Luminous Airplanes

LOST THINGS

Thebes is tucked away in the northeastern corner of the Catskills, more or less where Washington Irving set the story of Rip Van Winkle, and even as a child it wasn’t hard for me to see why Irving chose that location. As you drive east on the only road that leads into Thebes, the mountains seem to close their gray shoulders behind you, cutting you off from the rest of the world. The valley looks older and stiller than the rest of the country, as though the land itself were asleep. There are billboards for things no one sells anymore, their photographs bleached blue by the sun, and signs for Summerland, a resort that closed a few years before I was born. It isn’t a place that promises great excitement, and in fact, with the exception of my last two summers there, when marvelous and unprecedented things happened, my memories of Thebes have a Rip Van Winkle — ish quality to them, as though I and the town and everyone in it were not so much living as dreaming.

In fact the town was bigger than I remembered, and richer. It began with a sign for the Snowbird ski resort, then the self-storage complex, the graveyard, a stand of trees, a bar called Fire and Ice, a bed-and-breakfast decked out prematurely with orange Halloween bunting, and the ski shop, which had taken over the house next door to it and become a kind of sports emporium. Across the street, the Kozy Korner gift shop and the Kountry Kitchen, then Arturo’s, the Italian deli, which had a new sign with golden letters carved into a green oval of wood, then a video store and the Country Barn Antique Emporium, the crossroads, the gas station, the church, the public library, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, which I didn’t remember having been there before. Just past the bank, on the lot which used to have a drugstore, there was an organic grocery. An organic grocery! When I was little, you could barely get vegetables in Thebes unless you grew them yourself. Now there were bins of late-season tomatoes, apples and squashes, all faintly luminous in the late-afternoon sun.

I wondered what my grandfather had thought of it. When I was a child, he was always telling me about how things used to be in Thebes. He spoke of the town, which was founded by his ancestor Jean Roland in the early part of the nineteenth century, like an heirloom that had passed into the hands of strangers who were treating it badly. He knew what everything had once been: the Kountry Kitchen was the lunch counter for workers at the Rowland Mill until the mill closed in the 1940s, and Arturo’s was a smithy. Sheep had grazed where the ski shop stood, and I got the impression that my grandfather would have much preferred the sheep. He reserved his greatest displeasure, however, for Snowbird, the ski resort. Not only had it disfigured a swath of Mount Espy; it brought outsiders to Thebes: not workers who would buy houses and send their children to the public school and be humbled and annealed by the long winters, but seasonal people who had no respect for the town’s history or its way of doing things. It didn’t help that Snowbird’s owner was Joe Regenzeit, a Turk. My grandfather had never been to Turkey, and surely he exaggerated the Turkish people’s fondness for winter sports, but to him the resort was un-American, maybe even un-Western. It was the intrusion of a foreign culture into the deepest, best-hidden fold of his native land. And not just any foreign culture, but the Turks, hereditary enemies of the French ever since the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 C.E., which was the historical basis of the Song of Roland (and here I hear my ex-housemate Victor, the medievalist, correcting me: Those weren’t Turks who slew Roland, they were Basques—but be quiet, Victor). “The Turks don’t understand what these mountains are for,” my grandfather complained. “The Catskills aren’t the Alps. They aren’t the Rockies. These are old mountains. You can climb them, but you can’t ski them. It’s ridiculous.”

Compared with the rest of the town, my grandparents’ house was reassuringly unchanged. A white Colonial three stories tall, with flaps of black tar paper on the pitched roof, gray shutters and a gray porch with white posts, the exterior almost entirely devoid of color, as though it belonged to an era before things had been colored, or, more accurately, as if it were one of the Greek temples that had once been gaudily painted but were now worn down to a white austerity that they seemed, in retrospect, always to have possessed. The old oak tree that menaced the house was larger than ever, its leaves a dusty late-summer green. There was a pickup truck parked in front of the garage, with ROWLAND’S TOWING AND SALVAGE painted on the driver’s door in yellow cursive: my uncle Charles was there. The kitchen door was open; I went in. The white linoleum floor was tracked with muddy footprints, which my grandmother would never have allowed; the radio was tuned to a call-in show. “OK, OK, I’m going to admit it,” the caller said, “I really like fat women. The bigger, the better.”

“Say it!” shouted the host. “Let it out!”

I called out, “Charles?”

A door shut above me, feet on the stairs. “Well, hey! It’s Mr. California!”

We embraced, and I breathed in Charles’s atmosphere of cigarettes and Dial soap. “Thought you’d be tan,” Charles said.

I explained that San Francisco wasn’t always sunny, and besides I didn’t spend that much time outside. I didn’t say what I had expected him to be, the Uncle Charles I remembered from my summers in Thebes, a giant in an undershirt, with a walrus mustache and red stubble on his chin, who chewed tobacco and spat in a coffee can outside the kitchen door, to the great disgust of my grandmother, who told him that one day he’d go out to spit and wouldn’t be allowed back in. He was no longer that person. There was a bend in his back that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him, at my grandmother’s funeral, and as he led me in he picked up an ugly black cane and leaned his weight on it. White hairs poked up north of the collar of his undershirt, in the hollow of his shrunken neck.

“So, you were out of town when Oliver died?” he asked.

“Camping,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”

“Don’t hold it against yourself. Hell, I’m surprised the twins came. Not that they stayed. No. It was whup! Shovel of dirt on the coffin, whup! Off to the train. You’d think they were afraid the ground would catch fire.” He laughed at his own turn of speech. “They didn’t even stay for the reception, not that I blame them. You know, they don’t speak the language.” Charles meant this literally. The old people in Thebes have their own vocabulary, a couple dozen French phrases handed down from the original settlers. Langue d’up, my grandfather called it jokingly, langue from the French for language, and up for upstate. Further evidence of how tightly the Thebans cling to the past.

“Anyway,” my uncle went on, “it was just a bunch of old Thebes farts talking about the nice things Oliver Rowland did for them in the long ago and far away. For example, Mo Oton made a joke about how Oliver was generuz de son esprit, generous with his spirit. What Mo meant was, he was a skinflint. His spirit was the only thing he ever gave away! Gabby Thule told a story about how he came to visit her in the hospital when she had her gallbladder out. And how he brought her the nicest bunch of wildflowers. Of course he did! Nothing’s free like wildflowers!”

He got us each a beer from the refrigerator. “You’re still living in Frisco, am I right?”

“San Francisco. No one who lives there calls it Frisco.”

“Is that so?” Charles lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You know, I had my heart set on going out there, back when. San Francisco, or Big Sur, more like it. One of those hippie places right on the ocean.”

“You were a hippie?”

“I wasn’t anything. I was just a kid.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

Charles coughed. “Things got in the way.”

I wondered if he meant the war. Around the time I was born, Charles had enlisted in the Army, against the wishes of my grandfather, who wanted him to become a lawyer, or a banker, something commensurate with the family’s status in Thebes. Instead he went to Vietnam. No one in the family was entirely clear on what he’d done there; all we knew was that he came home knowing how to fix cars. With money grudgingly loaned him by Oliver, he opened a garage in Maplecrest, the next town over. The business grew quickly; by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, Charles had four tow trucks, a half dozen drivers, and a pretty secretary named Mrs. Bunce who gave me sour-cherry sucking candies.

“You should come visit,” I said. “I’ll go to Big Sur with you.”

Charles looked at me in a way that I didn’t understand, as if, I thought, he’d known what I was going to say before I said it. “Maybe in a while,” he said.

He left a few minutes later. I walked him out, and when he saw Norman Mailer’s car in the driveway he stopped, transfixed by horror. “Holy Jesus,” he said. “Tell me you didn’t drive across the country in that.”

“It runs OK. It just makes a grinding sound when it goes uphill.”

“I’ll bet it does. What is it, a seventy-seven?”

“Seventy-six. It used to belong to Norman Mailer, the Norman Mailer. My ex-girlfriend thinks I was stupid to buy it, but it turns out to be a pretty good car.”

My uncle laughed. “At least you aren’t gay.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, or even why Charles would think I was gay, until I remembered that he hadn’t seen me since I moved to San Francisco. No gay man in the city would have thought for even a second of dressing like I did, but my uncle couldn’t be expected to know that.

Charles said he’d come back in a couple of days to see if I was still alive. He climbed into his truck. I wanted to stop him from going, because it hurt me to think that after ten years apart we had made such poor impressions on each other, and also because I was afraid to be alone in the house, but it was too late; his truck honked and was gone, two red lights dropping into the deep blue of twilight in the country.

The radio was still on in the kitchen. “Speaking as a woman of generous proportions,” a caller said, “I just want to let everybody know that I feel good.”

I opened a can of chicken noodle soup and heated it on the stove. Outside, the wind whispered in the oak tree. In my hurry to leave San Francisco I’d packed only one book, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which I’d been meaning to read for months; but as soon as I started it I realized that I was not in the mood. Reading a novel, especially a contemporary novel, with its small stock of characters and situations, felt like being stuffed into a sleeping bag head-first: it was warm and dark and there wasn’t a lot of room to move around. I looked through my grandparents’ books and eventually chose Progress in Flying Machines, a purplish hardback with a winged contraption stamped on the front cover in gold. My grandfather had liked reading to me from it when I was a child. Published in 1894, it was, he said, the book that inspired the Wright brothers to build their airplane. What this meant was that none of the flying machines described in Progress in Flying Machines had ever flown. The book was a catalog of failures: giant wooden birds with flapping wings, aerial rowboats beyond the power of any human being to propel, corkscrew-crazy helicopters which under the best of circumstances never left the ground. I often wondered why my grandfather thought this was appropriate bedtime reading for a child. Maybe he hoped the book would teach me the importance of hard work and persistence, and give me faith that what looked like failure could be transformed, by history’s alchemy, into magnificent success. Perhaps he was also preparing me for the likely if not delightful possibility that the success would belong to someone else. As he didn’t tire of telling me, “Remember, it isn’t just the successes who matter. Even the ones who fail get us somewhere, if we learn from their mistakes.”

He meant this to be reassuring, but I found it sad: even as a child I suspected that the person he was reassuring was himself. And in fact my grandfather’s history, like that of many of the so-called pioneers of flight, was largely the story of his failure to get off the ground. My grandparents lived on the rent from properties they owned in Thebes, but over the years my grandfather had tried to increase this income by means of various schemes, not one of which did anything but fail. My mothers told me about them with acid glee: there was the time your grandfather bought real estate in Catskill, they said, he took a bath on that. There was the time he sold seeds from your grandmother’s garden! Even Mary couldn’t believe it and she loved those plants. And then of course there was the lawsuit, the great battle with Joe Regenzeit, which he lost. Oliver was not discouraged. That was what irked my mothers most of all: to see my grandfather fail, and fail again, and not give up. It wasn’t just that my grandfather’s hopefulness reflected badly on his common sense; it also made him unbeatable. No matter how high my mothers climbed, they could never have the satisfaction of getting above Oliver, who was always, in his sober way, hoping for something better.

My soup was ready when I came back to the kitchen. I opened a beer and sat down to read. At midnight, half drunk and far from sleep, I called Alice. Her voicemail picked up again so I read it a sentence from the book in front of me: “If one had an unlimited height to fall in, affording time to think and to act, he would probably succeed in guiding himself at will.” I added: “Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to let you know I got here OK. The house is a disaster, it’s going to take like a hundred years to clear it out. And my uncle is dying. Miss you. Bye.” I made up a bed on the sofa. The bedroom where I used to sleep was full of boxes, and I didn’t want to sleep in my mothers’ room, because I was haunted by the memory of what had happened there thirty years ago.

THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD

Whenever Celeste said my father’s name, she made a face; the four syllables, RICH-ard EN-tee, left her pursed lips like the taste of something rotten. Richard Empty, she called him, but when I asked what she meant, whether my father had really been empty, she only shook her head, as though to say that actually she had meant the opposite, and I was not supposed to understand. Despite my mothers, and to spite them, I was endlessly curious about Richard Ente. I collected facts about him the way other children collect stamps or baseball cards, and I assembled them into a story that I reviewed from time to time, solemnly, just as I went over the deposits and withdrawals in my savings account, checking and double-checking the total even though it was never more than a hundred dollars.

This is my father’s story: once upon a time there was a lawyer named Richard Ente. Six foot two, eyes of blue, nonetheless a New York Jew, Richard came to Thebes in 1969 to sue Joe Regenzeit on my grandfather’s behalf. Richard was handsome, and my mothers didn’t meet many strangers. They couldn’t get enough of him and — to their surprise, probably — he didn’t find them silly, or provincial, or young. Richard must have been fifty at the time, my grandfather’s age; my mothers were sixteen. I don’t know how Richard chose between them, but in the end, the one he fell in love with was Marie, and their love was, what, I don’t know, lovely, but brief. Oliver caught his lawyer romancing his daughter; Richard fled in my grandfather’s sports car, and my grandfather chased him in my grandmother’s station wagon. For some reason the two cars collided, and it was a miracle neither Richard nor my grandfather was hurt. The love-suit was over but the lawsuit went on, until, on the morning of the day when the jury was to announce the verdict in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc., Richard Ente ran away from Thebes. He died of a heart attack in Denver that summer, three months before I was born.

I tried to supplement this little collection of facts with information from my grandparents, but they had less to offer than I hoped. “Richard was a genius,” my grandfather said, but when I asked him how my father was a genius he declined to give concrete examples. The most he would say was, “It was impossible to beat him in an argument, although I certainly tried.”

My further questions got no answer so I turned to my grandmother. “What was my father like?”

“He was very intelligent,” she said judiciously. “He worked very hard.” I had the feeling she was sugarcoating the truth, in the hope that she could create a better father in my mind than the one who was already working mischief in my blood.

“Was he a good arguer?”

“I suppose he must have been. He was a lawyer, after all.”

“Why did he run away?”

My grandmother shrugged.

“Did he know he was going to lose the lawsuit?”

“I have no idea. Now stop grilling me, and get some peas from the garden. They’re just big enough to eat.”

That was the sum of the information I had about the Richard Ente Period, which lasted from the summer of 1969 until the spring of 1970, from Woodstock until about Kent State. Over the years I added to it scraps of less relevant or less assimilable information which my mothers let slip in careless moments. When I said I didn’t want to go to school, because I was smarter than everyone there, Celeste said I sounded just like my father. When I wouldn’t go to bed before my mothers, when I protested that if there were rules, then they ought to apply to everyone, adult and child, equally, Marie told me to stop lawyering, for Christ’s sake, it made me sound like a little Richard Ente. From these and other reproaches I learned that my father was a selfish person who didn’t do homework and hardly ever slept, who didn’t say thank you when he received a gift, who forgot to call when he was going to be late, who watched television during the day, who made up stories about places he had not been and people he had not met and told them as if they were the truth. All of which made me think he must have been very interesting, and made me regret not having known him.

Years later, when I was in college, I learned that Richard hadn’t died of a heart attack. My grandmother was very ill; she had a rare blood disease that carried her off to a teaching hospital in Syracuse. I went to see her there, and came in as a medical student was drawing her blood. “Does this hurt, Mrs., uh, Rowland?” he asked, as though he had been thinking about her disease so intently he’d forgotten that she was a person also.

“Of course it hurts,” she said.

The medical student left, and we talked about her illness, which was causing quite a sensation in the hospital. Specialists from several departments had been in to see her; she showed me the bruises on her forearms where they’d drawn vial after vial of blood. On the whole, she seemed pleased to be the object of so much attention. “If I’m lucky,” she said dryly, “they’ll publish me. I asked if there’s any chance they can use my real name.” My grandmother told me about the people who had been to visit: an aunt I hadn’t seen in years, cousins I barely knew. Charles had come several times to resupply her with the mystery novels she loved. My mothers came once. “For an hour,” my grandmother said. “It takes four hours to get here.”

“They should have stayed longer,” I said.

“I worry about them,” my grandmother said. “They want to live like they came out of a clamshell.” It took me a long moment to understand that she was referring to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. “But everyone has a family, even in New York City.” She looked at me with alarming lucidity. “Do they ever talk to you about what happened?”

“In New York?”

“With Richard,” my grandmother said impatiently. She took my hand. She must have known that her own life would soon be over, and that whatever secrets she kept would then be known by no one at all. Her time to tell was limited. And she was selfish, as I imagine many people are at the end of their lives; my feelings mattered less to her than they had when she was well. “You poor boy,” she said, “do you even know Richard shot himself?”

So it came out. One night in the summer of 1970, a police detective called from Denver and told Oliver that Richard Ente was dead of a gunshot wound, in all likelihood self-inflicted. The detective wanted to know if Richard had any next of kin. The only reason he called Oliver was because he’d found a check from him in Richard’s wallet. “We couldn’t help the gentleman,” my grandmother said. “Richard never talked about his family.”

“They didn’t tell me,” I said numbly.

“Exactly,” my grandmother said.

This story flattened me, and it weakened my grandmother also: maybe she had come without knowing it to the age when her last few secrets were what kept her alive. She leaned back against the pillows of her hospital bed. Her eyes closed and her lips trembled, as though she wanted to say more, but when she did speak, finally, what she said was, “Ring for the nurse.” I did, and a minute later the nurse came in and chided my grandmother because she hadn’t eaten her vegetables. “These aren’t vegetables,” my grandmother said, “they’re,” and she shrugged, her face lit up with disgust.

