Let Me Be Frank With You

I’m Here

STRANGE FRAGRANCES RIDE THE TWITCHY, wintry air at The Shore this morning, two weeks before Christmas. Flowery wreaths on an ominous sea stir expectancy in the unwary.

It is, of course, the bouquet of large-scale home repair and re-hab. Fresh-cut lumber, clean, white PVC, the lye-sniff of Sakrete, stinging sealants, sweet tar paper, and denatured spirits. The starchy zest of Tyvek mingled with the ocean’s sulfurous weft and Barnegat Bay’s landward stink. It is the air of full-on disaster. To my nose — once practiced in these things — nothing smells of ruin as fragrantly as the first attempts at rescue.

I notice it first at the red light at Hooper Ave., and then again when I gas up my Sonata at the Hess, before heading to the bridge, Toms River to Sea-Clift. Here in the rich gas-station scents, a wintry breeze flitters my hair while my dollars spool along like a slot machine in the gathering December clouds. Breeze has set the silver whirly-gigs to spinning at the Grandly Re-Opened Bed Bath & Beyond at the Ocean County Mall (“Only new bedding can keep us down”). Across its acres of parking, a tenth full at ten A.M., the Home Depot — Kremlin-like, but enigmatically-still-your-friend-in-spite-of-all — has thrown its doors open wide and early. Customers trail out, balancing boxes of new toilet works, new motherboards, new wiring harnesses, shrink-wrapped hinge assemblies, hollow-core doors, an entire front stoop teetering on a giant shopping cart. All is on its way to some still-standing domicile blotto’d by the hurricane — six weeks past, but not lost from memory. Everyone’s still stunned here — quarrelsome, funked, put-upon-but-resolute. All are committed to “coming back.”

Out here, under the Hess awning, someone’s piped in loud, sports-talk radio for us customers — the Pat ’n’ Mike Show from Magic 107 in Trenton. I was once among their faithful. They’re old now. A booming voice — it’s Mike — declares, “Wowee, Patrick. Coach Benziwicki cut loose quite a hurricane of F-BOMBS, I’m telling you. A real thirty-seconds-over-Tokyo.”

“Let’s listen to it again,” Pat says, through a speaker built deep inside the gas pump. “Total disbelief. To-tal. This was on ESPN!”

Another gravelly, exhausted, recorded voice — Coach B’s — takes up, in a fury: “Okay. Let me just tell you so-called F-BOMB sportswriters one F-BOMB thing. Okay, you F-BOMBS? When you can F-BOMB coach a team of nine-year-old F-BOMB grammar school girls, then I might, might give you one shred of F-BOMB respect. Until then, you F-BOMBS, you can DOUBLE F-BOMB yourselves from here to F-BOMB Sunday dinner. You heard it here first.”

The vacant-eyed, white-suited young Hess attendant who’s pumping my gas hears nothing. He looks at me as if I wasn’t here.

“That about says it all, I guess,” Mike concedes.

“And then some,” Pat concurs. “Just drop your keys on the desk, Coach. You’re done. Take the F-BOMB bus back to F-BOMB Chillicothe.”

“Un-F-BOMB-believable.”

“Let’s pause for a break, you F-BOMB.”

“Me? You’re the F-BOMB. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha.”

IN RECENT WEEKS, I’VE BEGUN COMPILING A PERSONAL inventory of words that, in my view, should no longer be usable — in speech or any form. This, in the belief that life’s a matter of gradual subtraction, aimed at a solider, more-nearly-perfect essence, after which all mentation goes and we head off to our own virtual Chillicothes. A reserve of fewer, better words could help, I think, by setting an example for clearer thinking. It’s not so different from moving to Prague and not learning the language, so that the English you end up speaking to make yourself understood bears a special responsibility to be clear, simple, and value-bearing. When you grow old, as I am, you pretty much live in the accumulations of life anyway. Not that much is happening, except on the medical front. Better to strip things down. And where better to start stripping than the words we choose to express our increasingly rare, increasingly vagrant thoughts. It would be challenging, for instance, for a native Czech speaker to fully appreciate the words poop or friggin’, or the phrase “We’re pregnant,” or “What’s the takeaway?” Or, for that matter, awesome when it only means “tolerable.” Or preemie or mentee or legacy. Or no problem when you really mean “You’re welcome.” Likewise, soft landing, sibs, bond, hydrate (when it just means “drink”), make art, share, reach out, noise used as a verb, and… apropos of Magic One-Oh-Seven: F-Bomb. Fuck, to me, is still pretty serviceable as a noun, verb, or adjective, with clear and distinct colorations to its already rich history. Language imitates the public riot, the poet said. And what’s today’s life like, if not a riot?

YESTERDAY, JUST PAST EIGHT, AN UNEXPECTED PHONE call disrupted my morning. My wife, Sally, answered but got me out of bed to talk. I’d been lying awake in the early sunlight and shadows, daydreaming about the possibility that somewhere, somehow, some good thing was going on that would soon affect me and make me happy, only I didn’t know it yet. Since I took leave of the real-estate business (after decades), anticipation of this kind is the thing I keenly miss. Though it’s the only thing, given how realty matters have gone and all that’s happened to me. I am content here in Haddam, aged sixty-eight, enjoying the Next Level of life — conceivably the last: a member of the clean-desk demographic, freed to do unalloyed good in the world, should I choose to. In that spirit, I travel once a week up to Newark Liberty with a veterans’ group, to greet the weary, puzzled, returning troopers home-cycling-in from Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t truly credit this as a “commitment” or a true “giving back,” since it’s hardly inconvenient to stand smiling, hand outstretched, loudly declaring, “Welcome home, soldier (or sailor or airman)! Thank you for your service!” It’s more grandstanding than serious, and mostly meant to demonstrate that we’re still relevant, and thus is guaranteed to prove we’re not. In any case, my personal sensors are on alert for more I can do that’s positive with my end-of-days’ time — known otherwise as retirement.

“Frank? It’s Arnie Urquhart,” a gruff, male, too-loud telephone voice crackled through distant girdering, automotive-traffic noises. Somewhere in the background was music — Peter, Paul & Mary singing “Lemon Tree” from faraway ’65. “Le-mun tree, ve-ry pritty / and the lemun flower is sweet…” Where I was standing in my pajamas, staring out the front window as the Elizabethtown Water meter-reader strode up the front walk to check on our consumption, my mind fled back to the face of ultra-sensual Mary—cruel-mouthed, earthy, blond hair slashing, her alto-voiced promise of no-nonsense coitus you’d renounce all dignity for, while knowing full well you wouldn’t make the grade. A far cry from how she ended life years on — muu-muu’d and unrecognizable. (Which one of the other two was the weenie-waver? One moved to Maine.) “… but the fruit of the poor lemun is im-poss-i-bul to eat…”

“Turn something down, Arnie,” I said through the noise-clutter to wherever Arnie was on the planet. “I can’t hear you.”

“Oh yeah. Okay.” A slurping wind-noise of glass being powered closed. Poor Mary went silent as the stone she’s buried under.

The connection was clearer, then went vacant a long moment. I don’t talk to people on the phone that much anymore.

“Why do weathermen all wish for a fuckin’ sunny day?” Arnie said, now at a distance from the phone. He’d put me on speaker and seemed to be talking out of the past.

“It’s in their DNA,” I said from my front window.

“Yep, yep.” Arnie sighed a great rattling sigh. Cars were audibly whizzing past wherever he was.

“Where are you, Arnie?”

“Pulled over on the goddamned Garden State, by Cheesequake. Heading down to Sea-Clift, or whatever the fuck’s left of it.”

“I see,” I said. “How’s your house?”

“Do you see, Frank? Well, I’m glad you fuckin’ see.”

Back in the bonanza days of the now-popped realty bubble, I sold Arnie not just a house, but my house. In Sea-Clift. A tall, glass-and-redwood, architect-design beach palace, flush up against what seemed to be a benign and glimmering sea. Anybody’s dream of a second home. I saw to it Arnie coughed up a pretty penny (two-point-eight, no “vig” on a private sale). Sally and I had decided to move inland. I was ready to take down my shingle. It was eight years ago, this fall — two weeks before Christmas, like now.

In my defense, I’d made several calls up to Arnie’s principal residence in Hopatcong, to learn how his/my beach house had weathered the storm. I’d called several old clients, including my former realty partner. All their news was bad, bad, bad. In Haddam, Sally and I lost only two small oak saplings (one already dead), half the roof on her potting shed, plus a cracked windshield on my car. “A big nothing,” as my mother used to say, before making a pppttt farting noise with her lips and laughing out loud.

“I called you, probably three times, Arnie,” I said, feeling the curdling, giddy sensation of being a liar — though I’m not, not about this.

The Elizabethtown guy gave me the thumbs-up as he headed out to his truck. Our water usage for November — not a problem.

