Luminous Airplanes

REGENZEIT

On Monday morning it occurred to me that I hadn’t visited my grandfather’s grave. The cemetery was at the other end of Thebes, on a gentle slope that steepened farther ahead and became the flank of the ski hill. An iron fence surrounded it, though the railing was falling down in places and lengths of baling wire had been strung across the gaps. The Rowlands were buried at the back of the graveyard, in the shadow of a pair of maples that were slowly pushing up the earth with their roots, so that, if they continued, the oldest skeletons would eventually be exhumed. Jean Roland lay beside his wife, Anne, who had outlived him by a decade. Small gray stones, their heads flush with the earth, remembered children who had not survived. Their son Oliver and his wife Claudine, born a Gerer, kept a respectful distance. Not all the Rowlands come back to Thebes in the end — my great-great-uncle Othniel, for example, is buried at the foot of a cliff in New Mexico — but I used to wonder, if my mothers came back, what distance they would keep from my grandparents. I passed the white column erected by the citizens of Thebes to John Rowland, who had turned the failing Rowland Mill into the profitable Thebes Furniture Company, manufacturer of the three-legged “Thebes stool,” of which my grandfather had a few examples, and found the rough gray stone my grandfather had picked out when my grandmother died. Its shape was suggestive of a naturally occurring rock, as though the Rowlands, having reached the zenith of their humanity with John, were sinking back into the natural world. Mary Rowland, born Ashland, 1924–1990, and the inscription, Beloved Wife, which enraged my mothers. It was just like my grandfather, they said, to turn my grandmother into another of his possessions.

Oliver lay between Mary and his father, John. There was no stone for him yet, only a wooden marker, to which a sheet of paper in a plastic envelope had been stapled. Oliver Rowland, it said, 1922–2000, and the words, May He Be Remembered, which, as they were printed in twenty-four-point Helvetica on a piece of paper that had been warped by the rain, undermined the sincerity of this wish, even though there were fresh flowers on the grave, indicating that people still remembered him. Here he was. I put my hand on the bare earth. I tried to imagine my grandfather lying beneath my hand. Body, I told myself, this is a body. But all I could think was that I should have brought flowers, and that my knees were cold. I stood up and brushed dirt from my pants. I walked past the graves of people who had died fifty or sixty years ago, mill workers, probably, covered by last year’s leaves. Their children were not buried here, no one wanted to be buried in Thebes anymore, except the Rowlands and the other old families. The town must have shrunk almost to nothing, I thought, when the last of the mill people died and their children moved away. What a grim place it must have been when no one came to the lunch counter, when the meeting hall stood empty and the musicians stopped playing at Summerland. Left on its own, Thebes would have died too. It would have become a place like the ones you pass on Route 23B, settlements so small they no longer merit their own post offices or general stores, Main Streets with nothing on them but a garage or the offices of a Bible study association. Who would want to live in a gloomy town hemmed in by mountains, cut off from the rest of the world? It was only when Joe Regenzeit arrived, when he opened Snowbird and made the snow fall, that life flowed back toward Thebes in the form of weekend visitors from New York City, who liked what they saw and rented houses, caused antiques stores to open, demanded Chilean coffee, created, out of mud and rock and poverty, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, the Kozy Korner and Kountry Kitchen, the organic grocery with its bins of glistening fall apples. Regenzeit had rescued Thebes; he fixed what my grandfather could not fix. No wonder Oliver hated him.

I drove to the grocery and picked out a bouquet of white flowers, lilies, I hoped, from their small, expensive floral department. I took them to the cashier, who turned out to be the pretty girl I’d supplied with beer two days earlier. I asked if she’d had fun at the party.

“It was OK,” she said, mistrustfully.

I told her not to worry, I wasn’t going to report her. In fact, my friends had stood outside the same gas station when I was younger than she was, trying to get college students to buy us beer.

“I didn’t know you were from here,” she said. I could see from the change in her expression that she’d admitted me into her human race: I was no longer an anonymous beer-donating adult. I thanked her for the flowers and went out, whistling. A Subaru Outback pulled up as I was getting into my car, and Yesim got out. She was wearing a black parka and a pair of night-black sunglasses that hid half her face. She looked like a secret agent, or rather, like a person dressed in a secret agent costume, someone who was making no secret of her secretiveness. I sat in my car with the door open and my legs stuck out. I wanted Yesim to see me, but she came out of the store holding a cup of coffee in its brown paper sleeve and got into her car. I decided to follow her. She took Route 56 out of town, past the main entrance to Snowbird, and turned onto a service road. I turned too, wondering what I was doing, but not really wondering. The road climbed steeply, and Norman Mailer’s car began to rumble and thump, as though Mailer himself were in the engine compartment, duking it out with the forces of inertia and rust. The temperature gauge crept toward Hot and I had to slow down: fifteen miles an hour, ten. I came around a curve and saw the Outback ahead at a fork in the road. For a moment I imagined that Yesim had stopped for me to catch up, then she took the left branch and I thought she’d been moving all along. The road switchbacked through a pine forest, climbing what was, from the Theban point of view, the far side of Mount Espy, the side that looked north to the next ridge of the Catskills. A break in the trees offered a momentary panorama: the flatlands through which the Hudson ran, an almost invisible silver strand. There were people down there sitting on their porches, mowing their lawns, walking their dogs. They had never seemed so far away, and also, curiously, they had never seemed so happy, those invisible people in the valley, but I wouldn’t have changed places with any of them. I coaxed Norman Mailer’s car up the hill, toward Yesim, who was out of sight.

I found her at the summit of Mount Espy, standing near the shed that housed the machinery for one of Snowbird’s chair-lifts, her hair blowing in the chilly wind. We could see the whole valley from there, with Thebes tucked away at the end of it like a cluster of pale cells stuck to the wall of a dark-green womb.

“I wondered if it was you,” Yesim said. I couldn’t tell from her tone of voice whether or not she was pleased.

“I hope I didn’t frighten you,” I said.

“No,” Yesim said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not very frightening.”

“Oh, yeah? I frighten plenty of people. My neighbors in San Francisco think I’m a ghost.”

“Really?”

“At least, I think they do.” San Francisco wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, and I regretted having mentioned it.

Yesim turned away from me, and walked toward the shed.

“What happened on Saturday night?” I asked.

“It’s complicated. I tried to explain.”

“About Mark? It sounds like you’re having second thoughts about him.”

“Mark is only part of it.” Yesim took off her sunglasses, which were, in any case, unnecessary: purplish cumulus clouds were coming over the mountains from the east, their bottoms dark and unpromising. She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “Did I tell you I was in love with Professor X?” she said. “Not platonic love, not love from a distance. I washed her when she couldn’t move. I washed her stomach, between her legs. I fucked her with my hand.” She watched me to see what reaction this new word, fucked, would provoke.

“OK,” I said, “but you don’t love her now.” I had never formed a mental image of Professor X, so Yesim’s words had little power to disturb me.

“No,” she said, “not anymore. But then there was my therapist, Dr. Y. Nice man, he showed me pictures of his grandchildren. We fucked everywhere but on the couch, he said he didn’t want to look at one of his other patients and think of me lying there.” She said fucked as if it were a technical term borrowed from another language, like cogito or Geist. It was a pretension, a word that didn’t belong to her, although it might have belonged to Professor X or Dr. Y. “Then there was Miss Z, who lived with me after the Pines,” she said, “and her friend, Mr …. shit, I should have started earlier in the alphabet, now I have to call him Mr. AA. I couldn’t say no. Do you understand?”

“I understand that you had sex with a lot of people, but so what? Does that mean I can’t like you?”

“Mr. AA liked me,” Yesim said. “He was very nice. He had a daughter in Wisconsin, and he sent her a postcard every day. He played classical guitar. He gave great massages.”

“So what was wrong with him?”

“He wasn’t the most stable person,” Yesim said, “although he was better than Mr., what should I call him? AB? BB?” Yesim looked up at me. “Now you know.”

Just then, as if to prove some idiotic hypothesis about the world, it started raining. There was almost no warning: the clouds were just on top of us, and a fat cold rain was falling. “Fuck,” Yesim said. She fiddled with the padlock on the shed. By the time she got it open we were both wet. “What are you waiting for? Come in.”

The shed was cold and dim. A few chairs, or benches, dangled from the curved track that would send them back down the mountainside, their safety bars open as if they’d been waiting for passengers since the end of the last winter. The air smelled of dirt. Yesim said she had to check to make sure the power was working, that was why she’d come up here. She tugged at the cover of the fuse box but it wouldn’t open. “Fucking stupid thing,” Yesim said. I pointed out that there was a catch; Yesim released it and the cover opened. She peered into the fuse box and flipped a switch and the lights came on.

We sat for a while on one of the chairs, not talking, just swaying back and forth, our feet dangling in the air, listening to the enormous sound of the rain. Yesim said she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to burden me with her tale of woe. I said I didn’t mind. She smiled. Was that the turnaround point? The place where we stopped struggling against gravity and let ourselves be carried downhill, toward whatever there was at the bottom, the lodge, home, life together? No. All we’d done was to turn on the power. We sat in the shed until the worst of the storm had passed, then we went out. The sun was shining again, lighting up the edge of the clouds like a curtain; red and yellow trees on the northern mountains stood out and seemed almost to sparkle.

Yesim said she had to go to the office, Kerem was probably wondering what had happened to her, and we walked to our respective cars. The flowers I’d bought were still lying on Norman Mailer’s passenger seat. I took them back to my grandfather’s house and rinsed out a vase; I set the vase full of flowers on the kitchen table, but it was too wobbly so I moved the flowers to the windowsill. They looked good there, their white petals taking on subtle color in the daylight. They made the house look as if someone lived in it.

REGENZEIT

The next day I ran into Kerem at the Kountry Kitchen. He was waiting in line to pay as I came in, and he embraced me. He had a black eye, which he’d tried to cover with makeup, but it didn’t work. The puffy blue flesh around his eye stood out like a burial mound seen from the air. I asked what had happened to him, and he told me he’d been in Philadelphia over the weekend. “Man,” he said, “there are some assholes in Philly!” He told me how this homeless—he used the word as a noun — had called him a sand nigger. “You should have seen what I did to the guy, though. I think I busted his collarbone.” Then: “Hey, you talked to my sister.” I nodded. Kerem asked if she had shown me her poems and for some reason I said yes, she had.

“Did she show you ‘Uyum’?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“‘Uyum’ is incredible,” Kerem said. “You have to admit I’m right. People are going to be reading it a hundred years from now.”

“They might.”

“She’s a genius!” Kerem said. “What I need you to do is hook her up. Do you know anyone in publishing?”

I thought of the people at Marina’s salon: Holly the graphic designer who wrote a zine called Hollylujah! sullen Ted who kept an online diary about the girls he hadn’t slept with. “I don’t know if my friends will be much help,” I said, but Kerem wasn’t listening. He leaned close to me, and for a second I had the strange feeling that he and Yesim were two parts of the same person.

“I don’t believe in fate or anything like that,” he said, “but I do think you showed up just when you were needed.” He hit my arm. “You should stick around until winter! I’ll hook you up with free passes to Snowbird.” He patted my shoulder one more time and left. I ate my lunch, a bowl of chicken soup and what the menu referred to as Yankee pot roast, though I doubted it had seen the inside of a pot, or an oven, or anything the old Yankees used to prepare food.

I went home and called Yesim and told her about my conversation with Kerem. I said I wanted to read her poems, and Yesim said that was very flattering, but she didn’t know how she felt about the part of her life that had ended in Cambridge years ago. I said of course I understood, but I still wanted to read the poems.

“You have to be patient with me,” Yesim said. “I have good parts and bad parts.”

“Everyone is like that,” I said.

“That may be true, but I’m a little more so.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I want to see you again.”

Yesim said I could come over anytime. After all, I knew where she lived. But I said I meant just her, alone. There was a longish silence, then she said she would stop by on her way home, but just for a minute.

I spent the afternoon on the sofa, reading in Progress in Flying Machines about Screws That Lift and Propel. Outside, the sky got darker and darker. Just when it seemed like Yesim wouldn’t come, the Outback arrived in my grandfather’s driveway, and there she was, a brown paper bag in her arms. She’d brought food, she hoped I didn’t mind, she hadn’t eaten all day.

Yesim paused on the doorstep. “You know I’ve never been here?” It hadn’t occurred to me but of course it was true. “All these years,” she said, carrying the bag to the kitchen table, and unpacking a plastic tub of soup and white Chinese-takeout boxes, “I’ve wondered what your grandparents’ house was like.”

“Come and see,” I said. I showed her the dining room, the parlor, where she admired Mary’s watercolors; my mothers’ room, my grandparents’ bedroom, the study. Somewhere on the second floor Yesim stopped talking, and she didn’t speak again until we were back in the kitchen.

“Excuse me for asking,” she said, finding bowls, plates, forks and spoons, carrying everything to the old scarred kitchen table, “but I thought you were supposed to be packing up?”

“I should be. But look at this place. I have no idea where to start.”

“It’s not hard. You just make two piles, one for things to give away and one for things to keep. Anything that’s too big to go on one of the piles, you tag with a sticker. Color coded, red for keep, green for sell or give away.” Kerem was right: Yesim was a born manager.

We opened the takeout boxes to reveal chicken and peanuts, broccoli, some kind of eggplant, this last, I thought, an almost Turkish touch. There was a little silence: so much not to talk about.

“So,” I asked, “how was your day?”

“Not bad,” Yesim said around a mouthful of chicken. The terrain park was almost finished but the contractor had gone AWOL. He didn’t have a regular phone; Yesim imagined that he was some kind of elf, hiding in an enchanted forest of concrete. “What about you?”

“Oh,” I said, “things with me are pretty quiet.”

We finished dinner in comfortable silence. It was as if we’d always been there, the two of us, as if all the contradictions of our history were dissolving in cheap broth and brown sauce, and what remained was just this image, the Rowland child and the Regenzeit child at the ancestral Rowland table, eating soup from my grandparents’ chipped white bowls.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” I said, as Yesim stood, plate in her hands, headed for the sink, but she was already washing the dishes.

“I like your kitchen more than mine,” she said. “It’s cozy. I never understood why my parents made ours so shiny and, you know, chrome-y. On the other hand”—she nodded at the clock in the shape of a cat, with a wagging tail and eyes set with rhinestones—“that’s a weird clock.”

“My grandfather bought it after my grandmother died. I don’t know why.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean to imply that he had bad taste. I’ve just never seen a clock like that before.”

“Get rid of it, you think?”

“I would,” Yesim said.

So it began. It seems ironic that the one thing Yesim and I could talk about was my grandparents’ possessions, the stuff that had brought me to Thebes in the first place, but it makes sense: everything else was too dangerous. When I had unplugged the clock and taken it down from the wall, it made sense to both of us that she would point at a ceramic beer stein, which had been full of pennies and nickels for as long as I could remember, and ask, “Are you going to keep that?” I asked if she thought I should.

“It looks kind of dirty.”

“OK, stein, Achtung!” I said. “To ze garage mit you!”

When I came back she was looking at the coat tree. “I know,” I said. “I’ll take it out later.”

It made sense that I would call Yesim at work the next day, to ask if she could spare an hour or two. Because I was cleaning out the library, and I could use her advice. Yesim came over and we spent the evening picking things up, showing them to each other, asking, Yes or no? Her advice was good, even if it tended to the nonaccumulative. That boat-shaped ashtray? Forget it. The box of matchbooks? The china shepherd? The green-shaded lamp? The lamp, maybe. It was a nice lamp. After a couple of hours, Yesim looked at her watch and said she had to go. Maybe she suspected that something else was happening, less innocent than the division of my grandparents’ things into two heaps, because she drove the fifty feet that separated her house from mine, as if she wanted to emphasize that we were not together. But she came back the next night. We worked in the dining room, then in the living room, with increasing sureness and speed. The great mass of Rowland stuff gave way before us, like ice breaking and spinning away into a warming river, and what was, from my point of view, even better, Yesim and I learned things about each other. I discovered that she had no use for the kitsch that people in San Francisco liked (“Please tell me,” she said indignantly, “what you are going to do with Cooking with Pineapples?”), but she showed a strange reverence for old-fashioned things (“You’ve got to hold on to these letter openers”), which I would have been happy (“Five letter openers? Yesim, I don’t get any mail!”) not to keep. We agreed about paperweights, planters, anything crocheted. These weren’t the things we would have chosen to reveal about ourselves, but somehow that made them even more intimate, more revealing. They were the secrets we didn’t know we had. How else, short of living together, would I have learned that Yesim didn’t like pillows or mirrors, that she hated curtains and only grudgingly tolerated blinds? How would she have discovered my strange fascination with the electric toothbrush?

With the things came stories. Yesim wanted to know about the Catskill landscapes in the dining room; I told her about my grandmother’s expeditions into the mountains, in all seasons, all weathers, expeditions that caused my grandfather furies of worry that didn’t end until she came home, sometimes in the middle of the night, the back of her station wagon full of diminutive canvases.

“She was really talented,” Yesim said.

“It’s true,” I said.

But my grandmother’s interest in painting ended when my mothers went to New York to become artists: as if she couldn’t stand the competition, or maybe it was just that, with her daughters gone and her son on his way to Vietnam, she didn’t have anyone to run away from anymore. After that, my grandmother put her energy into her garden, almost as if she’d become the one who was rooted to the spot.

“She sounds interesting,” Yesim said. “Not like my grandmother, ugh.” But Yesim didn’t talk about her grandmother: my house, she said, my stories.

On Saturday afternoon I found a box of my grandparents’ records. Here was Gil Gideon and the Two-Time Tunesters with a double album of Moonlite Melodies, here were Benny Goodman, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb and all their orchestras. Some of the records were thick, ten-inch 78s; others were regular 33s, in bright, busy album covers that belonged to a world untouched or unretouched by the airbrush. I put on Gil Gideon and turned the volume up, and his songs became the soundtrack for our work in the parlor, which went faster now that there was music playing. “Give me a sign,” Gil sang. “A spoon. The month of June. A reason to be fallin’ in love.”

“How did they meet?” Yesim asked.

“Gil and the Tunesters?”

“No, your grandparents.”

The way my grandmother told the story, I said, Oliver had fallen in love with her at a college dance contest. He was no kind of dancer; his first words to her were apparently, “Is that your foot?” Mary was disposed to tell him off. She already had a beau, a Baltimorean named Brett, also an undergraduate at Bleak, who possessed a widow’s peak, jet-black hair, commanding eyes, a sterling white waistcoat and one of each kind of foot. But something about Oliver stopped her. That was the word she used, stopped, as if it meant more than it did, as if Oliver stopped not only her lips but some crazy clockwork that had carried her from boarding school to boarding school, from state to state, from boyfriend to boyfriend, because young Mary was wild, or restless at least, very much like her daughters in that regard. If Oliver hadn’t come along, she didn’t know where she would have ended up. A lost woman, she said. Probably. Oliver stopped her. He was a talker; before the song was over he had told her how he came from a long line of tree exploiters: his great-great-grandfather had run a sawmill, and his grandfather had run a furniture company and his father made walking sticks and other wooden souvenirs for tourists in the Catskills. First trees, then chairs, then walking sticks: the only thing left for Oliver would be toothpicks, so he’d left home before the family business whittled him down to nothing. He got Mary to tell him her story. He listened, as though to him the music were no music, as though everything in the world were still except her voice, which grew still in turn, and the band stopped playing, and they lost the contest, and went outside for a breath of air.

Then came the Second World War. Oliver enlisted in the Army, hoping to see some action, but he was clumsy, clumsy, and in the interest of everyone’s safety he was posted to a base in Florida, where he excelled as assistant quartermaster, and then quartermaster, and probably he would have made it all the way to half-master and master entire if the war hadn’t ended when it did. He went back to Bleak and married Mary, and for a few months they lived in New York City, while they decided what to do with the rest of their lives. Mary argued for London; Oliver wanted time to think. They were still and moving at the same time. It was a strange experience, like being on a ride at a fair; you sat there and the lights went past, then passed again. Where were they going? Thebes, as it turned out. Oliver’s father had died and left behind him a fat dark skein of unresolved business, which looked from the outside as though there would be money in it, but unraveled, and unraveled, until Oliver was left holding nothing, only the thin end of a thread that led to someone else’s pocket. The Rowland Mill was bankrupt; the mill closed down. All that was left were the houses in town, and some securities, enough to live on if they lived in Thebes. Oliver liked the idea of having some more time to think, and besides, Mary was already pregnant with Charles. They moved to Thebes.