I called my mothers that night from my motel room in Syracuse and had a bad conversation. Why hadn’t they told me? Why had Richard shot himself in Denver? The first question was easier to answer than the second. My mothers had been trying to protect me from having to feel what they still felt, a kind of baffled sadness, which made Richard Ente impossible either to dismiss or to forgive. They wanted me to have two parents and not be haunted by the ghost of a third. But why did he do it? My mothers didn’t know. Celeste believed Richard’s suicide had to do with things that had happened a long time ago, before he came to Thebes. “Any fifty-year-old man who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl has serious problems,” she said.

Marie sobbed into the phone; she didn’t know either.

“Let him go,” Celeste said. “Suicide is a mystery with no solution.”

“I’m so sorry,” Marie said. “I wish I could have done something to stop him.” She could have done something, but I wouldn’t know that until much later. Finally I got off the phone with my mothers, wiped my eyes and tried to take Celeste’s advice and put Richard out of my mind. Dead was dead. The fact that Richard had killed himself didn’t make him any more lost to me than he had been already. How could it matter if he died of a bullet or a heart attack? But I couldn’t let go of the question why?

When I came back from Syracuse, I looked for my father in the Bleak College (not its real name, but that’s another story) library, but nothing I found cast any light on his death. The membership directories of the New York State Bar Association told me that Richard Ente practiced law in New York from 1949 until 1970. He worked for Silberman & Mischeaux, a personal-injury firm, then in 1961 he went into private practice. His office was a few blocks from Times Square, in a building that has since been demolished. Lexis, which was just becoming available at the time, and which I got access to with the help of a friend in the law school, confirmed that my father was of counsel in Oliver Rowland et al. v. Snowbird Resort, Inc. The lawsuit, which my family had talked about only in vague terms, turned out to be stranger and more significant than I’d expected. According to Lexis, my grandfather sued for an injunction to prevent Joe Regenzeit from “interfering with the clouds and the natural condition of the air, sky, atmosphere and air space over plaintiffs’ lands and in the area of plaintiffs’ lands to in any manner, degree or way affect, control or modify the weather conditions on or about said lands,” which, reading farther down in the document, seems to have been a response to Joe Regenzeit’s “cloud-seeding devices and equipment generally used in a weather modification program,” the purpose of which was, in short, to make it snow. As if it didn’t snow enough in Thebes! Beginning sometime in the autumn of 1968, Joe Regenzeit was sprinkling the clouds with silver iodide, bringing further gloom to the gloomy mountain town, with the intention of turning it into a winter paradise. My grandfather objected. He, or rather his counsel, Richard Ente, Esq., argued that Regenzeit’s snow had encumbered the land, choked the roads, and clouded the minds of Thebes’s inhabitants, who were already unhappy enough come winter. He did not prevail. Having failed to demonstrate, in the first place, that Joe Regenzeit’s weather modification program was responsible for any particular snowfall, and, in the second, that the plaintiffs’ hardships were brought on by snow, specifically, as distinguished from cold, darkness, old age, excessive consumption of alcohol, rheumatoid arthritis, poor eyesight, poor diet, unusual devotion to their domestic animals, acts of God, or any other cause, the injunction was not granted, and Rowland v. Snowbird assumed its place in the history of weather-modification law, an important precedent, but one with few successors. According to an articled titled “Who Owns the Clouds Now?” 73 Mich. L. Rev. 129, Rowland v. Snowbird established, tacitly, a doctrine of “modified natural rights,” which is to say that if Regenzeit could make money off the clouds, and my grandfather didn’t lose any money thereby, then the clouds belonged to Regenzeit, which would have made him, my law-school friend said, the first person in American history ever to own a cloud. I took copious notes, and even thought of writing a science-fiction story that would take the case as its starting point, and project from it a world where not only the clouds but all natural phenomena, rain, wind, sunlight, fog, and even such intangibles as “clear skies” and “autumn chill,” were privately owned, so that the experience of the outdoors would involve an endless series of payments, and become in all likelihood a pastime for the rich.

Lexis had nothing to say on the subject of Richard Ente’s character. Since childhood, I had pictured my father as a handsome man, a distinguished lawyer in a dark suit and a blue-and-gold Bleak College necktie, because yes, he went to Bleak, just the same as my grandfather, the same as me, and I wonder if I didn’t go there in part because I hoped I’d find some trace of him. I imagined Richard Ente sitting at dinner with my grandfather, twirling a glass of wine between his fingers, like an old version of the young Sean Connery, if you see what I mean. Richard Ente offering his considered opinion on legal matters, then turning and catching Marie’s eye. Richard Ente pressing my mother’s hand as they said goodbye, and murmuring something in her ear. Richard Ente under cover of darkness climbing the roof of the garage, still in his dark suit, and slipping through my mothers’ open window. My love! said his love. Ssh, Richard Ente murmured, a cross now between James Bond and Humbert Humbert, although I suppose Humbert Humbert is already that. We don’t want to wake them, do we? Marie’s hands at the knot of his tie. Richard’s hairy fingers — with a ring, perhaps, on the third left one? — undoing the top of Marie’s dress. Then an unclarity, willful, on my part. Then Richard Ente murmured, You mustn’t tell your father. — Damn my father, Marie said, rolling away from him and snugging her back to his chest. He’s a good man, Richard said softly. Not as good as you, Marie said. Hm, said Richard. He got up and dressed in the moonlight. Is my tie straight? — You look dashing, Marie said. — Then adieu. — No! But Richard Ente was gone; he had climbed out the window and down to the ground, and now he walked to where his car idled silently among the trees. None of this explained him taking his own life. I invented other scenes in which Richard Ente’s suicidal tendency would be manifest: Richard draining a flask before he gets into his car. Richard growling, I can’t go on with this charade! Richard speeding around a curve and closing his eyes. No. The story I’d made up about my father had petrified in my memory; adding the story of his death in Denver didn’t change him any more than the addition of paint to a rock would make it not a rock. My story was beyond contradiction, to the point where even now I think of it as being about my real father, even though I know for a fact that it is wrong in almost every particular.

Finally I stopped looking for the truth about Richard Ente. I was left with a mystery, a love of library research and a desire to get as far away from my family as I could: these last two came in handy when I went to Stanford to study American history.

LOST THINGS

The sun was already high over the mountains when I woke up, my neck and back frozen at bad angles from sleeping on the sofa. I washed my face and drank sulfurous water from the tap. By day, the house didn’t seem haunted, only cluttered. Four generations of Rowlands had lived there and as far as I could tell not one of them had ever thrown anything out. Cigar boxes and tobacco tins from the early twentieth century were heaped on a table in the hall, teapots, hatracks, mugs, pens, bowls full of buttons and pins, vases, stacks of old magazines, china statuettes of shepherds and milkmaids, candlesticks, bundles of letters, books, albums, records, telephone directories, ashtrays, bottle openers and pens given away by businesses that no longer existed, framed photographs of long-dead cousins, sewing kits, skeins of wool, coasters, place mats, watercolors of the Catskills that my grandmother had painted in her youth, road maps, paperweights, letter openers, seashells, lamps. Every horizontal surface in the house was heaped with stuff; every cabinet was full. There was no separation between the priceless things and the worthless ones: in the parlor, the silver inkwell which supposedly came over from France with Jean Roland was full of paper clips.

I went upstairs to my mothers’ bedroom, which looked just as it had when they ran away from Thebes in the spring of 1970. Embroidered bedspreads covered the twin beds; the trunks where Celeste kept her art things stood against the wall. There were two windows and two desks, and a poster tacked to the wall between them: Russian Folk Music, University Performing Arts Center, December 19, 1969. Their closet was a museum of fashion from the late sixties. Their bookshelf was the summum of thought from the same era: The Bell Jar, Being and Nothingness, Steppenwolf, The Stranger. The room had always seemed strange to me, and it was strange that my grandparents hadn’t done anything with it, the way they’d changed my uncle’s room into a study. It was as if they were still hoping my mothers would come back. But the room was creepy, and I could understand why the Celestes hadn’t wanted to come back. I felt like an idiot for agreeing to come in their place. I should have let them hire someone to get rid of everything. Without looking at my grandparents’ room, or the study, or the attic, my god, the attic, I got dressed and drove into town.

I parked in back of the Kountry Kitchen, took a booth by the window and looked blankly at the big sign outside the ski shop, which said

GOD BLESS AMERICA

WINTERS COMING

GET UR GEAR

There was almost no one in the restaurant, a couple of teenage girls in purple parkas smoking at the counter and a large party at the other end of the room, it looked like a business lunch, three men and a woman in suits, their jackets hung on the backs of their chairs, their cuff links gleaming. As I ate, I thought one of the men was trying to get my attention. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows inquisitively, and I wondered if it was because of my San Francisco clothes, my burgundy leather jacket and thrift-store shirt with the monkey Curious George depicted performing various activities against a yellow background. I nodded in what I hoped was a friendly, masculine way, as if to say yup, and went back to my lunch. Each time I looked up, he was watching me. I wondered if he was trying to pick me up, if he had come to the same conclusion about me that Charles had. A middle-aged businessman with curly gray hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, a dark-green suit a shade nattier than the suits around him, it was possible. My yup might have sent him the wrong signal; I didn’t know how grown-ups communicated in this part of the world. It was too bad, the woman sitting beside him was attractive. I would have liked to look at her wide mouth, her thick red lips and narrow chin. Even the faintly perceptible shadow of hairs on her upper lip was enticing. She would probably have fine brown hairs all down her back and arms. Instead I had to look at my lunch special, a breaded pork chop snuggled against the flank of a mountain of mashed potatoes and bathed in brown gravy. Then, suddenly, the man was standing in front of me, leaning toward me, eager, worried, saying my name. “Kerem,” he said, and held out his hand. “Do you remember me?” It was Joe Regenzeit’s son, grown and changed, thick where he used to be thin, shorter than me now. We embraced and his chin hit my shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. The last time I saw Kerem, he was fifteen years old, and bound, I thought, for fame in the world of professional soccer or notoriety in the underworld of punk rock.

“Running the family business,” Kerem said, grinning. He put his hand on my back. “Come say hello to my sister.”

He guided me to their table, where the woman, who had looked mysterious and attractive before I knew who she was, transformed herself into Yesim, Kerem’s younger sister, the way a certain shape beloved of psychologists changes from a rabbit into a duck. The hairs on her lip multiplied; her eyebrows grew closer to each other; her thick black hair became unruly. She stood up and shook my hand.

“We heard about your grandfather,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Meanwhile Kerem was introducing me to the other men, who were up from New York, “to give me a shot in the arm,” he said. They shook my hand and offered me truncated, almost furtive smiles, as though they could tell I was a negligible person, and regulations forbade them from associating with negligible persons while on duty. Still Kerem insisted on telling them who I was.

“We used to party together,” Kerem said, which wasn’t entirely true: we’d only gone to one party together. I kissed his girlfriend, but I don’t think he ever found out. Yesim looked at her brother anxiously.

“Are you in town long?” Kerem asked.

“A few days,” I said. “I’ve got to clean out my grandparents’ house.”

“Well, come have dinner with us. Come tonight!”

The city people glanced at each other. I wanted to warn Kerem that by talking to me he was reducing his importance in their eyes, but there was no way to do it and he wouldn’t have listened. Kerem had always been like that, generous when it would have been better to be selfish. I thanked him and paid my check. I looked back at Yesim, but she was talking to the city people, explaining that in a small town you were always running into people from the past.

REGENZEIT

That afternoon, instead of getting to work on the house, I picked up Progress in Flying Machines and read about M. Hureau de Villeneuve, the permanent secretary of the French Aeronautical Society, who built more than three hundred model flying machines, all of them with flapping wings. His experiments culminated with the construction of a giant steampowered bat, which was connected by a hose to a boiler on the ground. When M. de Villeneuve turned the machine on, it flapped its wings violently and did, in fact, rise into the air — at which point M. de Villeneuve became afraid that it would pull free of the hose, and switched it off. The bat fell to the ground and smashed one of its wings, and the story ended with M. de Villeneuve waiting for someone to invent a lighter motor so he could resume his experiments. I wondered what, if anything, the early-aviation community had learned from his failure. Don’t make any more giant bats? Hose-tethered flying machines not a good idea? The hard fact of it was that ornithop-ters, machines with flapping wings, were a digression from the path that led to the airplane. No matter what motor you used, none of them would ever really work. M. de Villeneuve had devoted his life to something, but I couldn’t think of exactly what it was: flight’s penumbra, maybe, the weird shadow of hopeless invention against which the Wrights’ brightness defined itself.

After a few pages of Progress in Flying Machines, my attention wandered, and I found myself thinking again about my grandfather. I remembered how he used to entertain me and my grandmother with stories from the Catskill Eagle: a police station was opening in Jewett, there was an art fair in Woodstock, the new pizzeria in Hunter was a big success. “Run by actual Italians, that’s their secret,” my grandfather said, as though we were the owners of a rival pizzeria wondering at our own sluggish business. “Apparently they import their flour from Italy.” My grandfather reflected on what he had just said, and frowned. “Not that there’s anything wrong with American flour. Mary, don’t you bake with American flour?” My grandmother affirmed that she did. “Perfectly good flour,” my grandfather said. He considered how much more he should say about it, or whether he ought to praise my grandmother’s baking. Instead he said, “It must be a question of technique. The Italians have been making pizza for a long time, you know.”

My grandmother rolled her eyes. “Do tell. Did the ancient Romans have pizza?”

But my grandfather was immune to her teasing. “I don’t believe so,” he said, “at least, not the kind we have today.” And he was off, explaining to us that the tomato, a relative of the deadly nightshade, was thought to be poisonous until the eighteenth century, and as for our modern pasteurized cheeses, the Romans had never known anything like them. I wondered when my grandfather had developed his taste for puns. I thought about how life turns people into the opposite of what you would expect them to be, as it had with Charles, and now with Kerem. I wondered if I seemed as strange to Kerem as he did to me, and, if so, what I was the opposite of.

It took me a long time to decide what to wear to dinner. All my clothes were wrong, and in the end I put on a white button-down shirt and one of my grandfather’s jackets, which was tight across the stomach but all right if I left it unbuttoned. I looked like my adviser at Stanford, a portly ex-Jesuit named Schönhoff. What was worse, the jacket smelled like my grandfather’s closet, like naphtha and wool and ever so faintly of aftershave. At various points in the evening I would catch myself sniffing my own shoulder, wondering if it still smelled, and whether Kerem and Yesim could smell it too.

Kerem greeted me at the door. He was wearing a black sweatsuit that made him look even older than the business suit had, and at the same time recalled his athletic youth. He hugged me and I pulled back, trying to protect him from the jacket. “You’re looking great,” he said. “Come in, hey, you didn’t have to get dressed up.”

The house had changed, but my memories of it were too old to say how, exactly. The black leather sofa and the enormous television were certainly new, as was the tiny silver stereo playing almost inaudible jazz. But the rugs were the same, and the smells, too, of cumin and cloves, onions and meat.

“My sister’s cooking,” Kerem said, “but don’t think it’s like this every night. We’re a take-out family, most nights we eat the most amazing junk. Do you drink martinis?” He came back with two of them, big ones, in highball glasses. “Sit.”

Kerem lowered himself into a black leather recliner that tried to open up its footrest. “I’m a lazy bastard,” he said. “What can I do?” He kicked the footrest back. “Welcome to Thebes!”

We drank. Kerem explained how they had come back to the old house: after he flunked out of Cornell, he’d scraped through SUNY Purchase and got a law degree from Villanova. He’d married a lawyer named Kathy and they had a son, Max, who looked down on us from a brass-framed photograph on the windowsill, a small fair boy with an overbite. Two years ago Kerem’s father was diagnosed with a cancer of the pancreas that was fatal in about 95 percent of all cases, but not Joe Regenzeit’s. It was a miracle he lived, and when the cancer went into remission he had a, “What could you call it? A middeath crisis,” and decided that he was through with America. He and his wife returned to the village where his ancestors had come from, “a town in Anatolia with about three goats and a well,” and he lived there to this day. Yesim had already moved back to Thebes to take care of her father, and when he went off to this village, which was called Akbez, and really was so small you couldn’t find it on most maps, she stayed on and took care of the ski resort. At first Kerem had helped her only a little; then he became interested in the business, and then: “I had this idea, I want to take what we’re doing here in a new direction. I can’t talk about it yet. You understand, right? You can’t show anyone until it’s finished?” He moved back up to Thebes; Kathy stayed in Philadelphia; they agreed to separate. “I have to tell you, I miss the hell out of Max, but I’m happy here. And it wasn’t good for my sister to be alone. Now,” he concluded quickly, as if he regretted having told me so much, “what about you?”

I told Kerem how I’d gone to Stanford for history, dropped out of the program and gone to work at Cetacean, then Yesim called to us that dinner was ready. I followed Kerem into the dining room, pursued by the jazz, which could be piped, he explained, into every room of the house, including the bathrooms. The dining-room table was covered with dishes. Yesim was still wearing her business clothes, but she’d exchanged her contact lenses for large eyeglasses with square red frames. Her hair was restrained by a flock of bobby pins. Kerem maneuvered me into a chair to his right, and his sister sat facing me. “Did you know he’s an Internet entrepreneur?” Kerem asked.

“How would I know that?” Yesim said. “He hasn’t told me anything.”

“I’m not an entrepreneur,” I said.