“That’s like calling the corpse to say you’re sorry he’s dead.” Arnie’s speaker-phone voice faded out and in from Cheesequake. “What were you going to suggest, Frank? Take me to lunch? Buy your house back? There’s no fuckin’ house left down there, you jackass.”

I didn’t have an answer. Patent gestures of kindness, commiseration, fellow-feeling, shared sorrow and empathy — all are weak sisters in the fight against real loss. I’d only wanted to know the worst hadn’t happened — which, I saw, it hadn’t. Though Sea-Clift was where the big blow had come ashore like Dunkirk. No chance to dodge a bullet.

“I’m not blaming you, Frank. That’s not why I’m on the blower here.” Arnie Urquhart is an ancient Michigan Wolverine like me. Class of ’68. Hockey. Rhodes finalist. Lambda Chi. Navy Cross. We all talked like that in those breezy, troubled days. The blower. The crapper. The Z-machine. The libes. The gazoo. Boogies. Gooks. Hogans… it’s a wonder any of us were ever allowed to hold a paying job. Arnie owns and runs — or did — a carriage-trade seafood boutique in north Jersey and has made a mint selling shad roe, Iranian caviar, and imported Black Sea delicacies the FDA doesn’t know about — all of it delivered in unidentifiable, white panel trucks — to Schlumberger execs for exclusive parties no one hears about, including President Obama, who wouldn’t be invited, since in the high-roller Republicans’ view, chitlins’ and hog-maws wouldn’t be on the menu.

“How can I help, Arnie?” I was watching the Elizabethtown truck motor away down Wilson Lane. Clients’ first target of opportunity when a home sale goes sour — no matter when — is almost always the realtor, whose intentions are almost always good.

“I’m on my way down there now, Frank. Some Italian piece of shit called me up at home. Wants to buy the lot and the house — whatever’s left of it — for five hundred grand. I need some advice. You got any?” More cars whizzing.

“I’m not using any of mine, Arnie,” I said. “What’s the situation down there?”

I, of course, knew. We’d all seen it on CNN, then seen it and seen it and seen it ’til we didn’t care anymore. Nagasaki-by-the-sea — with the Giants and Falcons just a tempting channel click away.

“You’ll get a kick out of it, Frank,” Arnie said, disembodied in his car. “Where is it you live now?”

“Haddam.” Sally had come to the door from the kitchen in her yoga clothes, holding a tea mug to her lips, breathing steam away, looking at me as if she’d heard something distressing and I should possibly hang up.

A loud truck-horn blare cracked the silence where Arnie was. “Ass Hole,” Arnie shouted. “Haddam. Okay. Nice place. Or it was once.” Arnie bumped something against the speaker. “My house—your house — is sixty yards inland now, Frank. On its side — if it had a side. The neighbors are all worse off. The Farlows tried to ride it out in their safe room. They’re goners. The Snedikers made a run for it at the last minute. Ended up in the bay. Barb and I were at Lake Sunapee at my son’s. We watched it. I saw my house on TV before I saw it in person.”

“I guess that could be good news.”

Arnie didn’t respond.

“What d’you want me to do, Arnie?”

“I’m driving down to meet the cocksuckers. Flip companies. You heard of them? Speculators.” Arnie had started speaking in some kind of tough-guy, Jersey gangster growl.

“I heard about them.” I’d read about it all in the Times.

“So you see the whole deal. I need your advice, Frank. You used to be honest.”

“I’ve been out of the realty business a while, Arnie. My license is expired. All I know is what I read in the newspaper.”

“It’ll make you more reliable. Take away the profit motive. I’m not planning to shoot you, if you’re worried about that.”

“I hadn’t quite gotten to there, Arnie.” Though I had. It had already happened. Once in Ortley Beach, once in Sea Girt. Listing agents shot sitting at their desks, typing out offer sheets.

“So. Are you gonna show up? I could say you owe me.” Another truck’s withering horn went blasting past. “Jesus. These fucks. I’m gonna get killed out here. So?”

“Okay, I’ll come,” I said, just to get Arnie off the road shoulder and on to the scene of destruction.

“Eleven o’clock tomorrow. At the house,” Arnie said. “Or where it used to be. You might recognize it. I’m driving a silver Lexus.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Are we gonna have NHL this year, Frank?” Hockey. Destruction’s great leveler.

“I haven’t really kept up, Arnie.”

“The shit-for-brains players,” Arnie said. “They got the best deal they’ll ever get. Now they’ll have to settle for less. Sound familiar?” As always, Arnie was on management’s side. “Hail to the Victors, Frank.”

“Champions of the West, Arnie.”

“Mañana en la mañana.” Which seemed to be how Arnie said thanks.

OUT ON LITTLE LEAGUE WORLD CHAMPIONS BOULEVARD, Toms River, nothing looks radically changed stormwise. In a purely retinal sense, the barrier island across the bay has done its god-given work for the inland communities, though much lies in ruins here, back in the neighborhoods. Traffic is anemic along the once — Miracle Mile, headed toward the bridge. It’s plain, though, that Toms River has claimed some survivor’s cred. A beardless Santa sits on a red plastic milk crate in front of the Launch Pad coffee hut (he’s clearly a Mexican), a red, printed-cardboard sign resting against his knee. COFFEE GIVES YOU COURAGE. FELIZ NAVIDAD. I wave, but he only stares back, as if I might be giving him the finger. Farther on, the Free At Last Bail Bonds has only a single car parked in front, as do a couple of boxy, asbestos-sided bars set back in the gravel lots. Days were — before The Shore got re-discovered and prices went nuts — you could drive over from Pottstown, take the kids and your honeybee for a weekend, and get away for a couple hundred. All that’s a dream now, even after the storm. A big sign — part of its message torn off by the winds — advertises the Glen Campbell Good-bye Tour. Half of Glen’s smiling, too-handsome face remains, a photo from the ’60s — before Tanya and the boozing and the cocaine. A paper placard in front of one of the bars — stolen off someone’s lawn after the election — has been re-purposed and instead of “Obama-Biden” now announces, “We’re Back. So Fuck You, Sandy.”

Driving, I’ve got Copland’s Fanfare filling the interior space at ten thirty. I bought the whole oeuvre online. As always, I’m stirred by the opening oboes giving ground to the strings then the kettle drums and the double basses. It’s a high-sky morning in Wyoming. Joel McCrea’s galloping across a windy prairie. Barbara Britton, fresh from Vermont, stands out front of their sodbuster cabin. Why is he so late? Is there trouble? What can I do, a woman alone? I’ve worn out three disks this fall. Almost any Copland (today it’s the Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by some Israeli) can persuade me on almost any given day that I’m not just any old man doing something old men do: driving to the grocery for soy milk, visiting the periodontist, motoring to the airport to greet young soldiers — sometimes against their wills. It doesn’t take much to change my perspective on a given day — or a given moment, or a given anything. Sally slipped a Copland in my Christmas stocking a year ago (Billy the Kid), and it’s had positive effects. I bought The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there — though I need to.

I haven’t had time to look up Arnie Urquhart’s home-sale paperwork from ’04—whether he financed, if he took a balloon, or just peeled bills off a fat wad. I, of course, ought to remember the transaction, since it was my house, and I pocketed the dough — used to finance our house in Haddam, with plenty left over. Though like a lot of things I should do, I often don’t. It’s not true that as you get older things slide away like molasses off a table top. What is true is I don’t remember some things that well, owing to the fact that I don’t care all that much. I now wear a cheap Swatch watch, but I do sometimes lose the handle on the day of the month, especially near the end and the beginning, when I get off-track about “thirty days hath September…” This, I believe, is normal and doesn’t worry me. It’s not as if I put my trousers on backwards every morning, tie my shoelaces together, and can’t find my way to the mailbox. My only persistent bother is an occasionally painful subluxation (a keeper word) in my C-3 and C-4. It causes me to feel “Rice Krispies” in my neck, plus an ache when I twist back and forth, so that I don’t do that as much. I fear it may be restricting signals to my brain. My orthopedist at Haddam Medical, Dr. Zippee (a Pakistani and a prime asshole), asked if I wanted him to order up “some blood work” to find out if I’m a candidate for Alzheimer’s. (It made him gleeful to suggest this.) “Thanks, but I guess not,” I said, standing in his tiny green cubicle in a freezing-ass, flower-print examination gown. “I’m not sure what I’d do with the information.” “You’d probably forget it,” he said, gloating. He’s also told me that a usually unobserved vertical crease down the earlobe is a “good marker” for heart disease. I, of course, have one, though it isn’t deep — which I hope is a positive sign.