Instead of English hills, Mary got the Catskills, and not the busy Catskills, where the Jewish resorts were, nor the majestic Catskills as painted by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, but Thebes, a town in the northeastern corner of Espy County, which she’d never heard of, a place so remote that the inhabitants spoke a foreign language. How good Brett and his urbane charms must have looked as the car stopped and the cold air came in, and Oliver explained to her that the house had been built in stages, that the original house had been only the kitchen and what was now the dining room and one of the bedrooms upstairs, that the parlor and library and the big bedroom had been added by John Rowland I, and his son added the bow window, a mistake, in Oliver’s opinion … A commentary that did not cease until she fell sick and Oliver took her to a teaching hospital in Syracuse, forty-five years later.

Mary was stopped, and good. Even so, she was smart enough to guess there was a reason why everything happened, smart enough to guess that she was, in fact, smart. If she’d been in love with Brett she would have let him make love to her; but she hadn’t. She had married Oliver for a reason, even if she couldn’t say exactly what the reason was, now, standing on the front steps of the Rowland house, looking out at a valley where few people lived, and all of them odd. So she made the best of it. She took up painting and drove off to turn the vast Hudson Valley into tiny watercolors; she made molehills of mountains, and spider lines of streams; forests turned to blotches under her brush, stippled with orange as the fall approached. And she had Saturday nights at Summerland, the old resort. Look: Oliver is in his shirtsleeves; Mary’s in a flared skirt that swings nicely when she swings, and she swings all right. Her hair is mussed. Now it’s Sunday morning, the kids are going to be up soon and Mary will have to cook, but until then she’s free to remember the night she’s had, and the band that was playing, let’s say it was Gil Gideon and his orchestra, and how she got Oliver to dance; when he was tired she danced with his friend Pete Samson, a doctor, who wasn’t bad, and when they were done Oliver took her out to the garden, which was lit up like a fairyland. She let him smoke a cigarette and kiss her; she grabbed his big behind and had the pleasure of watching his eyes get all round.

“Mary, please,” he murmured to her neck, “someone will see us.”

“Who’s to see? Everyone else is doing the same thing.”

It was true; the bushes rustled with amorous activity. Now and then someone hooted like an owl carrying something soft away in its talons. She pressed his hips into her stomach, dug her fingers into the scratchy wool of the seat of his pants.

“Mary!”

She could feel his cock getting hard, though, and she wondered if she ought to drag him into the bushes. Instead they went indoors. Gil G. was pulling out all the stops. The drummer was soaking in his shirtsleeves and the trumpeter’s eyes had gone red like sucking candies.

“Here’s the champion!” Pete Samson seized Mary’s waist and led her back to the dance floor, over Oliver’s objections that a man ought to be able to enjoy a moment with his wife …

“Let’s run away,” Pete whispered in Mary’s ear. He was ten years younger than she was, young enough to have strong blocky legs and a baby-boy face. His soft cheek pressed against hers. He was joking, but he wasn’t joking.

“Where to?” Mary asked.

“Anywhere you want,” said Pete.

“Not tonight,” Mary said. “Call me in the morning.”

“You always say that,” Pete said.

“You never call.”

Then she went back to Oliver, who was brooding. She squeezed his arm and told him to get her a drink. Mary knew that she was smart, smarter in fact than her husband, definitely smarter than Pete Samson, probably smarter than her children as well. She understood what none of them were even close to figuring out, that this was all there was. Wherever you went in the world, whatever you did, you would find more or less the same thing, people dancing in hot rooms, brooding husbands, gardens, lights, the sound of sex, children who wanted breakfast, and there was no point in wishing that life were otherwise, because if it was very much different from this, then it wouldn’t be life at all. Give me a rock, she sings. A ring. The promise of spring. A season. A reason to be fallin’ in love.

My uncle came over that night. “Hey,” he said, “you’re making progress!” He had been worried about me, but it looked like I was doing all right. “Maybe our talk did you some good,” Charles said.

“Maybe it did,” I said.

On Monday Yesim and I started on the parlor.

REGENZEIT

This is the good part: it’s the story of Yesim calling me at midnight to say she’d changed her mind, I ought to keep Mary’s sewing machine, and me saying, you’re calling at midnight about the sewing machine? And Yesim saying, I couldn’t sleep, I was worried that you would throw it out. It’s an antique, you ought to hold on to it. And me saying, I promise, I won’t make any rash decisions about the sewing machine until tomorrow morning at the earliest. And going back to bed, pretending to be annoyed that Yesim had woken me up for something so unimportant, but actually happy that she was thinking of me at midnight, that she was thinking of me and my grandmother’s sewing machine. It’s the story of Yesim calling me breathlessly in the middle of the afternoon to say she just saw a moose on the ski slope, a moose, can you believe it? And me saying, it couldn’t have been a moose, and Yesim saying, you don’t believe me? Come over and see for yourself. It’s the story of the two of us walking all over Mount Espy looking for a hypothetical moose and coming back to the lodge almost doubled over with laughter and not being able to tell Kerem what was so funny. It’s that story. You know how it goes.

But here are a few surprises: one afternoon when we were tired of packing, we sat on my grandfather’s porch, watching yellow leaves skitter past on Route 56, and talked about things we’d done when we were kids. It was just like the fantasy I had right after that first dinner with Yesim and Kerem — months ago, it seemed, although it had actually been less than two weeks. I told Yesim the story of how I was expelled from Nederland, and Yesim laughed, and said, if she had been expelled from high school her father would have strangled her.

“He wouldn’t let us do anything wrong,” Yesim said. “If I got a B in school, he would shout, Aren’t you ashamed?”

“That’s pretty harsh,” I agreed.

Yesim looked at me sidelong. “You have no idea.”

Even before he came to Thebes, Joe Regenzeit had figured out that here, in America, there was no room for error, and no one to catch him if he fell, an impression that his experiences with the Thebans did nothing to dispel. If his shirt was wrinkled, it was because Turks were slovenly; if Snowbird failed to file for a permit no one had ever mentioned until the deadline for it had passed, it was because Turks thought everything could be settled with baksheesh. What Joe Regenzeit received as prejudice, he transmitted to his children as obsession. He expected Yesim’s and Kerem’s lives to be as spotless as the glass-topped table in the dining room. His demands were all the harder to satisfy because he wanted his children to be perfect and Turkish, to show the town what educated Turks could accomplish in the New World. His idea of Turkishness came from Anatolia, where nothing was possible, Yesim said, and so it was only natural that it mostly took the form of restriction: no television, no parties, no short skirts, no jeans, no teen magazines. If Joe Regenzeit could have got into his children’s sleeping heads he would probably have forbidden them to dream.

I had trouble understanding how this fit with what I remembered of the Regenzeit home. “There was Kerem’s punk phase,” I said, “and …”

“Yes,” Yesim said, “that was when things got bad.”

She and Kerem, as natives, had understood how the spirit of Thebes, and maybe of America in general, loves failure as much as or more than it does success. They started to make mistakes on purpose, to let their grades slip, to change the way they dressed. As they fell fluently into this new language of truancy and misdemeanor, Joe Regenzeit’s anger grew. There was more shouting, more shaking, things Yesim didn’t like to think about, even now.

“He must have hated me,” I said.

“You? You were his great hope. The child of the oldest family in town, playing soldiers with Kerem! You were the promise that somehow things would work out, that we would be accepted here. Why do you think my parents let the two of us be friends?”

“I never thought about it.”

“You had it easy,” Yesim said. “You never had to think about anything.”

Then came the night of the dress. We had finished the parlor and moved on to my grandparents’ bedroom; I was taking bird books out of my grandfather’s nightstand when Yesim held up a long blue dress with a low neckline and a fringed skirt, it must have been one of the dresses my grandmother wore to Summerland. “What do you think of this,” she asked. “Isn’t it elegant?” She held it to her shoulders. I don’t know what I said, but Yesim carried the dress into the bathroom and closed the door. I asked what she was doing, and she said, “What do you think? I’m trying it on.”

A couple of minutes later she came out wearing the dress, her breasts pushing their way out of its décolletage as though she were an allegory for something, Victory, or Liberty, or America. She spun around the bedroom in tiny steps, because the dress had been sewn for a woman half her size and fit her like a manacle. She stretched the seams and caused the tiny seed pearls sewn into the hem to tremble, shuffled back into the bathroom to look at herself and came out again, toward me, slowly, her lip curled in expectation of something terrible or wonderful, which, I realized, I was expecting too. Then Yesim slipped on the bare floor. The dress tore from knee to waist and she sat down heavily. “Whoops,” she said. She retreated to the bathroom, tugging the ruined dress down over her white schoolgirl underpants. When she came out, she promised she would have the dress repaired, and asked, did I mind that she’d tried it on? I said honestly that I didn’t mind, but maybe it would be a good idea if she didn’t try on any more of my grandmother’s clothes. Yesim said obviously she wasn’t going to, she had just been curious.

That night, as if we’d crossed some frontier beyond which we no longer had anything to hide from each other, we stayed up late drinking tea and talking in my grandfather’s kitchen. Yesim told me she’d often wondered what her life would have been like if she’d been born fifty or even a hundred years earlier. Would she have been more at home in Istanbul, where her mother’s parents were from? She wouldn’t have had as much freedom, but on the other hand she wondered whether freedom was really what she wanted. “There’s something to be said for rules,” she said. “Just look at poetry. Of course everyone writes free verse now but you can do some beautiful things with the old forms. Desperate hearts: this ship is not the last to go, nor the last arrow of a life of sorrow. The lover and beloved wait in vain … That’s Beyatlı; do you know him?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Actually, he’s kind of corny. But it doesn’t matter, all I mean is that form counts for something.”

“Just as long as you don’t choke on it,” I said.

Yesim nodded. “I’m not going to let anything do that to me. Not again. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Would you have wanted to live a hundred years ago?”

“I used to be a historian. For me, the past is work.”

“When were you a historian?”

“At Stanford,” I said. “Before I became a programmer.”

“Huh,” Yesim said. “But studying the past isn’t the same as living in it. You really wouldn’t want to go back?”

“No.”

“Not even to find out if you were right about whatever it was you studied?”

“It wouldn’t be that easy. In some ways, it’s easier to know now what was happening then. Anyway, my subject was a cult, I guess you’d say, who believed the world would end in 1844. I don’t have to travel in time to know they were wrong.”

“Why did you give it up?”

“I couldn’t write my dissertation.”

“I understand. It must be very hard.”

I shrugged. “The problem was more that I lost interest.”

“In the end of the world?” Yesim smiled.

“In the past generally.”

After a moment, Yesim asked, “Did something happen? To you, I mean?”

“Yes and no. I mean, a lot of things happened. But nothing really happened to me.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I’m not in a hurry.” Yesim smiled into her teacup. “Besides, I showed you mine.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”

SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

Victor and Alex and I moved to San Francisco together at the end of our first year at Stanford. We needed to be in the city, we decided, because living in Palo Alto was like being dead, it was like moving into your own tomb before your death, breathing in the eucalyptus-scented embalming oils, waking up every morning to the same light, encountering, every day, the same lifelike faces, which asked you the same question, “Isn’t this heaven?” We looked at many unsuitable apartments, as well as a few that two of us liked but not the third. Alex wanted to live in the Castro, I wanted period charm, and Victor wanted a backyard where he could grill. Somewhere between Moscow and California he had picked up a love of barbecue; it had become indissociably linked to happiness in his mind, to the point where he would linger at even the most unbearable graduate-student parties as long as someone was cooking meat outdoors. We talked about splitting up, but none of us could afford to live alone, and finally we found the place on Sixteenth Street, which wasn’t what we wanted — the apartment was dark, the street ugly and loud, there was no yard — but there was room for all of us to work, and a back porch where the landlady said it would be all right to put a grill. And there was something else, a Murphy bed that unfolded from the back of a cabinet door in the front parlor. I loved the old-fashionedness of it, and I joked that, like the Murphy bed, I wanted to live in the apartment until someone dismantled me and carried me off. A month later we packed up our incompatible belongings and drove them to San Francisco.

The city was even better than I had expected. It wasn’t just like coming back to life, it was like coming to life, to a life I’d never lived before. Alex had friends in the city already, people he’d known in college, who had discovered a bar on Valencia Street, the Blue Study, which had a room in the back where no one went, with weather-beaten sofas, a patio table and a gray cat called Felix who glared at us from the corner. Alex invited me to drink with his group, and in this way I met Erin, who had been in a band in college and still dressed like a lounge singer, in low-cut dresses that set off her white skin, and a bobbed black wig, and sang, sometimes, when she was drunk, songs she had written, about people she’d loved so much she could kill them, and how she could kill them, exactly.

I fell in love with her. She didn’t love me back, but that didn’t stop us from spending hours sitting side by side on a sofa at the Blue Study, our arms around each other, talking about the countries we would like to visit, and when we would visit them together. Morocco, Argentina, Australia, Japan, the world, which had, until then, been made up of places that I would never see, became as close as a conversation, as close as the word yes, at least until Erin attracted Star, a short woman with a crew cut and red high-top Keds, and Star drew Erin into her orbit, never, alas, to return to my arms. It didn’t matter. Love meant something different in the back room of the Blue Study than it did elsewhere; it was like a vibration in the air, which, although you directed it at one particular person, spread outward from you in an expanding bubble, until it was absorbed by the walls, the bar, the strangers at the bar who you would never meet, Valencia Street, the red light blinking at the top of Sutro Tower. My love for Erin flew out of me painlessly, and when it had gone as far as it could, it came back to me as taste. Suddenly I preferred the super vegetarian burrito at El Toro to its equivalent at the Taqueria Maya, I frequented the used-book store with the cat, and not the one run by the barely ambulatory depressive outpatient; I shopped at Rainbow Market and not Safeway, which Erin called Slaveway. I had been naturalized. My monochrome East Coast clothes made way for a rainbow of Thrift Town shirts and permanently creased polyester slacks. My hair became unruly; I grew a beard, which made me look like a rabbi, Victor said, not the effect I had been aiming at, but maybe not entirely wrong, my father had been a Jew, and now, who knew, in San Francisco I might become a Jew too. I started smoking and purchased a record player. I had no idea how close I was to him, my father, how much I had come to resemble him, but if Charles had seen me slouching from my house to Java Man, from Java Man to the Blue Study, in my green Arnel shirt and crackled leather three-quarters coat, the outfit in which, I thought, I was finally free from the past and all possible constraint, I think he would have told me, You look just like a young Richard Ente.

It was around this time that I met Swan. He spent his mornings at Java Man, writing his leaflets, and because I was also a regular there, we talked sometimes, mostly about his program to get himself elected mayor of San Francisco, or Swan Francisco, as he called it. He possessed a great deal of information, most of it fictitious, about Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been, he said, a huge pothead, which was the reason he could understand what the birds were saying. Saint Francis began as an ordinary monk, Swan said, then he discovered marijuana, which was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, along with silk and the numeral zero. Weed unlocked the door to the animal world, Swan said, and Saint Francis went right on through. He discovered that animals deserve our love every bit as much as human beings do, more, in fact, because the patience of animals is limitless, whereas human beings get sick of you, which is the cause of war. Saint Francis became a Buddhist and a vegetarian, he preached a gospel of unfettered desire and kindness to animals, and if elected mayor, Swan promised to bring these teachings back to this, his city. It would be the beginning of a world revolution: pot would be legal, and money abolished; animals would be cherished and might, once the mass of humanity had reached a sufficiently advanced state, consent to serve as our teachers. Swan always kept a bird near him, a pigeon, usually, often one with a broken wing. As he spoke, he stroked the bird’s back; sometimes he raised the bird to his face and looked into its eye, and it seemed as though the two, Swan and bird, were really understanding each other, although no words passed between them. I liked listening to his unorthodox histories, and promised to vote for him as soon as he got himself on the ballot.

When my work was going badly, and the career I’d chosen seemed like a dull dream, as unfulfillable as it was unwanted, I wondered what decisions had made Swan Swan, whether they could be counted, how many they had been. How thick was the line that separated us, how easily could it be crossed, and, once you had gone over it one way, could you go back in the other? To this last question, at least, I got an answer, or deduced an answer, no, it was not possible. Swan refused to talk about his past; when I asked him even the least personal questions, where he had grown up, how long he had lived in San Francisco, he stopped speaking and turned his attention to his writing or his bird. Peter, the owner of the Latin Quarter Bookshop, told me that Swan had come from the Midwest, but where in the Midwest, and what he had done there, and whether he had been born there or had come from somewhere else, no one knew. Swan was Swan.

Once, on a rainy winter night, I felt a pang of concern for him. I heated a can of soup and poured it into a big plastic mug and took it downstairs to the doorway where Swan sat on his bedroll.

“No, thanks,” Swan said.

“Come on, it’s just soup. It’ll warm you up.”

Swan didn’t answer. I couldn’t think of anything to say either, and after a minute my waiting there became absurd, as if I were in a Beckett play. Swan understood why I was there, though. He wanted me to know that he was all right. So he lit a cigarette and, blowing smoke through his clenched brown teeth, he said, “I think I’m going to run for president.”

Gratefully I said it sounded like a good idea.

“If animals could vote it’d be a sure thing.” He nodded impatiently. “You don’t know what it was like when the door was open. It wasn’t about drugs. Now people say, oh, you were a hippie, you took LSD, you’re crazy. But it wasn’t like that. We were getting hold of the truth. Why do you think they killed Dylan?”

“They killed Dylan?”

“They replaced him,” Swan said, “with a robot from Disneyland. I knew the guy who made his face. He died of a heart attack in nineteen seventy-six. He was forty-one years old. A heart attack. Everyone who knows is in trouble. Are you a poet?”

“A historian,” I said.

“Is that right? I’ll tell you what you have to do. You have to write down what’s happening in this place.”

I tried to explain that the present wasn’t my period, I was more of a nineteenth-century person. Swan didn’t listen. “There are things happening right now that would blow your mind,” he said.

“Like what?”

He gave me a leaflet.

Swan was right: things were happening that would blow my mind. Even as I was becoming a native of the Mission, in the winter of 1993–94, the Mission was changing, in part because so many people like me had moved there, but also because our presence in the neighborhood was a signal to other people, unlike me, I thought, back then, that it was safe to move in. They came from the Marina, from Pacific Heights, from Redwood City and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, from Burlingame, they came from El Cerrito and Chicago and Texas and New York. They drove up the rent and the price of shoes; they occupied all the tables at the junkie breakfast restaurant, which served eggs Benedict now, and not to junkies, the lights were turned up too bright for them, and the manager put a lock on the bathroom door and gave the key only to paying customers.

Money came to the Mission, leading women in high heels down Sixteenth Street on Saturday night. Money parked its car in the middle of Valencia Street and didn’t care if it got a ticket, there was nowhere else to park, even the garages were full. You might as well live in New York, money grumbled. Money waited for a cab, but all the cabs were taken. Money went into the new Temple of Faith Bar on Mission Street, which had replaced the old Templo de la Fé church in the same location, but preserved the mural on the rear wall, of Jesus reaching down from the clouds as though to pluck a bottle of pepper-infused vodka from the top shelf of the bar. Money came out at two in the morning and eyed the donut restaurant across the street, with a big sign over the counter expressly prohibiting the sale of stolen goods on the premises. Money wanted a donut but was afraid to go in. Money had intense conversations just below my window. I don’t want to go home with you, money said to money, I don’t care about your business model, just get me a cab; but the cabs were still scarce, and in the end money said, OK, but please don’t put the top down, it’s cold.