“I should have known you’d end up in the computer business,” Kerem went on. “Do you remember when I had that computer? You made it do the most amazing stuff.”

“Not really,” I said. “I just copied some programs from a manual.”

“You wrote that game, didn’t you? We played it for days. We played it all summer.” Actually Kerem hadn’t played it at all. I was amused at what his memory was doing to the past, how he was making me grander than I had ever been. One look at Yesim and I decided to let his misrepresentations stand.

We finished the bottle of wine, and Kerem remembered another, a gift from the Karmans last Christmas. Soon I was telling Kerem and Yesim that content management was a misnomer, actually what I had managed was discontent, my own, mostly. Every project was the same, every client was looking for a way to turn the Internet into one of those ads you see on late-night television, for the carrot peeler that also makes soup. The only difference among them was that some clients wanted to give you the peeler for free and charge for the carrots, whereas others wanted you to pay for the peeler up front. Yesim’s lips and teeth were stained purple. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, and our eyes met. She seemed to be asking me, what do you want? A question to which I had no answer.

Finally the meal was over. Kerem said, “How about some coffee, sis?” and Yesim carried our plates into the kitchen. “We have this great Chilean coffee,” Kerem told me. “Can you believe it, great coffee in Thebes? We get it from the new grocery, they have everything.” He grinned. “You know who owns that place?” I couldn’t imagine why he thought I would care, but before he could tell me, Yesim came in with the coffee. I asked what she had been doing since I saw her last.

“Oh, me,” she said. “Actually, there isn’t much to tell. I was living in Albany, then my father got sick, and I came back up here. Now I’m a ski-resort administrator.” She looked at Kerem, as if, oddly, she were judging him.

I asked what she had been doing in Albany, but Yesim didn’t answer, and it fell to Kerem to wave his hand vaguely over his glass. “Yesim is a born manager. She’s the one who keeps things going. I like to think of myself as an idea guy, but the truth is, without Yesim, I’d be nowhere. Snowbird would be nowhere. Even my father admits it.”

“My brother is a little drunk,” Yesim said.

Kerem lifted his glass. “Drunk enough to tell the truth. To my sister!” But the glass was empty. “Yesim, there’s a bottle of Scotch in the cabinet over the refrigerator …”

“You can get it. I’m going upstairs.” Yesim touched my shoulder as she went past and said I shouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.

Kerem got the bottle of Scotch and two glasses and I followed him into the living room, where he poured us about half a glass each. He used to hate the stuff, he said, but there was some kind of rule that lawyers had to drink Scotch. He stuck his hands into the tangles of his hair. “Holy shit, I’m a lawyer,” he said, and collapsed into his recliner. This time the footrest came up.

I slumped on the sofa, and we drank what he told me was a very good Scotch, from an island where they fertilized the soil with goat shit, could I believe that, goat shit? No, it wasn’t goat shit, really, you can’t trust what lawyers say, lawyers are always making up the most fantastic crap. The conversation slipped away from me. Kerem was talking about how his wife had been freaking out ever since someone broke into her Lincoln Navigator, and wanted to bring Max to live with Kerem in the mountains, the mountains, she said, as though these were real mountains, as though this was fucking Colorado, and of course it wasn’t going to happen, in a couple of weeks she’d calm down and tease him again for being a survivalist, which, in fact, she’d already called him, as though his move to Thebes had been part of some plan, Kerem said, as though he had planned any of this.

Then he was telling me about his sister, who was, he said, a poet, and had been in trouble. “What she needs,” Kerem said, “is encouragement.” He made me promise that I would encourage her. “We’re going to get through this,” he said, and he told me that, if I stayed around, I would see, the glory days were coming back to Thebes, but by this point the conversation had escaped from me entirely, and all I remember are images: rosy clouds against a pale-blue sky, trumpets, people dancing in a tent, things Kerem can’t have said. I had to go to the bathroom, so I stood up and hit my shin against the coffee table. The pain was unbearable. I hopped around the living room, and when I stopped I was sober again, but exhausted, as though I’d just sat through a very long film. Yesim had already gone to bed. I said goodbye to her brother and staggered across the little gulf that separated the Regenzeits from the Rowlands. I lay on the sofa, got up, took off my clothes and lay down again. I thought of Yesim, and what it would have been like if I had followed her into the kitchen, reached around from behind and cupped her breasts, and if I had just, and if I had only.

REGENZEIT

Kerem was four years older than I was; in the beginning he was my champion, my protector. In the stories I told myself, which were largely plagiarized from J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, Kerem was the prince and I was the squire. I trudged across the wilderness in his footsteps, because even my most fantastic daydreams involved a fair amount of trudging, and when the imaginary wind froze me, Kerem loaned me his cloak and I was warm. This went on until puberty stripped Kerem of his princely qualities. One summer he went away to a soccer camp and returned with formidable legs, a slouch and a new way of talking, or, more precisely, of not talking. I had no claim on his attention; the most I could get from him was “Unh,” as he noodled past on his way to some incomprehensible teenage activity. That summer I was friends only with Yesim, who was just my age. She was willing to try my games, but with her for a companion all our quests got muddled. We trudged across the landscape, but I didn’t know what we were trudging toward or what we’d do when we got there. Then it became clear that we were headed toward Yesim’s bedroom.

“You are Prince Charming,” she said, “and I am Sleeping Beauty.”

She threw herself onto her twin bed and closed her eyes. For a long time neither of us moved. Then Yesim looked at me and said, “What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know. What happens now?”

“You kiss me, and I wake up.”

She returned to her slumber. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Yesim burst out laughing. “That’s not how you do it.”

“You’re awake,” I pointed out.

“If you can’t do better than that,” she said, “I’m going to make you a dwarf.”

I didn’t have anything against dwarves, who were, in Tolkien’s work at least, noble and tough, dwarves who had their own runic alphabet and their kingdom underground, but I didn’t want Yesim to be unhappy. “OK,” I said. I leaned toward her.

Yesim recoiled. “What are you doing? You have to wait for me to go to sleep.”

We tried the whole thing again. I leaned in and kissed her lips. Yesim opened her eyes. “Finally,” she said. “Now, go out, and come back in.”

“Why?”

“Narcolepsy,” Yesim hissed, a word I didn’t understand. I knew we were playing a strange game, but I didn’t know what was strange about it until Mrs. Regenzeit caught me coming down the stairs and said, “You are a leetle beet in love with my daughter. That is all right. Just you do not try to marry her.”

“I’m not in love with her,” I said. “Besides, I’m too young to be married.”

“This is true, fortunately for us all.”

I asked if Yesim was engaged, which sent Mrs. Regenzeit into a coughing fit of malicious amusement. “No,” she said. “She is too young, also. But when the time comes, she will marry a Turkish boy.”

I accepted her proclamation dutifully. Besides, I knew for a fact that there were no Turkish boys in Thebes but her brother. I had time. So I played along with Yesim’s stories, which only got stranger as the summer went on. I sat for an afternoon at the foot of the forbidden tower (or bed), listening to the princess read aloud from Nancy Drew’s Dos and Don’ts for Girls; I stumbled around in the enchanted forest (Yesim’s bedroom, with the lights off) and was thwacked with cushions by spiteful forest creatures. Yesim and I drank “poison,” actually grape soda with a St. Joseph’s baby aspirin crumbled into it, and lay side by side on her bed, feigning eternal sleep. Even then I knew that something was wrong with Yesim’s imagination: it stored its kisses too close to its tears. But I had no idea how to tell her so, and would not have spoken if I could. I loved Yesim a leetle beet too much for that.

Earlier that year, I had stolen a book called Man and Woman from my mothers’ shelves, at least, I thought I’d stolen it. In retrospect I think they must have left it out for me, as no book like that existed during the era when my mothers could have learned anything from it. Man and Woman was written in simple, direct language, and illustrated with pencil line drawings, carefully shaded, of men and women who were supposed to look ordinary, but in fact, because of the changes of hairstyle that had taken place since the book was published, seemed to have come straight out of the 1960s. For the first time, I saw clearly the difference between the sexes: the woman’s arms were crossed over her stomach, while the man rested a confident hand on his buttock. Late that summer I shared this information with Yesim. I told her solemnly that she had a uterus, as though I were a scout returning from a mission to a forbidden city.

Yesim nodded regally. “Let’s see,” she said, and we did. Our bodies looked nothing like the illustrations in Man and Woman, so I put my hand on my buttock and told Yesim to cross her arms over her stomach. The likeness wasn’t even approximate; I thought it would be better if Yesim wore her hair in a braid, but it was cut too short. Still we touched, and retreated, neither of us certain what had happened. Yesim pulled her pants up and we sat on the floor, not talking, because Man and Woman didn’t say what we were supposed to do in that moment, although it had a certain amount of information about what would come later, not all of it incorrect, as it turned out. And that was all. We didn’t take off our clothes again. The game of men and women ended and another began, I don’t remember which, maybe it was the game of Life, which Yesim liked, or Uno, which she also liked, but which I liked less than Life because it had no finely molded pieces.

For years afterward Yesim came to see me at night. She touched my imaginary hair, and in time she learned to do other things as well, but by then she wasn’t Yesim anymore, or not only Yesim; she had put on other faces and become general, a warm weight by my hip, a hand on my chest, she could have been anybody. I didn’t even remember what she looked like with her clothes off, I thought. But apparently I was wrong. As I lay on my grandparents’ sofa, drunk, my knuckles rubbing against the waistband of my underwear, I thought of Yesim again, not the woman but the girl, standing with her arms crossed over her stomach. I imagined myself placing my hands on her shoulders, kissing her, moving her arms out of the way, pressing myself to her flat chest. Was I grown up in this scene, or was I a child? We were both soft, I know.

SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

The phone rang just as I was falling asleep. It was Alice. She wanted to know if I was all right.

“I’m dead drunk,” I said.

“Your message was scary,” Alice said. “Are you losing your mind?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It sounded like you were going through some kind of Shining thing.”

“Ha. I’m not even alone up here. My childhood friends live next door.”

“But you’re drinking. You’re going to start seeing the twins.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m trying to go to sleep.”

“Redrum, redrum.”

Alice was coming home from a party too, it turned out. Her friend Raoul …

“Raoul? Who’s Raoul?”

“You met him, he came to the salon a couple of times.” No hair parlor this but a group of writers who met in a bar in the Tenderloin. When the salon started, a year earlier, there had been a lot of them, but as people found work or left the city their number shrank, until the salon became a group of bar friends like any other, who played pool and gossiped and argued about who owed whom a drink. I didn’t remember anyone named Raoul. “He works for Petopia, the pet-supply people,” Alice said. “He wants me to write copy for them.”

“How glamorous,” I said.

There was a beat of silence. “I just called to see if you were all right,” Alice said. “Not so you could cut me down.”

“I’m sorry.” Beat. “Was it a good party?”

“It wasn’t bad. There weren’t enough people and there was too much to drink.”

“And this Raoul, he’s a nice guy?”

“Will you be jealous if I say yes?”

“Not at all,” I lied. “I want you to be happy.”

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I feel like I’m floating. You know? It’s like I’m floating in the dark, in a sensory-deprivation tank, and nothing I see is really happening.”

“Maybe it’s just that we’re drunk.”

“Maybe. But,” beat, “I just feel like that’s what we’re all doing now. Like we’re all just, like, floating.”

Beat. “Maybe we are.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish you were here.”

“I’ll be back,” I said.

“And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.

“I guess we’ll find out then.”

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

Beat. Beat.

LOST THINGS

My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.

Charles laughed. “I know that car.”

He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”

“I was at the Regenzeits’.”

“Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.

I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?

“Why are they our enemies?” I asked.

“Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”

“Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”

“Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”

“The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”

“But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”

“That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.

“Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”

“You must be thinking of the Cold War, although even there—”

“You don’t get it,” Charles interrupted. “Snowbird is their revenge.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Snowbird is a ski resort, and this is the late twentieth century. You aren’t going to convince me that Joe Regenzeit and his family have been holding a grudge ever since Mustafa Pasha’s defeat at the gates of Vienna, or, even if they did, that they would take their revenge here, in Thebes.”

Charles growled at me that I didn’t understand a damn thing about Thebes, and I said I understood enough, Thebes was just a small town in the mountains that no one cared about, and there were more important things happening in the big world, and wasn’t it time to think about something else, and he said, what something else did I mean, which something else did I want him to think about, when every day they ruined Thebes a little more, and the old families were dying out, and people were tearing the old houses down and building Swiss chalets, and a barn sold for two hundred thousand dollars, a barn, and I said, you wanted to move to California anyway, don’t tell me that you love Thebes, and he said, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want this place to die, and I said, it wasn’t dying, and he said, you don’t know what dying is, then he started coughing in a way that left little doubt that on this subject at least his knowledge was vastly greater than mine.

“Do you want some water?” I asked.

He waved me away, stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard him washing his coffee cup. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he shouted.

“Packing up the house,” I said.

“Then pack up the house, and don’t get mixed up with people who hate us.”

The screen door banged shut. I sat in the living room, hurt by my uncle’s words. Was he really so confused, I wondered, that he thought the Regenzeits were out to get us? It was ridiculous. People like Charles were the problem, I thought, intolerant people who can’t let go of the past.

After a while, I went up to my mothers’ room and opened one of Celeste’s trunks. It was full of magazines and newspapers heaped up roughly according to size, the raw materials of her work. What the Rowlands had accumulated, Celeste cut up: worn back numbers of Scribner’s Magazine, McClure’s, Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, mixed in with issues of Life and Vogue and Look. I used to look in the trunks when I came to visit in the summer, each time stealthily, as though I were breaking a rule; in fact no one said anything to me about the trunks and I don’t think my grandparents would have minded if they’d known. I liked the way the holes Celeste had cut in the pages of the old magazines acted as windows onto the pages behind, so that where the head of, say, a Bohemian fortune-teller was supposed to be, you’d see words or parts of words:

little known epis

the remarkable discover

ich it directly and indirectly

properly be regarded as m

the progress of thought

The central figur

young woman

ome scoundrel

oor of her cot

Now that I was looking at them again, the effect was completely different. The magazines seemed to me typical of Celeste’s angry way of dealing with the world: she took what she needed with no regard for anyone else.

I opened the second trunk, where she kept her collages. Each white sheet was kept safe in a big black sheet of paper folded in half. I unfolded the top sheet and picked up the collage beneath. It had a woodcut of a feather, angled as if drifting toward the bottom of the page; above it a slender hand in a lace cuff reached down, either to let it go or to pick it up again. Below the feather, at the center of the page, set between quotation marks that had been pasted down separately, was part of a typewritten phrase: “ollow me.” Follow me, it must have been, or, just possibly, hollow me. The date was penciled in the bottom right corner, in neat, small letters, July 1970. I was about to be born. I had seen the collage before, but something passed through me as I sat on the floor, looking at the paper, a cool dark something like the shadow of a cloud. It was as if Celeste were about to tell me something. I opened the second folder. This collage was from April of the same year; it showed a pair of hands on the keys of an enormous typewriter, and, emerging from the top of the machine, the prow of an airship. Cherubs beckoned to the airship from above, while from the bottom of the page a Chinese dragon rolled its eyes angrily. The references to birth, to my birth, were easier to spot than in the other: the cherubs, the round head of the zeppelin poking out of the typewriter’s slot. The dragon might have been my grandfather. Still, I was disappointed. Ollow me, the first picture said, and I wanted to ollow, to follow, but how could I follow when I didn’t know where it went? The collages led backward, further into the past, away from me and my time. Celeste’s style devolved, words and blocks of text appeared, floral borders, dancers, neckties and the heads of famous people. The collages retained their formal elegance but became, unmistakably, the work of a young person. Ollow me, ollow me. If only there had been another collage to show me where to go, but there was nothing, because, in May 1970, probably no more than a few days after she made this collage, Celeste and her sister left Thebes. They were seventeen and a half years old, and they took with them nothing, or almost nothing: a warm protrusion that would in a few months become a child.

LOW-FLYING STARS

It was for my sake that my mothers ran away from Thebes. They didn’t want to have their child in a little town in the Catskills where things happened so slowly that people were still speaking French six generations after the first settlers arrived. By Thebes standards, my mothers were more like weather than like people: they changed fast, and they moved on. They took me to New York, where they were going to be famous artists, only they had no idea about money and knew how to do nothing, nothing. For a few scary years in the 1970s my mothers barely scraped by, she, waitressing, and she, clerking in a photo lab; she, selling ladies’ clothes, and she, waitressing; she, answering telephones for a Senegalese clairvoyant, and she, answering telephones for an Israeli dentist. The three of us, she, she, and me, lived in an apartment on West Ninety-eighth Street, with two tiny bedrooms and a view, if you leaned dangerously far out the living-room window, of a blue-gray shard that was alleged to be the Hudson River.

Later, when they had real jobs and even health insurance, my mothers liked to tell stories about those years, to prove how tough we had all been and how close we’d come to not making it. There was the time, Celeste said, when she lit a fire in the ornamental fireplace, because the heat in the apartment was broken, and how was she supposed to know the chimney had been sealed since the nineteenth century? The apartment filled with smoke and the three of us were nearly evicted and if you lifted the living-room rug you could still see the burned boards where the fire had spread before the super put it out, using a blanket from my mothers’ bed, which was a technique for fire prevention that Celeste had never seen before. And the worst of it was, she said, that afterward the blanket was ruined, and she and her sister had to sleep in their coats.