My view of the “Big A,” though — should I ever have it — is that it quickly becomes its own comfort zone and is not as bad as it’s billed. Dr. Zippee, who attended med school in Karachi and interned down at Hopkins, travels back to the old country every winter to work in a madrassa (whatever that is). He complains to me that America, in its vengeful zeal to run the world, has ruined life where he came from; that the Taliban started out as good guys who were on our side. But now, thanks to us, the streets aren’t safe at night. I tell him, to me Pakistanis and Indians are the same people, like Israelis and Arabs, and northern and southern Irishmen. Religion’s just their excuse to maim and incinerate each other — otherwise they’d die of boredom. “Awesome,” he says and laughs like a chimp. He’s recently bought a cottage on Mount Desert and hopes soon to leave New Jersey behind. In his view, life is about pain management, and I need to do a better job managing mine.

Copland’s soaring as I make it out onto the bridge. Barnegat Bay, this morning, is a sea of sequins the wind plays over, with the long island and Seaside Heights out ahead, appearing, in a moment of spearing sunlight, to be unchanged. Gulls are towering. A few tiny numbered sails are dimpling far out on a gusty land breeze. The temperature’s topped out at thirty-five. You’d need to be a show-off to be on the water. I’m certain I’m dressed too lightly, though I’m elated to be back at The Shore, even to face disaster. Our true emotions are never conventional.

An Air-Tran — one of the old vibrator 737s — is just nosing up from Atlantic City into the low, gray ceiling, full of sleepy gamblers, headed back to Milwaukee. I can make out the lowercase “a” on its tail, as it disappears into the fog off the ocean side where my old house once sat, but apparently sits no more.

LATER YESTERDAY MORNING, AFTER I SPOKE TO Arnie, Sally came downstairs to where I was eating my All-Bran, and stood staring, musing through the window into the back yard at the late-autumn squirrel activity. I was pleased to be thinking nothing worth recording, not about Arnie Urquhart, just breathing to the cadence of my chews. After a while of not speaking, she sat down across from me, holding a book I’d noticed her reading late into the night — her light stayed on after I’d gone to sleep, then was switched off, then on again later. It’s not unusual for people our age.

“I read this shocking thing last night.” She held the book she’d been engrossed by, clutched to her yoga shirt. Her eyes were intent. She seemed worried. I couldn’t make out the book’s spine but understood she meant to tell me about it.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Well.” She pursed her lips. “Back in 1862, right when the Civil War was in full swing, the U.S. Cavalry had time to put down an Indian revolt in Minnesota. Did you know that?”

“I did,” I said. “The Dakota uprising. It’s pretty famous.”

“Okay. You know about it. I didn’t.”

“I know some things,” I said and stared down at a banana slice.

“Okay. But. In December of 1862, our government hanged thirty-eight Sioux warriors on one big scaffold. Just did it all at once.”

“That’s famous, too,” I said. “Supposedly they’d massacred eight hundred white people. Not that that’s an excuse.”

Sally took in a breath and turned her head away in a manner to indicate a tear she didn’t want seen might be wobbling out of her eyes. “But do you know what they said?” These words were nearly choked with throat-clogging emotion.

“What who said?”

“The Indians. They all began shouting out as they were standing on the gallows, waiting to drop and never speak again.”

I didn’t know. But I looked up to let her understand I realized this was important to her, and that the next thing she said would be important to me. Possibly my spoon had paused on its upward arc toward my mouth. I may have shaken my head in amazement.

“They all shouted, ‘I’m here!’ They started calling that out in their Sioux language, all around that awful contraption that was about to kill them. People who heard it said it was awe-inspiring.” (Not awesome.) “No one ever forgot it. Then they hanged them. All of them. At one moment. ‘I’m here.’ As if that made it all right for them. Made death tolerable and less awful. It gave them strength.” Sally shook her head. Her tear of anguish for long-ago 1862 did not emerge. She held her book tight to her front and smiled at me mournfully, across the glass-topped table where I’ve eaten possibly three thousand breakfasts. “I just thought you’d want to know about that. I’m sorry to ruin your breakfast.”

“I’m glad to know about it, sweetheart,” I said. “It didn’t ruin my breakfast at all.”

“I’m here,” she said and seemed to embarrass herself.

“So am I,” I said.

And with those words she got up, came around the square table, kissed me once on my forehead, still embarrassed, then went away, carrying her book back to where she’d come from in the house.

MIDWAY ON THE BRIDGE, HEADED ACROSS TO DARKEST Seaside Heights, where who knows what awaits me (heartstrings plucked, outrage, wronged rectitude, and all that’s right corrupted), I realize there’s nothing I can really do for Arnie Urquhart’s domiciliary suffering, or to make things jake. Jake’s already blown out the window and all but forgotten, from what I’ve seen on TV. And yet: you bear some responsibility to another human you sell a house to. Not a financial one. Conceivably not a moral one. But one in which, even rarer, the professional and human operate on a single set of rails. A priestly, vocational responsibility. Though for all I know, Arnie might just as easily feel relief that his house is an ass-over-teacups total loss. It may have been just the thing he’d lain in bed and dreamed about — like the day you sell your vintage, lap-sided Lyman in-board: the runner-up best day of your life, after the day you bought it. Second-house ownership is often like that. People know they’re going to rue the day long before they sign the papers — but they do it anyway. Arnie may just be pretending to mourn. After all, he now owns a hunk of prime, undeveloped oceanfront — even if the taxes stay high. He can sit tight and wait for destiny — assuming anybody ever wants oceanfront again.

Though what I sense with my ex-realtor’s brain is that Arnie may simply want me to take the trouble to be there — to be his witness. It’s what the Christers all long for, dawn to dusk. It’s why there are such things as “best men,” “pallbearers,” “godfathers,” “invitees to an execution.” Everything’s more real if two can see it. A flying saucer. A Sasquatch. The face of the Redeemer in an oil smear at Jiffy Lube. And today I’m willing to say “I’m here” to whoever can hear me, and for whatever good it might do for man or beast.

AN UNUSUAL SIGHT GREETS ME AS I CURVE DOWN off the bridge into what used to be Seaside Heights (Central Ave., north to Ortley Beach, south to Sea-Clift). A New Jersey State Police command-post trailer has been hauled across the roadway to block unauthorized vehicles. Sawhorses are piled against Jersey barriers, red and silver flashers spinning on a striped trooper car that’s parked alongside — everything but razor wire and a machine-gun nest — beyond which the wound of the storm’s destruction assaults my eye. Up Central, toward my old office, as far as I can see along the beach side of the avenue, civic life has sustained a fierce whacking — house roofs sheared off, exterior walls stripped away, revealing living rooms full of furniture, pictures on bed tables, closets stuffed with clothes, stoves and refrigerators standing out white for all to see. Other houses are simply gone altogether. Great, heaping Mount Trashmores (one with a Christmas tree on top), piled with building debris, dirt, sand, ruined Halloween decorations, auto fenders, cabinets, toilets, mailboxes — all that could be bashed into and blown to smithereens — have risen on every corner. Awaiting what, it’s not clear. Meanwhile, a god’s own lot of human activity’s underway beneath the mottled sky, up the avenue and down the side-leading residential streets, ocean to bay. Much of it, I see, is police activity — large men in SWAT-team garb, and National Guard troopers in desert issue, their tiny lethal riflery strapped to their chests, patrolling. There are State Health vans with workers in white hazmat suits. Power-line people are here with cherry pickers (they come in convoys from Texas and Minnesota, and won’t be kept away). As well, there’re trucks of every species — Datsuns like the terrorists in Kabul use, new F-150s, raised Dodge muscle rigs, all the way to elephant-size dumpers and decommissioned garbage scows — conscripted to get destruction, pain, the memory of pain and destruction, up, out and away and into some landfill in Elizabeth like the 9/11 remains. Nothing’s livable or OPEN. There’s no power. A carpet of ocean and beach sand has been driven up onto the streets and yards and under all the ruined cars, as if The Shore in a single night had turned into Riyadh. It’s a post-combat zone, though in its own way perfectly pacific and orderly. I expect to see buzzards circling in the misty air. Though instead, a squadron of brown pelicans floats along the beachfront, seeking something familiar or edible or both.

In all, there’s the palpable, ghostly urge to “put back” what was. Though, in my view — just arriving — it’s too bad it can’t be left as it is a bit longer, like a ghost that goes on spooking. Decades ago, in my unsatisfactory Marine Corps tour, a few of us privates were dispatched as forward observers from Camp Pendleton down to Ensenada, to surveil enemy buildup in the local bordellos and mescalerias. At the time, I noticed it was impossible to discern if the tumbled-down Mexican buildings we passed were actually tumbled down or half tumbled up, with new residents waiting somewhere offstage. Ortley Beach — what I can see of it now — looks that way, as I’m sure do all the once-sparkling beach towns north and south: locked into a moment of indecisiveness between being and not being. I once made a handsome living off this patch of now-salted earth. I should be able to envision the grains of possibility in what’s left of it. But for the moment, I cannot.

