Mendocino Fire

Tabriz

David Merson, heartsore in the way of old activists, a stooped, unkempt forty-eight, leafs through his so-called love life for precedent and finds none. (Waiting in a parked car overlooking an arroyo induces introspection.) The other guys in EPIC share the leanness of long outrage, frequent marathons, and enduring luck with women, but obsession has not been good to David’s relationships, his days spent tracking the toxins that bleed through watersheds, questioning children in hospital gowns printed with teddy bears, inking cancer clusters onto topo maps, bringing his peculiar skill set to bear, his milky mildness, what his second ex calls his anti-charisma, the hangdog air of bewilderment that makes even dying children strive to enlighten him, the harmlessness that glints through his wire-rimmed specs when he shakes hands with some CEO or other, except that mostly they know better, now, than to let a bigwig sit down with David. Don’t so much as nod when you pass him in the courthouse hall, they’re told. Despite his scruffiness — one judge told him to get a haircut — he is sleek in pursuit, righteous, relentless, a scorner of compromise, a true believer.

Whose own luck with women was flawed, leaving him grateful for joint custody. David loves his two sons with the appalled passion of a dad whose work acquaints him with small coffins. From his right hand to the hollow of a kid’s well-worn glove runs a taut thread of inevitability, the ball held aloft and displayed—Dad, look! In the making of a boy psyche this is the key phrase. It’s David’s job to arrange plenty of occasions for its happy proclamation: Dad, look! His rendition of Goodnight Moon is famous for the oinks, whistles, and cheek pops enhancing the line Goodnight noises everywhere. He’s fed trembling white mice Coca-Cola from an eyedropper for the sake of fourth grade science, though his coworkers’ connections in the Animal Liberation Front would rip his heart out and nail it to the front door—Environmental Protection Information Center—if they found out.

His abuse of white mice — with their teeny old-lady hands! their suffering docility! — is an unusual departure from the party line. Though they have long since abandoned ecotage, the five members of EPIC hew to the rituals of brotherhood, to their affinity-group habit of staying up until two or three, baring their souls, though they do so now under the harassing buzz of fluorescence, tipped back in ergonomic chairs, ties loosened, feet up on desks variously avalanched or anal (David’s: anal) when in the old days it was shirts printed with raised fists, army surplus sleeping bags, a high-desert campfire sucked toward the moon, shooting sparks. Ice may be melting out from under polar bears, breast milk brims with mutagens, but change hasn’t ever before touched EPIC, not deeply, not at the level where they are bonded. At David’s wedding last Saturday they slouched in attitudes of conscientious celebration. They kissed the bride, they told her when she was done with this loser to give them a call, they stuck orchids behind their ears, and David alone understood they were holding back, and why. Of the five of them, he was the reliable loser in matters of the heart, and the phenomenon of Jade, the fearful symmetry of teeth and cheekbones, plus the fact that she’s on the other side, the sexiness of her being, basically, the enemy, can be neither assimilated nor forgiven.

The wedding’s meticulously repressed question: What does she see in him? In his rented tux, David had shrugged, reading minds he’d been reading half his life. They could have had a little more faith, though. For a profoundly good man to find love shouldn’t strain credulity. David caught himself thinking profoundly good and palmed his thinning fair hair in a manner Jade recognized as embarrassed or sad. She’d lifted her brows: What’s wrong? He’d slung her over his arm, leaned in as if kissing were drinking, held her practically horizontal until people said Aww.

But it was a moment’s uncensored private felicity to have meant it: profoundly good.

He’s earned it.

What he regrets now is not that thought but the ruefulness of his gesture, palming his hair — the mild, contrite, revisionist embarrassment — so that she’d had to lift her brows, to wonder what was wrong when nothing was.

In the arroyo a couple of wrecked trucks sail past a rusted washing machine, a listing, doorless refrigerator, tires of various sizes and degrees of rottenness, a cathedral window’s worth of shattered glass and the jutting wing of a small plane. The boys love coming here because nowhere else are they permitted such an array of dangers — prickly pear, anonymous stained underpants, rusty nails, rattlers. Actually, the altitude’s too high for rattlers, but the boys reject this fact. Before he lets them out of the car, David lectures. Careful, careful, careful, the poisoned echo of small white coffins. Down in the arroyo, out of his sight, they look out for each other, a good thing for brothers to learn. They are step-mothered now, in fairy-tale jeopardy, though in taking them on Jade has shown an easy, can-do confidence. She read up on step-parenting, and it turns out that beauty figures even here, in the reconfigured family calculus, the boys defenseless as their father. Regarding love, David has always been a doubter, a holder-back, the lukewarm opposite of his passionate work self. As a husband he was often described as just not there, and he had accepted as deserved the amicable breakups of marriages one and two. Along came Jade: they had gazed, eaten, drunk, fucked, the usual plot, but then fucking took over, the great power of fucking had been awakened and they fucked themselves mutually transparent, fucked their way into a dazed adoration, discovering there this clandestine status in being the two of them, this insolent sexual satisfaction coexisting with the improvisational restlessness of genius, this safety, this bliss exempt from inhibition and nagging history, neither one bothering, neither needing to explain their hasty marriage, because it was natural to want to seal such transcendent fucking with that cultural kiss of approval, dubious though you were, otherwise, about that culture.