“You slept in my coat,” Marie said, if she was present. “Your coat had those big horn buttons, remember? You said they dug into you?”

Celeste pretended to be perplexed. “But if I slept in your coat, what did you sleep in?”

“Sweaters, I guess.”

“Those were difficult times.”

There was something in Celeste’s voice, though, that made me think she missed those years, that in retrospect they seemed less difficult than the ones that came later. My mothers went to Hunter College; after they graduated Celeste got a job teaching art to middle-school students in the Bronx. Marie worked in the offices of semilegitimate publications with names like California Lifestyle and Platonic Caves, typing, making copies, answering the telephone, always in a short skirt, which Celeste didn’t approve of, but Marie rebutted that she couldn’t type to save her life, and without the skirts she’d be back to working for the clairvoyant, who could, presumably, see up her skirt no matter how long it was.

In the evenings my mothers sat at their worktables in the living room, making their art. They knitted sweaters for monsters with wrong arms and extra heads; they stamped papier-mâché medallions of modern saints of their own invention; they mixed brightly colored fluids in the sink and bottled them in glass phials on which they pasted labels, Potion of Temporary Resistance to Temptation, Elixir of Getting That Opportunity Back, Low-Flying Potion, Potion for Those Afraid to Drink the Other Potions in This Collection. Celeste painted miniature landscapes in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, in which the Upper West Side revealed its true, hellish character; Marie applied a Ouija board to a subway map and took photographs of the places the spirits told her to go. I loved the things they made, which was fortunate, because our apartment was becoming a museum of their work. The potions took up residence in the medicine cabinet; the demons capered over the nonworking fireplace. I found a three-armed sweater in my dresser, a joke, I think, but maybe not; the apartment wasn’t big and my mothers were always making.

They weren’t famous yet, but they had friends, and those friends had friends who had taken steps in that direction. My mothers talked about them all the time, enthusiastically but not uncritically, as though they, my mothers, were commenting on a sport from which they themselves had retired some years before. From their conversation I got the impression that it wasn’t hard to become famous. One day a gallery owner came to visit, and the next you had a show; the critic from the Times praised your work even if he didn’t understand what it was about. Then collectors sought you out, and you had to be careful; it was important to turn away from the collectors and their vulgar need, to encapsulate yourself in solitude and silence, so that you could emerge a few years later with your mature work, which was extremely difficult and cut no deals with anybody. That’s when the museums took you on, and afterward things happened without you, international exhibitions, retrospectives, scholarly monographs; the secret nominators spoke your name in secret and you got the MacArthur genius grant and as to what happened after that, why, you could imagine it yourself. With a mixture of excitement and dread — I wanted them to get their wish, but I didn’t know what would happen to me when they did — I pictured my mothers rising into the sky like two unwinking stars, possessed, finally, of all the solitude and silence they could ask for. Mostly it was a matter of not making mistakes along the way. Not like Leonora Kurtz, who worked with Marie, and had talent but listened to her boyfriend too much; not like Donatello DelAmbrosio, Celeste’s friend of the wonderful name, who needed to get out of the shadow of Fluxus. Not like Katy Gladwin, whose paintings were too theoretical, or Hugh Heap, whose string sculptures were cute but not really about anything, or Guy Anstine, whose white boxes were just white boxes, you’ve seen one you’ve seen a thousand. Not like Javier Provo, whose murals were in a Warhol movie and who was becoming actually famous, but was nonetheless completely preoccupied with his own body image. My mothers would not make these mistakes. They were ready to go up; they were waiting in our apartment, waiting and making.

Maybe their potions weren’t strong enough, maybe the demons they compacted with turned out not to have the powers they, the demons, had promised, maybe their saints were spurious; the ascension my mothers were waiting for did not arrive. Of course we were still waiting for it. We would always be waiting for it, but by the time I was nine or ten years old, my mothers had begun to glance backward to those first years in New York when food was scarce and success certain.

“You remember the time we saw that rat?” Celeste asked Marie wistfully. “It was about four feet long, sitting on the kitchen windowsill?”

“I saw the rat,” Marie said. “I told you about it. You wouldn’t come and look.”

“There were a lot of rats on the Upper West Side back then. Do you remember?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. “I remember bugs, but no rats.”

“Ah, bugs,” said Celeste. “Those enormous roaches. I remember when I was taking a bath, and this roach fell into the tub. I’d never seen such an enormous cockroach.”

“I remember your scream,” Marie said. “I’d never heard such an enormous scream.”

“Those were difficult times,” Celeste said.

Celeste Marie, Marie Celeste. My low-flying stars.

REGENZEIT

I spent the rest of the day on the sofa, reading Progress in Flying Machines. When it got dark I thought about going over to the Regenzeits’. I had promised Kerem I would visit soon, that I would consider myself a part of the family, just like I had been in the old days, but no one was home. They must be working late, I thought, getting Snowbird ready for the winter. I imagined Yesim at her desk, a pencil stuck in her hair. I imagined a brilliant blue day, the ground crackling with golden leaves, Yesim and me sitting on the Regenzeits’ porch, wearing bulky sweaters, holding mugs of hot cider. Then, in my imagination, one of my hands unpeeled itself from the side of the cup and settled on Yesim’s shoulder. In no time my tongue was in her mouth, my hands were in her black hair. In my imagination.

It was raining in gray sheets when I woke up the next morning, and with the rain came the autumn cold. I didn’t know how to turn on the heat; finally I went to the basement and looked at the furnace. It had gone out, and I couldn’t get it to start. I called the furnace company; they said they’d send someone as soon as they could. Looking out the kitchen window, I determined that Yesim drove a Subaru Outback, and Kerem a Ford Explorer. I went up to the attic bedroom and discovered that the boxes that filled the room were full of questionnaires left over from my grandfather’s lawsuit. Put a check next to every statement you agree with: 1. Morning is the time when I feel best. 2. My weight stays the same all year round. 3. I rarely cry for no reason. 4. I consider myself a “social person.” I sat on the bed and spent a long time thinking about I don’t know what. At five o’clock I called the furnace people again. A woman explained to me that they were waiting for a shipment of heating oil, which had not arrived because of a late-season hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. You want heat, talk to ExxonMobil, she said. I told her that I didn’t think ExxonMobil would take my call. Maybe not, she said, her voice weary and stiff.

Around six-thirty, I drove to town and bought a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale and a box of chocolate donuts. Two teenage girls stood outside the gas station, in the shelter by the pumps, wearing more makeup than I would have expected girls at a gas station to wear.

“Hey, mister,” one of them said as I passed, “will you get us some beer?” She was prettier than she looked at first; I wanted to tell her not to wear so much makeup. I said I’d give each of them a beer if they wanted, but I didn’t feel comfortable buying them more than that.

The girl said they needed it for a party, it wasn’t like they were going to drink it all. I said no, really, I couldn’t, and the girl sighed and said, “OK, give us each a beer.”

I wondered whose daughter she was, where she lived, whether she had grown up in Thebes. For a moment I thought of asking if I could go to the party, if only so that I would have something to do on Saturday night. But the thought of being at a party, any party, was unpleasant, and in any case I doubted the girls would agree to take me. I pulled two beers out of the six-pack and handed them to the girls, with a warning not to drink in public. They rolled their eyes and made complicated hand gestures, as if communicating how uptight I was to a deaf observer.

When I got home, the Outback was alone in the Regenzeits’ driveway. I watched a martial-arts film on television. “You will be punished,” said the hero, or the hero’s dubber. “All of you. Punished!” I wanted to correct his use of the passive voice, I wanted there to be heat, I wanted to be done with the packing, which I hadn’t even begun. Instead I showered, washed my hair and shaved under the hot water, which, thankfully, still worked. I put on a clean shirt, found a bottle of wine in my grandparents’ pantry and went across to the Regenzeits’ house.

Yesim was wearing a big shapeless sweater; her hair was tied back in a squiggly ponytail. I held up my bottle of wine and said I was afraid we’d drunk their entire supply the other night.

“Oh, no,” Yesim said, “Kerem always has more hiding somewhere.”

I thought that would be the end of our conversation, but Yesim, after hesitating for a moment, asked if I wanted to come in. I said I didn’t want to interrupt her, it was late, I was sure she had things to do.

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew me,” Yesim said. We sat in the kitchen, which hadn’t changed much since I was a child. The olive-green tin canisters that said FLOUR and COFFEE and SUGAR in orange faux-woodblock lettering still stood on their rack; the same red-and-white-checked tablecloth still covered the round kitchen table. The old white curtains printed with blue game birds hung before the window; the same clock counted off COCA-COLA TIME over the massive olive-green refrigerator. Now that Mrs. Regenzeit had returned with her husband to Turkey, I wondered whether she missed the Populuxe splendor of her kitchen, the streamlined mixer, the color-coded fondue forks she sometimes used to twist her long black hair into a bun. Yesim made us tea. I asked whether her parents liked living in Akbez, and Yesim said she didn’t know, she hardly spoke to them anymore. “The truth is,” she said, “I can’t talk to my father now that he’s found religion.”

“He’s found religion?” I remembered Joe Regenzeit as having been religious already. Hadn’t he thanked the god whose name I misheard as Olaf for nearly everything?

“Yes, he’s become a fanatic. It’s his way of saying fuck you to secular America.” The Yesim I remembered would not have said something like this. She did not curse; in fact, despite her sexual curiosity, she had always seemed to me somehow innocent. She told me that Joe Regenzeit had joined a medrese, that every third word out of his mouth was obscene or whore. Referring to America sometimes, and sometimes to Yesim.

“It sounds like he’s gone off the deep end.”

“Yes,” Yesim said, “and the really strange thing is, he wants me to come live with him. It’s the only thing that will save me, he says.”

“Save you from what?”

“Myself, I think he means, but probably America, too.”

“It doesn’t sound like a hard decision. Don’t go.”

“What if he’s right?” Yesim asked.

I wanted to ask what he might be right about, but Yesim didn’t look as if she wanted to be questioned. Instead I asked how Snowbird was doing, and Yesim told me they were building a terrain park for snowboarders, basically a place for them to break their arms and legs. “It’s all right with me as long as they don’t sue,” she said.

Some Coca-Cola time passed silently.

“I’m glad we’re still friends,” I said.

Yesim smiled. “Were we friends? I thought you were friends with my brother.”

“What about the summer when Kerem went to soccer camp? What about Man and Woman?”

“What?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Oh, that,” Yesim said finally. “I’d forgotten what it was called.”

“I used to think about it all the time.”

“Is that so?”

“Never mind,” I said, blushing. “I’m babbling. My grandfather’s house doesn’t have heat, and the cold must have affected my brain. I’m used to San Francisco weather, although it gets cold there too …”

“If you don’t have any heat, you should stay here,” Yesim said. It was as though she were telling me that if I touched the stove I would burn myself.

She offered to make up a bed for me in the study. I protested, I’d be in Kerem’s way, and anyway there were plenty of blankets at my grandparents’ house. Yesim said Kerem was visiting Kathy and Max in Philadelphia and it was really no trouble. “Just stay there. I’ll get things ready.” I studied my reflection in the toaster: I was elongated, bent beyond all recognition. My hands were enormous and unusable. Yesim came back. She didn’t know where Kerem kept his pajamas, would I be all right?

I would give a lot to know what Yesim was thinking as she led me upstairs to Kerem’s study, where she’d made up a bed on her brother’s black leather sofa. Did she feel sorry for me? Did what I told her set some idea in motion, some desire? All I know is that she smiled, or seemed to be smiling.

ADVENTURE

All through the winter that followed the summer of Man and Woman, I dreamed of seeing Yesim naked again, and when spring came I was in an erotic frenzy. I was a year closer to manhood, and I imagined Yesim as having made even more progress toward maturity. What wouldn’t we be able to do, once I had woken her from her enchanted sleep? I’d discovered masturbation that year, and if that was what that felt like, I imagined that lying with Yesim would be something completely unearthly. With strange courage I asked my mothers to send me to Thebes the day after school ended, and to my surprise, they agreed.

“If you want to see your grandparents so badly, of course we’ll send you,” Celeste said, as though it had been my diffidence, and not theirs, which kept me in New York, some years, until the beginning of July.

I got on the Trailways bus triumphantly, and when my grandmother picked me up in Maplecrest (the bus didn’t stop in Thebes), I was so excited that I couldn’t speak. This worried my grandmother, and when we got home she called my mothers. “You sent him too soon!” she said. “He doesn’t want to be here!” I can only imagine what my mothers replied. I wasn’t there: I’d already dropped my bag and run across to the Regenzeits’.

Mrs. Regenzeit was on the phone, but she motioned for me to sit down, opened the refrigerator, took out a bowl of twilight-purple eggplant and set it on the table. “I don’t give one sheet about that,” she said, opened a drawer and handed me a fork. “He should know better than to listen to such stupid things. Yes, goodbye.” She hung up the phone forcefully.

“Is Yesim home?” I asked, my mouth still full.

“Yesim? Yes, she is here. But I don’t think she is alone.”

I climbed the stairs, my stomach light with nervousness, and knocked on Yesim’s door.

“Come in,” Yesim said, and I went in, and found her sitting cross-legged on a pillow, and across from her, seated on a pillow also, a girl with long brown hair which fell across her face as she leaned forward to play an Uno card. “Oh, it’s you,” Yesim said. “I didn’t know you were coming back.” The other girl sat up and parted her hair just a little, revealing a skinny nose and a gleaming brown eye. “This is Matilda,” Yesim said. “She’s my best friend.” Both of them giggled, as though to suggest that they had become best friends by virtue of a long and humorous adventure, over the course of which their other, non-best friends had one by one been killed off.

“Who’s winning?” I asked.

“She is,” Yesim said, as I could have seen for myself from the few cards that remained in Matilda’s hand.

“Can I play?”

Matilda looked at me with horror, as though I were a biology experiment from which she had been excused for ethical reasons.

“Not now,” Yesim said, and with a grunt of satisfaction, played the Wild Draw 4 card.

“You bitch!” Matilda shrieked. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”

I backed out of the room and pulled the door closed quietly, no longer a prince, only a palace eunuch, dismissed and fearful for his head.

Downstairs, Mrs. Regenzeit beamed at me with full consciousness of what I might be feeling and asked, “You like that?” Meaning the eggplant. I nodded. “Good. Now listen, I need your help.”

Kerem was in trouble, she told me. Soccer had made him popular and popularity had turned him into a hoodlum. “He used to have good friends, people like you who make good marks in school and read books, but now his friends put safety pins into their pants. One of them has shaved part of his head, not the whole thing, and now Kerem is talking about doing that too.” Mrs. Regenzeit did not know what would be next, whether it would be drugs or crime or what people did when they had hair like that. “We try to talk to him,” she said, “but in his head there is only the terrible music he listens to.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?” I asked.

“No,” Mrs. Regenzeit said. “What could you tell him that we did not say?” She stabbed the air. “I want you to work with him on the computer.”

This, Mrs. Regenzeit explained, was their latest and maybe their last hope for Kerem, a computer they had ordered from a catalog, which might get him interested in science and mathematics. The computer came in a kit, the whole family had labored long to assemble it, Mr. Regenzeit had given up many hours of work, and finally they’d hired an engineering student from Rensselaer Polytechnic to finish the job. Now it was working, but would it work?

“You’re a good boy,” Mrs. Regenzeit said. “Help him to take an interest in this computer.”

Kerem came downstairs, rubbing his eyes and scowling. In the last nine months he had become skinny and pointed and his curly black hair stood on end with the support of some glistening goo. He looked like Spencer Bartnik, a social pariah in my class at the Nederland School for Boys who was renowned for his frequent and disruptive midclass nosebleeds.

“Good morning, Kerem,” Mrs. Regenzeit said sweetly.

I wanted to ask him a thousand questions. Finally, timidly, I asked if he was going to soccer camp again this summer?

“Football,” Kerem said. “The name of it is football. It’s only Americans who call it soccer.” Unbidden, he explained to me that last August he’d met an English assistant coach named Billy, who had demonstrated to him the superiority of all things English, and, incidentally, turned him on to punk rock. “He got me started on the Pistols, right.”

“If you say so.”

“That wasn’t a real question,” Kerem said. “You just say right at the end of a sentence, right.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Right,” Kerem said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

England had invaded Kerem’s bedroom, and brought with it disorder and the smell of feet. A big Union Jack hung over his bed, and opposite it a poster of Sid Vicious, who also looked like Spencer Bartnik, and who was, according to the poster, dead. Then full-color photographs of soccer players, or footballers, as I was supposed to call them now, razor-cut from imported magazines, ruddy men who seemed to be all tendon, caught in midleap, grimacing, as though they were keeping themselves aloft by force of will. The bed was covered with clothes and the remnants of more than one meal. I asked Kerem if that was where he slept. “Naw.” He pointed to a sleeping bag that lay unrolled by the window. “I’m squatting.” He steered me to the desk, where a gray box waited inertly: this was the computer, the last hope for his salvation.

Computers belonged, at that point, more to my imaginary world than to the world I shared with other people. Computers were 2001 and Forbidden Planet; they were big, blinking cabinets, sinister friends who did what you wanted to but couldn’t, like causing the New York subway to trap your enemies in perpetual darkness, or could but didn’t want to, like math homework. They looked nothing like the Heathkit H88 on Kerem’s desk, a gray box like a bulbous TV set, devoid of lights and switches, an appliance that was no more exciting in appearance than my grandmother’s microwave oven, and considerably less exciting than her electric toothbrush, which, with its rocket-ship styling and brightly colored interchangeable heads, its three speeds and warm rechargeable battery, seemed truly to announce the beginning of a new era. But this computer was real.