Money was coming, like the wave in the postcard my grandfather sent me each year, threatening to drown us. Overnight my friends sloughed off their part-time jobs and like wastrel princes ascending to the monarchy they became professionals. Josh worked for a construction company, filing plans in AutoCAD; Erin got a job at a Web startup which proffered folk remedies to people who couldn’t afford health insurance. In six months she went from half-time to full-time, from full-time to management, where she made a tacit policy of hiring only Wiccans. Even my housemate Victor, the medieval historian, started a company called MySky with some friends from Stanford. He wasn’t allowed to tell us what MySky did, but it carried him off six days a week at seven a.m. and returned him late at night, looking furious and pinched. A couple of years later I’d see billboards for MySky on Highway 101; I’d read about it in the Chronicle, in the Times, and I’d realize, with a kind of shock, that this was Victor’s company, that it belonged in part to the person who had lectured me about the hermeneutics of Saint Thomas Aquinas at our kitchen table. By then Victor was long gone from the apartment on Sixteenth Street. First he moved to Palo Alto; later, I heard, he bought a house in Sausalito, high on a bluff overlooking the bay.

By the middle of 1996 it seemed as if Alex and I were the last people in the Mission not employed by the New Economy, and Alex was increasingly caught up in the purposiveness of academia. He flew off to conferences, proposed panels, worked on Stanford Historical Notes. I had passed my oral exams, but still hadn’t found a topic for my dissertation. In fact, I was coming to the depressing conclusion that nothing about nineteenth-century America excited me, apart from a few subjects which had been done to death. I told everyone I was working, but really I was drifting, and because I was drifting, I saw a lot of Swan.

Those were great days for him. Not only were the poor being forced out of their rental apartments to make way for airy live/work condominiums; not only was Congress gutting the American welfare system and dropping bombs on Bosnia, but his car, a green VW Beetle that he had inhabited, literally, since the mid-eighties, had been towed, a consequence of too many unpaid parking tickets. Swan had never had so much to be angry about. When I saw him in the morning at Java Man, his fingers flew across the keyboard of the public computer, composing jeremiads in which he abandoned the doctrine of universal love and recruited the animals to go to war. He was so angry that he wouldn’t give his leaflets to human beings unless they begged him, sometimes not even then. He stood on the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia with a stack of them in his crooked arm, like a statue erected to commemorate an old battle. Generalissimo Swan, who fought the world to a standstill in the Battle of the Mission.

All small cute women are agents, he wrote. U can trust no one but creatures.

Concerned, I tried to interest Swan in other subjects. “Hey, Swan, any luck with the car?” Or: “Did you see the crowd outside Blondie’s last night? Man, they’re bringing them in by the busload now.” But he was completely caught up in his work, and I have to say I envied him for that.

Crews, take ur planes! Shoot the officers! Take ur tanks, men. Bomb all hi-rise + mansion areas! Get ready for the Coming of the Great Ghosts!

“What ghosts, Swan?” I asked.

He ignored me.

Bird Wars Rip City, Swan wrote. Riots Blood Flames!

“Hey, Swan,” I said, “did you see, they’re towing cars in the middle of Valencia Street!”

“Only allowed to park there on Sundays,” Swan shot back. “Only for church.”

Despite my clumsy efforts at friendship, we were never as close as we’d been the rainy night when I brought him soup. We would never be even that close again. Swan was becoming a prophet, a role that distanced him from the rest of the world — you couldn’t get too close to a lighthouse. He typed furiously, monopolizing the computer in Java Man, and no one dared ask him to stop. I will burn Spain with a ray from the ether, he wrote, I will crumple your planet like paper. It was as if he were already living in a different world from the rest of us, a world where poets and animals had the power of gods. I’LL show you what blood is, miles of iodine roses piled upon the ocean. O live in the thunder & lightning. Then one day a man who’d been waiting to use Java Man’s computer for half an hour finally shouted at Swan, “Dude, it’s time for you to get up!”

Swan didn’t answer.

“I’m telling you, dude!” the man said. “Don’t you hear me?” He grabbed Swan’s shoulder and some things happened very quickly: Swan stood up and reached out his hand, to steady himself, I thought. The man thought he was being attacked and shoved Swan, who fell to the ground and lay there motionless. “Damn,” the man said. He turned to the barista and said, “You better call an ambulance.”

I knelt by Swan’s head. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” Swan said.

He lay there with his eyes closed for a minute, then got to his feet. He gave us all a magnificent look of contempt and walked out, his shoulders high with prophetical rage. A minute later the ambulance pulled up outside Java Man, its lights flashing, and an EMT came in with his gear.

“Where is he?”

The barista nodded at the street. “He’s OK, I guess.”

The EMT laughed. “OK for now.”

The man who’d provoked the incident sat at the computer, not even typing. He didn’t look at anyone. It was as if nothing had happened. I think that was when I first felt the desire to disappear.

In the bad winter of 1997, when the days lightened imperceptibly out of wet dark and ended in droplets of water sparkling on the windowpanes, at some point in that winter of colds and molds and beaches white with storm-brought foam, I dreamed of sneaking out of my own life and leaving only an empty place behind. Victor and Alex would still fight about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, buses would still pull up outside Blondie’s, the rain would still rattle the windows, everything would go on, but I would be elsewhere, becoming I knew not what. I daydreamed about renting a room in a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin, or staking a claim to one of the Mission’s many doorways. I thought about getting on an eastbound bus and seeing, for the last time, the white mound of San Francisco sink below the horizon. I don’t know why that tempted me so strongly. Maybe it was the weather, or maybe I was afraid to stop being a young man with the potential to become anything, and to be something in particular, an academic historian. Maybe everyone wants to disappear at some point in their lives, and maybe all of us do. Some drop out of sight; others stay in the same place but vanish from each other; still others, most of us, maybe, vanish slowly from ourselves. I don’t know. In the end, I went nowhere, and it was Swan who disappeared.

Ironically, it happened while I was working on my dissertation. After months of watching me mope around the Stanford library, Alex mentioned a grant, a Michigan historical society that invited scholars to peruse their collection of nineteenth-century newspapers. “What do I want with Michigan newspapers?” I asked, and Alex said, “A grant looks good on your C.V. Come on, you’ve got to do something.” I couldn’t disagree with him and remain in academia, so I applied, and to my mild surprise was accepted. My C.V. got to call me a Visiting Fellow, Wagner Center for Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, and I spent a month in East Lansing, a rolling terrain of frozen mud that made me think of the First World War. Against all expectation, I found what I was looking for: The Michigan Midnight Cry, a newspaper published by a society of Millerites — or Adventists, as they called themselves — in Detroit. I had heard of the Millerites before, but I’d never thought of them as a subject worth knowing in detail. They were too religious and too marginal. But everything else in the Wagner Center was worse, and so, diffidently at first, then with curiosity and even something like excitement, I read the complete run of The Michigan Midnight Cry.

While East Lansing froze and crackled in one of the coldest Februaries in memory, I learned about an apocalypse long past. The Michigan Midnight Cry was part tract, part newsletter; articles explicating the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation alternated with stories about people in Detroit who needed a few dollars to get through the winter, recipes for “Jubilee Pie” and other such treats, poems, announcements of weddings, meetings, auctions. If it weren’t for the weird phrase if time continues, which was appended at the foot of every published schedule, the Millerites could have been stamp collectors, pony breeders, almost any special-interest group in America with a developed body of knowledge. And yet I found myself getting strangely engrossed in their obscure debates about the fall of the Ottoman Empire — had it happened yet? was it a sign of the end times? — and the return of the Jews to Israel. I shared their enthusiasm as the summer of 1844 brought all-night bouts of singing and prayer, and their anxiety as the final days drew near. When was it too soon to give away everything you owned, and when would it be too late? No one wanted to be homeless in Detroit in October, but no one wanted to be burned up for covetousness either.

The popular press called the Millerites “raving maniacs” whose imagination had run away with them, but as I read The Michigan Midnight Cry another picture emerged: of people who continued to build houses and fences, to buy and sell livestock, to attend concerts and lectures, to read poems, to marry and give birth to children. Some of them spoke out against slavery; they argued for temperance and woman suffrage. They believed in reform, albeit the way you might believe in cleaning your house before you left for a trip. I didn’t understand why these ordinary, good-hearted people had believed the world was about to end. And why then? The first half of the nineteenth century in America was a time of progress and rapid expansion: the number of states in the union doubled and the population grew by a factor of five; canals were dug all across New York and Pennsylvania and even in Ohio and Illinois, where, because of drought, they were useful only half the year. Steamboats plied the Hudson and the Mississippi and crossed the Great Lakes. The railroad was invented, and the industrial printing press, and the telegraph. Why, in such a giddy and optimistic time, had the Millerites dreamed of apocalypse? I thought of San Francisco, of money and the Mission, and I wondered if rapid change made some people want the world to end. I heard my dissertation ringing like a church bell, clear and close at hand.

I came back from Michigan in March and lost myself in research. I needed to know more about technology in early nineteenth-century America, about Michigan and also upstate New York, where William Miller had lived: the region was a hotbed of religious enthusiasm in the 1830s. So my project returned me indirectly to Thebes, to my own history, which increased my sense of its rightness. This was what I was meant to be doing, and I was the one who was meant to be doing it, I thought, and if I didn’t ever put the thought into words, it was always there, a living shape frozen beneath the ice of my unbelief in destiny. Enthusiastically, I spent weeks assembling a delicious absence, a palpably hollow space in the tangle of recorded knowledge, which my dissertation would fill.

When I looked around again, Swan was gone. He wasn’t at Java Man in the morning; he wasn’t asleep in an armchair at the back of the Latin Quarter Bookshop. At night Swan was not to be found on any of the doorsteps where he usually slept. I asked Peter when he had last seen Swan, but Peter couldn’t remember. It must have been a busy time for all of us. I asked Josh, who lived on Twenty-fourth Street, if Swan had migrated to another part of the Mission, but Josh hadn’t seen him either. In fact, he was going to ask me, had I seen Mr. Babylob? The one who stood on the corner of Twenty-fourth and Mission with a sign, WHORES OF BABYLOB, REPENT, FORNICATION IS DEATH. Whether Babylob was a deliberate misspelling or not, no one could say. Had something happened to them both? Josh said he would ask his friend who worked at the needle exchange, and was in touch with a lot of the street people. Weeks passed; I saw Josh but he didn’t mention Swan. When I remembered to ask, he admitted that he had been too busy: this full-time thing, you know, there was more truth in those words, full and time, than he had ever imagined. He was on it now. The rainy season dragged on, cutting the short days even shorter, leaving the sky, in the rainless intervals, a washed-out blue that was the closest thing to winter you could find on the California coast. I wondered if Swan had died, he was older than most street people, and he smoked foul brown cigarettes, and his skin was yellow like an old tooth. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to get pneumonia.

The thought that Swan might be dead would not leave me. It was a hollow feeling, as if I had skipped an important step in a complicated procedure and gone on to the next step, unaware that what I did now no longer mattered because the procedure was doomed to fail. It occurred to me that I could find out one way or the other, that people did not die without leaving a record, if there was one thing I knew from the study of history, it was that people left a record of their death, even when nothing else in their life was recorded. But I didn’t do anything. Then one day I had a fight with Alex about whether or not to buy a car that Peter was trying to get rid of, an ancient Volvo that had once belonged to Norman Mailer, at least that was what Peter said. Mailer had once come to the Bay Area to teach a class at Mills College, this was the story; he bought the Volvo, then he became smitten with one of his students, a nymphet who happened to be the heiress to a canned-pasta empire; and this girl, who, for the purposes of the story, is called Noodle Girl, insisted that he get rid of the Volvo, because it reminded her of her parents, the canned-pasta couple, who were about the same age as Norman Mailer. So Mailer sold the car almost new to Peter, who was in those days a local literary impresario. He, Mailer, bought an MG coupe, and drove to L.A. with Noodle Girl, who left him there, or was left by him, and later became a member of one of the new religions that believed the cosmos was friendly, at least in comparison with the earth. That was the story. And the car was majestic, it had a big, confident body painted the deep blue of the sky in a Northern Renaissance painting, the blue of an illumination in an illuminated manuscript. I had to buy it. Alex said I was an idiot, the story was obviously false, and even tweediness had its limit, which was the cause of our fight, the word tweediness, because I had to point out that I did not own a single tweed garment, or even a pair of flannel pants or a blazer or anything with elbow patches. Alex said it didn’t matter, I was a tweedy person, which cut me to the quick. I thought I dressed like an outlaw, and here my housemate was telling me that I was donnish.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “tweedy is good. This is just a case of taking it too far.”

I bought Norman Mailer’s car that afternoon for five hundred dollars and took it to a mechanic, who told me it would cost another twenty-five hundred to get it to the point where it would pass inspection. Fine, I said. And with the energy I’d got from winning that conflict, because it did seem to me that I’d won, with that rage, I looked up the City Records Office in the phone book and called them to see if they had a death certificate? “In what name?” the clerk asked. And of course I didn’t know. I went back through my file of leaflets. Swan, he called himself, or Saint Swan, or Swami, or Swhandi, or Sewanee, or Swan the Swain, or Mayor Swan. I asked Peter, who said, yes, Swan had told him his name, but it was a long time ago, and he didn’t remember it. David something? He thought it was a Jewish name, which surprised him, because he didn’t think of the Jews as homeless, an irony that he had savored from time to time, over the years.

I should have gone around to all the places where Swan had been and renewed my inquiries; I should have put up a sign, stapled it to the utility poles and hung it in the windows of the hipster shops, to let everyone know that Swan was missing. But I was ashamed to do these things. I didn’t want the neighborhood to know me as the person who was looking for Swan; and if there was some explanation, obvious to everyone but me, for Swan’s disappearance, then I didn’t want to be the asshole who didn’t know what it was. And it was still winter, and the rain still hadn’t stopped, and there was The Michigan Midnight Cry begging to be understood, and perhaps it was a kindness to let Swan alone. If he was not on the street in that ugly weather, maybe it was for the good; if he was unfindable in that dark season, maybe it was because he did not care to be found.

THE DAY OF OUTRAGE

That was what I thought, but I wasn’t the only one who cared about Swan. Josh had reported his disappearance to a friend who worked for a nonprofit housing-rights organization, and they decided to use the disappearance of Swan and Mr. Babylob and other homeless residents of the Mission as an occasion to protest the city’s policy of harassing homeless people and driving them out of gentrifying neighborhoods. They were going to have a rally and a march. The Day of Outrage, his friends called it. Josh asked if it was something I wanted to get involved in and I said yes, even though I was skeptical about the power of any protest to accomplish what I wanted, which was not the modification of city policy, but Swan’s return. More generally, I was skeptical about protests as such, in particular about the ones Josh and his activist friends staged. I’d been to a couple of them right when I moved to San Francisco and they struck me as being almost completely self-enclosed, as though the world they were changing was uniquely that of the people who took part in them. Still, I felt like I owed it to Swan to do something. And in the back of my mind there was, if not the hope that the protest would bring Swan back, at least the superstitious belief that doing something was better than doing nothing at all.

Josh’s friend had printed a stack of posters, and I volunteered to hang them. I mixed up wheat paste in one of Alex’s Tupperware bowls and went out at night, slathering sticky white stuff on the sides of newspaper vending machines, construction hoardings and utility poles, and pressing posters into the paste to let people know the Day of Outrage was coming. My pasting technique was not good and often as not the posters went on crooked, part of their message swallowed by creases or torn off in my clumsy efforts to get them to stick. It didn’t matter, I hoped. I was spreading the word. The strange, or not so strange, thing was that, as I worked, I came more and more to believe that the Day of Outrage would not be in vain. How could people see the posters I had spent hours putting up and not take action? I imagined a crowd of thousands, a march on City Hall. The mayor would speak to us from a window. We have a sane and reasonable policy, he’d begin, and we’d drown him out with our simple, irrefutable chant. Swan! Swan! Aides would be dispatched to find out what it meant. Records would be searched. Swan! Swan! Sooner or later a clerk would find the file of David Somebody, a.k.a. Swan, transferred from the Mission District to who knew where, on such and such a date. Advisers would tell the mayor to leave him where he was. An old man, in poor health … But by then the chant, Swan! would have become perpetual. SWAN would be spray-painted on the columns of City Hall; banners reading SWAN would hang from windows all over the Mission; airplanes would write SWAN over the city in ice crystal letters half a mile high. The only thing to do, the advisers would finally admit, was to send him back. One day without ceremony an unmarked white van would stop outside Java Man and Swan would get out, unbowed, making “V for Victory” signs with his nicotine-stained fingers.

If this sounds delusional, you have to understand, first of all, how badly I wanted Swan back, and second, that I was now not alone. Everyone I knew was doing something to get ready for the Day of Outrage, except of course Victor, who had vanished into MySky. We met at the Blue Study with our notebooks, and Josh gave us assignments; we e-mailed one another frantically, asking where the microphone stand was, who had the poster paint, who was going to choose the route our procession would take once it left the park. Erin’s friend Neil volunteered to make puppets that would represent the people who had vanished, and suddenly puppet-related tasks sprang up. A week before the Day of Outrage I was drafted to drive to Hunter’s Point to buy plaster of paris from a wholesaler. He didn’t want to let me go with less than five hundred pounds; I convinced him to sell me two hundred, and got halfway back to the freeway when I drove over a bump and heard something in the engine go snap. I was staring into the tangle of hoses under the hood of Norman Mailer’s car when two men came up and asked if I needed help. Hunter’s Point was a rough neighborhood and these guys looked rough, but in this case need trumped prejudice and miseducation. I said yes, please, help if you can, and the three of us pushed the burdened car a block and a half to an auto-body shop, where a Mexican mechanic diagnosed the problem as a broken fan belt and sent his friend to get a replacement from another garage. The two of them installed it in my car, asked me for twenty bucks and went back into the shop. I looked around for someone else to pay, but no one wanted my money; even the guys who had helped me push the car were gone. The whole process had taken an hour and a half and no one even wanted to be thanked. I drove back to the freeway, full of courage and hope: it was as if I’d just moved to San Francisco all over again, as if I had stepped over a wall that kept me from experiencing the mercy of the world. I delivered the sacks of plaster to Neil’s house in Bernal Heights, we grunted as we carried them up the driveway to the garage where the puppets were being made, already some of them had giant heads and recognizable if unpainted faces, they looked up at us benevolently from the floor. I rubbed my eyes as though to wipe away sweat, in fact tears, small tears.

The Day of Outrage began as every day in San Francisco did that season, wrapped in a dense white fog that smelled of the ocean. By the time I finished breakfast, though, the air was warm and still. It was spring, but it felt like summer, real summer, as though we’d stolen a day from the world of seasons. I thought it was a good omen, and Alex agreed. We took the bags Josh had told us to pack, with water and chocolate bars and a list of phrases we were supposed to say if we were arrested, a highly improbable contingency. Dolores Park was full of people sunbathing; the tennis courts were full, the soccer field already churned to mud. Two kids were throwing a Frisbee back and forth, leaping in the air, running, catching it between their legs. After all the rain we’d had that winter, the grass shone emerald like a patch of wet Scotland hung out to dry here on the coast. Josh and his friend Todd, the organizer, were in the park already, talking on handheld radios to their distant minions, who, to judge from their voices, were not doing as they should. When Josh ended his conversation, I asked if I could do anything to help. Josh looked at my folded banner and emergency bag with distaste. “Not unless you have a sound system and a truck.” This was at eleven o’clock. The rally began at noon. As the remaining hour passed, the story of what had happened to the truck and the sound system came to light, phrase by angry, garbled phrase. Erin’s bassist Tristan had set off in the wrong direction, toward Berkeley; he got stuck in traffic at the entrance to the Bay Bridge, then the van overheated; it was an old van, it didn’t like to idle. A tow truck was summoned; the van was dragged across the bridge and fixed, provisionally. Now the traffic was on the Berkeley side of the bridge and Tristan was afraid of another breakdown.

Erin and Star arrived with the literature table, and arranged the pamphlets and flyers published by the various organizations that were sponsoring the rally. We sat on the grass and waited for the crowd to arrive, while Josh and Tristan shouted at each other on their radios, and Todd called people who might own microphones and speakers. I lay back and closed my eyes. No speakers had arrived by noon, but on the other hand no spectators had arrived either. The sound system was back on the Bay Bridge, but now there was an accident on the bridge and nothing was moving. Alex and I drank beer and talked about Stanford.

“Did you know that Schönhoff used to be a Jesuit?”

“Sure.”

“Did you know he was defrocked?”

“No.”

“Absolutely. He slept with a seminarian.”

“Is that a defrockable offense?” And so on.

One o’clock, one-thirty. Todd and Josh conferred on the stage. A small crowd had gathered, drawn by the illusion that something was about to happen.