Crossing to the arroyo’s edge, he can make out the boys’ voices, and guesses they’re intent on intergalactic slaughter. Lasers, viruses, dirty bombs — their games incorporate everything there is to fear. This is good for them, David believes.

“Hey Shane.

“Edmund.”

He calls the ill-assorted names — ranch hand, dandy — chosen by two of the three women he’s loved and, from the hush that follows, figures he’s been heard. A scrap blows by, and David stomps. This is the usual lawlessness, the regular Joe’s cost-effective contempt for the environment. People find this wasteland irresistible: free dumping! Showing a perverse initiative, somebody has carted an oil drum out to the tip of this stony spur where the road dead-ends. The human love of shortcuts accounts for a lot of devastation, David thinks. The ADHD species, distracted from the story unfolding down at the level of chromosomes or up in the ozone. He releases his scrap to the wind, and it’s whisked away. As if a signal has been given, more bits and pieces swirl past, the dervish blowing by, revealing that an object he had mistaken for a plank or beam sticking out of the oil drum is in fact a furled rug. It seems undamaged, and as David puts an arm around it and levers it out, a kamikaze egg carton rears up and crunches into his shoulder. He studies the oil drum’s seethe: tin cans, a partially melted telephone, a doll’s head trailing singed acrylic hair, a coil of filthy rope, a shirt stippled with blood, a clock, rain-fattened paperbacks, eggshells, ashes, a melee of electrical wire, a high-heeled shoe. As he works it loose, the rug dislodges a cascade of junk that tumbles along the ground, light bits scattering, heavier things rolling this way and that. Something, an envelope, wings past, nicking the corner of his eyebrow.

“—wouldn’t be anybody.” Panting. “Left to. Operate. Lasers.”

“Wrong! Somebody lived! Cause they hid in—”

They come clambering up the slope.

“—caves—”

“—that, like, connect, a whole underground—”

“—city—”

Reaching the arroyo’s rim, the half brothers come to a halt and stare.

Squatting, David peels back a corner of the rug. With only a few square inches revealed, the workmanship is unmistakably fine.

“Hey guys,” he says. “Look what I found.”

For a breezy minute they ponder the scene, litter skittering and dodging past. The moon catches their eye-whites. Two hours’ reckless play brings out the brother in them.

“So?”

One brother’s cool slides its knife blade through the bonds of pairdom.

“Show some fucking interest in what Dad found, whycantcha.”

Ordinarily, and despite the unfairness of enforcing rules in this male wilderness, David would have to deal with fucking. He does a quick check. Edmund does not appear hurt, only newly severed from his older brother. His eye-whites glitter. Not with boredom, either. Freshly relieved of intimacy, both boys are radiant. David gives the rug a good yank, and it thumpingly unrolls.

“Wow.”

“Wow.”

David sits back on his heels, trying and failing to understand, to account for the intrusion of marvelousness, the rug’s fanatically executed geometry interrupted just at the point of frigidity by winding, organic movement, delicate leaves, impish involutions, this diversion, this near escape from paralysis part of its tale, its secret proffered with the bristling incomprehensible vitality of bees dancing within a hive, vision inspired by the challenge but the mind’s movements tentative, repeatedly stubbed out, this agitating impenetrable beauty the work of how many nights and days, its blood reds and ominous crimsons contending with, outnumbered by, a choir of blues, azure, lapis, jay feather, baby blanket, forget-me-not, but to number them like that, to try to say what they’re like, that’s merely a poor, doomed attempt to domesticate them. They are gorgeous blues, and they assail peace of mind. In the center there is an oval where nothing happens, visually, and this is the indeterminate dun of animal camouflage, of a doe fading into underbrush, and what appears to be peaceful is really another wild evasion.

Edmund, at nine still sometimes playing the baby, hangs an arm around his neck. “You pulled that out of the garbage, Dad?”

“It shouldn’t have been in there.”

Shane leans into David from the other side. “Why was it, then?”

“I really have no idea.” No taint of yeast or compost, no halitosis of souring milk carton, no oil-drum dankness mars the rug’s dry, antique compound of grass, twine, stone floor.

Edmund says, “I want to see in the can.”

“Honey, there’s nothing else in there, and we’ve talked about syringes and dangerous sharp things and how the guys handling garbage wear gloves.”

“You didn’t have gloves.”

He tries a technicality and some italics, an old parenting tactic. “I wasn’t reaching down into the garbage, the rug was right on top, and I carefully carefully carefully pulled it out.”