“Check it out,” Kerem said. He switched the machine on, and on the gray screen, underneath a pennant for Manchester United, green words appeared and vanished, leaving only a prompt,

>

the beginning of the beginning. The Heathkit H88 was intended more for serious hobbyists than for recreational users, and came with no software other than a BASIC interpreter and a game, intended to demonstrate the computer’s capabilities, where letters and numbers appeared near the top of the screen and fell slowly downward; you had to type each one on the keyboard before it reached the bottom, or you lost. Kerem played a game, then I played. It was too easy at first, then, as the letters speeded up, it became too hard. Only a machine could have kept up after the third or fourth round.

“It’s stupid,” Kerem admitted, “but look at this.” He typed,

>10 PRINT “FUCK YOU!”

>20 GOTO 10

>RUN

and an unstoppable column of insult flickered up the screen. That was power. It didn’t matter that it was a tiny, ineffectual kind of power that would strike no fear into the hearts of my enemies nor save me from any trouble; all that mattered was that the gray box was in our camp. It did what we wanted without questioning; our power was, in the first instance, power over it. We taught the box new obscenities, and had it shout them over and over at the top of its lungs, until Kerem’s mother called him down to dinner.

I wanted more. By the end of that first day Kerem and I reached an understanding that seemed brilliant to us at the time, although it had disastrous consequences for me later on: I would teach myself to program the computer, and Kerem would take the credit. I wouldn’t have known where to start, but the Heathkit came with a book of programs you could type in to play games, perform calculations, or sort a list of names in alphabetical order. Even the shortest program was many dozens of lines long, and stayed in the computer’s memory only until you switched the power off. If you wanted to run it again after that, you had to retype the whole thing. The work was excruciating, endless, monastic, exalting. If I typed a line wrong, the only way to correct my mistake was to type the entire line again; if I didn’t catch it right away, the Heathkit would bide its time, then ambush me with a syntax error when I tried to run the program. The screen was tall enough to display only twenty lines at a time, which meant that I had to check my work in tiny increments, looking for a typographical error that was sometimes to be found in the book itself.

I worked in Kerem’s room while he slept, twisted up in a torn t-shirt, on a sleeping bag by the window. After a couple of hours he woke up. He looked around the room and sighed, as though the people who were supposed to take care of the décor had once again let him down.

“I fucking hate America,” he said.

“Too bad you live here,” I said, nettled.

“It is too bad, mate. I’m getting out as soon as I can. America is full of racist hicks.”

“Where are you going?”

“London.”

“They don’t have racists in London?”

“You’d better believe they don’t.” Then, reconsidering, Kerem said, “Or if they do, they get their asses kicked by redlace skinheads.”

I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t refute him either. Kerem stalked to the bathroom; I heard him pee, then water in the sink. When he came out, he pulled on the jeans he’d worn the night before and we went downstairs.

“Morning, Mum,” Kerem mumbled, forgetting that he was supposed to have been awake for hours.

“You have a good lesson?” Mrs. Regenzeit asked.

“Really good,” I said.

Kerem agreed that I was making progress. He jogged down the hill, kicking at rocks, dodging the invisible members of the opposing team. I went home. At dinner I listened impatiently as my grandfather read us the news from the Catskill Eagle. Eastern Gas was laying a new main in Ashland; police had chased a group of suspicious youths out of the cemetery; meanwhile the library was selling unwanted books to raise money for its new reading room. I helped my grandmother clear the table and wash up, then I went to the Regenzeits’. Kerem was listening to a tape he’d made off the radio, Dave Stein’s show from WCDB. He paced around his room, looking for something, a sock, a leather wristband.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“None of your business.”

“Did you ever go to the cemetery?”

Kerem glared at me. “Mate,” he muttered, “stick to the box.”

He found what he was looking for and climbed out the window; the rubber cleats of his football boots shushed down the garage roof.

I was afraid that Mrs. Regenzeit would discover our trick, but she never did. She must have wanted badly to believe that the computer was working, that Kerem was working. How she believed! Sometimes, when I came over in the morning, I’d hear her talking on the phone about her son, the whiz kid. All of the signs that she’d read formerly as meaning that Kerem was in trouble now meant that he was a genius. He had messy hair, he wore the same clothes day after day, he didn’t speak much, but on the computer he was something! I think Mrs. Regenzeit believed he was the equal of the young Bobby Fischer, or the boy in Florida who could solve any Rubik’s Cube in a minute flat. I didn’t mind that Kerem’s genius was all my doing, because I got to listen to his music: Minor Threat and Murphy’s Law, the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, a live Sex Pistols recording that had been copied and recopied until Johnny Rotten’s call to the faithless was practically lost under the hiss of tape. I shared his secret. What was better, what was even better, Kerem passed on to me a portion of the adoration he was getting from his parents. He was the whiz kid, but I was the Wiz. One night he took me with him, down to the steps of the public library, which were broad, deep and secluded. I met his friends, a boy named Eric with a shock of red hair and protruding ears; a girl named Shelley who had made her skirt by cutting up a sweatshirt and sewing it back together. Kerem introduced me as his mate from New York City, and Shelley and Eric drew long hollow breaths.

“I really want to go there,” Shelley said. “I’ve just got to check out the scene in New York.”

“Lower East Side,” Eric said. “CBGB, right?”

I thought he meant the SeaBees, the Navy engineers. I wondered if there was a naval training center in lower Manhattan.

“When we come to New York,” Shelley said, “can we stay with you?”

“I can ask,” I said, “but my apartment is pretty small.”

We walked to the Texaco station and stood by the pumps, watching people go in and out of the convenience store. Now and then one of the group would point to a customer and murmur to the others: Known fag. Definite fag. Total fag. Once Shelley approached a couple of men in a low-slung Camaro and persuaded them to buy her cigarettes. She offered me one; I said no but this didn’t change Shelley’s mistaken idea of my status.

“I shouldn’t be smoking either,” she said. “My mom’s really on me to quit.”

We talked about what we would do if the world ended. “Like if there was a nuclear war,” Eric said, “but all the people up in the mountains were OK.”

“We’d still have democracy,” Shelley said. “You can bet the people up here would keep it going.”

“Not bloody likely,” said Kerem. “You wouldn’t have television, so there couldn’t be democracy. You can’t have democracy without television.”

“You could still vote on stuff, though,” Eric said.

“Television and the central bank,” said Kerem, who had ordered some tracts from an ad in the back of one of his football magazines. “Without that, you have anarchy.”

“Anarchy!” My friends knocked their beer cans together.

“What I think is, we would still be together,” Shelley said. “No matter what other people were doing, you know?”

We agreed that we would be anarchists together. Shelley would make our clothes, and Eric would provide our food, because his family had a farm farther down the valley, with cows and shit. Kerem would be the leader, because he knew the most about how anarchy was supposed to go. And I, “You’d be, like, my adviser,” Kerem said. “You’d help me plan our takeover.” Because we wouldn’t be content to be isolated anarchists. We’d get other people to join; we’d spread anarchy up and down the valley, and on the far side of the mountains. The apocalypse held no more fear for me that night. I leaned back against the convenience store’s wall and closed my eyes, warm with the knowledge that I wouldn’t ever have to be alone.

“My adviser is falling asleep,” Kerem said. “I better take him home.”

My magnum opus that summer was a game called Adventure. It was at the back of the book of programs that came with the computer, and I avoided it for weeks because it was much, much longer than any of the other programs, a thousand lines or more, an epic of code. It was written more densely than the other programs, also, so that it was hard to figure out what the game was supposed to do. I tried to make sense of the long DATA statements, the multidimensional arrays, the variables marked with unfamiliar signs, the complex string functions, the subroutines, but I kept getting lost; I hoped the Heathkit would understand it better than I did.

For a long time, Adventure did nothing at all. With each line I fixed, a new error manifested itself, more cunning than the last one had been, better at hiding its true nature, or appearing to be in one part of the program while in fact it was in an entirely different part. I was haunted by the thought that someone would turn the computer off before I was finished, or that there would be an accident, Kerem would trip over the power cord, a storm would blow down the lines that led to his house, a generator would fail, Russian missiles would arc over the horizon, civilization would collapse with Adventure still unfinished. I had stomach pains, dark circles under my eyes, and the beginnings of an irreversible stoop. My grandparents worried about me.

“What’s that Turk teaching you now?” my grandfather asked.

“He’s tutoring me in science,” I said.

“So Kerem’s good at science?” asked my grandmother.

“Yeah. He’s a whiz kid.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” my grandmother said. “I heard he was in trouble.”

She let the subject drop, but, and this was my grandmother’s usual strategy, she returned to it days later, hoping to catch me off guard. “You’d know,” she said, looking up from the Sunday newspaper. “How does oxygen become ozone?” Or, as she trimmed bushes in the backyard, “Maybe you can tell me, are these little critters going to turn into butterflies?”

But I had learned something from Kerem. “Unh,” I said, studying the green squiggles that scurried across the underside of a leaf.

My grandmother shook her head. “Go eat something. You look as gray as a grub yourself.”

It must have been late July when I finished Adventure. Something gave, something moved, something opened. Run, I could say, and it would run. Nothing flashed across the screen, no dancing letters, no space invaders, no canary cries or ping-pong pings. Only words.

Entrance to Cave

You are standing outside a dark and gloomy cave.

There is a gold key here.

>

I had made a world. Not a large world, not even, from any reasonable point of view, an interesting world, but a world nonetheless. Compared with the work of getting the program to run, the adventure of Adventure was absurdly simple. You typed,

>take key

and took the key; you went into the gloomy cave and crossed the subterranean river at the ford, you found the sword, surprised the troll and navigated the maze where all the rooms looked exactly alike. You entered the castle, you read the note, you opened the secret door and found the locked treasure chest. Did you have the gold key? You did, you did! The castle, the maze, the troll, the river and the cave were the whole of my kingdom, but they were, to my mind, like one of the holograms pressed into a tiny button or pin, where, as you turn it in your hands, a three-dimensional pattern seems to repeat itself in infinite space. I saw not what was there but what could be there, if only I had written it, a world of rooms where I would be free to wander as I pleased. It was as though the gray box had been working in secret to fulfill my oldest dream about its powers, although, like many dreams, the coming true bore only a metaphorical or tangential relation to the dream itself. Yes, I could know all, do all, create and destroy at my whim, I could make subways and strand my enemies within them, yes, everything, yes, only I would have to do it in the gray box. It was enough.

It was too much to take in. After I had unlocked the treasure chest and won the game twice, I needed to tell someone what I had done. I found Kerem with Shelley and Eric at the gas station.

“My game works!” I said.

“Oh?” Kerem frowned at me, as though he’d expected me to say something completely different. “Yeah, OK, that’s great. Good work.”

“We have to play,” I said, “before the power goes out.”

“Play what?” Shelley asked.

“This game I wrote on the computer,” I said.

“You wrote a computer game? Wow!” Shelley put her head very close to mine and whispered, “We’re a little stoned.”

I nodded gravely, as though Shelley had told me that the three of them had contracted an incurable disease. Their lives had become more serious, suddenly, and also more exciting. They would probably die. But secretly, if their being stoned meant that I got to have Shelley’s breath in my ear, I was all for it. Eric was hopping in tiny circles around the air pump.

“Are you ready?” Shelley asked Kerem.

“Shelley’s brother is having a party,” Kerem said. He must have felt bad that he hadn’t appreciated my game, because he added, “Want to come?”

“We’re going to have a great time,” Shelley said.

“OK,” I said. Consequences were whirling around me in a cloud of great seriousness. If, and if, else if, else. Then. Then. Then.

ADVENTURE

You are standing at the entrance to a dark and gloomy cave. Ahead of you, in the darkness, there is music.

“You’re OK?” Kerem asks. “Just be cool, and if anything happens that you don’t like, come find me. OK?”

Say OK.

“Let’s go-oo,” Shelley moans.

You follow Kerem and Shelley and Eric into the cave.

You’re in Shelley’s brother’s apartment, on the second floor of an apartment complex at the far end of Thebes, by the storage facility and the graveyard. There are many people here, and you don’t know any of them, although some of their faces are familiar from town. There’s the guy who works at the grocery store, and there’s one of the guys from the ski shop. You associate them so closely with those places that seeing them here is like being in a dream, where heads are pasted on new bodies and one city borrows the name of another. What’s more, everyone in the room is twice your size. Shelley has gone off to talk to her brother, and Eric is talking to the grocery-store guy. Only Kerem stays with you, and only because he doesn’t know anyone here, any more than you do.

“Let’s get some beers,” he says.

Follow Kerem. You follow him into the kitchen, which is, if anything, even more crowded than the living room. You are pressed by waists, hips. Girls in tall vinyl boots are laughing. Men are looking at you, they want to know what you are doing here. Kerem opens the refrigerator and gets a can of beer for himself and one for you. It tastes awful, but you hope that if you are seen drinking, people may mistake you for a midget, or a late-blooming fifteen-year-old. Kerem says something to you, but everyone is talking at once and you can’t understand him. He waves, he is leaving you, he is gone. You are alone in the forest of giants.

“Hi,” says a girl with vast blond hair. “What’s your name?”

Say your name.

“How old are you?”

Lie.

“Do you live in Thebes?”

“In New York,” you say.

“Oh, wow, that’s really great!”

You tell the tall girl about New York. She screams, “Mike!” and one of the giants turns around. “I want you to meet my new friend.”

“Hey.” Mike tips his beer toward you.

“Hey,” you say, and tip your beer toward Mike.

“He’s from New York,” the tall girl says.

This is good, Mike no longer looks at you as if you were a pituitary oddity. For all he knows, everyone in New York looks like this. It might be something in the drinking water. Keep people small to make the housing more efficient.

“The big city,” Mike says. “I love it! Wish I got there more often.”

“It’s not very far away,” you say, emboldened. “There’s a bus from Maplecrest. It’s like two and a half hours, and it goes straight to the Port Authority.”

Mike grimaces. You didn’t need to tell him about the bus. You turn to the tall girl, hoping for reassurance. “Do you ever go to the city?” She shrugs as though now she doesn’t know what city you’re talking about. “Or do you mostly stay up here in Thebes?”

You have come to a dead end.

Find Kerem? You look for him in the living room, but there are too many big people; if you go into that crowd you may never come out. You end up perched on the back of a sofa next to a kid with stripes shaved in his hair, who is willing to talk to you about the Dead Kennedys. “I kind of like the lyrics,” you say. “Like, you know, too drunk to fuck? That’s funny.”

The kid looks at you. “Have you ever fucked?”

“No,” you admit. There is a lull in your conversation. “Have you?”

The kid shrugs. “I think so.”

Much later, you’ll understand that this is what Mrs. Regenzeit meant by only part of his head, and you will laugh, and wish you could tell her that there is nothing to fear from the partially shaved. You excuse yourself, you have to pee. You wait on line for the bathroom.

Shelley is here. “Oh, my god,” she says, “it’s you!” She takes your hand. “I am so happy to see you.” Her eyes are red. “I just don’t feel like I ever got a chance to know you, and I think you’re probably a really great person.” She tells you how few great people there are in the world, and how her ambition is to own a big farmhouse somewhere in the mountains, and to get them all together, the great people, in a big sleeping loft in the barn, and, like, talk. The bathroom door opens.

“Don’t go away,” Shelley says.

She goes in, she comes out, you go in. You have never peed so quickly in your life. But she’s gone when you come out, and you can’t find her again. The apartment is crowded with strangers, and not one of them wants anything from you at all. What is this game you’re playing? Who wrote the code for it? You wish you were back in Kerem’s room, seated in front of the Heathkit H88, but you aren’t. You go back into the kitchen. Three boys are sitting at the table, taking turns throwing a quarter into a glass of beer. If the quarter goes in, they drink; if it doesn’t go in, they drink. One of them is dangerously overweight and appears to have been dipped in oil. He takes the quarter out of the glass and licks it on both sides.

“You want to play?” he asks.

You understand now that this is a game with no victory conditions. The rooms lead only to other rooms, and there is no treasure in any of them, and no way out of the cave once you have gone in. You aren’t afraid anymore, but you can’t remember ever having been as sad as you are now.

Leave world.

You can’t leave that.

Go.

Where do you want to go? The kitchen is full of smoke, and there’s no place for you to sit, and you suspect that people are looking at you again, thinking midget thoughts. You find a door that leads out to a balcony. From here you can see the graveyard, the upslope of the ski hill, the stars. A few people Mike’s size are leaning on the railing and talking. They pay no attention to you. You sit on the ground with your back to the wall. You are suddenly very tired. You fall asleep.

Time passes …

Lightning wakes you up. A storm has crossed into the valley; the wind hisses through the trees across the road. Beyond the roof’s overhang, rain falls in sheets. The big people have gone inside, sensibly. The thunder breaks over you, then the lightning, then the thunder again. You would be happy to stay here all night, watching the weather.

Shelley finds you. “Thank God,” she says. “I thought you might have left.” She sits next to you and takes your hand. “I’m so glad Kerem brought you. He’s sweet. Do you think he likes me?”

“Definitely.”