LOOTERS BEWARE! A SIGN ON THE SHOULDER OF THE exit curve warns all who’d enter and do ill. A skull ’n’ crossbones has been painted on in red to drive the point home. CURFEW 6 PM THIS MEANS U! fills out the space to make it personal. A forest of other signs is sprouted around like political yard art, announcing, WE’LL BUY YOUR HOUSE (OR WHAT’S LEFT OF IT). MARTELLO BROTHERS — REFUSE HAULING. HABLA INGLES — RAPIDO! LEARN GRIEF COUNSELING IN TEN DAYS. FAST MOLD REMOVAL. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. WRITERS’ COOPERATIVE. NRA ICE-BREAKER AT THE TOMS RIVER HAMPTON INN. A DRUNK DRIVER KILLED MY DAUGHTER. FLOW YOGA. TANTRIC SEX WORKSHOP. FIRST RESPONDERS SPAGHETTI SUPPER. One sign merely says NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS (for victims with a liberal arts degree).

As I nose up to the command-post trailer, Copland turned off, a policeman steps out a side door down to the sandy pavement. No one’s permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor). But I’m in luck. The cop, hiking up his heavy cop belt and situating his blue hat on his big cop head, is a man I know. It is Corporal Alyss of the Sea-Clift PD. Years back, I sold his house in Seaside Park when he was a rookie and his family size suddenly doubled, requiring a bigger, cheaper place — in Silverton.

Palm forward, Officer Alyss transforms himself now into a human Jersey-barrier, warning off looters, unauthorized rubberneckers, and sneakers-in like me. When I buzz down my window, he comes round to utter his discouraging words, big right hand rested on his big black Glock. He’s much larger than the last time I saw him. Portland concrete seems to have been added to his shape and size, in-uniform. He doesn’t quite move naturally — fully Kevlar’d with heavy, combat footwear as thick as moon boots, plus his waist-harness of black-leather cop gear: scorch-your-eyes perpetrator spray, silver cuffs, a walkie-talkie as big as a textbook, a head-knocking baton in a metal loop, extra ammo clips, a row of black snap-closed compartments that could hold most anything, plus a pair of sinister black gloves. He is the Michelin man of first responders, his police ball cap with gold insignia beetled down to his eyebrows. I want to laugh, since he’s a sweetie at heart. But he’s too uncomfortable not to be sympathized with. In any case, laughing at the police is a prime misstep in New Jersey.

“Okay, sir. I just need you to…” Corporal Alyss begins his “just-turn-’er-around-and-head-your-ass-on-back-across-the bridge” spiel. As I suspected, he’s not seen me properly. Though a sneaky smile’s awakening, and he shifts his big face to the side, leaning toward my window, like a kid (a big kid). “All right. All right,” he says, his smile breaking through, becoming in an instant the jolliest of gendarmes. I’m outed as a friendly. (He takes plenty of ribbing about his name — Alyss/Alice — and has clearly grown into his job.) His big Ukrainian earlobes, I notice — fat, pendulous, and pink — do not have the hint of a crease. He obviously lacks a care in the world. All his needs are met with his tidy Silverton family, a badge, and a gun. “I guess you’re down here to teach us all how smart you are to get out when you did,” he says. He’s beaming, his big, blue Slavic eyes wide and intense as he peers in and around inside my car. He is only thirty-five, played tight end at Rider, then spent a year in Ecuador on his Pentecostal mission, bullying the natives into accepting Jesus. His old man was a beat cop in Newark and paid “the ultimate price.” You get to know such things in the realty business. His wife, Berta, was one of the nurses who looked after me when I got shot and stayed a long time in the hospital.

“I’m just going down to counsel an old client, Pete. His house got blown away.” No need to tell him it was my house. Just the facts, here.

“Yeah, well, tell me about it,” Corporal Alyss says, his smile fading. He is not a handsome boy — all his features way too big, too pink, too fleshy — a cross between a Minnesota farmer and one of his animals. He’s lucky to have a wife. His little shoulder microphone sputters, but emits no voice. Even though he might not say it — and though he himself moved years ago — it probably rankles him that I moved away. “Your old office is an empty lot,” he says. “Back wall just blew in.” He’s all police business-y now, as if some training session he’s sat through has flashed up into his thick head. Our friendship is paling.

“I heard,” I say up through the window. Chill air has rushed in, carrying sour odors of ocean and diesel and Corporal A’s leather rigging. Another cop, a black, hatless NJ state trooper in jodhpurs, has appeared at the trailer door, watching us gravely. He takes note of my license plate, then steps back inside, where they’re probably playing hearts. “Did you guys survive okay,” by which I mean him and his brood.

“Just lost our electric. Some roof coping,” he says soberly, extending his lip. “Nothing like down here. Insurance won’t pay ours either, though. Ours is supposedly wind, not water.” He inserts a big thumb knuckle into his ear canal for a scratch, cocks his mouth awry, while his other hand rests on his police issue. He’s most at ease not moving. “The wife’s having repetitive thought patterns. Just worrying, you know?” He’s forgotten I know her and know her name. All is policing to police. The rest of the world is like groceries on the shelf.

“I guess it’s natural.”

“Oh yeah.” He looks confident and says nothing more, as he thinks about what’s “natural” and what’s not.

“Okay if I drive on down to Poincinet Road?” I try to act like I’ve already been there twenty times and am going back to resume whatever I was doing before.

“That’s all changed down there,” he said. “The storm, and before the storm. You prolly won’t recognize it. But yeah. Just be careful.” He takes his thumb out of his ear and wipes his nose with it, then backs away from my car door. He produces a tiny red notebook from his flak-vest pocket, and with a ballpoint notes down my license number. “I’ll write you down in case you get in there, and we never see you again. We’ll know who to call.” He smiles at his note-taking. He is a mystery — even for all that’s plain about him. It’s not easy to balance his life: one minute friendly; one minute a hostage situation; and all the time in between longing to be home with the kids, cooking brats on the Weber and smiling at the day.

“Great,” I say. “I’ll be safe.”

“No worries.” (… On my inventory; a two-word misnomer meaning “You’re absolutely welcome. I’m really glad to be able to assist you. After all, we seek each other in these dire times. So know that I’m thinking about you. And do be safe.”) No worries is maybe better.

I run my window back up. Corporal Alyss steps farther back, drags the NJSP sawhorse to the left, waves me through past the skull ’n’ bones and the message from Ozymandias. I give him my two-hand fellowship wave and drive on. His back is already to me. He’s forgetting I exist. I’m here. He’s here. But, in another sense, we’re not.

SEA-CLIFT, WHEN I DRIVE SOUTH ON CENTRAL, gives to the world the sad look of having taken a near-fatal punch in the nose. Power poles are mostly up but lacking wires. Sand has eddied up over everything low-down. Houses — even the now-and-then ones that look unscathed — seem stunned to stillness. Roofs, windows, front stoops, exterior walling, garages, boats shrink-wrapped in blue polypropylene — all look as if a giant has strode out of the gray sea and kicked the shit out of everything. Here are all places where people have lived. And not just smarty-pants, foggy-shuttered summer renters who stay ninety days past Memorial Day, but a sturdy corps of old-time “Clift-dwellers” plus happy retirees, alongside an older echelon of hedge-fund, coupon clippers who’ve bought in since the ’70s and call it “home.” Each in his own way patronizes the pizzerias, the mom-and-pops, the car-repairs, the Chinese takeout, the fried-seafood eateries where the TV’s never off in the bar and a booth’s always waiting. A bracing atmosphere of American faux egalitarianism long has reigned here — which drew me two decades back, when I moved down from Haddam. I arrived when seven hundred thousand still meant seven hundred thousand and could buy you a piece of heaven. With Sally Caldwell as my helpmate I couldn’t have been happier.

All that life has now been poleaxed and strewn around like hay-straw, so that even a hardened disaster-tourist who sees opportunity in everything would have to ask himself: “What can you do with this now? Let it settle back to nature? Walk away and come back in a year or ten? Move to Nova Scotia? Shoot yourself?”

Here, too, the morning’s bustling with cleanup-removal-and-teardown, line re-stringing, front-loader and backhoe operations. Citizens are about — though many are just standing, hands-on-hips staring at their ruined abodes. As Corporal Alyss has said, it’s easy to see how a person could drive down on a reconnoitering mission and simply never show up again; as if calamity had left a hole in the world on the rim of which everything civilized and positive-tending teeters — spirits, efforts, hopes, dreams, memories… buildings, for sure — all in jeopardy of spiraling down and down. I do, in fact, feel smart for having gotten out when the getting was good. Though when you sell a house where you’ve been happy, it’s never that you’re smart. In all such moves one feels the bruise of defeat.