“OK,” Josh announced, “we’re going to go ahead without the sound system.”

“How is anyone going to hear us?” Erin asked. She had agreed to sing, and Tristan would in theory accompany her on the guitar.

Todd took one of the posters and rolled it into a tube. “Hello,” he said into the tube. “Can you hear me?”

Three or four people sitting in front of the stage nodded yes.

“Welcome to the Day of Outrage,” Todd said. “I’m glad you could join us. Now let’s talk about what this is all about.”

No one was listening. This is a fiasco, I thought, and worse, it was just like every other protest I had ever been to. How could I have believed that it would be otherwise? I opened another beer.

“OK,” Todd shouted, “we’re going to have some music now. Sing us something, Erin!”

“No way!” Erin shouted from the literature table.

“You promised!”

“I promised when there was a microphone.”

“Whose fault is it there’s no microphone?” Todd yelled through the rolled-up poster.

“What do you mean, whose fault?”

“Why did your bassist go to fucking Berkeley?”

“I don’t know, Todd. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because he’s apparently switched off his fucking radio!”

Josh and I went to buy more beer, and came back with a fifth of Jameson, which induced a slight wobble in the rotation of the earth, a periodic dip, like cardiac arrhythmia. At some point Todd called to me to talk about Swan. I stood on the stage, overlooking the crowd, which, at this point, consisted of Erin, Star and Star’s knitting friends. The makeshift megaphone was wet with spit, but I didn’t mind, I pressed it to my mouth and spoke about Swan’s plan to bring vegetarianism and the love of animals to San Francisco. I spoke about Saint Francis of Assisi and some aspects of his biography known only to a few enlightened souls, and how important it was to know these stories, the stories that only a saint could tell you. Then I said, “Holy shit, there he is.” There he was, all right, twelve feet tall, colorful and impassive as a god, wobbling down the hill toward me at the head of a line of like-sized deities, coming down the hill in silence. “Motherfucking puppets,” I called into the megaphone. “You’re just a bunch of mother-fucking puppets!”

There would be no procession. We finished the whiskey and used the banners to sit on. The puppets lay on the grass like passed-out revelers, their arms splayed and their faces turned to the sky. Now and then people who had heard about the Day of Outrage showed up, and we yelled at them to sit and drink with us. Some of them did, and as the sun went down our numbers grew, until there were thirty or forty people gathered in front of the empty stage. We had failed utterly to organize a protest, but something else was happening, something remarkable. Strangers were speaking to one another. Alex knelt by Erin, picking blades of grass and tossing them over his shoulder. Star was talking to Neil. I lay on the ground, my ear to the earth. This was good, this was very good. People were joining with one another. Even more than a protest, this was what we needed, for everyone to be joined together by many threads, we needed each person to be entirely surrounded by people, because we had seen what happened when you were at the edge of the crowd, like Swan and Mr. Babylob, you could be plucked from the world at any moment, you could vanish. By this measure the day was a success. We were bound to one another now; we could not disappear. We would remain in this place forever.

The sun went down; the dog people called their dogs homeward. Tristan appeared just after sunset, his hands and face streaked black with motor oil. He looked at our little drunk crowd and howled, Bastards, you bastards, but it was no use, Todd tackled him and forced him to roll through the grass until he was happy. “We’ve at least got to set the fucking thing up,” Tristan said, so we ran to the truck, which was parked illegally between palm islands on Dolores Street, and hauled speakers and cables from the back. Tristan and Todd carried a generator between them, and Erin danced around them, plugging things together while there was still light to see by. The generator roared like a failing car; we had power. Erin sang a song about being so much in love that she wanted to kill us all, then someone hooked up a portable CD player and put on one of Pearl Fabula’s mixes. I pulled Star to her feet and we staggered toward the speakers. You could hardly call what we did then dancing. It was pure autonomous motion. I held on to Star’s hand, because I was afraid if we were separated in that darkness we would never find each other again. If no one held my hand I might become one of the unattached people, one of the people who could be made to die. We staggered back and forth; someone elbowed me in the stomach; I tried to kiss Erin but bit her eyebrow instead. The music got louder, its beats and bleeps building toward something utterly magnificent, a universal binding together of all of us, and as it reached the peak of its intensity blue and white lights came on, flashing, making a real club of the stage. Our hands rose joyously into the air. For a moment it seemed as though we had succeeded in doing that impossible thing, we had made a complete, real, other world, then someone shouted, “Police!” and people were running, falling, getting up and running again. The music stopped. Tristan and Erin and Josh grabbed parts of the sound system, which were, unfortunately, still cabled together. The wires got caught on a tree and they dropped the speakers and ran. I looked for the bag that contained my instructions in case I was arrested, but it was too dark to find an object that size in the disorder of empty bottles and banners, leaflets and posters. Neil was shouting, “Save the puppets! Save the puppets!” so I picked up a puppet, it was massive and difficult to maneuver, and stumbled down the hill, across the soccer field, toward the tennis courts. I was a giant, my shadow enormous in the tennis-court lights. I ran into the street, around the corner, this giant head waving above me like a flag, a totem, a burden. When I had gone far enough and no one was following me, I stopped. Only then did I look up to see whose head I was carrying: Swan’s. Thus the Day of Outrage ended.

SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

Three months later, I dropped out of Stanford. There was no obvious reason why I left: my dissertation topic had been approved; all I had to do was write it. But after the Day of Outrage my heart no longer pointed in that direction. I struggled all summer long with the first chapter of The Great Disappointment: Progress and Apocalypse in a Michigan Millerite Community, and in September I sent a letter to my department chair, informing him that I would not be returning to the program.

“You moron!” Alex cried, when I told him what I’d done. “Go down to school right now and take that letter back.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe in history anymore.” I hadn’t realized that it was true until I said it. But actually I was angry at history, I hated history. It was good for nothing. Could history make Swan come back? Could it change anything about the city where I lived?

“So?” Alex said. “What does that even mean, you don’t believe in history? How is that not a historical statement?”

“I think it’s useless,” I said.

Alex sniffed. “Baby, if you were looking for useful, you should have become a doctor.”

“Well, I don’t want to do it. If I’m going to do something I don’t care about, I want to get paid for it.”

We kept arguing, but Alex didn’t change my mind. Finally he said, “Do what you want, but don’t come crying to me when you’re peddling your ass on Polk Street.”

In another city, or another decade, he might have been right to worry, but this was San Francisco in 1997 and the Internet caught my fall. I mailed my letter to Stanford on a Wednesday, and the next Monday I was temping for Cetacean Solutions, LLC, and laughing at their motto, “We Go Deep.” A few weeks later I let slip that I’d once written a BASIC implementation of Adventure, and my boss, Mac, urged me to get back into programming. I learned Java and C++ easily, and at that point Cetacean hired me and I was issued a key to the Fun Room.

If I had been thinking about it, I would have realized that my facility for programming was proof that the past mattered. In some significant if cryptic way I was picking up where I had left off when I was expelled from Nederland, as if everything I’d done since then was merely a detour or, as Swan might have called it, a long strange trip. But I wasn’t thinking about it; I didn’t want to think about it. I was happy to work long hours at Cetacean, managing other people’s content, about which I knew nothing and cared not at all. On weekends I went dancing with Erin and Star and Josh. We took Ecstasy and promised to love one another forever, then, at a party in Oakland, I met a woman in a white fur coat. “What’s your name?” she asked. I told her I wasn’t sure, I had names for various occasions, names that revealed my essential self to greater or lesser degrees, this was, for me, the problem with Ecstasy, I was filled with love for those around me, but love, in my case, took the form of complex sentences, each of which had to be uttered with great care, because I loved the concepts they articulated almost as much as I loved the people I was saying them to, or maybe just as much, I had to think about it, and so, when I was rolling, I did nothing but talk, talk, talk. The woman in the white fur coat accepted my explanation. “I’m Alice,” she said. It was deliciously simple. By the end of the night, my head was in her lap, and I had told her no fewer than three times that I loved her. Oddly, she seemed to believe me. And more oddly still, after the drugs had worn off, after the sun had come up and it turned out that we had been in a courtyard all night, and not, as I had supposed, a vessel hurtling through interstellar space, I believed it myself. I was happy, although in retrospect it seems to me that I was already becoming a ghost.

REGENZEIT

By the time I finished my story — obviously I didn’t say everything I’ve written here, only the gist of it, and I left Alice out completely — it was after midnight and the tea had grown cold in our cups. Yesim was looking at me with affection and sadness.

“Swan never came back?” she asked.

“No.”

“You should look again,” she said firmly. “You never know, he might turn up.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that Yesim might take the story practically: not as an account of delusion or moral weakness or spiritual collapse, but as a problem that could be solved. But of course she was right, I had barely looked for Swan. It was possible that he was alive somewhere, and that he could be found.

“Where would you look?” I asked.

Yesim smiled. “One thing at a time. First let’s finish with your grandparents’ things, then we’ll find your friend.” She stood up. “Now it’s late.”

For a moment Yesim’s face hovered happily beneath mine. I leaned down to kiss her and she stepped away. “I can’t do that,” she said.

“Because you might lose Mark?”

“Because I might lose everything.” Yesim hesitated. Then she said, “Good night!” and went out to her car, to drive the fifty feet to her house.

It was only a matter of time before she changed her mind, I thought. I didn’t believe sex was really her problem; what was so terrible about sex? I knew people in San Francisco who’d slept with far more people than Yesim had, and they were fine. They were sex-positive, they went to sex clubs, it was no big deal. By day they sat in cubicles like everyone else. If I could just convince her that I wasn’t going to hurt her, that I wanted her to be happy and free, like, as my yoga teacher said, all beings everywhere, if I could only convince Yesim that I loved her, sooner or later she’d fall into my harmless arms.

But I was wrong, possibly in my diagnosis, certainly about what would happen next. Two days after she’d tried it on, Yesim brought back my grandmother’s dress, its seam invisibly fixed, in a dry cleaner’s bag. I asked if she wanted to come in, and she said, “I can’t see you now.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Please, don’t ask any questions,” she said.

“Is it something I did?”

“Just be patient. I’ll tell you when I can. OK?”

“OK,” I said.

The next night her car didn’t come home. Surprise! The good part is over. That’s why they call it a part.

LOST THINGS

I didn’t have the courage to pursue Yesim, but I couldn’t let her go either. I drove to Snowbird, pulled into the parking lot, then turned around and drove away. I dialed her number but hung up before it rang. I stopped by the organic grocery in the morning, and ended up becoming friends with the girl who worked there, Carrie. She’d grown up in the valley; her parents had a farm out past Maplecrest. Her uncle owned the grocery. Yesim didn’t appear. And she kept not appearing, through a week of blue fall days, as the leaves in the valley lit up, and the ones on the mountaintops fell, and lines of smoke rose up from the hillside like strings connecting the earth to the sky.

I sat in my grandparents’ kitchen, looking across at the Regenzeits’ house. Kerem came and went uselessly, but not his sister. Where was she? I imagined Yesim in Mark’s strong former-construction-worker arms. I imagined her with Dr. Y, with Professor X, and at this point I began what I can only describe as an advanced degree in masturbation. Alone in my grandparents’ house, I wrote a thesis in the bowl of the downstairs toilet, and my subject was Yesim. If it was a little theoretical — well, so are many dissertations. Its footnotes said everything there was to say about her feet, and its endnotes got to the bottom of her rear; the curls of her hair tangled in the index, on the title page I put her eyes and her mouth took the place of my name. I submitted my Yesim to the committee on Yesim in partial fulfillment of my need for Yesim; I submitted and submitted.

Then one night she came home and that was even worse. To watch her walk across the kitchen, take pins from her hair and make tea, to watch her pick up the phone and not to hear my phone ring; to watch her speak and hear nothing. Given that I’d never had Yesim, it shouldn’t have been so bad to lose her, but in fact it was worse to lose her that way. I kept wanting to call her, to run across to the Regenzeits’ house and pound on the front door, to throw myself at Yesim’s feet and ask her to take me back, but I was keenly aware that she couldn’t take me back, she had never taken me in the first place, unless you counted the things we did when we were ten years old, or that night in Kerem’s study. I had no standing, as a lawyer might say, to plead before her. I was just a childhood friend with a house full of junk and a collection of unbearably vivid images of what might have been.

Finally, in desperation, I went back to cleaning out the house. I finished my grandparents’ bedroom and started on the attic. I hoped there would be some treasure hidden there — a painting by Thomas Cole, a secret diary kept by one of my ancestors — but finding treasure in your grandparents’ attic turns out to be something that happens only in novels and on TV. What I found were cardboard boxes of sweaters, a trunk with a missing hinge, extra leaves for tables that had long since vanished, mattress frames, box springs, empty dressers and cracked leather shoes. I slept; I woke; I packed; I slept again. I carried skis and tennis rackets down to the garage, and a box of dolls that must have belonged to the Celestes, curiously unlifelike in their stiff smocks, with their big, blinking eyes. When did dolls first have movable eyelids, I wondered, it must have been in the nineteenth century, when realism was in vogue and the simulation of domestic life was the business of novelists and playwrights and even husbands and wives, all of them concerned with getting the details right, from wedding banns to mourning crepe, and what game would have been more in keeping with the Victorian spirit than to make dolls sleep? But what about peeing dolls? Not a nineteenth-century invention, I thought. For realism that extended below the waist you had to wait for Freud. And then also plastic. Sometime after the Second World War, probably, you got peeing dolls, doll diapers, doll messes, Henry Miller, the apogee of scientific psychoanalysis, Nabokov. I put the dolls with the things to sell or give away, guessing that some child might be interested in them, if the fashion in dolls hadn’t moved on to catch a new facet of the human experience: dolls who threw up, mentally ill dolls, dolls who grew old and hung on.

For the first time, I wondered who would receive what we were giving. A family of refugees, washed up on the American shore with nothing, maybe, or else a family whose belongings had been lost in a fire, although in either case, I reflected, looking over the great heap of Rowland junk, it would have to be a family with some unusual hobbies, or one that wasn’t particular about what it owned. I called Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and left them messages describing the situation. I watched game shows on television, then dramas, then the news, which told us that a group of African-Americans in Minneapolis were building a space ark. They showed pictures of the ark; it looked like a big silver egg studded with colored lights, a Fabergé egg that could seat up to a hundred people. The TV reporter asked how it was going to fly, and the spokesperson for the ark project, a light-skinned black woman, said it wasn’t going to fly, it would be picked up. “By whom?” the TV reporter asked, and the spokesperson said, “You will know them by their craft,” a phrase that’s stayed with me ever since. Still no word from Yesim.

I finished the attic and started on the study. The small room, with its single window that faced our other neighbors, the Karmans, was the place where my grandfather’s presence could still be felt the most strongly, and for this reason I had avoided disturbing it. It was as though Oliver continued to exist as long as his clutter occupied the space he had given it. When all the signs of his life were packed away, then he would truly be dead. Now I wanted that moment to come quickly. I threw away catalogs from building-supply companies, letters telling my grandfather that the Republican Party needed his help because the Democrats were up to unspeakable mischief, letters from a foundation that worked to reunite missing children with their parents, the kind of mail that old people get from organizations that prey on their absentmindedness and goodwill, each letter annotated by my grandfather, Can this be true? and Free calendar! I threw away the book of word-search puzzles in which he had marked unfinished puzzles with Post-it notes. All At Sea, Creatures of the Night, Roman Holiday.

By morning the drawers of my grandfather’s desk were empty. The closet was robbed of its wealth of original packaging, hard styrofoam pillows that fit the contours of long-gone machines. The bookshelf had surrendered its helpful volumes, Bargain Your Way to a Better Life, How to Be a Nice Guy … and Still Win, How to Make Time for Everything, to boxes with DONATE written on their sides, and now the bookshelf itself was labeled for donation. Maybe someone would take boxes and bookshelf alike, set them up in another study, and learn from them what they had been unable to teach my grandfather. More likely the books would be pulped. They would dissolve in a slurry of acids, fall fiber from fiber, until not a word of their advice remained, then they would be put together again in a new shape, cradling white, unbroken eggs. The floor lamp was gone, the set of five-pound weights was gone, the boxes of Christmas cards, which contained far more envelopes than cards, suggesting that my grandfather had written several drafts of each card he sent, was gone, although one box had a few cards in it, with pictures of a Japanese fishing boat and a fisherman waiting before a wave that was about to break.

All that remained were the dozens of thick folders related to Rowland v. Snowbird. They contained articles from law reviews and scientific journals, newspaper stories about snow-related accidents, photographs of cars and houses half-buried in snow. I felt a little thrill when I found the original complaint, with Richard Ente, Esq., listed as counsel for the plaintiffs. The facts were more or less as I remembered them from the research I’d done years ago: in October 1966 there was a big snowstorm in the valley. Sixty-two inches of snow fell in a forty-hour period, a white deluge that left Thebes submerged for days. Trees and power lines came down; cars went off the road. There were slips and falls, accidents of all kinds. And this was just after Joe Regenzeit had begun seeding the clouds — he’d even boasted about Snowbird’s “scientifically augmented snow” in an ad. It looked awfully like his cloud seeding had worked, and Oliver, along with a dozen other Thebans, set out to make him pay for it.

Seen close-up, some of Richard Ente’s arguments were far-fetched: could you sue someone for trespass because his snow fell on your land? If a storm knocked down power lines, was that theft of electricity? But there were masses of documents to support these claims. The files held analyses of the wind patterns in the valley, charts showing the seasonal fluctuation of temperature and precipitation in the area, affidavits from people who had seen the clouds change as the cloud-seeding plane flew through them, medical records of people who had slipped and hurt themselves. Then there were the counterassertions, doctors who admitted in deposition that their patients had been off-balance for years, meteorologists who pointed out that winter weather in the mountains was wildly variable. Had Regenzeit really made it snow? Had the snow hurt anyone? Behind or beyond these questions of fact were the questions of law. Did Joe Regenzeit have the right to seed the clouds that passed over Snowbird, and, if so, was he responsible for them when they passed over someone else’s land? Where did Regenzeit’s interest end, where did the public interest begin? Who owned the clouds?

I thought of Victor and MySky, which was making headlines with its weather mill, its promise of renewable energy from medium-altitude wind layers. When Victor told me what MySky did, I’d laughed at him; it wasn’t until I began to read about his company in the papers that I wondered if his engineer friends could really do what he said they could. Now they had weather farms in the Sierras where they were testing their technology, and protesters were gathering at their gates. What a strange world it was, I thought, where these dreams kept coming back. Human beings had been trying to harness the clouds forever, and no one had really managed to do it, but we didn’t stop trying. It was just like with the airplane, thousands of years of total failure didn’t deter us. And maybe MySky would get it right. Would the human race be better off if its weather mill worked? By any reasonable standard the answer was yes, clean low-cost renewable energy would make the world a better place to live, but a perverse part of me resisted this answer. For reasons I couldn’t articulate — maybe I was just jealous of Victor, who used to be a graduate student like me, and was now so rich — I wanted MySky to lose. I wanted humans not to control everything. I felt a wave of unexpected sympathy for my father, who had fought Joe Regenzeit with every legal argument he could think of. Why did he run away, I wondered, not for the first time, and just then, as if in answer to my question, I came to a thin folder labeled Richard Ente, Esq.

I pressed my forehead to the cardboard in the hope that its contents might pass directly into my mind. But no, I had to open the file, to leaf through onionskin invoices for $100, $200, $500. Richard might have been cheaper than other lawyers, but he wasn’t cheap. There were bills from the months before the trial: $400 for an unspecified meeting, $212 for “initiation fees,” $675 for research. Where was Richard going, what was he doing? The last bill was for $3,000, trial prep, but it wasn’t the last document in the folder. That was in an envelope, addressed to my grandfather in a big, spiky hand I’d never seen before. My father’s hand. The letter was postmarked Denver, and it had been mailed in May 1970, about three months before my father died.