Shelley rests her head on your shoulder. “It’s just so hard, you know?” She complains that Kerem has been avoiding her; she’s afraid that he drinks too much and smokes too much pot. You aren’t sure you should hear these things, but you’re so grateful that someone, anyone, Shelley! has found you that you will listen to anything.

“You know what I think the problem is, really?” says Shelley. “Thebes is so small. Kerem needs to be somewhere big, like New York City.” She gives you an unreadable look.

Read it? You can’t. It’s unreadable.

“Do you want to kiss me?” Shelley asks. You would like to, but you don’t know how. Shelley presses her hands to your cheeks, immobilizing your head. Suddenly her tongue is in your mouth. Her eyes are closed; you stare at the smudges where her eye shadow used to be.

“Mmm,” Shelley says, and lets go of your head. “You’re a good kisser.” Compared with what, you wonder. Robots? “Don’t tell Kerem,” she says.

Shelley goes inside. A few minutes later, you go in too. The shiny boy still sits in the kitchen, resting his chins on his hands, staring at a half-full glass of beer.

“Your turn,” he says.

The living room is ruined, human beings will never live here again. Kerem and Shelley are holding hands in the middle of the room.

“Where did you go?” you ask Kerem reproachfully.

“Where did you go?” Kerem asks. “I spent half the night looking for you. I thought one of Mike’s friends had stuffed you in a closet.”

“I think we should sleep here,” Shelley says. “If we go out, we’re going to get soaked.”

“Do you think Mike will let us?” Kerem asks.

You imagine the two of them lying together on the sofa, or on one of the coat-covered beds. You want to prevent them from doing this. Here’s the prompt: act promptly.

“I’m going home,” you shout. “Come on!”

Run.

The wind takes you like a downed leaf, it pushes you down the street, and when you look back, you see that Kerem is running after you. “Punk lives!” he shouts, and he kicks over a newspaper box. Copies of the Catskill Eagle tumble out and are blown away. You run up the hill as fast as you can, the wind very strong at your back, so that it seems as though you’re flying.

When you’re almost home, doubled over and out of breath, Kerem grabs your shoulder and presses you against a soaking tree. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone what you did tonight,” he says.

You promise, you never will.

The next morning you learn that the storm knocked down a power line, and Adventure is gone. It doesn’t matter. You have already won. Did you kiss Shelley? You did, you did!

REGENZEIT

At some time in the night I woke up, and Yesim was sitting on the edge of the sofa. She was wearing a white t-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. I pressed her hand to my face. It smelled of soap; the skin along the side of her index finger was dry. I opened my mouth and Yesim put her finger between my lips. I sucked on her finger; it had no taste beyond the smell of soap. Yesim made a small happy noise. I squeezed her flannel thigh just above the knee and let my hand travel upward. Yesim wasn’t wearing a bra; I put my hand under her shirt and confirmed my suspicion: almost imperceptible hairs covered her back. Yesim leaned toward me. The tips of her breasts brushed my chest. My hand moved farther up her back, to the space between her shoulder blades, and then down to the waistband of her pajamas. “Don’t,” Yesim sighed, after a while. “Sleep.”

REGENZEIT

When I woke up again, Yesim was in the living room, drinking coffee and watching the news. “I’m engaged,” she said. “Did you know that? I’m supposed to get married next June.”

“Congratulations,” I mumbled.

She told me that her fiancé was someone she had worked with in Albany, at an employment agency that staffed construction jobs. They had gone out for years, on and off, and had just become engaged when her father got sick and she returned to Thebes. Since then they had put off the wedding twice. Her fiancé, Mark, was very patient.

“Yesim,” I began.

“I know. It’s a little late to be telling you this, but Mark isn’t the most important thing about me. He’s not always the first thing I talk about. But I owe him a lot. I can’t tell you what a mess I was when I met him.”

“You can tell me. I complained to you last night, didn’t I?”

“This is worse,” Yesim said. She told me that she had gone through a hard time after she graduated from college, a very hard time. It began when she moved to Cambridge to work as the personal assistant to a famous poet whom she’d call Professor X. Yesim herself was writing poems, which was something she’d always done, though it was only in college, when she won a prize offered by a real literary journal with nationwide distribution, that she began to think of writing as something she might do instead of other things, rather than along with them. Anyway, she was living in Cambridge, and spending most of her time in the car, because Professor X suffered from chronic weakness in her legs, which was almost certainly psychosomatic, but nonetheless prevented her from driving or walking any distance, so that the work of being her assistant turned out mostly to involve driving Professor X around and waiting for her to emerge from buildings that Yesim wasn’t invited to enter. After a few months of this vehicle-bound life, Yesim abruptly and stormily left Professor X. She got a job waiting tables at a restaurant called Casablanca, where her Middle Eastern looks compensated for her lack of experience, and sat up late in her studio apartment on Mt. Auburn Street, writing poems that came slowly and turned out to be ill formed. One night, while she was writing, she had the sensation that a hand was closing on her throat. The feeling went away, then returned; it got so bad that black stars with green coronas appeared in her field of vision, as though she were asphyxiating.

Yesim thought it might be strep throat, or asthma, or maybe the city air had found some latent flaw in her lungs. She went to a doctor; the doctor found nothing. She thought that if only she knew whose hand was grabbing her by the throat, she might be able to do something about it, which was, she admitted, a ridiculous way of thinking, but at the time it really was as though someone had cast a spell on her, as though someone’s hand were seizing the throat of a doll as someone’s voice muttered a spell. Whose hand was it, whose voice? Yesim suspected the jilted Professor X, who was witchy, if not literally a witch. Her condition worsened. She quit her job, and she wanted to leave Cambridge but couldn’t think of anywhere she wanted to go, or what she would do once she got there. It was as though the crooked streets, the plan of which she had never been able to master, were keeping her in, like the walls of a maze. She left her apartment on Mt. Auburn Street less and less often, only to get food, then not even to get food. If her father hadn’t come for her, she didn’t know what would have happened, but he did come. She weighed ninety-eight pounds. Her father, not a large man, carried her downstairs and drove her out of Cambridge, although, she noted with satisfaction, he got lost on his way to the Mass Pike. The city’s evil influence affected everyone.

Joe Regenzeit took her to the Pines, a clinic near Albany. She wouldn’t say too much about it, except that it wasn’t a malign place, just quiet. It was so quiet, sometimes she imagined that she had died and no sound that came from the world could reach her any longer, as though the hand had let go of her throat too late; now she could speak but there was no one left to listen. Eventually, Yesim moved to an apartment that she shared with other women who had graduated from the Pines, and in time she took a job at the staffing agency. The work was not demanding and she enjoyed the compactness of the lives that passed through her hands, file-sized lives, on their way to file-sized jobs. They were almost like poems, but with the advantage that they never had to be revised or read aloud. She met Mark, a large, competent person, who had been a construction worker in an earlier life. He was a decade older than she was; his first question, after they kissed for the first time, was whether she wanted children, and her answer was yes, of course. If only her father hadn’t got sick, they would have gone ahead with all the plans they’d made with natural, heartening quickness: to marry, to buy a house that Mark would fix up, to have a child, children. Yesim really did want children, she’d always wanted them. She could have been happy forever after. Only Joe Regenzeit did get sick, and because he had saved Yesim’s life — seriously, she was certain she would have died on Mt. Auburn Street, that Cambridge would have let her die — she owed him the effort to save his life in return. There wasn’t much more to tell, Yesim said. Her father got better and left for Akbez, while she stayed on in Thebes.

As I listened to her story, I thought about how much Yesim and I had in common. We had both fucked up, or maybe we were both fucked up, and we’d both come to Thebes to start over. What if we could start over together? Of course I didn’t say anything about that. I nodded and tried to look grave. But inside, I was thinking about the future.

Meanwhile, Yesim was talking about Mark again. “He used to come up here,” she said, “but the visits went so badly, he said he’d wait in Albany until I’m through figuring out what I need to figure out.”

“What’s that?”

“Whether I’m going back.”

Yesim said she had to go; as she climbed into the Outback I took her hand. She left her hand in mine for just a second, then took it back. She attached no importance to the gesture; it was as though she were about to leave her hand behind then remembered that she would need it after all.

LOST THINGS

Charles came over that afternoon to help with the packing. “Goddamn, this place is an icebox,” he said. “Don’t you want to turn on the heat?” I explained about the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Charles snorted. He took his cane and limped down to the basement. He studied the furnace, sniffed, lit a match and stuck it into a hole near the base of the big cylinder. With an explosive whumph the heat came on, grumbling and grinding its way back into the house. I said we didn’t have central heating in San Francisco, I’d never needed to know how it worked before. “OK, Mr. California.” Charles laughed. “Let it go.” I wanted to tell him not to call me that, but I was afraid we’d start to fight again. We went upstairs and sat in the kitchen, looking awkwardly past each other. For days I’d been thinking of how to apologize to Charles, but now he was here the words wouldn’t come, and it was my uncle who spoke first.

“I’ve been thinking about you. How it must have been hard for you to grow up without a father. And with the twins, jeezus.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never grew up any other way.”

“Still, I guess you have the right to be angry.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Come on,” Charles said. “Even I’m angry at him.”

“At my father?”

“Sure. At what he did.”

“Because he killed himself, you mean?”

My uncle shook his head. “I’m talking about when he was alive. Richard Ente was the biggest hippie bastard that ever lived.”

“A hippie?” Goodbye, Sean Connery, I thought. “But he was my grandfather’s age.”

“He was. He was an old hippie. Or maybe just an old man who wanted to be young again. I don’t pretend I ever understood him. I’m just telling you, he did things that no one should ever have done, definitely not someone his age. I’m not offending you, am I?”

“Go on.”

As Charles spoke, the father I’d built from a few sentences, a word here and there, a shrug, a frown, was drowned under the mass of his words — it was, to change metaphors, as though the currency father was devalued, and my savings were worth nothing. If that was all the father I had, I might as well have had none at all. And here, striding up out of nowhere, came the new, high-denomination Richard Ente, a fifty-year-old hippie who smoked pot and inclined his head to get a better view every time one of the Celestes bent forward.

“He didn’t even try to hide what he was doing,” Charles said. “Oliver, he said, you have two lovely daughters, I’ll buy them from you for a dozen camels. Like he was some tribal Jew in the desert, which is really what he should have been. I bet he would have done all right in the desert.” Richard Ente told bad jokes at the dinner table and got food in his salt-and-pepper beard. He came to Thebes by bus because he barely knew how to drive a car. He didn’t wear deodorant, he didn’t cut his nails, he didn’t wear socks. He ended sentences with the word dig. And from the first he was after the Celestes. “You know how he got away with it? I’ll tell you. Richard was very shrewd, and one of his talents was to guess what you were dreaming, not like in your sleep, but what you wanted, and then he’d say that thing out loud, and be, like, that is certainly going to happen. And since you heard it coming from another person, who didn’t know you’d been dreaming of it, you thought maybe that meant it would happen. He got us all that way.”

Richard Ente made promises to everyone. To Oliver he promised victory, and not just that: he said that if the lawsuit went the way he thought it would, Joe Regenzeit would pack up and leave. To Mary, my grandmother, he promised the world. “She’d always wanted to travel,” Charles said, “but she’d never been able to, on account of Oliver not having enough money, and being generally tied to Thebes.” To the Celestes he promised fame. “He was, like, you girls are geniuses, and you aren’t getting what you deserve here, and I know some people in New York who would really be into what you’re doing. Why don’t you let me introduce you? He told them he was friends with Andy Warhol!” There was, apparently, no lie of which my father was not capable. And the Celestes, who were smart, and should have known better, believed him. “He said he’d get them a loft in New York. He told them they could model. Like, part-time, for good money, right? You tell me if that happened.”

It didn’t, I said, but I was still thinking about what my uncle had said earlier. “He smoked pot?”

“All the time.”

“And he had long hair?”

“A ponytail.”

“What kind of music did he like?”

“Joan Buy-yez, that kind of thing. He even had a bead necklace. Can you imagine that, a fifty-year-old man in a bead necklace? He was ridiculous!”

“Wow.” I felt giddy: the child who had been saving all his life was suddenly rich. I had more father than I knew what to do with. And yet the new Richard Ente that I had received from my uncle didn’t fit either with the story I had told myself as a child or with the fact of his suicide. My uncle and my mothers and I were like witnesses identifying different people in a lineup; and like a stubborn eyewitness I continued to believe that the Richard I saw (even if I had never seen him) was the one who had done it. Charles must have got him wrong. Maybe he had misinterpreted Richard’s behavior, although what he could have misinterpreted to come up with his Richard Ente, I had no idea.

“Anyway,” my uncle said, “I’m here if there’s anything you want to get off your chest.”

We spent the rest of the day cleaning out the basement. I didn’t get anything off my chest, other than dozens of heavy boxes, the contents of my grandfather’s woodworking shop. If anything, it seemed to me that Charles was the one who still had something on his chest; now and then he looked at me as though he was about to say something, but he didn’t. I didn’t press him. It was only after he left, when I was in the kitchen, drinking the last of the beers I’d bought the day before, that I remembered something he had told me a long time ago that fit with his description of Richard Ente, something that made me wonder if my uncle had not, after all, been right.

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

After the storm wiped Adventure from Kerem’s computer, I lived in a state of excited inaction, as though, like the Heathkit, I lacked instructions about what to do next. I avoided Kerem and didn’t go to town to look for his friends. It didn’t even occur to me to find Shelley again. I was consumed by the feeling that something was going to happen, something wonderful, but because I knew it was going to happen I wanted to put it off just a little longer.

“Aren’t you getting behind in your studies?” my grandmother asked.

“We’re taking a break,” I said.

“Oh, a break,” she repeated, as though this were even less plausible than my studies had been in the first place. “Well, a few days away from the Regenzeit boy won’t do you any harm.”

Then it turned out that I had waited too long, and the glorious something I’d been waiting for was no longer mine to enjoy. Mrs. Regenzeit telephoned my grandfather to inform him that Kerem had been arrested for smoking marijuana in the cemetery, that I might be involved too, because I’d been spending so much time with her son, and that she was peaced as hell. “All right,” my grandfather said stiffly, and hung up the phone while Mrs. Regenzeit was still talking. His dislike for the Regenzeits, his outrage at the implication that I could have been responsible for corrupting one of them, and his astonishment at Mrs. Regenzeit’s indelicacy in breaking a ten years’ silence just to tell him so, all together convinced my grandfather that the whole business was the fault of the perfidious Turks. He warned me about falling in with bad company, and told me how important it was to find out what people were really like before you put your trust in them. It was like choosing antiques, he said, some people looked good on the outside but when you opened them up you saw there was just nothing you could do, whereas other people, who didn’t look so good, could be fixed up, and would, with a little work, become solid, usable friends. He patted the arm of the chair on which he sat. It gave a solid, usable thump. It was all I could do not to remind him that he hadn’t fixed the chair; it had come into the house via my grandmother’s sister, who had donated it because there wasn’t a decent place in the whole house to sit. He forbade me to see Kerem again and that was all.

My grandmother was less convinced of my innocence, and her reproaches were harder to endure. When I said something in her presence, even if it was the most innocent and matter-of-fact statement, for example, that I wasn’t going to the lake because the radio said it would rain, she seemed to break what I had said into its component parts to determine whether the statement was worthy of her trust. If the clouds overhead convinced her that I was justified in staying indoors, or if she happened to have heard the same weather report, she would nod hesitantly, as though she were taking a chance on me despite her better judgment. If, on the other hand, the weather looked fair from where she stood, my grandmother would only shrug, as though to say, who knows what you will do, you, who doesn’t tell us the truth?

I began to understand certain things my mothers had said about my grandmother. Sometimes, at the end of their frequent though brief conversations, Celeste would grind the telephone receiver back into its cradle and cry out, “That unforgiving so-and-so!” Then it would be Marie’s job to tease from her an account of what had gone wrong, an account that always began the same way, “This time she’s really lost her mind!” I used to think this was just Celeste being her angry self, but that summer I wondered what it would have been like to have my grandmother for a mother, to be the object, again and again, of her shrug. It was no wonder my mothers ran away from Thebes, I realized, and in fact, my mothers’ hardness, their self-containedness, their unwillingness to give out information, especially with respect to Richard Ente, all made more sense to me now that I knew what doubt my grandmother was capable of. Her shrug explained my mothers, and it taught me everything I had left to learn about heredity. And heredity, naturally, made me think of Richard Ente. Was it possible that traces of him remained in the people — me — who he had left behind?

One day, when the forecast was fair, and I had no reason in the world not to go to the lake with my uncle, I turned to Charles and asked, “Why did my father run away from Thebes?”

Charles sighed as though he had been expecting the question for a long time. He rolled onto his stomach, baring the tattoo on his right shoulder, Je te frapperai sans colère. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but you have to keep it to yourself. Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Just between you and me, then, your father told me he was going to discover America.”

“America,” I repeated, amazed. We had studied the discovery of America in our history class the year before, and I knew that Christopher Columbus was an Italian, and that he had named the continent for another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, which, I thought, meant that really it should be called Vespuccia. I said so in class and got laughed at, and afterward Ronald Kaplan taunted me, Ve-spooge-ia, the land of spooge, and I’d been embarrassed. Then something about Leif Eriksson and the Vikings who had perhaps discovered another part of it. My father didn’t fit into either of these stories, so I guessed that Charles meant some other kind of discovery, or maybe some other America, a continent with the same name as ours that nobody had discovered yet, which was a thrilling idea but not probable, given the size of continents and the advanced state of geographical knowledge.