At the end of Central, where my house sat, there was never an actual street, just a sign — Poincinet Road — and a rough beachfront sand track and five large, grandfathered residences, with the ocean and pearlescent beach stretching out front, the way you’d dream it. Nothing between you and paradise but fucking Portugal. It’s now become an actual street — or had been before the climatological shit train pulled in. I see no sign of Arnie or his Lexus as I turn down the sanded-over asphalt. Though as attested, my former home, number seven — once a tall, light-strewn, board ’n’ batten ’n’ glass beach dazzler — lies startlingly up to the left (not right), washed backwards off its foundation, boosted topsy-turvy across the asphalt, turned sideways, tupped on its side against the grassy-sandy beach berm, and (by water, wind, and the devil’s melee) ridded of its roof. Its back-side exterior wall where I once entered through a red door (gone) is stripped of its two-car garage and torn free of interior fittings (pipes, re-bar, electric), the dangling filaments of which along with whatever else ever connected it to the rest of the world, hanging limp from the house’s exposed “bottom,” which you used not to be able to see. The blond-brick chimney’s gone — though not the stone fireplace, which I can make out in the ripped-open living room. The banistered outside steps have disappeared. The panoramic deck, where I spent happy nights gazing at constellations I couldn’t identify, is bent down and clinging to the broken superstructure by lug bolts I dutifully tightened each fall. What was then glass is now gaping. Studs show through the “open plan” where, in years past, transpired sweet, murmurous late nights with Sally, or merry drinks’ evenings with some old Michigan chum who’d shown up unexpected with a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé… where life went on, in other words.

The poured gray foundation is what’s left intact — a surprisingly small rectangular pit with a partial set of wooden steps going nowhere. The big Trane heat pump’s in place in the dank water that’s collected. But everything else in the “basement”—bicycles, hope chests, old uniforms, generations of shoes, wine racks, busted suitcases someone’s father owned, boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff you should’ve gotten rid of decades ago — all that’s been sucked up and blown away to some farmer’s field in Lakehurst, to be found, possibly returned, or else put in a museum to commemorate the awesomeness of mother nature when she gets it in her head to fuck with you.

All four other houses down Poincinet are simply missing, leaving only vacant cellars like my old place. Though opening up the space these houses so recently occupied has reconfigured a new pretty vista — ocean and beach the way they used to be, time immemorial. A lone fisherman in hip waders is visible, casting for stripers with his long pole to the incoming tide. He’s dressed in a bulky cable-knit, heavy gloves, and an orange watch cap, and doesn’t seem to have caught anything. Out at sea, between the land and the fog bank, an unmeasurable distance from where I’m sitting behind the wheel, a great white cruise ship — a wallowing twelve-decker — sits motionless against the gray. Carnival, Princess, Norwegian — one of those. I have a feeling passengers are at the rails, scoping out what used to be New Jersey, taking snaps with their phones and shooting them back to Ashtabula and Boise, as they ply their way toward Great Abaco. I’m not so certain they’re empathetic to our lives ashore.

I, though, am struck by something I’ve never thought before — even in my role as residential specialist, seeking shelter for those in need. And it is… what little difference a house makes once it’s gone. How effortlessly, almost sweetly, the world re-asserts its claim and becomes itself again. People wring their hands and cry bloody murder when a garish new structure rises and casts its ugly shadow; or when a parking lot behind the Pathway paves over the sacred midden of the lost Lenape or a wetland where herons nested and ducks stopped to rest. As if these evils last forever. They don’t. All may not be vanity (though plenty is); but nothing’s here to stay. There’s something to be said for a good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective. It’s always worthy of our notice when we don’t feel precisely the way we thought we would. Easy to say, of course, since I don’t live here anymore.

Up the beach, opened by the absence of what were people’s houses, the sight line stretches all the way up to Ortley Beach and beyond, to where the old roller-coaster bones sit marooned in seawater. Two tiny, faraway figures are walking a dog along the surf’s lap. A front loader — I hear its distant beeping through my open window — is slowly returning sand to the beach from the blanketed streets. I hear — over the berm, out of sight — the clatter of hammers striking wood, and the cheerful hum of Spanish. How strange life is. One day Reynoso, the next Sea-Clift. “Oh, jes,” one of them shouts (they’re English speakers now). “It’s cunt sniff.” At least I think that’s what the words say. Frolicsome musical notes rise from their radio and over the berm top. They’re gutting or hauling or de-molding someone’s dream home, no doubt wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves against the spores. “Sí, sí, sí pero. Hees husband ees a Navy SEAL.” “Pendejo!” someone answers. “Sex can’t be zhat good. Comprendes?” They all laugh. Good luck is infectious.

But where’s Arnie? Am I stood up? About to be ambushed from a Lexus parked at a distance? People distrust realtors in a climate of disaster. We’re wildcards in the human deck, always filling out a winning hand. Though not me. Not now.

My stomach, however, has begun skirling around and ker-clunking. I should’ve bought cashews back at the Hess. It’s almost eleven. My All-Bran is barely recollectable. I put a stick of spearmint in my mouth and let it calm things. Whether you wear falsies or not (I don’t), whether you’ve been eating garlic or onions or pizza or choucroute garnie and brush your teeth eight times a day, being “older” makes you worry that you reek like a monkey’s closet. Sally assures me I don’t, that she’d give me “the signal.” But if the machine’s winding down, its parts start to fester. I’ve lately begun brushing my tongue morning, noon, and night, since the tongue’s the petri dish for every sort of rankness. In general, it’s fair to say that as you get older you experience a complexer relationship with the ongoing — which seems at odds with how it should be.

I wait in my car, chewing, beside the ruins of my house. There’s no reading matter available. I’ve left the Times at home. Here’s only a pamphlet Dr. Zippee amusedly gave me, depicting the exercise routine for relieving movement-inhibiting neck pain. Cartoons show a little round-headed stick figure rotating his bubble head and smiling to exhibit the golden way to neck happiness. In other squares he’s displaying a mouth-down frown to show the “wrong way”—that leads to traction, invasive surgery-through-the-throat, painkillers, Betty Ford, if not all the way to Rahway. I do feel new Rice Krispies at shoulder level, which makes me wrangle my neck around. Tension’s the culprit; the tension of Arnie Urquhart not goddamn being here like he said he would.

The only other reading material in my car is a copy of We Salute You, the publication we volunteers put into the hand of each Iraq and Afghanistan returnee the moment after we shake that hand and declare “Welcome home! Thank you for your service!” We Salute You is a useful cache of vital information pertaining to anything the home-leave soldier might need, want, or encounter in the first six hours stateside (assuming no one’s meeting him or her, as surprisingly happens much of the time). We Salute You is printed by a cabal of right-wing, freedom-forum loonies out in Ohio, who nonetheless manage to do a damn good job because they don’t stuff our magazine with any of the gun-control-anti-abortion-back-to-the-stone-age bullshit they do put in their regular anti-Obama mailings. I know, because these publications came to my house, until I made a complaint with the Post Office, after which they still came, right through the election — though by now the crackpot Ohioans might’ve concluded their message didn’t get through.

We Salute You is printed for each U.S. port of troop entry — L.A., New York — Newark, Boston, Houston, Seattle, even Detroit. It’s twenty gray newsprint pages (an online edition’s in the works) full of important phone numbers, e-mail and postal addresses for whatever geographical area the trooper or marine or airman first puts a foot down on home soil. Panic attack, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse helpline numbers are included. Veteran-friendly taxi companies. Directions to transportation hubs. Numbers to purchase a phone card. Every church you can think of, including Muslims, atheists, and Agnostics Anonymous. All these numbers are, of course, obtainable by anyone — though not in such an easy, free-of-charge, depoliticized format. There’s also plenty of less expectable info. Clean Vietnamese massage boutiques. Outfitters for mule pack-ins to the Sierras. A clearinghouse for online sites to help you find a former girlfriend who’s abandoned you. Chat-line numbers dealing with revenge issues. Private phone numbers of all U.S. congressmen and senators. Sites for how to buy Cuban cigars and condoms by the gross. There’s an LGBT strength-in-numbers line. Even a number for a Socrates Death-With-Dignity support league, where psychologists with degrees from Oberlin and Macalester try to talk a soldier back from the brink while seeming to understand that death might seem the only option.

Our mission, of course, occasionally fails. One young sailor from Piscataway, three days out of Kandahar, stuffed the exhaust pipes of his Trans-Am with stolen copies of We Salute You’s and slipped the surly bonds in the Washington Crossing State Park parking lot — a note taped to the steering wheel saying “Here’s the future. Get ready for it.” There’s nothing you can do when someone’s ready to go, though possibly a handshake didn’t hurt.

MY CAR CLOCK NOW SAYS ELEVEN FIFTEEN. THE striper guy is stowing his gear in his bucket and notching his hook to his rod handle. The tide’s come in. He’s fished with his back to the mayhem ashore as if it wasn’t there.