Dear Oliver,

You opened the letter. That’s a good start. Now be brave and don’t chuck it until you’ve read everything I have to say. First of all, forget about the lawsuit. You must know by now it couldn’t have gone any other way. Little money loses to big money every time in America, and even with a lot more money you wouldn’t have got what you wanted. The only way to beat the Regenzeits is to kick em in the nuts, I told you that. Now you know. And if you’ve really been thinking, you know the Turks are the ones who will lose in the end. You can twist Mother Nature but She springs back every time and woe to the one who bent her then. If it hasn’t happened yet it will soon, and you’ll be there to say you told them so. OK, now the tough part. Are you ready? Oliver, you may choose to be my enemy, and if you do, God knows you won’t be the first. Plenty of people have hated me for my faults — and believe me, I know what they are, I know them like a high-diver knows his pool — as if they had never in their own lives made a mistake. I don’t know if you can be bigger than that, I don’t even know if I have the right to ask you to be bigger, seeing how small I can be myself. But if you can, Ollie, if you see what I see, that we’re all creatures of more or less the same species dancing around on this planet for only an eyeblink and then forever gone, sans money, sans folks, sans everything, then maybe you’ll be able to do what I’m going to ask you to do now. I’m enclosing a letter for Marie. I want you to pass it on to her — give it to her if she’s at home, or else send it to her wherever she lives. For gods sake don’t read it. I can’t explain all the reasons why it’s important for you to do this, but I’ll tell you that in the last three months I have walked through hell on foot — literally, Ol, you should see my feet, what calluses, what cracks — and if she doesn’t get the letter I will have made the trip for nothing. And I don’t have the strength to walk back home.

I wonder if you’d know me if you saw me now? I’ve gone so far into my head these last few months, I’m as faint as a memory. I haven’t cast out my demon but I’ve got the bastard’s throat between my hands. And I’m squeezing. I’m asking you for help, Oliver, not just for my sake or even for the sake of Marie and her sister, but for your own sake. I know you won’t want to hear this, but you’ve got to see what big plants your daughters are, and how you’ve tried to choke them, to keep them from the light — it’s not just you, of course, but the whole system of socialization that came over in the Puritan ships — we’ve got to disentangle ourselves from it if we’re ever to be happy. Happiness is love. Love is freedom. OK, but enough Richard Ente — izing. I trust you to do the right thing. I can’t tell you how much depends on it.

Peace,

Dick

I wanted badly to know what Richard had written to my mother, but the second letter wasn’t in the envelope. My grandfather must have done as my father asked. Which was big of him, under the circumstances: his lawyer run off, his case lost. I credited Oliver’s gentle heart, but actually I didn’t see how he could have refused Richard. Even I was moved by the letter, and I’d never known Richard Ente. More than ever it felt like a shame that I hadn’t met my father: compared with Oliver, Richard was completely unreserved; compared with my mothers he was scintillatingly honest. He alone among everyone I was related to had an idea of what life was actually about, what it was for. But even as I missed this dead father whom I would never know, I mistrusted myself. Was Richard’s letter one of the ploys Charles had told me about? Was in the last three months I have walked through hell on foot real contrition, or just my father telling Oliver what he wanted to hear?

I read the letter again and again, as if by memorizing it I could learn Richard Ente’s heart. But his heart was not there to be found; all that happened was that my new affection for him was joined, more and more, by doubt. Who was Richard Ente, what had he meant, what had he wanted? The pain and guilt and life I’d felt when I read the letter for the first time gave way to a scholarly distance, as though Richard were becoming, before my eyes, a historical character. Soon, I thought, sadly, I’d be tracking down his references, people have hated me, even the whole system of socialization that came over in the Puritan ships. I called my mothers but no one was home. I phoned Charles at the shop and asked him about the letter. “I never saw it,” he said, “and I have no idea what Richard was thinking, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t surprise me. He liked to keep us guessing, and you know what? We’re still guessing. God damn Richard Ente.”

After a brilliant cold night when the stars seemed to part as I looked at them, as if the planet were moving deeper into space, a fog settled in the valley. The mornings were white and the days ragged and soft. I spent a lot of time watching TV, and trying not to look over at the Regenzeits’ house to see if Yesim was there or not. It must have been around this time that I got an e-mail from Dave, the owner of Cetacean, informing me that my two weeks’ leave, which had by now stretched to four and a half weeks, was never officially approved, and that I was fired. I didn’t care. Honestly, it was hard for me to believe I had worked there at all.

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

Now I am coming to the hard part my story, but I don’t want to tell it, not today. Let’s talk about something else: history, for example. If I were to travel back in time, to check the accuracy of my guesses about the Millerites, one question I’d surely want to settle concerns their ascension robes, the white gowns they supposedly put on in order to go up to Heaven. Did the Millerites really wear them, or not? On the one hand you have a host of eyewitnesses who say yes, the Millerites wore white robes: a New Hampshire seamstress who made robes for her neighbors; a cloth merchant who ran out of white fabric as the final day approached; and so on. On the other hand you have the historians who say the Millerites never wore robes of any kind; they planned to go up to Heaven in whatever they happened to be wearing.

Just about everyone who writes about the Millerites weighs in on the ascension-robe question. You have to wonder, why was it such a big deal? When I was working on my dissertation, I thought about this a fair amount. The conclusion I reached was that the ascension robes, if they were real, were a sign that the Millerites’ fundamentalism — their belief that the world would really end after however many years and days it said in the Bible — was just as petty and materialistic as the world to which it was opposed. If you believed in Jesus, what did it matter if you wore a robe or not? The robes made the Millerites ridiculous in the public imagination, but I couldn’t help thinking that they also united the Millerites to a noble tradition of people whose actions respond, in the end, not to the real world but to some kind of dream. From the so-called pioneers of flight to the explorers who set off in search of a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, or even the timid people who sit down at their desks to write books, how much of what human beings undertake is based, not on a calculation of possibilities, but on the blind belief that if we just act on our desires, the world will somehow make them possible? Everyone believes what they want to believe, everyone sees what they want to see, if they want it badly enough, and all I can say is, the Millerites must have wanted the world to end very badly if they did dress up in white robes, but on the other hand I can understand them, I can understand wanting something badly enough that you are willing to make yourself ridiculous. If there’s anything I can understand now, it’s that.

I don’t think you are reading these pages, Yesim, I don’t see how you could be reading them, but if you are: I’m sorry!

REGENZEIT

One morning in early October I was in the grocery, telling Carrie about the summers I’d spent in Thebes, and I was just coming to the story of Kerem and Shelley and Shelley’s brother’s party when Yesim came in, dressed not in her secret-agent outfit but in a long blue coat that I had never seen before. Her hair was all askew, her blouse wrinkled and untucked.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

Yesim looked surprised by my question. “If you have a minute, I’ll show you.”

In the parking lot she took my hand. “I’ve been up all night,” she said, “so don’t hold me responsible for what I do or say, OK?” She squeezed my fingers. It was as though a Morse message passed through her arm to mine, a secret pulse to let me know we were on again.

Yesim drove us out Route 56, past Snowbird, where mowers were clearing the slopes of the summer’s grass in preparation for the first snowfall. She took the road up which I’d followed her a couple of weeks earlier, and where she had turned left before, this time she took the right fork. The road became a path, the path became a track. Branches scratched the sides of the Outback. Then we were in a clearing. Before us stood a wooden ruin, painted white and green but nearly worn of its colors by weather and neglect. The siding sagged, the windows were blinded by boards, the porch had collapsed and only joists remained, the space between them full of earth and dead leaves, a red-and-yellow carpet that led to the front door. We got out of the car.

“Do you know what this is?” Yesim asked. “It’s

SUMMERLAND

the old hotel, or what’s left of it. I wanted you to see it before it changed.”

“Changed?”

“Can’t you guess?” Yesim said. “We’re going to fix it up. You can’t tell Kerem I told you, or he’ll never forgive either of us.”

She pushed the door open and we looked together into the dim rotten house. Here and there a gap in the boards over the windows let in a slice of gray light, showing us a section of floor, a bit of mantel, a door. Yesim took a flashlight from her pocket and swept the beam over an old parquet floor twisted by damp. “As you can see,” she said, “it’s going to take a lot of fixing.”

The hotel smelled like wet towels gone bad a very long time ago, a breath-stopping mildew smell that had itself decayed almost to nothing. The room we were in had been a lounge, from the look of it: a big fieldstone fireplace yawned across the room at what had been a bar. There was an indistinct area to the right that might have been a restaurant. Yesim said they were going to restore all the original details: the bar, the stage, the fireplace, the leather armchairs, even the deer heads on the walls. They were going to renovate the swimming pool, and reopen the gardens, and maybe put in some cottages in the woods. Oh, yes, and they were going to have music, just like in the old days. “What was the name of the band you played for me?”

“Gil Gideon and the Two-Time Tunesters.”

“We’re going to have music like that. We’re going to advertise on billboards all the way down the Thruway. Summerland, the good old days are back, something like that. My brother wants me to write the ads because I’m a poet.” Yesim laughed. “Do you want to see the upstairs?”

The air on the second floor was closer, harder to breathe. I covered my mouth with my hand. We walked down a long hallway, Yesim opened a door and there was light. We were in a bedroom that faced the upslope of the hill; beyond the window was a big tangle that might once have been Summerland’s famous garden. The room had never given up its old furniture, an iron-framed double bed, a sink, a rocking chair with a collapsed cane seat. A writing table, a chair. On the table, a stack of paper, and beside it a loose sheet that Yesim quickly turned over.

“This is my secret,” she said. “I’m writing again.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“I don’t know if it’s wonderful, but it feels right, so for the time being I’m going to keep doing it.” Yesim looked bemused, as though she’d forgotten it was her birthday, and here were these presents to remind her.

“It looks like you have a lot of pages there,” I said. “Is it poems?”

“Not really.”

“A story?”

“Kind of.”

“Can I read it?”

“Maybe later,” Yesim said. After a while she went on, “It’s because of you that I’m writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, these last few days.”

“Me? Why?”

“Actually,” Yesim said, blushing, “I was thinking about your shirt. The one with the monkey on it? I was really surprised when I saw you in the Kountry Kitchen, wearing that shirt. It was so ugly and so cheerful at the same time. I didn’t think you would ever wear a shirt like that. If you had asked me, when we were kids, what you would turn out like, I would have said you were going to be kind of a nerd. You aren’t offended, are you? I don’t mean it in a bad way. I even think nerds are a little sexy. Anyway, when I saw you wearing that shirt, I thought, we don’t have to become anything. We can choose. Although now that I think about it, the shirt is a little nerdy, isn’t it?”

She looked so happy, it was impossible for me to be offended. “I’ll loan it to you, if you want.”

“I’m not sure it will fit me.”

She sat on the bed and I sat down beside her. If I had known what would happen because of what I did next, all the terrible consequences that would follow, I want to say that I wouldn’t have done it, but actually, when I think about that morning at Summerland, the dusty smell, the sunlight descending yellowly through a crack in the clouds, all I remember is how beautiful Yesim looked, even with dark circles under her eyes, and something in me was saying, now, now, now!

I don’t remember what I said. Something about the cosmological constant — can that be right? And how the expansion of the universe is accelerating, how the stars we see in the sky are the only stars we will ever see, how the stars are retreating from us, in millions of years they’ll be out of sight, and cool, and turn to iron, and the sky will be entirely black, I don’t know, my mind, to change metaphors, was like a forest on fire, and thoughts were leaving it like animals, running away in packs toward a faraway river, but I remember how Yesim looked at me, perplexed, and moved to the far end of the bed. I swung my legs onto the bed and crawled toward her, because it wasn’t fair that I should be such a poor persuader; it wasn’t fair that Richard Ente had done so much harm without passing on to me the power to get what I wanted most in the world.

“No,” Yesim said. “What did I tell you, I can’t do this.”

I kissed the hollow of her collarbone.

“Stop,” she said, but I didn’t stop, and a moment later she encircled my head with her arm, drawing me closer. I worked my fingers through the gap between the buttons of her blouse, and circled her navel with my finger.

“Fuck,” Yesim said.

I took it as an imperative. We sank together; a puff of dust rose from the bed, composed of spores of mold, insect feces, particles of skin left behind by guests who were now in their graves, powdered wallpaper glue, all the dusts that fill a house when it has begun to die. I pulled Yesim’s blouse up and kissed the stiff cup of her bra. “So good,” Yesim said. I sprang her from her hooks and snaps, she slipped my buttons through their slits, our clothes came off, we lay together on the old poisonous mattress, pushing out clouds of dust. The bed’s frame groaned happily, the springs yawned, it was as though the room were waking up, with each thrust a little life came back to the building. Soon hot water would be running in the pipes, maids would do their dusting, bellhops would buff their shoes and set their caps on straight, then come to attention as the grumble of the first car echoed up the road, the fire would be lit, the registry clerk would uncap his pen and prepare himself to write on the first page of his new book, the first new name.

“Yes,” Yesim said, “yes yes yes!”

We lay there, just breathing, then Yesim felt the wet spot on the mattress and cried out, “What did you do?” She jumped up and gathered her clothes in her arms.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but Yesim was already running. I ran after her, barefoot, naked, down the stairs, but she wouldn’t stop; then I heard another voice say, “Yesh?” Kerem and a man who was probably his architect stood in the lobby, and now Yesim was in Kerem’s arms.

“Yesh, what happened?” Kerem asked, then he saw me. His face changed, and a look appeared on it that I had never seen before, but that I understood at once. Fury. I’d seen the black eye he got in Philadelphia; I’d seen him at fifteen, kicking rocks and throwing beer cans, but I never figured out, never bothered to figure out, what he was feeling. Fury. I think he must have had it all along: fury at his parents drove him from Thebes and fury at the world brought him back, fury at the world that had fucked his sister up. Maybe that was the reason for the restoration, the secret project, maybe it was intended to keep Yesim interested, to keep her in Thebes. I was intended to help her too; it was as if Kerem had brought me in to help her, and now look what I’d done. Fury! Kerem lunged at me and I ran. I don’t know how I got past him; I guess my desire to disappear was greater than his desire to catch me. I ran through the grass to Yesim’s car and got in the car and locked the door. Kerem was shouting. He banged on the windshield with his fists. I noticed that I was sitting on something sharp, I reached under my buttock and felt the plastic haft of an automobile key.

“Sorry,” I mouthed to Kerem, and I started the car.

He followed me, still shouting, as I backed up until the road was wide enough to turn around, beating the roof, the side windows, the hatchback, shouting words at me that I couldn’t make out through the solid car. I drove back down the rutted road and after maybe a quarter of a mile the black Explorer appeared in the rearview mirror. I drove faster; the Outback bounced down the hill and skidded onto Route 23. I drove west, away from Thebes, too fast in the middle of the road. My teeth were chattering. Maybe I can go now, I thought. Maybe I can just keep going, take 23 to 88, 88 to 86, 86 to 90, and cross the country that way. I wasn’t wearing any clothes, I didn’t have any money, but maybe that was the only way I would ever leave Thebes. I fumbled on the unfamiliar dashboard for the heat and the radio came on. Gautier del Hum was bringing us the greatest hits of the 1980s and today. I wanted to turn the radio off but I couldn’t find the control again, or the switch for the heat, and it was too much, I had to get my bearings, to figure out how the car worked. I stopped in the middle of the road and I’d just found the button for the radio when there was a sound.

The Explorer ran into the Outback; the Outback gave way before the Explorer. In another century, in another country, it might have been a tragedy, but these cars weren’t built for tragedy. These were family cars; they crumpled where they could; beyond that they stood firm. There was a crunch, a curse, a hiss as the air bag let out its air. Then Kerem was standing beside the Outback, looking in through the window. He asked if I was all right.

“I think so,” I said.

Kerem tugged at the driver’s door but it wouldn’t open. He walked around the wreck and tried the passenger door. “I think we’re going to have to cut you out,” he said. He went to the Explorer for his phone, then came back. “Why did you stop, anyway?”

“I couldn’t find the heat.”

“You what?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” Kerem said, “you’re sorry? You asshole, these aren’t even your cars.”

In a quarter of an hour the tow truck came, its yellow lights flashing. Charles climbed down with his cane and limped over to us. He saw me naked and looked away, embarrassed. “Man,” he said, “this brings back memories,” and it was only then that I realized my father had done much the same thing thirty-one years earlier.

THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD

I spent the day in a hospital in Albany. There was almost certainly nothing wrong with me, a cut on my forehead, some bruising on my chest, but even so, said Dr. Weiss, the attending physician in the emergency room, there might be a tiny hemorrhage, something the machine couldn’t detect, but which, if it went untreated, could give us problems. I think the fact that I was admitted to the hospital wearing nothing but a Mylar blanket had aroused his concern. And sure enough, when Dr. Weiss was gone, a nurse came in and told me that she was going to ask a few questions. What was my name? Where was I? What year was it? Who was the president of the United States? I answered the first three correctly and objected that the fourth wasn’t a good test of mental acuity. Imagine a hermit, I said, who’s been living without television in a hut in the woods, he’s still clear in his mind, but … The nurse made a note in my chart and that afternoon I was visited twice by other nurses who took my temperature and blood pressure and asked me the same questions. Finally I told them who the president was and they had no choice but to let me go.

Charles was waiting for me with some of my clothes. “How would you feel about a beer?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t drink. I might have a concussion.”

“Just one beer.”

He drove us to Maplecrest: a gas station, the cracked plaza of a supermarket that hadn’t been able to stay in business, then my uncle’s garage, dark for the night, a couple of houses decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and skeletons and American flags, a bar that took up the ground floor of a white, two-story house. The Crossroads, it was called, although there wasn’t actually a crossroads there. Possibly it had moved from another location. Charles got us a couple of beers and we found a table at the back of the room.

“Listen,” my uncle said, “there’s something I didn’t tell you the other day. When I was seventeen, eighteen, I was what you’d call a stoner.”

“So?” I said. “It was the sixties, everyone smoked pot.”

“That’s true. But the thing is, when Rich, your father, came to Thebes, he didn’t have a connection. I happened to be fairly well connected in those days, so I hooked him up.”

“You sold my father dope?”

“I’m not proud of it,” my uncle said.

“I’m sure if you hadn’t done it, he would have got his pot from someone else.”

“Very likely,” said my uncle, laughing.

We sat for a while, watching bubbles rise up through the jukebox’s glowing tubes.

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

“I feel responsible for what happened,” Charles said. “I didn’t contribute to your father’s mental stability.”

I thought about this. “How much pot did you sell him?”

“The thing is,” my uncle said, “it wasn’t just pot. My friend Douglas Turpin had a brother who was a Hell’s Angel in Albany, he could get us coke, speed, acid, PCP, and sometimes we sold a little, just between friends. Then Richard Ente comes to town, and he was so cool, I won’t say I didn’t feel the tug of the desire to do mischief. Not to hurt him, just to show him that we were all players in the same game. You know what I mean?”

What Charles did was, he found out that Richard had never dropped acid, and invited him to climb a mountain and watch the full moon rise. “When we were at the top of Espy Peak,” he went on, “I took out my tabs, and Richard said, What’s that? and I said, Acid, it’s part of the ritual. He couldn’t back out. I gave Richard a big dose, probably bigger than I should have given him, and he and Doug and I all sat there waiting for the moon to rise. Then it came on. I was, like, Richard, tell us about the moon! But Richard had turned very, very white, and whatever he knew then, he wasn’t telling. I guess he experienced some heavy things, like, afterward he told me he had died about halfway through the trip. He said death was gentle, like potting a plant in a bigger pot, you moved the consciousness into the earth, where it had room to grow, and if you left it long enough, you’d find you had a planet-sized mind. Fucking Richard Ente! I thought I was showing him, and there he was, showing me.

“Then Richard went away for a few months. When he came back that summer, he was, like, Charles, my man, I’m counting on you, you’ve got to fix me up with that good stuff that you were kind enough to procure once, in what seems to have been another life. Richard was always strange, but now he was really strange. He talked a lot about balance, about how evil was necessary in order to make good. Even the greatest evil, World War Two, and everything that happened to the Jews, was necessary. We paid in blood, Rich said, and now we will collect in light. I ought to have said something to Oliver, but how could I tell him that I’d given his attorney LSD?

“Meanwhile, Richard made me come with him to meet these old mountain freaks who lived on state land. They baked their own bread, and we brought some back to my folks. Hoc est enim corpus meum, Rich told them, holding out this little crusty loaf. I thought that was pretty funny. The truth is, I was in awe of him! The more drugs we took, the more it seemed like we were walking down a path together, a spiral path that led right to the center of a garden. The garden was all of human thought, and when we climbed the hill in the center of it, we would understand everything anyone had ever said or done.