“Did he discover it?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Charles said. “Maybe he did.”

My father had gone to discover America. It’s just the kind of thing an aging hippie might have said before hitting the road, circa 1970, but to me it had a different force: not that of truth, but that of myth. I stood up, brushed the sand from my legs and dove into the lake, down as far as I could go, beneath the children whose legs hung down like dark branches from the silver overhead.

Charles’s secret was about to get me into a lot of trouble, but I didn’t know it and in fact I had other things on my mind. A few days after our trip to the lake, I went home to New York and found my mothers changed. Celeste wore a cardigan and pants, like an old man; she’d pulled her hair back into a bun, uncovering the whole of a face that looked more and more like my grandfather’s, big, waxy and serious. Marie, meanwhile, had permed her hair into loose curls, and, what I found even more shocking, wore dark-red lipstick that made her look like a film star from the 1940s.

“What happened to your lips?” I asked.

Celeste laughed.

Marie was working for S now, as an assistant to the Quick Styles editor, and already something of the magazine’s glamour had been transferred to her, in the form of narrow black skirts that she bought from the designers at a discount, and little jars of beauty products which she got for free and arranged on the bathroom sink, where the potions of imaginary powers had once stood guard. In the medicine cabinet, there was a small, round beige plastic case, whose purpose I wouldn’t have been able to guess, except that next to it lay a tube of contraceptive jelly, crinkled at the bottom. A new kind of potion for a new kind of life. Celeste, meanwhile, had given up talking.

“Did you have a good summer?” I asked her, but it was Marie who answered, “Comme ci, comme ça, you know? Up and down. Celeste hasn’t been working.” Celeste, not work? But she was always working. Something tremendous must have happened while I was away, a reversal of my mothers’ polarity, so that Marie was now leading the way, and Celeste trailed behind.

I was so puzzled by my mothers that it didn’t occur to me that my perspective on them might have changed also, and I was surprised when Marie asked me at dinner, “What happened to you?”

“To me?” I squeaked.

“It looks like you did a lot of growing up this summer.”

“Not really,” I mumbled. “I was just hanging around.” I was afraid the Celestes would mention the lies I’d told my grandparents, but they never did. Either they didn’t know about them, or they’d dismissed them as nonsense from my grandmother, the unforgiving so-and-so.

“Hanging around with a girl, I bet,” said Marie.

“No,” I lied, “just with Kerem.”

“The Regenzeit boy?” Celeste said. “Hm.”

“Anyway, you look older,” Marie said. “I like the way you’re doing your hair.” I’d experimented with gel, in imitation of Kerem.

“Thanks,” I said. “I like your hair, too.”

“Ha!” said Celeste.

Marie blushed and touched her curls. “The magazine did it for free.”

As soon as the meal was over I fled to my room and put on one of the cassettes I’d dubbed from Kerem. After a few minutes Celeste opened my door and stuck her head in.

“What’s that music?” she asked.

“Dead Kennedys.”

“Hm,” said Celeste, and closed my door again.

It was as though my mothers no longer had any idea what to do with me, as though they were a childless couple taking in an orphan, a child who belonged only to a mystery. I was a mystery, I had been kissed, my father had discovered America, and in this exalted state I began my seventh and final year at — or as I sometimes thought, in—Nederland.

NEDERLAND

The Nederland School for Boys was founded by the Dutch a long time ago. How long ago, exactly, was a subject for perpetual inquiry by the school librarian, an enormous shiny man who looked very much like Thomas Nast’s caricatures of Boss Tweed, and who discovered, once or twice a decade, a document that proved the school had been founded at an earlier date than anyone had dared to guess. With due ceremony the year on the school’s coat of arms was changed and the Board of Trustees ordered new letterhead for the staff. Occasionally this led to incongruities, as when Nederland celebrated its 350th and 375th anniversaries only two years apart. My mothers were invited to both galas, and the school’s pretensions became, for a while, one of their favorite jokes. In a few years Nederland would be older than New York, older than the New World, older, probably, than the rock it was built on. I laughed with the Celestes, but with the consciousness of being wronged: they were the ones who had chosen the school for me in the first place. I think they sent me to Nederland because it was close to our apartment, twenty blocks down West End Avenue; also, and more to the point, I started first grade at a happy moment in the seventies when Nederland’s trustees, moved by the protests of some upperclassmen and recent alumni, raised scholarship money for underprivileged students. My mothers were poor but not unsavory, I did well on the entrance exam and the end of the story was that I went to school practically for free, provided that I kept my grades up and posed yearly for a special group photograph.

My last year there began as every year did, with an assembly in the Great Hall, which was what Nederland called its auditorium, where our principal, Mr. Van Horn, a grim homunculus who might for all we knew have been as old as the school itself, amplified for us on the motto, Recht Maakt Maakt, or Justice Is Our Strength, and on the importance of correct behavior generally. We, clean, chilly and newly awed by the gloom of the Great Hall and the red banners that hung from the ceiling, celebrating NEDERLAND AT 375, behaved correctly for about as long as the assembly lasted, then we were released to our homerooms and began the important business of sizing one another up. Who posed a new threat? Who had something new to offer? The truth was that most of us had been at Nederland since the first grade, and we already knew more or less everything we could expect from one another. We were like characters on a long-running soap opera, who are required to display the same personalities for so long that they stop being personalities at all, and become mere functions, guidelines for the production of dialogue in the style of X or Y. August Waxman, who had been the fastest runner in the third grade, fished for something in his nose; next to him Andrew Ames, honor student, drew insane rabbits in the margins of a blank notebook. David Metzger had finally convinced his parents to let him grow his hair long, like the singer of Def Leppard, whose name I forget but who has certainly not been forgotten by David Metzger, wherever he is now. Ronald Kaplan and Gideon Peel, indistinct, indistinguishable, had spent the summer in the Hamptons and said they’d both got laid. “Right,” sneered John De Luca, who had curly black hairs on the backs of his knuckles, “more like you fucked each other up the ass.” There it was, ass and fuck in the same sentence, a sign that the gloves were once again off. The rituals had all been observed; Mr. Fitch could yell at us to be silent and the year could begin.

Actually two things marked the year as different from the ones that had come before: we had American history with Mr. Savage, and I discovered Nederland’s computer room. The two strands which, twined each around the other, would occupy the next twenty years of my life, presented themselves almost simultaneously, maybe even on the same day, but at first I understood the importance of only one of them. The computer room was housed in the basement of the New Building, formerly a residential hotel, which the school had purchased in the sixties and renovated in a fantasia of Formica panels and fluorescent lights. The computer room was down there because no one knew, yet, how important computers would be, whether they would spread, like coeducation, or dwindle, like civics and home ec. Still, the trustees had approved the purchase of a magnificent machine, an Alpha Micro with ten terminals and eighty megabytes of storage, which seemed like enough room for all the information in the world, although now you could emulate five hundred such machines at once on a cheap laptop. There was a dot-matrix printer and a staggering stack of manuals, thousands of pages of instructions, all written in a language that presupposed that you already knew how to do the thing you were trying to learn. As soon as I found my way to that low, stuffy basement, I knew that I wanted to re-create Adventure on a vastly larger scale, a world of words without end. But it was beyond my ability to make even the smallest part of my world appear on the other side of the terminal’s dull glass. I had typed Adventure in from a book, and although I figured out many things about how the program worked in the course of getting it to run, the ideas behind it remained completely mysterious to me. I was like a caveman who had, by dint of banging, repaired an automobile, and now set out to build himself a new car. With a great deal of effort I could make nonworking replicas of some features of the original, a seat, a wheel, a grinding sound, but no matter how well I made these things they wouldn’t add up to a vehicle, or take me anywhere.

One day I came home late and Celeste, who was home already, told me that I was looking serious, which was the highest compliment she ever paid anyone. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Working on the computer.”

“Hm,” said Celeste. She mistrusted computers herself and had very little idea how they worked. “Well, it looks like you’re doing it seriously.”

I threw myself on my bed. I didn’t feel serious, only consumed, exhausted, permanently puzzled. At dinner Celeste asked me questions about programming, which even someone who knew more about it than I did might have found difficult to answer. “How does the computer know what you want?” I tried to explain that it wasn’t about what you wanted, you had to say things just so. “But what if you mean one thing, and the computer means another?” Impossible; all the words in computer language had fixed meanings. “The words, all right, but what about the sentences?” I dodged, I ducked, I grunted Keremishly. I was a caveman, but Celeste refused to believe it. No matter what I said, she nodded gravely and asked another question.

By the time we came to dessert, even Marie could see that I’d run out of answers, and she tried, out of pity, I think, to change the subject. “You won’t ever guess what happened at the magazine today,” she began, but Celeste interrupted, “Hold on. This computer thing is serious, and I think we should take it seriously.”

Celeste’s faith in me was steep and sharp. She gave me a book called Algorithmic Programming in Structured BASIC. “For every logical function f,” the preface began, and that was as far as I got. In retrospect it seems clear that Celeste was using me to leapfrog over her sister, who was, she feared, getting ahead of her, her sister whose new clothes she mocked because they were only a fashion uniform, her sister who was making money, her sister who was invited to media events where she made friends with media people, with sheep, with those Ivy League bitches who ran New York. At the time, I knew only that Celeste’s confidence was hard to take, almost as hard as her doubt had been. I wanted to be the person she believed in, but I was constantly afraid she would figure out that I was not that person, I was no kind of programmer, I was a caveman, banging stones together and grunting in something that wasn’t a language yet, not even to me.

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

In class I sat by the window, looked at the sky and thought about my invented world. My teachers were happy to let me go. I was quiet and as long as I did well on their tests and showed no signs of abusing alcohol or drugs, unlike August Waxman, who came to school one day with pupils the width of pencil leads and his shirt buttoned askew, and said, Say what? to every question, no matter how many times you asked it, Mr. Fitch didn’t mind if I slumped forward in my chair, and Mrs. Booth let my unrolled French r pass without comment. Only Mr. Savage, who taught American history, still wanted something from me. “You asleep?” he shouted when I rested my head against the wall. “Wake up, we’re making history here!” He called on me to answer questions, and embarrassed me when I didn’t know the answers, oblivious to the rolling eyes of my classmates, who had seen me embarrassed so many times that they could take only a moderate pleasure from it. Mr. Savage didn’t know this. He was a new teacher who had come to Nederland the year before from a public school in Detroit. He was short and dark, with menacing eyebrows and a five-o’clock shadow that was in full bloom by one-fifteen, and he dressed like a plumber at a funeral. Mr. Savage had made the mistake of telling last year’s American history class that he had a black belt in jujitsu, and could flip someone twice his weight. Now, when he bored us, Ronald Kaplan would raise his hand and ask, “Um, is it hard to learn jujitsu?” And when one of us misbehaved, the others would shout, “Flip him! Flip him!” Mr. Savage was not amused. “Violence is serious,” he said, the first week of American history. “If you learn only one thing this year, it should be that violence is serious.” Violence is serious, I wrote in my notebook; then I stopped listening again.

“Hey! How’s the weather?” Mr. Savage called to me.

I opened my eyes. “Partly cloudy.”

“You think it’s going to rain?”

I looked at the sky. Low lumpy clouds grazed the spire of the chapel, the black weathervane with a figure of a Dutchman atop it, the school’s emblem. “It might.”

“No chance,” said Mr. Savage. “Those are stratocumulus clouds. You never get rain from stratocumulus.”

He continued the lesson as if this checking of the weather were an ordinary event. Gideon Peel looked at me and rolled his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he meant that I was an asshole for not knowing that stratocumulus clouds were not rain-bearing, or that Mr. Savage was crazy for telling me so. I rolled my eyes back and returned to the window.

Mr. Savage stopped me as I was leaving class. “Why don’t you come with me?” he said. He led me to one of the small rooms, furnished with a coffee warmer, some vinyl chairs and a strong sour smell, where the teachers lived. He asked if I wanted coffee, I said no. “You aren’t paying attention,” said Mr. Savage. “You don’t notice anything. It’s like you’re living on another planet.” How close you are to the truth, I thought. “Are you like this in all your classes?”

“Yes.” It was the truth, and besides he was a decent person and I didn’t want him to think I found his class any less interesting than the others.

“What is it? What do you think about?” I wanted to tell him about the game, but it would have been too humiliating to confess that I was consumed by a project I didn’t have any idea how to do and would probably never figure out. The secret of it was all I had; if I told him I would have nothing. “Are you thinking about girls? I could understand that,” Mr. Savage said. “I think it’s terrible that you don’t have girls here. You’re like”—he waved his hand again—“you’re like astronauts, on some space station up in orbit.” He shifted his jacket, which was, I saw, too small for him; in another life he could have been an athlete, or a bouncer. I was afraid that he would pick me up by the lapels of my jacket, lean his stubbled face to mine and whisper threats featuring the word youse, even though there was only one of me. I giggled. “Astronauts, it’s funny, right? But you have to learn how to live on earth.” Mr. Savage struck his knee with his fist. “Help me,” he said. “If there was one thing you wanted to learn, something you really wanted to know, what would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything,” said Mr. Savage. “Just one thing you want to know.”

I looked at the coffeepot. “Maybe the discovery of America.” It came into my mind because of what Charles had told me.

“Really?” said Mr. Savage. “Who discovered America?”

“Columbus or Leif Eriksson,” I said. “We had it in world history last year.”

“But you’re not convinced, is that right?”

“I guess.”

“Good.” Mr. Savage tapped my breastbone with a thick finger. “That’s a good place to begin.”

The next day, Mr. Savage asked how many of us had read Plato’s Timaeus. Not a hand went up. “In that dialogue,” Mr. Savage said, “Critias tells Socrates a story that comes from the priests at Thebes, which is where? Andrew, yes. Egypt. Thebes is the oldest city in Egypt, which is quite possibly the oldest nation in the world. The priests at Thebes told a story which was already thousands of years old, about a land to the west of the western ocean, which they called Atlantis.” He wrote ATLANTIS on the blackboard. “Anyone heard of it?” So we embarked on the discovery of America, the discovery of the discovery of America. Strange facts were coming to light in Mr. Savage’s sixth-period class, stories about seafarers and prevailing winds, about the climate in Greenland and the Gulf Stream, about carved stones and burial mounds. For a week, it couldn’t have been more than a week, we studied the people who might have discovered America, not only the Vikings, but the Phoenicians, the Basques, the Chinese; there was a story that Welshmen had been the first Europeans to arrive in North America, so we learned about that. Mr. Savage spared us nothing, not even the story that the Indians were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the proof of which was that the Jews, like the Indians, once lived in tents, that both races had been known to anoint themselves with oil and that the Indians did not eat pork, or at least some of them didn’t.

Our textbook had nothing to say on these subjects, so Mr. Savage photocopied the maps drawn by people who had seen much, a little or none of the New World, the fantastic maps that show California as a peninsula the size of all the rest of North America, the maps that stocked the interior with lions, serpents, dragons and gold. “Why gold? Matt, yes. Good, yes, so that people would keep exploring.” We kept exploring. Mr. Savage talked about cannibals, about how each tribe the Europeans met reported that there was another tribe, over there, who ate human flesh. “Anyone want to draw any conclusions? Andrew, yes.”

Reactions to the unit, which put us a week behind the other section of American history, taught by Mr. Rye, a very tall man with yellow teeth, were mixed.

“Man is crazy,” said Gideon Peel after the first class. “He smoke too much weed.”

“He is a disciple of the pipe,” Ronald Kaplan said. “His thoughts are unsound.”

David Metzger liked the idea that the Indians were from Israel. “Jews, yo!” He pumped his fist in the air. “You honkies can all get off our land!”

“Dude, even if the Indians were Jews, that doesn’t make us honkies,” said Gideon Peel.

“You are so a honky,” said Ronald Kaplan, whose father was Jewish.

“And besides, we did this last year. History is repeating itself, man.”

I kept quiet. There was no way I could have explained what I felt when I looked at the maps, how, running my finger over the big whiteness between the coasts, I went queasy with excitement, as though what Charles had told me was literally true, and my father was hidden somewhere on the map, a tiny black dot, not reproduced at this scale, but there all the same. As though, when I looked at the map, I was also, in some obscure, magical way, looking for him.

At the end of the week Mr. Savage divided us into groups, each of which had to make the case that a different people had discovered America. The group that made the most convincing argument would receive a pizza lunch. I was, with David Metzger, Andrew Ames and Matt Bark, the Chinese, not a good assignment. We met in the school library, where we found no books on the subject of the Chinese discovery of America, no mention of it, even.

“Well, so we make it up,” said Matt Bark.

“We can’t make it up, that’s plagiarism,” said David Metzger.

We argued about whether it was plagiarism if you were just lying, and concluded that it might be all right. But I held out for facts.

“There are no facts,” said Matt Bark.

“Just rock and roll,” said David Metzger.

“It’s not fair,” Andrew Ames said. “We should have got the Vikings.”

I said that I could probably find some facts, and that afternoon I took the Broadway bus to the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. It was the first time I’d ever gone there, and of course I wasn’t allowed in; only adults could enter the Reading Room. My first encounter with the library was an anticlimax; I was shunted to the Mid-Manhattan Library two blocks south, where men in smelly coats coughed in the fluorescent light. I leafed through a book on the Chinese navy, and another on ancient seafarers, and learned about the Polynesian islanders who navigated by means of knotted strings, an interesting subject but not one that convinced Matt Bark to change his plan.