The tiny, distant beach figures with the trotting dog alongside have come clearly into view. They turn out to be the Glucks, unsociable neighbors from when I lived here. Arthur’s a defrocked Rutgers professor (plagiarism — the usual “overlookings” and “carelessnesses”). He’s trudgering along with his plump wife, Allie Ann, and an all-but-immobilized, low-riding fat brown dog I’d have sworn they had ten years ago, which would make it eighteen. “Poot.” The Glucks, who must be in their late eighties, are preserved not much better than their dog and are walking with old-age difficulty along the tide-narrowed beach, arms looped, chins lowered, dressed like Eskimos, leaning into each other so that they look like one lumpy human package. Are they here, I wonder, to survey the ruins? Their house has vanished. Or did they get away (like me) and buy into staged-retirement in Somerville that buses them to the Whole Foods, keeps Columbia-trained M.D.s onsite 24/7, and lets them keep their ’95 Electra ’til the State takes the keys. I’d rather jump in my watery basement hole than talk to them. What rueful recognitions would glint in their beady eyes? “Oh, yes of course, Mr. Bascombe. Of course, of course, OF COURSE!” How many old acquaintances, neighbors, former teachers, fellow marines have we all caught a glimpse of in an unexpected place and dived in an alley rather than face for a second? All because: (1) We don’t want to; (2) There’s too much unsaid that doesn’t need to be said — a Chinese wall of words that would fall on top of us and we’d die; (3) We know others feel the very same way about us. We’re, most of us, the last persons anyone in his right mind wants to talk to on any given day, including Christmas.

I ease down in my seat and raise my window in case the Glucks see me. But they don’t so much as glance at my car, parked fifty meters from where their house once staunchly stood. They plod along the empty beach like specters, their dog at their knees. Where would they be going but back into the fog?

And then all of a sudden, I don’t want to be here anymore — at all. Whatever inland protections I’ve come armed with have worn away and rendered me — a target. Of loss. Of sadness. The thing I didn’t want to be and explicitly why I haven’t ventured down here in these last weeks, and shouldn’t have now. I have these sensations more than I like to admit, since they make me feel that something bad is closing in — like the advance of a shadow across a square of playground grass where I happen to be standing. When the shadow covers the last grass blade, the air goes suddenly chill and still, and all is up for me. Which will ultimately be only true. So who’d blame me for feeling it now, and here?

But I’m ready to cease and desist. Being here makes me feel guilty-without-context. Like being present when someone you know, but don’t know well, all at once falls into a pit of despair and starts blubbering, and you can’t do anything except wish the hell he or she would stop. I feel not a straw of blame for anything hereabouts, yet somehow feel implicated by everything’s dilapidation and sad future. This is more than I bargained for — much more — yet doesn’t seem actually to be anything. Just stupid, stupid, stupid. I am. Again.

Though should I just sit — motor thrumming, hoping the continental edge will re-buoy me? Should I turn on the Fanfare again (Obama used it for his Lincoln Memorial speech, where it worked)? Should I climb out into the foggy chill and have a poke round my old edifice, possibly spy something I left a decade back? A plastic laundry hamper? A bicycle pump with Bascombe painted on in red nail polish? What the fuck am I supposed to do? Anyone else would drive off. I’m worried, of course, about picking up a roof tack in my radials.

OUTSIDE MY CAR WINDOW, ARNIE URQUHART, OR A man I take to be him, stands, talking, silenced by my closed glass. (Where’s the Lexus hidden?) He’s pointing beyond the berm and the ruin of my old house — his old house — a stack of sticks rained down from the sky. Conceivably I’ve fallen into a carbon monoxide fugue. Has he been here long? Have we had our meeting already? Have I made everything right by him, the way I once did?

Arnie seems to me to be talking about the Twin Towers, which is possibly why he’s pointing north. I used to believe I could see them from my deck, though it was only clouds and light playing tricks. “It must’ve taken some real nuts to do that,” Arnie’s saying, as I lower my window. We’re suddenly very close to each other. “That huge skyscraper just coming right at you, three hundred miles a fuckin’ hour. Fascinating, really.” I can’t open my door because Arnie’s in the way. A current of damp, foggy ocean air sifts around me where I’ve been warm in here. When I was in college in Ann Arbor, I loved the cold. But no more. “We bring our disasters down to our own level, don’t we, Frank,” Arnie’s saying. “But those poor people really couldn’t. So we’re lucky down here in a way. You know?” Arnie turns toward the wrecked corpse of his house. “Remember that place? Boy, oh boy.” Out of the ocean’s hiss, a foghorn moans. Surprising it would be working when nothing else is.

“Nature always has another thing to do to us, I guess, Arnie.” It’s my best go-to Roethke line and fits most human situations. Arnie and I traded stories about poor old Ted when I sold him the house.

“Take the lively air, Frank.” Arnie says and begins walking toward the uprooted house, as if he’s abandoned all thought of me. “Climb the hell out and tell me what I’m supposed to do with this wreck.” He’s talking into the breeze. “I’d say I have a problem here, wouldn’t you?”

Arnie Urquhart is changed and changed dramatically from the last time I saw him — at the closing, a decade ago. Every year he’s sent me a Christmas card, each one with a shiny color photo showcasing several smiling, healthy-as-all-get-out humans, grouped either on a dense, oak-shaded lawn, grass as green as Augusta, a big, white, rambling red-shuttered house in the background; or the same bunch in cabana attire, tumbled together on the sand, all grins, with a sparkling ocean behind and a golden retriever front and center. I assumed the beach picture to be taken more or less where we are at present, depicting the righteous outcome of things when life goes the way it ought to. At one point a smiling brown face became part of the Christmas showcase (female, pretty, young, in some kind of ethnic or tribal costume). Then two years later that face was replaced by an even more broadly smiling blond girl who I thought (for some reason) was Russian. I might’ve noticed the change in Arnie’s looks right then, if I’d been looking closely. But I was never bored enough.

But sometime in the decade Arnie’s undergone considerable “work.” The Arnie Urquhart I sold my house to — age fifty-four — was a stout, balding, round-belly, thick-knuckled old Wolverine net-minder and only son of a crusty Eastport lobsterman. Arnie had made it off the boat on his hockey skills, then studied history and became a scholar. After graduation, he drove dutifully back to Eastport to be stern-man for his ailing pop, but got “kicked off by the ole man for my own good.” After which, he picked up an MBA at Rutgers, worked a decade in institutional provisioning, then went out with his own ideas and made a ton of money running a fancy fish boutique, catering to big-money types in Bernardsville and Basking Ridge. With his Maine-boy solidity, athlete’s doggedness, and a lifetime gnosis regarding fish, Arnie (who was a quick read) figured out that what he was selling was authenticity—his (as well as Asian Arowana and Golden Osetra). The Schlumberger and Cantor-Fitzgerald bosses all adored him. He showed up personally in the van with his sleeves rolled up, meaty forearms bared, grinning and ready to give great service at a top price. He toted trays, set out canapés, made tireless trips back to the shop, saw to it that every single fishy thing was better than perfect. He reminded his rich customers of the get-your-hands-dirty (and smelly) New England work ethic that made this republic great, powerful, and indomitable and always would, and that they’d gone to Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth to make sure they never got any closer to than the length of Arnie’s sweaty arm.

“I just shake my head, Frank,” Arnie said to me, when we were getting the house sold back in ’04. “My ole man’d drown each and every one of these cocksuckers like palsied puppies. But I like ’em. They’re my bread-and-butter. The moment they’re gone — and they will be, take my word for it — I’ll be right up there in Hopatcong with fish gunk on my hands, delivering lobsters to a whole new limo-full of boy geniuses.”

Arnie knew something about the future. How much he knew might’ve been worth something to somebody paying attention to our economy back in ’08.

What’s since then happened to Arnie appearance-wise, however, is not much short of alarming. His big face, once scuffed and divoted by a boyhood on the briny, now looks lacquered, as though he’d gone to the islands and picked up some new facial features. There’s also something strange about his hair. Arnie, like Corporal Alyss, was never a good-looking brute. And even with whatever strange resurfacings and repointings he’s gone in for, he’s no more handsome than he was, nor any younger-looking — which must’ve been the goal. He has the same snarly mouth, the same pugnacious chin, the same brick-bat forehead and too-narrow eyes and meaty ears. I’d assumed the new brown face in the Christmas photo had been a son’s young wife. But possibly she’d belonged to Arnie, who by then had made some dough and traded up from his original wife — first, for a winsome Shu-Kai, then later on for a busty Svetlana. Along the way he’d felt the need to make the old outer-Arnie keep pace with the spirited, energetic, seemingly ageless inner-essence Arnie. Whatever. His need dictated a Biden-esque transplant to replace his old Johnny-U flattop — a follicle forest that’s now grown in but will never look natural. Likewise, the center crevice between Arnie’s thick eyebrows has been paved over — the part he formerly utilized to register stare-you-down take-it-or-leave-it’s to the high dockside price of halibut and Alaskan crab claws. Plus, the old gulley-gulley of his previously pocked neck now looks the smoothed way it did in his ’68 Wolverine team picture, when he was known as “Gumper Two” and had the habit of roaring out from between the pipes and kicking your ass if he thought you needed it.