“Also,” my uncle continued after a moment, “there was a social benefit to be reaped from supplying Rich with drugs. For a while, I was the second-coolest person in Thebes. You should have seen, I had this black leather cowboy hat with a green feather in it, like Robin Hood had stuck in his hat, or hood, whatever. I’m only telling you so you understand, I wasn’t trying to harm Richard in any way. I only wanted to be someone different, not just a Thebes kid anymore; and I was, I was different. I drove Richard down to Albany to hear Janis Joplin at the Civic Center, we got good tickets from Doug Turpin’s brother, in the front row, and a drop of water landed on my cheek, I thought from nowhere, and Richard said, Holy shit, you know what that is? That’s Janis Joplin’s sweat, don’t touch it, that’s some precious sweat you’ve got there, mister. I wiped it off. It’s sweat, I said. Don’t sweat it. Like it was nothing to me then.”

My uncle stopped talking, and I didn’t know what to say either. I didn’t understand how Charles could have sat by and watched as Richard Ente lost his mind, and at the same time I appreciated how completely he must have been under Richard’s spell. What a number Richard had done on him, I thought. What a number he’d done on all of us. Finally I asked, “What did he promise you?”

“What?”

“You said he promised everyone something. What did he promise you?”

“You really want to know? You and me, he said, you and me, Charles, we’re kindred spirits. We both want to know the truth of things. I want you to go to college and read everything. You have a first-rate intelligence; get it in order. Because one day, you and I are going to meet again. We’re going to talk this life business through, and we’re going to blow it open. Richard suggested that I move to California. San Francisco or Big Sur, some place by the ocean. I’ll find you there, he said. I’ll always know where to find you.” My uncle coughed. There was a deep knocking in his chest, like a vending machine delivering a can of soda.

I went to the bar and ordered us two more beers. I put a dollar in the jukebox, because I thought we needed music to take us away from ourselves. Soon Robert Plant was singing, Good times, bad times, you know I’ve had my share, which fit the moment, even though I hadn’t chosen it for that reason, I didn’t know Led Zeppelin at all, I had chosen these songs because they were the only recognizable noncountry tunes on the jukebox, with the exception of a Best of Frank Sinatra album that I knew we needed to avoid. Charles’s big gray head rose and fell to the music. In the orange light of the jukebox he looked at once older and younger: younger, because I could see how he had looked when he was twenty. His hair was restored to shoulder-length luxury; his mustache grew black and sleek; in his eyes the certainty that he was at the center of the room, wherever he happened to be sitting, that he, Charles Rowland, was an event, a sensation, shone like a stage light. Older because I knew how many years had passed since that moment, and because I could see how badly those years had used him. He had been fixed too many times already, and when the next thing broke, whatever it was, his hip, his lungs, he would be beyond repair. Richard might have broken him first, or it might have been Oliver, who had ruined even his girls. With his only son he must have been a terror. Always tinkering with the last male Rowland in history, always making improvements. Now look. Charles doesn’t see that I’m looking at him. His thick gray fingers drum on the table and his lips move to the song. Good times, bad times. His eyes are lost in a past he will not share with me. Maybe he’s back in Vietnam. Maybe he has gone to California at last. I bring the beers back to our table and he grins at me.

“Fucking music,” he says.

He salutes me with his mug and I salute him back. Charles sets the mug down and belches. End of story. Or not quite the end. When he’s finished with his beer, Charles looks up at me with a sly, almost evil happiness that makes him look like the uncle I remember from childhood. “You know what we ought to do right now?” he says. “We ought to go see some girls.”

This is going to be a mistake, I thought, as I got into Charles’s truck. We drove north on Route 296, away from Maplecrest. Charles had the radio on, and we listened to Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House,” and Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” a strange combination, as though, as these songs grow older, all their actual, musical qualities are forgotten and the only thing that anyone remembers about them is that they’re from the past.

“You like this stuff?” I asked.

“Not really,” Charles said, “but there’s no radio for men like me.”

He stopped the truck in an unpaved parking lot outside a concrete pillbox with a yellow sign atop it that read SPHINX CLUB.

“I used to go to a place like this in San Francisco,” I said.

“No shit?” Charles said. “I bet that was sweet.”

It wasn’t. In the gloomy winter of 1997, I’d gone a few times to a club where you got to sit in a dark cubicle and look at naked women through an almost soundproof sheet of glass. I went in the afternoon, mostly, though the word mostly makes it sound like more of a habit than it was. At first I was charmed by the collegial atmosphere that existed on the other side of the window; the women were all in one big, bright room and as they gyrated they talked to one another. It was impossible to eavesdrop on them through the glass, but it looked like they were having pleasant conversations. As I watched them dance I found myself wondering what they were talking about. I imagined that they were acquaintances who used their time together to catch up on one another’s lives, the way women in other casual settings might do the same thing. Johnny’s fine, I imagined one of them saying to another as she twirled lazily around the silver pole in the middle of the room, he’s going out for the soccer team, and he’s decided this year, no more Spanish. — Is that so? the woman who was leaning against the window right over my head replied. Marcia didn’t take Spanish either after the seventh grade. I wonder what it is, do they have a bad teacher? — They think it isn’t cool, said the pole girl. Oops! Looks like you dropped something! — Thanks! said the other woman, and she got down on all fours to look for it. I found this fantasy strangely erotic. I wanted to be idle with the women in the big bright room, where sex was as simple and harmless as a conversation in a supermarket.

I stopped going to the club when I found out, by looking in the mirror at the back of their room, that the women could see me almost as well as I could see them. They knew my face; they might remember me from previous visits; they might, and this was the clincher, they might make me a topic of conversation. The guy in booth three is a serious masturbator, I imagined the pole girl saying to her friend. You can tell by the way he holds his dick. Her friend looked down at me. He’s not touching himself! — Make him start, said the pole girl. Her friend made a face at me as though we were having sex. I see what you mean, she called over her shoulder. What is it, something in the wrist? — It’s his concentration, said the pole girl. Do you see how he’s frowning? — Oh, my god, you’re right, said her friend. That’s so intense! Hey, have you ever been to the Zen Center?

I sat in the darkness, holding my penis as though to protect it from the cold, and I thought I saw the women look at me, and there was no companionship in their eyes, nor any compassion. That was unpleasant, but it was clear as soon as we stepped inside the Sphinx Club that this was a much worse place. The loudspeakers played Nirvana for a skinny girl on a stage that stuck into the room like a wooden tongue. The girl looked too young to be there, and really was too thin; her torso rested on her hips like a puzzle piece that didn’t fit the piece below. There was a red spotlight on her, but even so you could see the blue tracery of her veins.

Charles was saying something, but the music echoed so loudly off the concrete walls that I couldn’t understand him. He motioned for me to stoop so he could shout in my ear. “You know what I call this place? The Kountry Kunt. With two Ks, like the Kountry Kitchen and the …”

“I get it,” I shouted.

We sat next to an old Latino in a blue-checked shirt and a younger man who could have been his son. As we watched, the girl took off her top, exposing small white breasts which she took by the nipples and tugged in one direction then another, as if to show off their mobility. She looked like a salesclerk showing us how to use a new household object. The old man seated next to us put a five-dollar bill on the stage and the girl knelt and did the breast demonstration again. Up close, she looked older, twenty-five or even thirty, in the red light it was difficult to tell. The song ended and the woman paused, then the Guess Who’s “American Woman” came on, and she stood up, turned her back to us and dropped her underwear. Next to me, Charles was rocking back and forth to the beat of the song.

“You like this?” I shouted in his ear.

“It’s better in the wintertime,” he shouted back. “This is the off season.”

His breath steamed and I realized that it was cold in the Sphinx Club, not as cold as it was outside but much colder than you’d expect a man-made structure to be at the end of the twentieth century. I didn’t like to think how it felt to the woman onstage, although maybe she was used to it. Or maybe the Sphinx Club was having trouble getting heating oil, maybe their tanker was delayed because of the hurricane also.

“Wait till you see Barb, though,” Charles said. “She comes on later.”

The woman spun around a metal pole that pierced the tongue stage at its widest point. She climbed the pole, embraced it with her legs and let her torso fall backward so her hair brushed the floor. I shivered. How could anyone want this, I wondered, but I couldn’t look away. I was ashamed of what I’d done at Summerland. How could I have forgotten everything Yesim had told me? Why hadn’t I been able to stop myself? The woman doubled over and looked at us from between her legs. Yes, she seemed to say, that’s the riddle. — Do you know the answer? I asked. Do I know, she said, do I know? I’m the country cunt, I know everything. — OK, I said, what is it? — Guess, said the country cunt. Love? I said. Love, she repeated, don’t make me laugh. You want love, take a look at this. She reached back and grabbed her goosefleshed thighs and pulled the lips of her vulva apart for the benefit of the man beside us, whose hand lay paralyzed on top of the five-dollar bill he’d set on the stage. You feel that? the country cunt said. Brr. — Give me a hint, I said. It starts with the letter h, said the country cunt. Hope? I said. Not even close, said the country cunt. Guess again. But I didn’t want to play her game anymore.

“I don’t feel well,” I shouted at Charles.

“You want to leave now?” Charles asked, surprised. “But we only just got here.”

“Yes, now.”

I left the Sphinx Club. A moment later Charles came out and we stood beside his truck.

“It’s too bad,” he said, “I would have liked for you to meet Barb.”

Just then a blue Toyota raced into the parking lot and stopped, and a chubby black woman climbed out, wearing black leggings and a fur-collared bomber jacket.

“And here she is,” Charles said. “Barb, hey! Come over here and meet my nephew.”

Barb shook my hand. “He’s a lot bigger than you.”

“Aah,” said Charles, “I just shrunk.”

Barb asked if we were on our way in, and Charles said no, in fact he was taking me home. “He was in a car accident this morning.”

“Well, then,” Barb said, “you get him home, all right? You got to take care of him.” She jogged around to the back of the Sphinx Club and vanished.

“She’s a nice girl,” Charles said as we climbed into his truck. “I don’t know where she comes from, but I told her I’d take care of her, if she wanted. You know what she said? She told me she was waiting for a rich man to come along. A rich man! God bless her, but I don’t think she’s going to meet one in that place.”

“It doesn’t look promising.”

“On the other hand, maybe I’ll get rich,” my uncle said.

It occurred to me that you could never know other people, and that no matter how much you learned about them, they would always have another side that was hidden from your view, a dark bulk that made them complete but that you would never understand. By then we were back in Thebes.

“Where’s your car?” Charles asked.

“At the grocery store, but I don’t think I can drive. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“You forget that we have a tow truck.”

“No,” I said, but it was too late, he was already pulling into the parking lot. He climbed down and hooked tow chains to the front fender of Norman Mailer’s car, which was strangely unscathed by everything that had happened. With a grinding sound, the car rose to its rear wheels, like a begging animal. We drove back to Thebes with it rolling behind us, and when we got to my grandparents’ house Charles backed the truck deftly into the driveway and lowered Norman Mailer’s car to the ground. Then: “Hey,” I said, pointing. The lights in the kitchen and one of the upstairs bedrooms were on.

“Uh-oh,” said Charles.

I knew without being told that Kerem was inside, waiting for me. Or else he was vandalizing the house, ruining it, as I had — so I thought — ruined his sister. As if to confirm my fears, Charles opened the glove compartment and took out a.45 automatic. Holding it with its muzzle pointed at the sky, he slipped from the cab of the tow truck and motioned for me to wait. I sat helplessly in the passenger seat, sick with guilt and fear, imagining my uncle surprising Kerem in the living room. Kerem had a short temper; my uncle hated the Regenzeits. I was sure one of them was about to kill the other, or that they would both be killed, and that it was going to be my fault, and when, a moment later, a woman screamed, I thought, Yesim! and came running out of the truck to see what terrible thing had happened.

Charles stood on the porch, the pistol dangling at the end of his limp arm. He turned to me, his face pale, and grinned irritably. “It’s your mothers,” he said.

LOW-FLYING STARS

When I left Stanford, with only the most confused of explanations, four years into my doctorate, the Celestes said they loved me as much as ever, and wanted me to be happy as much as they always had, but they became noticeably remote, as though my decision had revealed something about me that they did not understand and could not embrace. We talked every week, but their questions about my job at Cetacean were pro forma; the days of Celeste’s puzzled interest in computer programming were long gone. I tried to understand their disapproval. They wanted me to be poor but noble, like them, I thought. They didn’t like the idea that I was making money in the business world or, worse, that I might, by some ordinary standard, be more successful than they were. My Christmastime visits to New York became strained, then stopped completely.

But when I saw the Celestes sitting side by side on my grandparents’ sofa, their lower bodies covered by an afghan, their faces still animated by the shock of nearly being shot by their own brother, I realized that this had all been illusion. My mothers weren’t poor. Marie wore a deep-gray cashmere turtleneck set off with a wide gold necklace; austere Celeste wore a blue denim shirt and fleece vest specked with white paint. Four brand-new hiking boots stood in a line by the kitchen door. My mothers must have bought them for this trip, as though they were going into the wilderness, and not back to their childhood home.

“We took a cab from the train station,” Marie was saying. “We thought you’d gone out to dinner, so we let ourselves in. I didn’t know Thebes was so dangerous!”

“We thought you were burglars,” I said.

Celeste looked at me sternly and asked, “What happened to your head?”

“Car accident,” I said. “I got rear-ended.”

Charles said nothing.

“Oh, dear,” said Marie. “Were you wearing your seat belt?”

“Yes. I’m fine. It was a low-speed collision.”

My mothers felt bad about having sent me off to Thebes to pack up the house on my own. For several weeks they’d wanted to come up, but New York was so busy in the early fall, they’d had to wait for the Columbus Day weekend. They’d called me to say they were coming, but got no answer. “We thought you might be camping,” Celeste said, a little maliciously.

“We were just having a beer,” I said.

“Before the accident, or after?” Celeste asked.

“After.”

“Just a nightcap,” my uncle said, as if this were the normal course of things: accident, drink.

“Well, we’re glad you didn’t shoot us,” Marie said.

Sure, now, that they would be staying, Celeste carried their bags upstairs. Marie made tea. Changing the subject, she told us she’d been promoted. Now she was the style editor at S. “It’s an almost meaningless distinction,” she said, “but I do get to travel. Milan in October, Paris in January. Celeste is jealous.”

“She’s not coming with you?” I couldn’t imagine one of them going anywhere without the other.

“She has a show. You should ask her about it, she’s been making the most incredible …”Then her phone rang. “Hello? Just a sec.” Marie went into the parlor.

“Thanks,” I said to Charles.

“Thanks for what?” asked Celeste, coming downstairs again. She poured herself a mug of tea, and when neither of us answered her question, she went on, her voice expressing surprise and possibly disapproval, “How nice of you to leave our room the way it was.”

My mothers stayed for two days. It was the first time since I was in high school that we’d spent so many hours together, and I found them different than I remembered: gentler, less insistent on their own apartness.

“It’s too bad you didn’t come to the funeral,” Celeste said, on Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in the parlor while Marie circled the house, her telephone pressed to her ear. “You would have heard some stories about your grandfather. Did you know, he went to visit Gabby Thule when she was in the hospital, and he brought her wildflowers? He was a generous spirit, that was the phrase one of his friends used.”

I didn’t point out that generuz de son esprit meant something different. “It sounds like you miss him.”

“Miss him?” Celeste said. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like he’s still here, and sometimes it’s like he was never here at all. Although I had a dream about him the other night. He had sent me a pair of wool socks, and I called to say thank you. Wool socks!” she repeated, smiling. “It’s very strange.”

Celeste fell silent. I asked her about her show, and she said it wasn’t her show, it was a group show, organized by an arts council in Lower Manhattan. “You know who had a big show, though? Guy Anstine.”

“The white box guy?”

“That’s him. Only now he’s tied his boxes together with string, and people are saying they represent some kind of network, a hermetic system of historical reference, what bullshit. Of course, Guy is a man.” Celeste tapped her finger on her knee. Cautiously, as though she didn’t know how her words would be received, she began to indict the system that elevated guys like Guy to the heavens while she was left somewhere in between, not obscure but not brilliant, ascending with infinite slowness. As she spoke I understood that Celeste didn’t care whether I was an artist or an intellectual or a computer programmer: all she wanted from me was to know that I wasn’t part of the system she was constantly fighting against, the one that wanted her to be unfamous, unknown. If Celeste had seemed to withdraw from me, it was because she worried that I wouldn’t care so much about her.

That evening at dinner I mentioned that Yesim and Kerem were back in Thebes. I didn’t say anything about having seen them, but Marie saw through my feigned casualness. “What a coincidence,” she said, “that you should all come back here at the same time! It must be nice for you not to be alone.”

“Didn’t you used to like the Regenzeit girl?” Celeste asked.

I had no idea that she’d known. “Sure,” I said. “I liked both of them.”

“What’s she like now?” asked Celeste.

“Older,” I said, and the conversation went tactfully on to other subjects.

The next morning Marie went for a run and I had coffee with Celeste. We talked about New York and San Francisco, then suddenly Celeste turned to me and with a sweet, sad smile, said, “I remember the first time I fell in love. It was with a Thebes boy, Vaughan Oton, Mo’s son. I don’t think you ever knew him. He was your uncle’s age, and very good-looking. He and Charles used to ride their bicycles all over town. Vaughan! Vaughan! I’d chase after them, but they never stopped. So one day I waited right outside the house, here, and when I saw them coming up the hill, I lay down in the middle of the street. Like I was one of the perils of Pauline. Help me! I might even have shouted. Help me!”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Vaughan ran me over,” Celeste said. “I’d like to think that he didn’t see me, but I’m not sure. I was in the middle of the road.”

“Were you hurt?”

“Not physically. I did become more cautious, though.”

This was the first time Celeste ever voluntarily spoke to me about her life in Thebes. At first I didn’t understand why she had told me about Vaughan, then I realized she had somehow intuited the connection between my mentioning Yesim and the cut on my forehead. The story was her response. A lesson, maybe. Be careful who you fall in love with. I felt that Celeste and I were in rare sympathy. It was like we were really what we seemed to be, more and more, as we got older, not mother and son, not aunt and nephew, but people of the same generation. Two old friends talking in the kitchen on a gray Sunday morning. “Why did Marie fall in love with my father?” I asked.

Celeste hesitated. “Freedom is very attractive,” she said at last. “To us, as girls in Thebes, in the sixties, Richard was freedom. He was the first person who told us it was all right to do what we wanted.”

I couldn’t help noting that she’d said us. “Were you in love with him, too?”

Celeste made a face. “I never trusted Richard.”

“Why not?”

“It’s hard to put into words. It wasn’t how he dressed or what he said, or even what he did. But there was always this feeling of there being something else that we should have known about but didn’t. As if he had cancer, or a family somewhere.”

“Did you find out what it was?”

“I’m not sure there was anything to find out, really. It was just my feeling about him.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“You may not believe it,” Celeste said, “but I was too shy to interrogate grown-ups back then. Why all these questions?”

Impulsively, I got my father’s letter from the pile of things to keep. Celeste read it and put it down. “I always thought there must have been something like this,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“In Oliver’s files.”

“How sad,” Celeste said. “None of us could bring ourselves to throw his letters away.”

We went up to her old bedroom. Celeste took Being and Nothingness off the shelf, opened it to the last page, and removed the letter that had been folded there for thirty years. “Kind of a morbid hiding place, don’t you think?” she said.

“I had a strange sense of humor when I was seventeen.” She glanced at the letter, then passed it to me. “You know, when I called you, to ask if you wanted to come here, I think I was hoping you’d find this.”

“I would never have found it. This room freaks me out.”

“Yes,” Celeste said, “it is a little weird.”

THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD

Happenstance Institute

Denver, Colo.