“String, fuck, this isn’t a report on string.”

“But imagine, if the Chinese had these string maps …”

Matt put up his hand. “Shut up, weather boy.”

“Weather boy.” David Metzger laughed.

“You shut up,” I said.

No one acknowledged me. I slumped in my chair and closed my eyes. There was no use in fighting them; the facts were all on their side. How could I argue when I didn’t know what kind of clouds rained and what kinds didn’t?

On the appointed day, Gideon Peel reported to our class that archaeologists had found Norse houses in northern Newfoundland, dating from around the year 1000. If the Vikings hadn’t discovered America, he concluded, prudently, at least they’d been here before Columbus. John De Luca stumped for the Phoenicians, the first masters of the ocean; he described the Phoenician inscriptions found on rocks in Brazil, and also certain man-sized slabs of stone found in a cave in New Hampshire, which, he said, smiling, were probably sacrificial altars left behind by the Phoenician priests. John explained that the Phoenicians sacrificed human beings to the great god Baal, whose wrath could be appeased only by blood, so probably virgins had been tied to these New Hampshire slabs, and stabbed, and stabbed, with bronze daggers, which by the way people had also found in New England. When the harvest was bad, or the wind blew the wrong way, or someone was angry, whoa, human sacrifice! The blood of the virgins steamed on the cold stone, and John’s smile grew wider and wider, and the great god Baal too was pleased, because he was a god of war and destruction and he could drink gallons of blood …

“OK, John, thanks,” Mr. Savage said.

John sat down heavily. Wayne Echeverria spoke briefly for the Basques, then Matt Bark gave our group’s report on a certain Admiral Ho, who was blown across the Pacific by a storm, and founded a Chinese colony on the California coast. The proof of it was that there was more Chinese food on the West Coast of America than there was on the East, not to mention the dish that was actually called Admiral Ho’s shrimp, which Matt Bark had eaten in Los Angeles and which was, he assured us, very tasty. And then there were the Chinese place names in America, for instance, San Francisc … ho! and San Dieg … ho! and even, even the legendary El Dorad … Ronald Kaplan began making strangled laughter noises halfway through, and before Matt Bark could finish he put his head on his desk and moaned, “Oh, my god, oh, my god,” and he wouldn’t look up, even when Mr. Savage yelled at him to stop, and that was it, everyone was laughing, and when Mr. Savage tried to raise Ronald back to a sitting position, Gideon Peel thought we were finally going to get the jujitsu demonstration, and howled, “Flip!”

Mr. Savage took Ronald and Gideon out and stood them in the hall; he came back and told the rest of us, quietly, without anger, that it was good to laugh sometimes, and that it was true, sometimes the things you studied as history were just stories that someone had made up, but the important thing, in this case, was to make up a good story, he didn’t expect us to understand, but he would tell us anyway, that this effort was in some ways the most important thing, more important than memorizing dates or the amendments to the Constitution, and that if we learned anything from him that year, it was that we should try as hard as we could to tell a good story, if we tried hard enough we would get to the truth somehow. No one reminded him that if we learned one thing, it was supposed to be that violence was serious, but we must all have been thinking it.

“The Vikings win,” Mr. Savage said.

I tried to catch his eye, to communicate that it hadn’t been my fault, but he wouldn’t look at me. The Vikings went out to pizza and American history picked up where it had left off. The Puritans were making treaties with the Indians, the French were up to no good in the woods, the Dutch founded schools, among them Nederland, glory, glory be. The story about Admiral Ho got back to Mr. Rye, who was the head of the History Department, and Mr. Rye talked to Mr. Savage, and that was it, there were no more deviations from the textbook. Oh, but I got my revenge: with the help of something the middle-school principal let slip, I figured out how to log in to the school’s accounting system, where I gave Matt Bark and David Metzger each a five-thousand-dollar charge for athletic equipment.

Soon afterward we had Christmas vacation. I spent most of it in my room, avoiding my mothers, who were embroiled in a series of small but bitter arguments about the holiday parties to which Marie was invited and Celeste was not. On New Year’s Eve, I went with Celeste to a party in a SoHo loft that belonged to a famous art critic in her sixties. When we arrived, the critic was sitting on a black leather sofa, her legs folded under her, like the stone image of a primitive god.

“You’re early!” she shouted at Celeste. “Why did you come so early?”

“The invitation said ten o’clock,” said Celeste hesitantly. I’d never heard her hesitate before.

“How stupid of you,” said the critic. “Now you’ve interrupted my meditation.”

“I’m sorry. We can go.”

“Too late! I’ve already come out of it. You’ll have to sit down and endure my displeasure. Well, sit!” The critic lit a cigarillo and poured herself a glass of bourbon; the bottle stood on the table in front of her, an aid to meditation, I supposed. “What are you working on?” she asked.

This was the era when Celeste was working with fabric: she made costumes for bodies that could never be, gowns for women with no heads or arms. At home, she talked about the costumes as explorations, but now, fixed by the critic’s stare, Celeste froze. “Clothes,” she said finally in a schoolgirl’s voice.

“Clothes!” boomed the critic. “You’re letting your sister’s job rub off on you. Celeste, my darling, when are you going to understand, it’s not an advantage to be a twin?”

Celeste blushed, but the critic’s attention had already turned elsewhere. “Is this your son? He looks interesting. What does he do?”

“Tell her,” murmured Celeste.

“I write computer games,” I said.

“Yes,” said the art critic. “And you like music?”

“I guess so.”

“Who?”

“Sex Pistols?”

“Ha!” said the critic. “You’re just at the beginning.” For two hours she talked about the musicians she’d known in the East Village in the seventies: Johnny and Lizzy, Debbie and Patti, Richard, Lou, and David who wore a dress everywhere. The names didn’t matter, although years later I would learn who they were, some of them.

“David in a dress?” Alex would shake his head sadly.

“You are an ignorant motherfucker.”

“Why, who was that, David Byrne?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the New York Dolls? Oh, you child.”

When I was a child, what mattered to me was the critic’s face. Her eyes were partway closed and her head turned to the door, as though one of the people she was talking about might walk in at any moment. Time didn’t work for her the way it did for me; she had her finger on the crossfader and she could slide it back and forth. Present, past, present, past. She was mixing. Of course I didn’t think of it in those terms; at most I had a dim awareness that in the notion that goes by the name of history, there might be room for more stories than even Mr. Savage had told me about. Now and then the critic interrupted herself to pull a record from a sagging shelf of records and play a song or part of a song. As she lifted the needle from the record, she poked at me with her cigar, and said, “That’s the real stuff, isn’t it?” I hadn’t ever heard anything like it, and if it had been played for me in another context, I wouldn’t have been sure that it was music at all. It was the sound of cavemen figuring out how to make cars, and I liked it immensely. Celeste was on the point of asking a question, then she turned toward the window and shrugged impatiently. In vain. The critic was lost in her own memories; she no longer saw either of us, or the apartment, or herself, as she talked on and on about basement clubs and the dead. When I came into her view again, she closed one eye, opened it and said, “You should get a Mohawk.”

Then it was midnight. We drank champagne from plastic cups and watched the fireworks rise into a bank of low cloud. At twelve-thirty the other guests began to arrive, some of them people I knew; there was Celeste’s friend Donatello DelAmbrosio, and Hugh Heap with his wife, who looked like an ornamental pillow, and Javier Provo in mirrored sunglasses and a leather vest, leaping in the air, crying out. As the guests arrived, Celeste looked more and more disappointed, as though she had been expecting something that became less likely with every body that entered the room. At one o’clock, when it was no longer possible to move from one side of the apartment to the other, she put her hand on my back and said it was time to go. I’d been drinking champagne unobserved for some time, and on the subway home I told Celeste about Kerem, the authentic punk rocker, and how I used to go to parties with him in Thebes, and met a boy whose head was partially shaved, and maybe I would get a Mohawk the way the famous critic had suggested, did Celeste think that was a good idea? “Sure,” she said, then went back to staring at her reflection in the window of the subway car. Just before we reached our stop, she did something I’d never seen her do before, she stuck her fingers in her hair and combed it forward, so that it covered her forehead and hung down over her eyes.

A couple of days later, Nederland resumed with another assembly in the Great Hall. I found myself sitting next to David Metzger, who had turned a deep orange-brown in the interval. We sang our school song,

From the shore of Noten Eylandt

To the Zuyd River’s strand,

We ne’er will forget thee,

Our old Nieuw Nederland,

et cetera, and as we filed out of the Hall, David Metzger hissed, “You’re dead.”

I went through the day waiting for someone to beat me up, and in the afternoon, puzzled but no longer frightened, I found Spencer Bartnik, he of the spiked hair and nosebleeds, in the courtyard, talking to a sophomore named John Littlejohn, who had very pale blue eyes and was reputed to have given himself a blowjob. I had just mentioned certain bands, whose names I’d learned from the famous art critic, when Mr. Geist, the middle-school principal, appeared between me and the low winter sun, looming like a rock formation with a human-shaped profile. He pointed at me and said, “Get up.”

Together we climbed the grand staircase, which was not ordinarily used by students, because it led only to the offices of the school administration, and walked down a corridor, which, I swear, if I did not remember better, I would say was lit by torches, to a heavy barred door, or rather to an ordinary door, behind which Mr. Van Horn waited. Around his office hung portraits of the former principals of Nederland, beginning with the recent ones, who wore coats and ties, like Mr. Van Horn himself, but adopting, as you looked around the room, stranger and stranger forms of dress, until, at the back of the office, behind Mr. Van Horn’s desk, they wore lace cravats and white wigs; these portraits, however, were the most recent of the lot, they had been done as a result of the head librarian’s research, which pushed the date of the school’s foundation further into the past. From what models they were painted I do not know.

“Come here,” said Mr. Van Horn.

Mr. Geist put his hand on my shoulder and guided me forward.

“We know what you’ve done,” Mr. Van Horn said. “I understand that it began with a certain”—Mr. Van Horn licked his lips—“with a certain Admiral Ho.” He told me the whole story, how I had come up with this preposterous tale about Ho, and how, when it didn’t work out the way I’d planned, I had taken revenge on my partners, who were, in fact, opposed to the Ho business from the start; how I had used my formidable computer skills to alter their financial records, alarming Mr. Metzger, who was, did I know? on the Board of Trustees, and creating an embarrassing situation for the school.

“But …”

Mr. Van Horn held up his hand. “There isn’t anything for you to say. Every step of your catastrophic career has been witnessed.”

“But …”

“It may surprise you to learn that men are more intelligent than machines,” Mr. Van Horn said. “You may fool machines, but men, never.” He licked his lips again. “This is my question for you. Do you understand that what you did was wrong?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you feel that it was wrong?”

I looked around at Mr. Geist. He nodded, but I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t feel anything. I did what I did because I had figured out how to do it, which, it seems to me, is the main reason why things like that happen, because angry, slighted people have figured out they’re possible. They open the door, they go into the next room. Who knows whether what they will find there is good or bad.

Mr. Van Horn sat up in his chair. “Let me offer you a metaphor that you will understand. In this world, there are ones and there are zeroes, just like in your computer. Only they are not perhaps in equal numbers. This is a school for the ones. What are you?”

I didn’t answer.

“I expect you will have a great deal of time to ask yourself that question,” Mr. Van Horn said. He left it to Mr. Geist to take me back to his office and explain that I had been expelled.

LOST THINGS

What I found in the next room was a semester of danger at Intermediate School 44, where I relearned a number of subjects that I had mastered in the fifth grade and became dodgy about physical violence. My grandfather, when he heard that I’d ended up in public school after all, told the Celestes that I ought to learn a trade, and for a brief but frightful moment it seemed as though I might spend the summer studying woodworking in his basement. It’s odd that the prospect of going to Thebes should have been frightful. I had cried when my grandmother put me on the bus to New York, only a few months before, and after the bus pulled out of the station I took a pocketknife from my bag and scratched SHELLEY on the plastic window. I don’t remember when or how I lost the desire to go back to Thebes. Probably I didn’t lose it all at once; Thebes faded in me as a season fades; it dropped its leaves and a new kind of weather moved in. When, in March or April, Celeste asked me if I would be interested in learning carpentry, because my grandfather was willing to take me on as his apprentice, what came into my mind was not the Thebes where I had kissed Shelley, or even the Thebes where I was in love with Yesim, but a hot, stuffy Thebes that was made from my grandfather’s workshop and visits to antiques shops and long dinners listening to the news from the Catskill Eagle.

“Can’t I go to camp?” I asked.

Celeste raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I thought you liked spending the summers in Thebes.”

For years I’d wanted her to acknowledge that fact; now that she had, I contradicted her without hesitation. “Thebes is stupid,” I said. “There’s nothing to do there.”

I couldn’t really have forgotten about Kerem and Shelley and Yesim; rather, I think Thebes was always a picture done on both sides of the page, and I was able to keep only one side in my mind at a time. Now I had turned the page over. If I had gone to Thebes that summer, I would probably have been surprised at how interesting it was, and surprised that I hadn’t remembered. But I went to Camp Hockomock, in Maine, where I became friends with Spencer Bartnik. It was a happy coincidence, a little thread of continuity, like a drumbeat carried by a DJ from one song to the next. We spent the summer smoking cigarettes that Spencer’s brother sent him in the mail, and listening to the heavy heavy monster sound of Madness. I didn’t think of Thebes once, or if I did, it was as a place I had been a long time ago, or maybe a place I had read about, where everything was smaller than in real life and very close together, like the figures in a diorama, who represent different aspects of native life, say, washing clothes and hunting, faithfully, but not the distance that would have kept those activities apart. That’s how my summers in Thebes are in my memory, and even now, as I try to return them to their actual size, I notice that the interesting events cluster together, as though all that was good or decisive in that part of my life happened all at once, to relieve me of the burden of having such a long past. Was the summer Kerem got his computer really the summer after I was in love with Yesim? Was the summer I was in love with her even the same summer as Man and Woman? I don’t know. It might just be that I’ve run the tracks together at the point where their beats match, to keep things going, to keep there from being a long moment when no one dances. If so, I’m sorry, and I hope you will understand. I’ve been wanting to dance, myself, and maybe to have others do a little dancing.

In any case, my grandfather was wrong. There was still some hope for me in school, thanks to the recent discovery of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which, according to the people who had discovered it, was responsible for all sorts of misbehavior. I went to see a Dr. Jeremy Ott, who asked me if I had trouble following what people were saying, if I experienced periods of intense anxiety, if I thought about violent acts, if I had ever felt the desire to set persons or objects aflame, if I took drugs, what kind of music I liked to listen to, and why, and whether I ever had trouble following what people were saying. Yes, yes, yes, yes, no, punk rock, because it was so fuckin’ loud, what did you say? I was saved. My mothers enrolled me in St. Hubert’s Prep, which took a charitable view of misbehavior, offered financial aid to half the student body and admitted girls, some of them refugees from Nederland’s sister school, the Anglesey School for Girls. SHP had a computer room, but I hardly ever went there. Another current had me in its pull, American history, who knew? It was as though I wanted to prove to Mr. Savage that he hadn’t been wasting his time. Or maybe — thank you, Dr. Ott! — maybe it was just that I couldn’t pay attention to any one thing for too long.

A GALAXY OF CHICKENS

Much later I found a story that the Chinese had discovered America. It was in a book on the history of Santería in Central and South America, don’t ask me why I was reading about that. There was a chapter on the nature and purpose of chicken sacrifice, in which the author, one George F. Carter, discussed the difference between the European and the American chicken: the former has white feathers and white flesh, whereas the flesh and feathers of the latter are black. In this the American chicken resembles the chickens of, yes, China. “Since the Asiatic chickens are very different from the Mediterranean chickens and most of the traits that reappear in the flocks of the Amerindians are found in Asia, the obvious conclusion would be that the Amerind chickens were first introduced from Asia and not from the Mediterranean …” You can hear Mr. Carter growing excited here. “When one considers the total data available on the chicken in America, a conclusion for a Spanish or Portuguese first introduction of chickens into America is simply counter to all evidence. The Mediterraneans, as late as 1600, did not have, and did not even know of, the galaxy of chickens present in Amerind hands …” A galaxy of chickens spun through my imagination; white European hens shone against a black mass of Asian wing- and tail-feathers. Mr. Carter went on to observe that in China, too, the chicken was thought to have magical properties; the Chinese used to read the future by dripping chicken blood on parchment. I watched the blood spatter on the page, and what it showed me was not the future but the past: I was back at Nederland, telling Matt Bark that I’d found something really good. I gave the report on the Chinese; I had irrefutable, unsuspected proof that Eriksson and Columbus were latecomers; Mr. Savage nodded his approval, and when I sat down he declared that if we learned only one thing from American history, it should be that if you trusted yourself you would get there in the end. I won; I went out for pizza; I was not expelled. Of course none of this would ever have come to pass. Even if I had somehow stumbled on the Asian-chicken hypothesis back then, Matt Bark would have laughed it off. Chickens? Dumbfuck, who cares about chickens? — But … — You think chickens discovered America? — No, they were carried on ships … — What, to start a chicken farm? Chicken-shit! Chicken boy!

Even in my daydreams I lost the argument. But the chickens remain, all over Central and South America, black, silky-feathered Asiatic chickens that lay blue-shelled eggs. So, Matt, what do you make of those chickens?