your suitability for a position in the company that I created from nothing, a company I understand better than anyone else in the world, you’ll be in this room alone. Shall we do that?”

Hannah didn’t laugh. “I’d like to continue this interview under protest,” she said.

Was that a real thing? Was there a form you could fill out?

“Listen,” said Edward. “I would understand completely if you didn’t feel comfortable going forward, if you maybe wanted to try somewhere else.” Please, please, try somewhere else.

“You sound like Frederick now. Get the person to believe her rejection is actually her own idea. Classic Frederick. Old school. I bet you’ve been told that before.”

“Never.”

“I guess it’s no secret about me and him,” Hannah said, grinning.

Edward stared at her.

“That we’re involved. I mean, everyone must know at this point.”

He wished he didn’t. That was knowledge he’d very much rather not have. He picked up her résumé, waving it at her. “Shall we?” he said. “An actual interview, and to hell with the past?”

Hannah Glazer was right. She was qualified for the position. Edward was crestfallen. She was smart, articulate, preposterously experienced, and when he challenged her with difficult production scenarios—bottlenecks on the front or back end, human error, acts of nature—she produced a staggering arsenal of troubleshooting strategies, more sophisticated than any he’d ever heard, which she rattled off casually, as if they were too simple to be of interest anymore.

“You know,” she said, “Frederick is good at this sort of thing, too.”

This sort of thing? Was his job just a hobby to her, something to perfect in the off-hours?

“But of course he’s more of a manager/leader/boss type. As you might imagine.”

“Of course,” said Edward, even though what did he know about Frederick and his life outside the workshop?

“So…” said Hannah. “I mean, if you ever thought of taking a leave of absence, or retiring or something like that—not that you’re that age yet—Frederick could be a really ideal person to take over.”

He could only stare at her.

“I mean, of course, only if, you know, that sort of thing has been on your mind. Taking a break. Succession. Lineage. You know. Just don’t forget about him. About Frederick. He could really do your job, and still have time left over for his other work.”

On her way out Hannah looked at his couch. “Is that where you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Fuck them.”

“What?”

“All of the desperate people who come looking for work. Is that your casting couch?”

“This isn’t like that. It’s just a couch.”

“You didn’t think, when I walked in, that within twenty minutes, if everything went well, you’d have me down on it?”

Edward couldn’t answer. Was that an option that he’d somehow missed? Two minutes into the interview she was yelling at him about his bias. Was that some deeply veiled flirtation?

“So you’ve fucked no one there? I’m curious.”

She didn’t seem curious. She was yawning.

He looked at the brown couch and thought back, and back, and back. The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location—or, in fact, on any couch ever—was, indeed, zero.

His phone rang that night and this time he wasn’t going to screw it up. He grabbed his bag and headed over to the high school, alone.

The roads were quiet, streetlights shining so fiercely the neighborhoods were bright as day. A siren issued into the night, deep and low. He’d never heard this before. The closer he got to the high school, the more the sound became like an engine rather than a siren, rumbling beneath the ground. When he reached the turnoff, he came upon a sea of abandoned cars, doors jacked open, hazards flashing.

Edward stopped fast. The cars racing behind him closed in, trapping him there. He could do nothing but leave his car and walk, as the others must have done. When the drill was over, it would be one hell of a mess driving out of here, but for now he had to get inside.

He was one of the first to check in with Sharon, and it seemed she almost smiled at him. She looked strange and excited, her face glazed. Maybe he could show her that last night was a fluke.

From across the gymnasium he watched Hannah’s settlement grow, waiting for a sign of his parents. Now that he had checked in, he wasn’t supposed to leave, and since this was a drill, since it didn’t matter, he resolved not to care. Probably his parents hadn’t been called. This was some new thing they were doing, a test of loyalty he would fail no matter how he responded. Anyway, he’d long ago given up trying to understand the methods of the workshop. Even if his parents had been called, the phone was broken, and how would they know? It couldn’t matter. But Edward kept looking over to Hannah, even as the gymnasium filled with bundled-up people, and children, and, of all things, animals—smooth, golden dogs—a few of them wandering sleepily across the hardwood floor, moaning. He’d never seen it so crowded. The generator roared over the chaos—something felt different tonight.

To be fair, he’d had that feeling before. Maybe he always had that feeling. They were good at making you believe that this was the real thing, at last. No matter how false and strange things were, Edward always thought it was smarter, in the end, to believe they were real. You’d better not get caught thinking something was only make-believe.

Finally, Edward spotted his father joining Hannah’s settlement. He was alone. Hannah waved him in and he vanished into the crowd. The gymnasium lights never switched on and Frederick never appeared to praise and chastise them, to bark strange phrases about a future none of them could imagine. Instead the settlements headed outside to get in line for buses, which were departing from the back field of the school.