May — June, 1970

My star,

beyond dearness. You must be wondering why I ran away. I have been wondering the same thing myself. Me, wretched Dick, lame Duck (that’s what Ente means auf Deutsch—some crazy Jew chose it for the family a couple of centuries ago, a man who loved ducks, I guess), not a day passes that I don’t ask myself that question. For a long time I couldn’t answer. Just a voice in my head shouting, Go. Lately my ideas have been getting clearer, maybe on account of the mountain air. Also, I have fallen in with some fellows here who have an institute. They’ve latched on to the old Indian idea that we choose a life because there’s something we want to figure out. Each of our lives, and we have many, is like a book you pick up because there’s something in it you want to learn. I did some sessions with them early on and they told me what my problem is. It’s pride. I want to take all the world’s sorrow on myself. I look back at my life and everything fits into that pattern. Top of my class at Bleak, but a lousy law school. Top of my law school class, but a lousy job. And even that was too good for me; I had to quit S & M (I mean Silberman & Mischeaux), and do two-bit private law and live among bums. I had to find the greatest love I’ll ever know in my life, the only real love I’ve ever known, and run away from it. I look for the darkest spot in the woods and I run right in, hoping to make it less dark. That’s pride. I’m ready to let it go, and right now. Not in the next life, when I’ll probably be a rat or an ant given how I’ve screwed this one up. Getting to this knowledge has been hell, and a long trip, too. You wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve been in the last four months, the dark spots I got into before I saw which way the light was. I slept in the woods with the Indians back of Jewett and got them so drunk, they agreed to do one of their most powerful curses for me. Together we blasted the whole USA, this sick land, and we begged the sky to take revenge on the bastards who shoot their chemicals into it, beginning with Joe Regenzeit and then all the way out from him. We stuck knives in our arms and bled for it to happen. Then I was on the South Side of Chicago, sleeping at the Y, talking to a disc jockey named A-10, who plays outer-space music from 2 to 4 a.m. because he wants the aliens to feel at home. I told him I was from Mars and he believed me. Apparently a lot of Martians go to Chicago, and all over the Midwest. He was going to take me to a nightclub for Martians but I got pneumonia and checked myself into the hospital and when I got out I left Chicago and drove all night to Santa Fe, where the air is pretty good. Spent some time there with a rabbi named Yoel Hernandez who tells me that half the population of New Mexico are Jews only they don’t know it. I was looking for a way back to the God of my fathers, then I saw it was all wrong, you don’t go backward to find God. God is in front of you if It is anywhere. So I went to Denver, met the institute folks, and here I am. I’m up at 5 a.m. every day to stare at my bellybutton; after three weeks I’ve come to think there might be something in it. I’ve given up pot and everything, even coffee; now I drink tea made from sage twigs and eat rice we get surplus from the US government, with weevils in it. I don’t eat the weevils. With the help of the good people here, I’m moving out of the darkness. I’m unjewing, laying down the ancestral guilt — I could write a book just about that. I sleep four, five hours a night. I don’t talk to my mother in my head. I teach english composition in a school that’s mostly Pueblo kids with bare feet and fantastic hippie hair. If they let me, I’m going to organize a debate team. I’m telling you this so that you’ll know it’s real, what I’m telling you. I hope you can see that. You always saw through me, you see into people as clearly as any swami, you have the magic eyes of serious purpose. I hope you can see me writing this in my little room, outside nothing but bushes and some uncollected litter and the big big night. I won’t promise you anything because promises are for liars, but if you come out here, I know you can trust me not to run. I love you with the real love. Nothing that happens will change that. But hope with me that it isn’t too late to make the wrong things right; hope with me that we can all still be fixed. I ran from you and it was the worst mistake of my life. But you can fix it, if only you’ll f

and then a square cut from the corner of the page where Richard Ente’s last words would have been. Ollow me.

“Marie gave it to me,” Celeste said. “After Richard died, she didn’t want to keep it. I doubt she even knows it’s here.”

I’d like to say that when I read my father’s last letter everything became clear, and that I knew for certain who Richard Ente had been, but actually what I thought was, Holy shit, he sounds just like Swan! And for a moment, just for a moment, I allowed myself to imagine something so sweet I could barely hold it in my mind, like an atom of an element not meant to exist in this world. What if Richard had lived? What if he hadn’t died in Denver, but had merely stolen away, in the darkness, on foot, and made for the narrow end of America’s funnel? What if after untold adventures he had settled in San Francisco and what if he found there the true visionary powers he had been looking for. What if he had become Swan. What if I had known him. U think? said the Swan in my head. U really think? Then the vision, or whatever it was, fell apart, and I began to think about the letter. “How come she didn’t go?” I asked.

“She couldn’t,” Celeste said. “You weren’t there, you don’t understand. Richard turned her inside out. He was such a fucking liar! He made us all live in a world of lies. But you know, when he left, the rest of us came out of it, and Marie, Marie didn’t. She, you know, she was pregnant, and we knew that, and she was certain that Richard would come back. Then he wrote her that letter, and your grandfather gave it to her, which was not conscionable. Because she wanted to go. Marie wanted to live with Richard Ente in the world of lies! I was the one who persuaded her to go to New York instead. Can you imagine what would have happened if she’d gone to Colorado? Can you imagine what her life would have been like? Living out there, in dirt …”

“Hello?” Marie called. “Where are you people?”

“We’ll be down in just a minute, Marie.” A door closed and we heard water running in the sink. “In the end, I made her choose,” Celeste said. “Richard or me. If you stay, I said, I’ll stay with you always. If you go, you’re on your own.”

Celeste looked at me uncertainly. She wanted me to tell her she had made the right decision, but I wouldn’t say it. Celeste had kept my mother from going to Richard. And then, heartbroken, presumably, Richard had killed himself. I couldn’t forgive Celeste for that, even if, at the same time, I knew that the person I really could never forgive was Richard Ente, who had killed himself and left us all to think about him endlessly. I was angry, and my anger focused itself on the hole in the page. How could Celeste have cut up Richard’s letter, as if it were just material? It didn’t occur to me until much later that the collage might have been more than a simple act of destruction, that for Celeste cutting might have been a way of coping.

“You killed him,” I said.

“No. You don’t understand. You don’t …”

“What are you two doing up there?” Marie called up the stairs.

“Coming, Marie!” Celeste shouted. “We’re coming.”

LOW-FLYING STARS

Weeks later, when I’d left Thebes and gone to stay with a friend in New York, Marie sent me a letter. It was three typed pages long, and I guessed that it had been through several drafts. She expressed her sorrow at what had happened to Richard Ente, and her guilt: if only she’d gone out to Colorado, Richard’s life, and hers, and mine, and everyone’s, might have turned out differently. But at the same time she felt that she had made the only choice she was capable of making. And although Richard’s death was an irreparable tragedy, she believed that she’d made the right choice, and that the consequences, for her, and Celeste, and me, were mostly good ones. You have two loving parents, she wrote, and you had a stable environment as a child. But finally, she wrote, we can never know what would have happened if I had made the other decision. Our lives are what they are, and I hope you can forgive me for being young, and confused, and scared of the unknown. She loved me, and one decision she would never regret was the decision to have a child.

I cut the letter into hundreds of pieces, which I put in a paper bag. I planned to make a collage out of them and send it back to Marie by way of an answer. But unlike Celeste I wasn’t really a maker of collages, and when I moved out of my friend’s house I left the paper bag behind. I asked my friend about it months later, and he said he must have thrown it away.

THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD

Was my father a lover or a liar? Was he sane or mad? I’ve asked those questions a lot in the last several months, but I still have no answer. My father is dead. What I have are stories. The real Richard Ente is a continent on the far side of an ocean I cannot cross. He is undiscoverable, and maybe he always was.

LOW-FLYING STARS

On Monday morning I drove my mothers to the train station in Hudson. Celeste went to get tickets, and Marie took my hand. “I feel like there’s so much we have to talk about,” she said, but then Celeste came back with the tickets. My mothers boarded the train, and I saw them walking down the aisle, looking for seats. I thought of something that had happened a long time ago, when Marie started work at S. A host of names had joined us at the dinner table: Marcia the intern, Frank the managing editor, Nancy, Marie’s boss, the despot of Quick Styles and Personal Health, Mitch in the mail room. As Marie became familiar with these people, they acquired attributes that were as immutable as the epithets in Homer. Sing, Muse, of Marcia of the striped stockings, who was into Japanese men; and of Frank, whose lover was sick, very sick, Frank, whose lover was dying, Frank, who lost his lover to a long illness; sing of AIDS, or don’t sing, Marie didn’t, and I didn’t figure out what she meant by a long illness until later, much as it didn’t occur to me until I was an adult, looking at the Pacific Ocean on an overcast afternoon, what Homer had meant by the wine-dark sea. Sing of Nancy, that bitch, and sing of Mitch, a nice guy. Later, when Marie had been at the magazine for about a year, one name started to appear with more frequency than the others. Jean-Luc, the photographer, whose attribute was that Marie couldn’t see what all those women saw in him, was working with her on a story about dietary fiber. They went to the supermarket together and shopped for cereal, wasn’t it ridiculous? Jean-Luc was at the launch party for a line of clothing made from actual rags, wasn’t it funny? Marie spent the whole evening talking to Jean-Luc. He wasn’t so bad, she said, and that became his new epithet. Jean-Luc, who, it was true, had dated a lot of women, but was a good storyteller. Jean-Luc, who had been a photojournalist, and had a scar where a bullet had passed through his upper arm on its way from one part of Cambodia to another. Wily Jean-Luc, he had made himself a main character, and from that point on the story went in a new direction.

“I don’t like where this is going,” Celeste said. “It sounds to me like he’s just using you.”

“For what?”

“Don’t be naïve.”

“Have you considered the possibility that I’m using him?”

Celeste snorted. “Don’t let the women’s-magazine rhetoric go to your head, Marie.”

“It’s not rhetoric.”

“Please. The only thing worse than telling lies is believing them yourself.”

New crises arose at the magazine: there had been a small but significant misprint in the fiber story, women in Ohio were giving themselves colitis by eating hundreds of servings of Chex, and Jean-Luc vanished from our conversation for a while. Then he was back, he was flying to Los Angeles and he wanted Marie to come with him, it was a business trip, sort of, they were going to scout designers.

“Actually,” said Celeste, “what surprises me is that you seem to be asking for my permission.”

“That’s not it,” Marie said. “I just want to make sure you’re comfortable with the idea that I’ll be gone for a few days. And to make sure there aren’t any, you know, conflicts.”

“Why, are you afraid of conflict?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not going to reassure you. In fact, if you were asking my permission, I would say no, because I don’t like the way you’re trying to disguise a romantic getaway as a business trip. If you had said, Celeste, I’m going to California to fuck …”

“Celeste …”

“If you had told me you wanted to fuck this guy’s brains out on the beach in California, at least that would have been honest, and I would have said, go, have fun, just make sure this French creep doesn’t get his hooks in you too deep, because you know where he’s been. But that’s not the situation.”

“No, it’s not.”

“As it is I have nothing to say. You don’t need my permission. Do what you want.”

“Jesus, Celeste,” said Marie. “Why do we have to fight about this?”

“I’m not fighting.”

“We’re separate people. I wouldn’t do this to you if you were going away.”

“That’s because I’m not going away,” Celeste said.

“Well, I am,” said Marie.

But she didn’t mention the trip to Los Angeles again. She did mention Jean-Luc, but only once, to say that he had turned in some photographs late. It was as though he were one of those Homeric sailors whose names are mentioned only as they die in a shipwreck. We talked about ordinary things again, about those morons at the Times, about whose play was opening at La MaMa, about the terrible people on the subway and in the supermarket. Then Marie vanished. The phone rang while Celeste and I were eating dinner, Celeste answered, she said, “I see,” and hung up. “My sister isn’t coming home,” she said.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Downtown.”

“When will she be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tonight?”

“No more questions,” said Celeste.

Days passed. We didn’t talk about Marie at dinner. Instead Celeste talked about her work: she was thinking of writing a book, she said, but not a regular book, it would just be quotations from other books that she fit together so it looked like they all belonged. It would have a story, only she didn’t know what the story would be yet; that was the thing about this book, it was the kind of story you wouldn’t understand until it was finished, which was, she said, true of all stories, only people kept getting themselves into trouble because they thought they knew what they were doing in advance. And indeed the story of my mothers was already turning in an unexpected direction. Celeste was happier than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was louder, her gestures larger, as though she were gaining volume to compensate for the twin who had left. One night the famous art critic came to dinner. She sat in Marie’s chair and smiled indulgently at Celeste’s poulet basquaise. Celeste explained that the recipe was a relic of an old plan to move to Paris, and the famous critic did not disapprove, either of the plan or of Celeste’s failure to carry it out. She chuckled and lit a cigarillo off the candle flame. “Paris, Paris. It’s not what it used to be. Do you know the poem by du Bellay? Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois … Nowadays it’s all Russians with too much money, Russians and Japanese. Do you know why the Japanese photograph everything? They’re documenting, so that when they get home, they can reproduce it all in miniature.” Another dark chuckle. “No, that’s unkind. Celeste, my darling, do you know that I once had a penis?” I stifled laughter. “Yes, it’s true, I wore a penis to a Surrealist dinner. A lovely pink plastic penis. In more or less the appropriate location. Were the Surrealists amused? My dear, they were not. There was quite a scandal. Mon chéri, said our hostess, the wife of some painter or other, cette personne a oublié de fermer sa braguette! She forgot to button her fly! Oh, oh, Paris, really, it hasn’t been Paris since Gertrude Stein passed on to whatever was left for her to discover …”A long thin sigh of smoke. Another story. How she had hitchhiked all the way from Paris to Geneva with a fork in her purse, with which she planned to stab any man who dared to touch her. How she still had the fork. Though nowadays, she said, she preferred to be touched. “Which reminds me, my dear, what happened to your sister?”

“She fell in love,” Celeste said.

“Enfin!” said the critic. “I was afraid it might never happen. And now, how magnificent, you’re free.”

“I suppose so.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“May I give you a word of advice?” asked the critic. “Live. The road to art passes through extravagant life.”

Celeste smiled. “That’s easy to say.”

“Everything is easy to say,” said the critic. “Also, I would suggest you cut your hair short. As it is, you look like someone’s grandmother.” She shot up from her chair and kissed the top of my mother’s head. “I must go.”

Celeste did not cut her hair, but she spent more hours working on her project. I missed Marie, but as the weeks passed the way I missed her changed. I didn’t imagine her coming home to live with us; instead, I pictured myself going to visit Marie and Jean-Luc downtown, shaking hands with old J-L, walking with them along the South Ferry piers. The sunlight was clear and strong. I balanced on a bollard and spread my arms like wings. You’ve grown, said Marie. Have I? I asked, archly.

My understanding of how that scene would go was so complete that when Marie actually came home, and told me it had all been a terrible mistake but she was back now, she was back, and she would never leave again, I was confused. This was no longer the dream I wanted to come true. Surely there had been a mistake, a moment misfiled in the big cabinet of time. We didn’t talk about what had happened downtown, and I never knew whether she was, as she said, overcome with remorse at how she’d left her sister and her son alone, or whether Jean-Luc got tired of her, as Celeste had predicted he would. My discretion was less perfect than Marie’s, though. I mentioned that the art critic had come over to dinner, and we’d all had a good time. I asked Celeste if she might come again, and if she had any more stories about forks.

“Forks?” Marie said. “What about forks?” Her voice was bright, but it was clear to us that she was searching for an explanation.

Celeste only nodded and went on eating, and it fell to me to say, portentously, as my sole and ample revenge for what she had done, “There’s a lot you don’t know.” That was what I thought of as I watched my mothers walk through the train, looking for two seats together; and it occurred to me that they had paid for the decisions they’d made thirty years ago. They had chosen each other. They were together still.

REGENZEIT

On the way home from Hudson, I stopped for lunch at a diner. I was still angry at my mothers, but as I replayed our conversations in my memory, and came up with even more devastating things that I might have said, I found myself thinking of the story Celeste had told me on Saturday, and its conclusion: I became more cautious. And soon I found myself thinking about Yesim. We’re all creatures of more or less the same species dancing around on this planet for only an eyeblink and then forever gone, Richard Ente had written. What was the point of being cautious? I borrowed a phone book from the cashier and called Snowbird. The secretary said Yesim was out of the office for a few days, and I said, OK, I’ll try her at home. The secretary must have recognized my voice, because she said, “Actually, she’s gone away for a rest, but I’m not supposed to say that. Do you want to leave a message?”

“No message,” I said. I guessed where Yesim was.

The Pines sat on a hill about fifteen minutes northwest of Albany, in a place where the suburbs began to give way to forest. A double row of pine trees stood alongside the driveway, as if to demonstrate that this at least was a place where words and things corresponded. I parked by what looked like the gatehouse, a pink cottage with lace curtains in the windows. It was unseasonably warm, and the last cicadas of the second millennium C.E. were clicking away in the tall grass. The feeling of the place was secluded but not confined: there was no fence, no gate, no signs warning unauthorized persons to keep out. In fact, I thought, the Pines didn’t look all that different from Summerland. Put in a big swimming pool and an ornamental garden and the two places could have been siblings. I talked to an attendant in the pink cottage, who made a phone call and directed me onward to the main house. “Wait on the patio,” he said, “she’ll meet you there.” I walked up a crunching gravel path and found myself facing a big gabled Victorian which could have belonged to an Albany industrialist a century ago. Some outbuildings stood farther away, former sheds and stables, probably. I sat at a white metal table strewn with pine needles and closed my eyes. The low sun sent light slantwise through the trees; a bird called out softly and got no answer. This was the kind of place you’d want to go after you died, I thought: not heaven with its harps and clouds and cherubic whatnot, but a quiet hill in the middle of nowhere, with some cabins, some grass, a fireplace to keep you warm in the winter. Then I opened my eyes; Yesim was coming out of the main house, dressed in a long gray sweater and jeans and a baseball cap. She looked gaunt and tired.

I remembered where I was, and what Yesim was doing here, and I opened my arms and mouth to express my dismay, but before I could speak there was a terrible howling overhead. A passenger jet was falling out of the sky; as I watched, it dropped rapidly toward us and disappeared behind the trees at the top of the hill. I must have looked terrified; Yesim laughed and, when the howl faded to a rumble, said, “The airport’s just over there.”

“This is a hell of a place for a sanatorium,” I said.

“It takes getting used to,” Yesim agreed, “but one of the things about being crazy is, you have to put up with a lot of interruption.” She told me that the Pines once belonged to an Albany banker — so my guess was more or less right — but when the airport was built his grandchildren had donated the house and land to a hospital. The property had lost so much value, there was no point trying to sell it. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s not a very busy airport.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked after a moment.

“I don’t entirely know,” Yesim said. “I’ve only been here a couple of days.”

“Yesim,” I began, but she interrupted: “If you’ve come to tell me that you’re sorry about what happened, forget it. I should come with a warning label.”

“You did come with a warning label,” I said.

“But I didn’t push you away, did I?”

“You didn’t push me away.”

“That’s my problem,” Yesim said.

She told me that after Summerland, it was as if she’d slipped backward in time, toward some earlier and more dangerous self. She’d tried to hold on to the Yesim who ran Snowbird and generally kept things going, but it was no use; that Yesim now seemed to her like a character in a play, a role she’d studied without ever really understanding its motivations. Why shouldn’t she fuck whoever she liked? What was the use of restraint? She came up to Albany and slept with a friend of Mark’s. “Then Mark left me and I realized I was in serious trouble again. So here I am,” Yesim said, spreading her palms upward on the white table. “Did you just come to say hello, or is there something you want?”

That was when I realized something that has probably been obvious for a long time: the Yesim I’d wanted to fall in love with ever since I saw her at the Kountry Kitchen was the one who was ten years old and still playing at Man and Woman. But that Yesim was no longer anywhere to be found — if she had ever been anything other than a creation of my memory. The Yesim who was waiting for me to speak was the only Yesim in existence, and, for the first time, I saw her. Before my eyes the duck changed back into a rabbit. It was a very strange moment.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Another airplane roared by, coming in for a landing.

“Forget it,” Yesim said. “Do you want the tour?”

She led me across the lawn to the mansion, and into a marble-floored hall, where a stone cherub perched on the edge of a stone bowl, his mouth open, as though to vomit. “This is the dining hall,” she said, opening a door and showing me in to a big room with a polished wooden floor, long tables, heavy-looking chairs. “The food is better than you’d think. The other night we had lobster rolls! Really, I don’t know why anyone lives out there.” Yesim gestured toward a mullioned window through which we could see only grass and trees. “Except, I guess, that no one can afford to stay here forever. Come on, I’ll show you the library.”