I just have to trust that the old Arnie’s in there somewhere. Though, in truth, his re-purposed “look” has left him looking compromised and a little silly and (worst of all) slightly feminized — which couldn’t have been what the doctor promised. These decisions are never a good idea.

ARNIE’S WALKED ON AWAY FROM ME AND COME TO stand in front (though also possibly to the side) of our ruined house. He’s looking up into what’s been skinned open by the wind and water — stark rooms with furniture, plumbing, appliances, ceiling fixtures, white electric harness-work sprung and dangling, giving the shambles a strangely hopeful stage-set look of unfinality, as if something might still be done. It can’t. The Democrat-donkey weathervane I nailed to the roof ridge back in ’99 at great risk to myself has been bent and busted and left hanging — unrecognizable, if I didn’t know what it was and signified. Opposition to “W” Bush.

Arnie’s wearing a sharp, brown-leather, thigh-length car coat, high-gloss, low-slung Italian loafers, a pair of cuff-less tweed trousers that probably cost a thousand bucks at Paul Stuart, and a deep-maroon cashmere turtleneck that altogether make him look like a mafia don instead of a high-priced fishmonger.

I’ve struggled out of my car, tossed my gum, and am instantly cold — my ribs especially — as if I wasn’t wearing a shirt under my jacket. The leavening effects of the Gulf Stream are, of course, bullshit. I’m only wearing an old Bean’s Newburyport, chinos and deck shoes — at-home attire for the suburban retiree-not-yet-come-fully-to-grips-with-reality. I’m also concerned about stepping on a nail, myself. And because of something Sally said, I feel a need to more consciously pick my feet up when I walk—“the gramps shuffle” being the unmaskable, final-journey approach signal. It’ll also keep me from falling down and busting my ass.

What is it about falling? “He died of a fall.” “The poor thing never recovered after his fall.” “He broke his hip in a fall and was never the same.” “Death came relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard.” How fucking far do these people fall? Off of buildings? Over spuming cataracts? Down manholes? Is it farther to the ground than it used to be? In years gone by I’d fall on the ice, hop back up, and never think a thought. Now it’s a death sentence. What Sally said to me was “Be careful when you go down those front steps, sweetheart. The surface isn’t regular, so pick your feet up.” Why am I now a walking accident waiting to happen? Why am I more worried about that than whether there’s an afterlife?

Fog has pushed in onto the high-tide beach. My cheeks and hands are stinging with damp. The air’s hovering at the dew point, ready to turn to water and freeze when the temperature dives. Somewhere nearby a vicious saw whine goes silent. A truck door slams, its engine starts, then revs, then shuts down. The Mexican house gutters, invisible beyond the berm, have knocked off for an early almuerzo. Quiet and wondrous seaside beauty has descended. The ocean’s hiss and foghorn are all that’s audible.

And like a pilgrim at Agra, I’m struck by my former house’s solid stationary-ness, a wreck held in place only by its great weight. It has taken up a persuasive residence on the berm, with its former neighbor houses all gone. It is solemn, still, and slightly mournful teetering so, as if it was aware of its uninhabitability, but determined to re-find dignity in size. I look to my toes to determine if I’ve got good footing. Something catches my eye, sand crusting over my shoe tops. A bright blue condom lies in front of my toe — out of its wrapper, elongated and spent, its youthful users now far away. I could see it as a gag gift from Poseidon. Though I prefer to see it as a sign that humans are drifting back to this spot already — now that it’s vacant — and utilizing the beach as they have and should. Possibly sooner than anyone’s predicting, complex life will resume here, and time will march on.

“So. The guy says to me. This putz speculator,” Arnie says. We’re at a distance from each other. Forces of officialdom have spray-painted a red circle on the broke-open side wall of the house, then divided it into pie-shaped thirds, and inscribed mysterious numbers and letters — code for the structure’s present state of body and future. Total loss being the gist of it. Arnie’s carrying on talking. It could be to anyone — if anyone else was here. I notice he’s lost his old nyak-nyak Maine accent. “… he says, this speculator, ‘We’ll buy your lot, pay to have the derelict hauled off. Write you a check on the spot. ’Cause you’re gonna be payin’ taxes on the fucker, house or no house. Insurance won’t pay. Rates’ll be sky high if you do rebuild — assuming anybody’ll insure you at all. And once the new flood map’s issued by fuckin’ Obama’s lackeys, you’ll be sitting on unbuildable ground. If it’s not already flooded again. Plus the goddamn thing’ll have to be up on fucking stilts. Who wants that kind of African rig-up? Beachfront. BFD.’” Arnie shakes his head, staring up at the vacant husk. He sniffs, clears his throat, coughs in the new, approved CDC way — into his elbow. No doubt his new wife has schooled him in this. He would never do it otherwise. “So what’s your view, Frank? A disinterested observer? What would you do? I said ix-nay to three million exactly one year ago. And that was a shit market. I’m fucked, is how you spell it.”

“What’s the guy offering?” Arnie’s a few feet up the berm. I’m not sure I’m being heard.

“Five and change. I told you,” Arnie says bitterly. “I was leavin’ the place to the kids. My daughter’s a diplomat in India. Got her own car and a fuckin’ armed driver.”

“Do you need the money?” I’ve come to within a few feet of him, but I’m still talking up.

The cotton-y whiteness of the fog has made a cloud of vitreous swimmers swarm my vision, slightly disorienting me. Tiny tadpoles of blood cells, like space junk, shift and subside in my vision — the result of an old Marine Corps cudgel-stick blow to the eye that sent me reeling. They’re harmless and would be pretty if they didn’t feel like vertigo.

Arnie obviously believes that the money question doesn’t require an answer, because he’s stuck his hands in his pockets and extended his big chin like Mussolini.

“Was the place paid off, Arnie?” As I said, I haven’t consulted my records. I believe cash was exchanged — though a second mortgage is possible.

“Nah,” Arnie says. “F-N-C. I paid you cash. You’re slippin’, Frank.” He swivels around and looks at me dismissively, a few paces back down the berm from him. There’s, of course, a standard calculator for “calamity expense”: take the rebuild off the value of the house the day before disaster struck (October 28th); add twenty-five K as an inconvenience surcharge, then don’t sell the sucker for a farthing less. That, of course, may not work if you can’t be certain the ground will be ground and not seawater in ten years. Normally I counsel patience in most things. Patience, though, is a pre-lapsarian concept in a post-lapsarian world.

“If one of these speculators suffered what I’ve suffered here, you know what would happen to him?” Arnie’s turned and started back down the berm, his loafers taking on sand. He’s stared at his ruin for long enough. He doesn’t really want my advice.

“He’d get richer, Arn,” I say.

“So fuck it,” Arnie says. “F-U-C-K.” Like most conversations between consenting adults, nothing crucial’s been exchanged. Arnie just needed someone to show his mangled house to. And there’s no reason that someone shouldn’t be me. It’s a not-unheard-of human impulse.

Arnie walks right past me in the direction of my car. “You’re well out of it, Frank,” he says. Close up, I can see better the elements of his new feminized visage. Possibly he forgets how he looks, then remembers and feels skittish and starts looking for an exit. He realizes everyone’s seeing the new Arnie, the same way he does in the mirror every morning, and that it’s weird as hell. The smoothed-out, previously raveled Gumper forehead, the stupid tree-line hair implantation, the re-paved cheeks and un-ruckled neck. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.

“Here’s what I’d do, Arnie,” I say to Arnie’s back, heading down the berm. “Sell the son of a bitch and let somebody else worry about it. It’s OPM. Other people’s money.” I don’t know why, but I’m now talking like a Jersey tough guy.

Arnie’s not hearing me. He’s already down by my car in the shifting fog. It’s gotten colder than I want to expose myself to in just my light jacket. My toes are stinging up through my shoe soles.

Arnie stops by my blue car, turns to look at me, where I’m still halfway up the sandy-weedy extrusion, the house shambles behind me. The foghorn emits its baleful call from nowhere. The striper fisherman’s long gone. Likewise the Glucks (we always called them the “Clucks”). It’s just us. Two men alone, not gay, on an indeterminate mission of consoling and being consoled, which has suddenly revealed itself to be pointless.

Which means trouble could be brewing. Arnie’s a man who answers his phone by just saying his name — as though to say, “Yeah? What? Speak your piece or get lost.” These men have hair-trigger tempers and can’t be trusted to do the right thing. How many women answer their phones by saying their names? So much for “I’m here.”