The siren was so loud that when Edward tried to speak nothing came out. Some terrible noise cancellation was at work. Was this intentional, a trick of Frederick’s to keep them from understanding each other? Edward looked at Thom—who was terminally available for eye contact, lying in wait for it—and Thom smiled, giving a thumbs-up. Thom was excited. He’d wanted to leave for years. He was ready to roll. He had no parents, no wife, and it was as if he was waiting to start a new life somewhere else where they weren’t drilling for escape day and night. Unless in their new location, too, wherever in the world that ended up being, they’d have to pretend to leave all the time, just as they’d done here.

Only one other time had the drill run this long. To Edward, that night seemed like years ago, when the workshop began, when it was just a few worried citizens finally admitting to each other how little they knew of the future. But probably it was only last winter. It was a viciously cold night and they’d waited in this very spot while the buses warmed up. He’d been so scared! But then Frederick’s girlish voice had rung out through a megaphone and everyone had hurried back for their critiques.

So there was still time. Frederick could call this off and get them back inside.

As the settlements gathered behind him, headed to separate buses, Edward waited and waited and waited, until finally Hannah approached, and, behind her, her settlement, mostly old-timers from Wellery Heights. He had only a moment for this, but he had to do it. There was nothing in the protocol about it, anyway. The protocol hadn’t been written this far. It was a blank chapter. They’d spoken so much about how after a certain point nothing could be known, and they were right. Edward grabbed his father, who looked startled, and then the two of them opened their mouths soundlessly at each other. They couldn’t hear anything. It was his mother Edward needed to know about. His mother. He shrugged where and he mimed other things, things to indicate his mother, which anyone else from any country in the world, during any kind of crisis, would understand, but it was no use, it was stupid. Or his father was stupid, because he either did not get it or did not want to, smiling dumbly at Edward, reflecting the mime back at him as if it was a game. Finally Edward grabbed his father’s left hand, isolating the ring finger, and held it up to him, tapping on the ring.

Do you get it now, you stupid old man? Where is she?

Edward’s father smiled, put his palms together, closed his eyes, and leaned his head against his hands. A universal sign. His mother was home sleeping. His father had left her there asleep, and don’t worry, she was doing fine.

His mother was asleep, alone, at home. In a city that might soon be empty. She was fine.

The buses traveled south. Frederick had been wrong about the highway. It was not an ugly variable. It didn’t even present a problem. Was something supposed to shoot out at them from the trees? He was no longer sure what, exactly, he was supposed to fear. In a caravan the buses climbed the on-ramp, entering a freeway that seemed reserved for them alone. They drove for hours. The driver was in radio communication, but otherwise the bus was quiet. Edward sat by himself in a rear seat, staring from the window. At this point, he reasoned, the drill should have been called. They’d done it. They’d proven they could leave quickly, if necessary. But now what? They’d never rehearsed this far, so what on earth could they be testing? Wasn’t it a pain in the ass now that they were so far from home, and how exactly were they going to get back? The buses, of course, could be ordered to turn around. But as the sun started to rise, and as muffins wrapped in brown paper were sent back, along with juice boxes and clear packs of vitamin pills, that didn’t seem so likely.

During the second day of driving, after he’d slept and woken and then slept a little bit more, he heard a commotion at the front of the bus and the bus steamed and seized and buckled as it started to slow down and pull off the highway.

Thom slid into the seat next to him.

“Holy fuck, right?”

“What happened?” asked Edward, still waking up.

“Sharon.”

As the bus lurched to a stop, Edward tried to look, but there were too many people mobbed together.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

Thom shook his head. “I don’t think so. She fell out of her seat. All of a sudden. I only got a quick look. But, fuck, man, I think she’s dead.”

It was a pretty sight. Ten—or was it more—glittering yellow buses pulled over on the side of the highway. Edward’s was the only bus that had discharged its passengers, and this was spoiling a lovely image: ragged, tired travelers wandering up and down the embankment while the passengers from the other buses, from behind darkened glass, looked on. Edward found a soft, dry place to sit. What a drill this was! Something for the record books. In a strange way he was excited for the critique. How would you begin to pick this apart? He wondered, surveying the fleet, which of the buses carried his father. Sharon had been removed, conveyed on a stretcher by some younger fellows, who’d hiked her into the woods and returned already. Without Sharon. Without even the stretcher. They were sharing a thermos down in the grass. One of them sang something. Edward wasn’t sure what the holdup was now, even while Frederick and some others, including the mayor, huddled in conference down in the shadow of the last bus.

It wasn’t long before a signal was given and the buses revved up again. Edward stood and joined the orderly line his settlement had formed to board their bus, but the door didn’t open and their driver never appeared. Where was he, and who was supposed to drive them now?

Frederick and his crew had already boarded their buses. One by one the other buses wheezed into motion, crawling from the side of the road to join the highway. His neighbors reacted differently to the situation that dawned on them, but Edward stood out on the shoulder to watch. Of course the windows of the buses were dark, so he couldn’t see, but in one of them, perhaps pressed against the glass, perhaps waving at him this very moment, waving hello and, of course, good-bye, was his father. So Edward, just in case, raised his own hand, too. Raised it and waved—thinking, Good-bye, Dad, at least for now—as the other buses built up speed down the highway and disappeared from sight, leaving the rest of them alone in the grass by the side of the road.