She showed it to me — it wasn’t so much a library as a comfortable room in which to read, or sleep, or write letters, which, she told me, people here still did. The Pines was probably one of the last places in America to make use of the U.S. Mail for personal correspondence. “In twenty years the only people who write letters at all will probably be in mental institutions,” she said. “Just imagine, the postal system will exist only to carry letters from one nuthouse to another.” I asked where the other people were, and she said, “Mostly in their rooms. In the morning we all get up early for Group, and after that there are classes and individual therapy, so by lunch we’re pretty worn out.” Yesim led me out the back door and down a gentle grass slope to the vegetable garden, where some yellow-orange pumpkins were pushing their way out of a tangle of vines, like moons emerging from behind stringy clouds.

“There’s a pond, do you want to see it?” Yesim asked.

“Is it OK if I pass?”

“It’s better. Let’s sit down and have a cigarette.” I took one from her and we sat on a bench by the garden, our feet pushing against the plastic fence that kept the deer away. “How’s the packing?” Yesim asked.

I told her what had happened with my mothers, and about Richard Ente’s letter. “I guess he was crazy,” I said, “but at the same time, I can’t help wondering whether my mothers could have saved him. Even if Marie didn’t run away to Denver she might have been able to do something.”

“It sounds like a terrible situation for everyone,” Yesim said. “Your mother was so young, and Richard was sort of taking advantage of her. And maybe your grandparents didn’t know what was going on. Kids that age don’t usually confide in their parents, at least not about sex. I certainly didn’t.”

“But they could have saved him! If Marie had just gone there, he might still be alive.” But it occurred to me that Richard Ente had been the same age as my grandfather. Even if Marie had saved him, by now he would probably be dead. I began to cry. I was crying for Richard Ente, who died alone in Colorado, but also for Swan, wherever he was, if he was still alive at all; I was crying for my grandfather, who’d died alone in his cluttered study. I was crying for all the people it was too late to help, even if there had never been a way to help them, even if they had died before I was born. I was crying because there was nothing else I could do.

Yesim touched my arm. “One thing they tell us here is that the only person you can ever really save is yourself.”

“Thanks.”

“Although maybe you don’t want to take advice from a person in a mental institution?”

“At this point,” I said, “I’ll take any advice I can get.”

REGENZEIT

How many times did I visit Yesim? It can’t have been more than four but it seems in retrospect like hundreds. Therapy must have put her in the habit of confessing; she told me about sexual fantasies she’d had as a girl, involving classmates, teachers, friends of her brother, sex movies, she called them, which she watched with closed eyes as she waited to fall asleep. “Just fantasies, but fantasy has a way of becoming reality,” she said, “or rather, it has a way of making life just part of fantasy.” But turning life into a sex movie in a town as small as Thebes was dangerous, to say the least. By the time she was fifteen, Yesim was struggling to keep her sexual escapades secret. She found herself lying so much and about so many things, it was like she was a fictional character, or really like several fictional characters, none of whom could know anything about the others. It was a miracle that her parents didn’t find out what, who, she was doing; sometimes Yesim suspected they were doing their utmost not to know. The end of that period of her life came when she drove to her math teacher’s house to have the next installment of what was already a fairly useless and unpleasant sexual relationship, and found his seventy-year-old father waiting for her in his wheelchair. He threatened to expose her, so she fucked him in the wheelchair, which creaked back and forth, straining against its brakes. At that point Yesim realized she had to get out of Thebes. Mercifully, she had worked almost as hard in school as she had at covering her tracks; before she turned seventeen she was off to college, where she met a wise poet, W, who taught her to love her desire and forgive her past. All might have been well if she hadn’t moved to Cambridge and fallen in love with Professor X, who took cold, jealous possession of her body, leaving her choked — literally — and starved — literally! Yesim slept with so many people, trying to get over what Professor X had done to her, you would need a whole different kind of alphabet just to keep track of them. That was when she realized there could be no peace between her and unappeasable want, this thing of darkness she’d acknowledged hers, but which refused to be owned, this desire that sucked the world into the vortex of its tight, hopeless little dream. Mark was a truce that Yesim had allowed herself to mistake for an armistice. Now he was gone, Yesim realized that making peace wasn’t enough: she needed to change her life. Here she was, thirty years old, and she hadn’t done anything but fuck. She wanted to make something she could be proud of. “The social worker who runs Group says I have all the insights,” she said. “It’s just a matter of putting them together. As if my life were a jigsaw puzzle. Which,” Yesim added after a moment, “is how I’ve been treating it. Trying to stick all those little knobs into those little sockets.” She grimaced. “I guess I’m not cured yet.”

Maybe she was right, but every time I came to visit there was a little more of her: her eyes brighter, her voice fuller, her hair thicker. She talked about what she’d do when she left the Pines. Maybe she’d apply to graduate school in poetry, or maybe she’d work for a foundation and put her managerial skills to good use. One thing was for sure: she was leaving Thebes. “Too much history here,” she said. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit about winter sports.”

“Not one sheet?” I asked.

Yesim laughed. “I want to live someplace warm.”

Airplanes passed over us, carrying people to Albany from distant cities, or carrying them away to places neither of us had ever been, places we were unlikely ever to go, airplanes shining in the sunlight and moving darkly through the cloud. We were going to be all right, I thought. We had made mistakes, but we could still get off the ground.

The warm weather ended. The next time I went to the Pines Yesim met me in the library, and we weren’t alone: two residents shot pool on a magnificent, uneven table, and others sat by the fire, reading newspapers from days and weeks before. Yesim and I shared a pink sofa, tucked away in a corner, but we had trouble finding things to talk about. I thought we might be inhibited by the other people in the room, or maybe we were tired. I didn’t mind the awkwardness. It was as if, after everything that had happened, we were finally having our first date.

“So,” I said, “read any good books lately?”

Yesim bit her lip. “I’m pregnant.” She’d missed her period; she’d peed on the little stick. She was sure. After a while she asked, “What are we going to do?”

“I’ll do whatever you want,” I said.

Yesim burst into tears. She had been up all night thinking about it, she said, and on the one hand a child was the last thing she wanted, when her life was so uncertain. She was a resident at a residential treatment facility; she had to worry about her own future and not that of a hypothetical other person, a helpless innocent who had done nothing to deserve a mother like Yesim. “But on the other hand,” she said, “I wonder if this isn’t the change I was looking for?” A child might be what she needed to come out of her erotic tailspin, a creature whose need to be loved was even greater than her own. “Is that very selfish of me?” she asked.

“People have had children for worse reasons,” I said.

We sat there, not talking, while, with terrible symbolic aptness, billiard balls shot by lunatics rolled over the hills and humps of the pool table and found their way softly to the pockets. The possibility of having a child, which hadn’t existed just a few moments ago, now floated in the air between us. It was something we could look at. And like other sudden revelations, like the sudden ones more than the gradual ones, probably, it had a kind of rightness. If we were floating, as Alice had put it, drifting through a weird time between childhood and adulthood, a child would anchor us. If we were wondering what would happen next, a child would answer that question. If we were frightened, a child would make us brave. Almost immediately, the possibility began to assume a kind of magnificence: a child, offspring of the Rowlands and the Regenzeits! A union of the feuding families, an end to the old fight, in Hegelian terms an Aufhebung. I’m sorry: I was trained as a historian and the words still rattle around in my head. A transformation that preserved us even as it carried us forward, into the future.

“I could do it,” I said.

Yesim looked at me, or seemed to be looking at me, sizing me up. In fact I think she was looking at the possibility of the child too. “You’re not the one who would have to give birth.”

“That’s true. And maybe you wouldn’t want to have me around.”

“If that was how I felt,” Yesim said, “I wouldn’t have told you.”

Time passed. We were still on the sofa. The sky had gone dark. Yesim and I were talking about the future, our words shining in the dimness of the room. Yesim wouldn’t leave Thebes right away: for the time being she would stay in her house, and I’d go on living in my grandparents’ house, at least until it was sold. I’d find someone to sublet my apartment in San Francisco but I wouldn’t give up the lease: we might move there one day. Yesim would finish her treatment program, which had only two weeks to run, then go back to work at Snowbird. Neither of us would say anything to Kerem yet. We wouldn’t talk to our parents, either, until we had made our plans. We would make plans. We wouldn’t commit to anything, but we were both excited about this idea, the idea of the child, and at some point we must both have realized that the possibility had become a decision. Then they called Yesim for dinner. I promised to come back the next day: we had so much to talk about. I drove home in the dark, humming along with the radio, and began, like a Millerite, to prepare for an impending change, the real nature of which I could barely imagine.

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

Imagine what it felt like to be a Millerite in the early fall of 1844: to go about your business with the certainty that the world was about to end. You’d have to live a kind of double life, supporting, with a minimum of effort, the outward person who still ate and bathed and wrote in the ledger, the one who admired the first tinge of red in the maples and thought, on the first frosty morning, how autumn paradoxically felt like the time when the world came to life, whereas in fact in three months it would be winter. You’d have to shine your shoes and you’d still be put out when the mail was late. But most of your attention would be on the inner self who in three months’ time would be in Heaven. You’d touch the white ascension robe (if such things ever existed) that hung by the bed, and look forward to the day when you would wear it: the dress in which regardless of your sex you’d wait for the Bridegroom to show up. You’d spend as much time as you could with the other people who were Going Up, because they were the ones to whom you could speak as your inner self, and be understood. You’d read every word of the Midnight Cry, even the birth and death announcements, the silly songs, the stories for children rewritten with the moral And that’s the way the world ends, not because you cared especially for the stories but because they belonged to the world in which your inner self lived. You’d send dollar after dollar to the newspaper society because without them your inner self would wither like an unwatered plant. And when the Millerites’ tent came to town you’d sing and shout and dance all night, your outer person utterly forgotten, and it would be as if you had already Gone Up, as if you were in Heaven already, except with bodies and grass and fog lying low in the valley at dawn. You would love it all. But, loving it, would you wonder, as you walked home, whether Heaven could be this good? Would you wonder whether you wanted this world to end?

LOST THINGS

As it turned out, I didn’t visit Yesim the next day. That morning a woman from Goodwill called and said she had received my message about a house of stuff to be donated. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the regional center is full.” Property prices were up, and people all over the Northeast were looking for ways to share their good fortune, only the people in need of good fortune were either ignorant of Goodwill or unwilling to visit. If I could wait until after Christmas, the woman suggested, they might be able to squeeze me in. Or if I could transport the goods to the national center, they would be happy to accept my donation.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s the national center?”

“St. Louis, Missouri,” she said.

I told her I’d try the Salvation Army, and she warned me that they hadn’t been accepting donations since August. Forgetting, in the face of this setback, that just the day before I’d decided to stay in my grandparents’ house indefinitely, I called Charles and told him that we would have to take everything to St. Louis. He laughed at me. There was no way he was going to drive a truck to St. Louis and back, he said, even if he had a truck the right size, which he didn’t. If I wanted to pay for a truck and drive it to Missouri myself he might be able to get a couple of his boys to help with the loading. For the unloading I would be on my own.

“Well then,” I said, “what do you suggest?”

“We could just leave it where it is. Let whoever buys the house deal with it.”

“Then what have I been doing, sorting the good stuff from the junk? Was I just wasting my time?”

“Calm down,” my uncle said. “We’ll figure it out.” He said something about taking it to Canada and dumping it there, just taking it over the border and leaving it in a field; after all, Canada was a big country, probably no one would notice if we left a little pile of things in a field where no one went.

“Absolutely not. This is American junk, it’s going to stay in America.”

“Then we’ll sell it.”

“To who?”

“Whoever wants it,” Charles said.

So for the second time in my life I found myself making signs and taping them to lampposts, tacking them to bulletin boards in the laundromat and the public library, setting them by the door to the Kountry Kitchen and the Kozy Korner and the organic grocery, to say that the Rowlands were having a garage sale. Hundreds of antiques priced to move. Everything must go. I took a photograph of the house and used it to illustrate the sign in the hope that the historic exterior of the Rowland home would create the illusion that the items for sale were equally impressive. Now and then someone who saw me putting up a sign would nod and say, “The Rowlands? That must be quite a sale,” and they would laugh.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s going to be quite a sale.”

Like a Millerite, I knew that I was carrying out two incompatible plans: on the one hand I was going to live in my grandparents’ house, and on the other I was selling their stuff. I was preparing for both cessation and survival, but somehow the incompatibility didn’t bother me. The house wasn’t livable as it was, with everthing in piles; maybe Yesim would move in with stuff of her own. Maybe it was important to create an empty place for the child. Anyway, having sorted my grandparents’ things, it would have been a step backward to unsort them, and if I did I would never have the energy to sort them again.

“You might as well go ahead with it,” Yesim said when I mentioned the sale to her. “Who knows, you might even make some money.” She lay back on the sofa and groaned. As if deciding to keep the child had hastened her pregnancy into a new phase, she’d been having morning sickness. The smell of coffee made her want to throw up, but everyone at the Pines drank coffee. Everyone smoked, too: it was a pregnant woman’s nightmare. She had told her nurses she had the flu; she was afraid that if she told them she was pregnant, they wouldn’t let her leave. Or that they’d advise her to have an abortion.

“Only two more weeks,” I said.

“Twelve days,” Yesim sighed.

I asked if I could bring her anything: flowers? Something to read, to take her mind off of the Pines? I still had that copy of Norwegian Wood.

“I don’t think I could read.” Yesim made a face. “Am I going to have baby brain? What will I do about my work?”

“You’ll manage. I’ll help you.”

“Be careful what you offer.”

I squeezed her hand. Yesim squeezed back. “It’s funny,” she said. “My body feels more like it’s mine now that something else is growing in it.”

“It’s paradoxical,” I agreed.

“I’m not going to think about it now,” Yesim said, and closed her eyes.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m not going to sell anything we might be able to use when our child comes.” That was the first time I’d said our child. Yesim smiled, but didn’t open her eyes.

We had the sale a couple of days later. With the help of an off-duty driver from Rowland Towing and Salvage, Charles and I carried everything out of the garage and set it on the lawn. My grandparents’ things looked even less appealing by daylight than they had in the house; like an accusing finger the sun found the scratches, the stains, the chinks in the enamel, the hidden spots of rust. Charles asked if we should put prices on things, but I said no, it would take too long, we’d just let people pay what they wanted. For what we hoped would be the last time we arranged the shadeless lamps, the plastic ladle with the half-melted handle, the trunk missing a hinge, the fire tongs, the skis, the ancient after-dinner drinks, the calcified colander, the immersion coil, the trunk of curtains, the mound of towels, the gardening tools, the gardening gloves, the straw hat, the box of matchbooks, the boat-shaped ashtray, the pot holders, the wicker wastebasket, the vases, the planters, the paperbacks, the paperweights, the party napkins, the coatrack, the boot scraper, the sweaters, all five letter openers, the humidifier, the dehumidifier, the fans, the dolls, the plastic boxes that covered kleenex boxes, allowing my grandfather to buy cheap generic tissues, the bird books, the china shepherd and milkmaid, the playing cards, the road maps, the old magazines, the beer stein, the coasters, the cookbooks, the kitty-kat clock, the box springs, the napkin rings, all the lost things.

Soon the first people from Thebes arrived to see what we were selling. “Wow, look at all this stuff,” said the owner of the Kountry Kitchen. I said she might be able to find some things to round out her collection.

“My collection!” She laughed, but when I came back a few minutes later she was kneeling by the mixing bowls. “How much do you want for these?”

“How much do you want to pay?”

“I’ll give you five dollars for the set.”

“Hey,” said her husband, holding up my grandfather’s binoculars, “are you letting these go?”

Already another car had pulled up to the curb. The driver introduced himself as Cal, the owner of Stuff n’ Things Antiques in Saugerties, and he paced through the collection, touching one or another piece of furniture, saying to himself, “I remember this, I remember this.” The neighbors who lived on the other side of my grandparents’ house, the non-Regenzeit side, Dr. and Mrs. Karman, bought a drawer’s worth of forks and spoons, which were almost the same design as their own depleted set, for three dollars. “Look around,” Charles told a stranger. “You might find something to round out your collection.”

All day, people came from Thebes, Maplecrest, Hunter, Catskill, Hudson and beyond. They took things, they gave me money, they left, and slowly, as the day passed, the driveway and the lawn uncluttered themselves. Just before dark, I saw Carrie with an older woman, looking through my grandfather’s records.

“Oh, hi!” She beamed at me. “I want you to meet my mom.”

“I know you,” her mother said. It was Shelley, Kerem’s old girlfriend. Her blond hair had streaks of gray at the roots and she’d put on weight, but even so she didn’t look very different from when I’d last seen her, twenty years ago. “You’re Kerem’s friend.”

“Oh, my god, Mom, you know him?”

“What are you doing back in Thebes?” Shelley asked.

I told her about my grandfather. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “And how do you know my daughter?”

“Mom,” Carrie said, exasperated, “he’s the one who comes into the grocery.”

“Oh?” Shelley raised a pale eyebrow. “I thought you were talking about someone younger. Not someone who’s basically my age.”

“Mom,” Carrie said.

“So, tell me,” said Shelley, “what have you been up to?”

I gave her the shortest possible version of my life story while Carrie stood by sullenly, looking at me as though I had betrayed her. “How exciting,” Shelley said. “You’ve really moved around.” She told me that Mike, her brother, owned the grocery, and she had a farm in the mountains, which she was turning into a kind of artists’ retreat.

“For all the truly great people,” I said.

Shelley laughed. “That’s right.”

“You told me about it twenty years ago. It was your dream, you said.”

“Did I? How long are you in town?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to come up next weekend?”

“Dad has the farmhouse next weekend,” Carrie said.

“Right,” said Shelley. “Well, you could come up during the week, if you don’t mind a simple dinner.”

“Don’t invite him for dinner,” Carrie said.

“Shh, sweetie. Have you seen Kerem?” Shelley asked me.

“A couple of times.”

“I think it’s sad, what happened to him. All he does is drink and worry about his crazy sister.”

“Yesim isn’t crazy.”

Shelley laughed. “You don’t know her. Did you know she tried to set fire to the ski lodge? It’s true, it happened last summer. The police caught her pouring gasoline all over a wall. They should have arrested her, but since it was her place, and her dad was already gone …”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Everyone knows. Ask Kerem if you don’t believe me.”

Whether it was true or not, this story left me with not much interest in talking to Shelley. I asked her some inane question about the farm, and she gave me an equally inane answer, and repeated her invitation to dinner.

“Mom, I’m freezing,” Carrie said.

It had in fact become much colder, as if Thebes had gone from fall to winter in the course of the afternoon. Shelley gave me her number and Carrie hurried her back to their minivan. I watched the two of them go, two backs, two heads of dirty-blond hair framed in the minivan’s open door, then the door closed, they were gone. Everyone else had already left, and I helped Charles carry the things we hadn’t sold back into the house. We’d done better than we expected: more than half of my grandparents’ possessions were gone, off to begin new lives in the houses of people we didn’t know. I thought about what Shelley had told me about Yesim. What was I getting myself into? Thebes was microscopic, a cuckoo clock where the same people came around and around again, none of them really changing, only getting older, and having children who you also ran into, over and over. How long would it be before we ran into the math teacher and his wheelchair-bound father? If there was this one story about Yesim seting fire to Snowbird, how many other stories were there that I didn’t know yet?

As soon as my uncle was gone, I went upstairs and packed my clothes. I carried my bag out to Norman Mailer’s car, then went back into the house and took Progress in Flying Machines. I got into the car, then I realized that I’d forgotten the charger for my cell phone, and when I came out with it in my hand Kerem was standing on the porch.

“Are you going somewhere?” he asked.

“Just over to Maplecrest,” I said. “I’m taking some stuff to my uncle.”

“You going to be gone long?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“When you get back, will you come over to my place? I need you to sign some insurance forms.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I can’t believe winter is here already,” Kerem said.

“It’s good for business, right?”

“So long as it snows, it’s good for business.”

I drove away. I was glad Charles wasn’t there: I didn’t need him to tell me that, thirty years ago, Richard Ente had done what I was now doing, running away from the mother of my unborn child. I drove slowly down the hill, then picked up speed as I got out of town. By the time I got to the place where Route 56 joins Route 23, hard little snowflakes were falling, and even as part of me wondered whether I was making a terrible mistake, another part decided that I was leaving just in time.