“What’s this, a fucking Honda? An itchy pussy?” Arnie leans against my car door, as if he’s amused by its sky-blue paint job and plastic fenders.

“Hyundai,” I say uncomfortably, but take a wrong step on the sandy incline, my toes prickly-numb, my socks damp with sand, my hands clammy. I pitch then half over onto my side, though not all the way onto my face. Not a true fall. “Shit. This fucking sand.” I’m balanced like Arnie’s house — half on my ass, half on my hand — trying to get my feet under me so I can get off this goddamn sand pillar. I’m afraid of wrenching my neck. Possibly I should roll the rest of the way down.

Arnie’s taken no notice. “A hybrid, I suppose.” He’s still appraising my car. “Like you, Frank.” He’s all of a sudden supremely satisfied — with something. Dismay and house grief have vanished in the fog. I’m getting myself back on my feet. But has something happened? Is it what I feared — Arnie’s turning on me? Possibly he’s packing a PPK and will simply shoot me for once selling him a house that’s now worth chicken feed. I’ve let myself in for this. Men are a strange breed.

“A hybrid of what, Arnie,” I say with difficulty. “What am I a hybrid of?”

“I’m yanking your schwantz, Frank. You look a little peakèd. You takin’ care of yourself?” I’m down off this berm now, my shoes full of cold sand, my ass damp. Arnie, for his part, looks robust, which was what his cosmetic work was in behalf of. He looks to have swelled out his chest a few centimeters and deepened his voice. I don’t like being said to be peakèd. “You oughta do yoga, Frank.”

I’m back on his level, though unsteady. “I let the machine maintain itself, Arnie.”

“Okay,” Arnie says. “Probably smart.” He’s possibly thinking about his cosmetic work in contrast to peakèd me. New grille. New bumpers. In my view, though, Arnie looks like somebody who used to be Arnie Urquhart. Age and change have left him squirrelly, and unpredictable — to himself. This is what I witness.

I come to stand beside my Sonata’s front headlamp. I’m Christmas cold. Arnie’s blocking my path back inside now — unless I want to go around and crawl in the passenger door. I’d like to get in and crank up the heat. But I don’t want to seem to want to leave. Arnie — wax-works weirdness and all — is still a man who’s lost his house, endured an insult I haven’t. He’s deserving of a little slack being cut. Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

Fog’s retreated toward the water’s edge, as if the tide change has created a vacuum. A tangy fish stink is all around. I look up through the blue-white mist and can see another Air-Tran jet spiriting upward. I’ve heard it but haven’t registered.

“I need to act quick, I guess,” Arnie says, back to his house and the charade that I’m here for real reasons. “That’s the way, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” I say, finding the warm hood surface with my hand.

“Fish business is the same. ‘Let it sit, you might as well quit. Then you’re in the shit.’”

I smile, as if that idea sized up all of life. “It’s better than ‘hurry up and wait.’”

“That’s the old man’s mantra.” Arnie sniffs, looks down at his own spoiled shoes.

At this small distance of five feet, not looking at him, but letting my eyes roam anywhere but into contact with his, Arnie (in my fervid mind) has magically become not himself, but another boy I also went to Michigan with — Tapper Spitz. I used to bump into Tap in the strangest of places over the years. The Mayo Clinic urology waiting room. The Philadelphia airport cell-phone lot. On the sidewalk outside the My Office bar on Twenty-First and Madison. Tap was likewise a Wolverine puckster. He and Arnie probably knew each other. What did the poet tell us? “All memory resolves itself in gaze.” It’s much easier at this stressed, empty moment to imagine I’m out here with ole Tapper than that I’m out here with ole Arn. I happen to know Tapman L. Spitz died doing the thing he loved best — para-skiing down the Eiger on his sixty-fifth birthday. RIP ole Tapper.

“My wife doesn’t like it down here.” Arnie/Tapper snuffles his big, as-yet-unaltered schnoz, then folds his thick arms — not easy in his severely tailored mafia coat. He’s staring again up at his house, as if it was where it belonged. I’m supposed to know he means his new wife, not the nice, plump-pastie Ishpeming girl I met at the closing, who seemed pleased with life. He shakes his head. “She won’t even come down here.”

“A reason to cut it loose,” I say. Tapper’s already sadly fading back where he came from. His service rendered.

“Oh yeah.” Arnie’s voice is lonely. He’s still leaning on my car door, blocking me. A gull has spied us and begun a savage, rhythmical screeching. Get off the beach, you assholes! It’s ours! We want it back. You did your worst. BEAT IT! “What’s the most mysterious thing you know, Frank?” Arnie says, and looks speculative, his lacquered cheeks fattened. He’s ready for our conversation to be over, he just doesn’t know how to end it — his brain speeding ahead to thoughts of growing his fish business, luring his diplomat daughter home to run things, getting his young wife to take more interest in his interests, having things work out better than his makeover makes him feel. His wrecked house, I’m certain, will be gone by New Year’s.

“I don’t know, Arnie. What universe is our universe inside of? Why do so many people have pancreatic cancer all of a sudden? How does a thermos work? I could come up with several.”

Arnie unfolds his crossed arms, pushes his palms back through his hair, both sides, Biden-like, clears his throat, then steps away from my car as if he’s realized he was keeping me out of it (my chance now to get out of the chill). Arnie has creases deep as the Clipperton Trench in both his big earlobes. Possibly he feels dark intimations, but wouldn’t recognize them.

I inch forward. My neck is already stiffening up after my partial tumble. I’ve strained something. Arnie’s standing back as if he’s sold my car to me and is watching me enjoy it for the first time. I’m trying not to be in a rush to get in. Precisely what’s happening here between us, I don’t really know. A small-scale mystery in itself.

“Did you ever meet Obama, Frank?” Arnie’s harsh mouth is raveled by a look of familiar distaste. Why he’d ask this is beyond me.

“Never have, Arnie. No.” My hand’s on the door handle, squeezing it. “He’s not really my kinda guy.”

“You voted for him, didn’t you?”

“Both times. I think he’s great.”

“Yeah, yeah. I figured.”

My guess is Arnie did, too, but can’t admit it.

Over the berm, from where saw and hammering noises have previously floated, the scratchy radio comes on again, at first too loud, then softer. You’re once, twice, three times a la-a-dee.. . Who sings that? Peabo Bryson? Ludacris? “Eees like, okay, Serena Williams if she was a man,” a man’s Spanish-spiced voice begins into the cold air over the music. “Se-re-na Williams eees a man!” another male voice says back. “Nooo! Hom-braaay!” They all crack up. Life’s good if you’re them.

“You’re taller than you used to be, aren’t you, Frank?” Arnie’s coming toward me now, a smile opening on his strange, half-woman face — as if he knows he’s wasted my time but means to make it right before all is lost, the beach returned to the dominion of the gulls, all trace of us gone.

“I have the personality of a shorter man, Arnie.” I’m trying to get in my car before Arnie gets closer. I fear an embrace. It could damage my neck and render me an invalid. Bonding heads the list of words I’ve ruled out. Emerson was right — as he was about everything: an infinite remoteness underlies us all. And what’s wrong with that? Remoteness joins us as much as it separates us, but in a way that’s truly mysterious, yet completely adequate for the life ongoing.

Arnie (the idiot) does indeed mean to clap his surprisingly long, leather-cased, net-minder arms around me and pull me — like a puck — into his bosom. A save. I have nowhere to escape to, but try to duck my head as he engulfs me, awfully.

“Enough,” I say, my mouth muffled against his goddamn mobster coat, which smells like the inside of his Lexus but also like some epicene men’s fragrance Arnie no doubt sprays on, après le bain, with his Russian wife keeping stern watch, tapping her toe like Maggie to Jiggs.

“It is rough, Franky,” Arnie mumbles, wanting me not to feel as bad as I feel about whatever he thinks I feel bad about (being hugged). Clearly he’s here for me (also on the inventory). A harsh shiver caused by the ocean’s chill rattles my ribs — though Arnie may think I’ve shuddered, possibly even sobbed. Why would I? My house hasn’t been ruined. I try to pull away. My back is against the metal door frame so that if I try any harder I’ll hurt my neck even more; or worse, fall back in my car with Arnie on top of me, drive the shifter into my C-4 so that the next thing I know the EMS will have me on a board, hauling me back across to Toms River Community, where I’ve been before and do not ever want to see again. There’s nothing I can do — the familiar dilemma for people my age. So what I do — an act of pure desolation — is hug Arnie back, clap my arms around his leathery shoulders and squeeze, as much to save myself from falling. It may not be so different from why anybody hugs anybody. Arnie’s hugging me way too hard. My eyes feel bulgy. My neck throbs. The empty space of car seat yawns behind. “Everything could be worse, Frank,” Arnie says into my ear, making my head vibrate. He is surely right. Everything could be much worse. Much, much worse than it is.