“Dad I really really need to see.”

Father and son go over and peer down into the oil drum: garbage. “Okay?” David says.

Behind them Shane wings stones at the drum until David says, “Cut that out.” Shane pitches a last defiant stone and the drum gives off the resonant gong of a bull’s-eye. Edmund runs back to try to match this feat, and David decides to let them have at it, because what can they hurt? He rolls the rug up tight and improvises a kind of fireman’s carry. The metal whines when the stones whang against it. The brothers have refined their aim, and as David grapples with the rug, shoving it into the car, he takes pleasure in his boys’ prowess. Hunters. He’s the father of a pair of slender, moonlit, stone-throwing boys: there may be no deeper pleasure on earth. He pauses to admire them. They sense this. It throws their aim off. They want to be fatherless, motherless, outcast, a savage tribe of two, their terrible prey — black, squat, stinking like a bear — moaning when it’s dinged. Before they can leave this place, the spirit of the bear that the oil drum mysteriously incarnates must be stoned back to the underworld. If there were no boys throwing stones, that spirit would never have emerged from the underworld in the first place, but put a stone in a boy’s fist and the old world breathes out reeky ghosts. The Pleistocene lives on in the heads of boys. In fact, three-fifths of EPIC believes that we’re headed back that way: when weather chaos descends big-time and the center cannot hold, humans will regroup as hunter-gatherers. That’s the optimistic view. What the other fraction of EPIC believes cannot be spoken aloud, since (David is one) they are fathers, and certain thoughts are forbidden to fathers. Annihilation. Universal extinction. Nestled, still tightly rolled, in the rear of the station wagon, the rug’s strangeness is muted: it could be rightfully his, bought and paid for. David calls to the boys to get into the car but finally has to start the engine — David’s own dad’s long-ago threat — before the boys climb in. They’re overextended, he figures, long past the hour when they should have been freed of the intensity of their love for each other by the bleating electronic triviality of Game Boy.

“It’s skanking up our car,” Edmund complains, and Shane chimes in, “It smells all old.”

“Hey, does everything have to be new? Plastic? Old’s not such a bad smell, is it?”

Pleading, always a wrong move.

“It’s not ours.” Edmund, doing a good imitation of Jade. She’s new enough that they shouldn’t be able to mimic her this well, and the boys’ appropriation of Jade’s voice and style when they want to drive home a point slightly worries David, and feels unfair, as if he’s being ganged up on.

“It’s ours now, sweetie.”

Sweetie is fatal, registered in jolting silence. Jolting because the next thirty miles are so bad, the road seeming as lost as a road can get, running aimlessly along and then madly swerving, barely managing to avoid outcrops of rock or steep drop-offs.

“You mean you can just take anything out of the garbage, whoever left it there, and if they want it back you can say no, it’s yours?” Shane, bent, at eleven, on discovering the moral workings of the world.

A hard curve, and as he slows the car, David tries his mostly successful good-father voice. “Look, I don’t want you going through any garbage ever. You never find anything good.”

“You did.”

“You did.”

Jade says, “It must be worth a fortune. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars, even, depending on how old it is. Really, somebody’s going to want it back. Because how could it have been left in a garbage can? I’ve never seen anything like this except in a museum. And why didn’t I know that you go for these drives? Was this a thing you did before?” Before her. “Were you just having a really bad day? Is something going on?” Do we have secrets now? “The rug is a problem, David. There’s been some kind of mistake, because this is not the sort of thing that gets thrown away, not ever. You took it? What made you think you could just walk off with it?”

“Which question do you want me to answer? It clearly had been thrown away. At the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was coming back for it. It was getting dark.”

“I just think you were a little hasty,” she says, “impetuous,” and he shouldn’t be flattered, but he is. “Draw me a map of how you get there?”

Her love of proof, documents, evidence, is very like his, and on the back of an envelope he sketches a map, the journey’s last leg a squiggle meant to indicate arduousness, culminating in a cartoon oil drum.

“This is your secret guy place? There’s nothing there.”

“That’s what’s good about it.”

He wants to explain further, to point out the sadness of there not being many unowned places left, but she’s already asking, “How do you know nobody was coming back? Maybe the real owner is there now, looking, and it’s gone.”

Cross-legged on their bed, husband and wife consider the rug unfurled across the tiles of their bedroom floor, and he watches, under the lowered lids of her downward gaze, the REM-like movements of her eyes as she follows, or tries to, the rug’s branching and turning and dead-ending intricacy, its profusion of leaves and petals or the geometric figures that might be leaves and petals, which the gaze barely discerns before relinquishing them back into abstraction. Jade, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, her right breast indented by her right arm, her shadow thrown across him because her reading light’s on, her backlit profile showing the radiant lint of her upper lip, the angle of her jaw, the length of her throat, and below that the contour of the heavy breast, the nipple’s surprising drab brown color, the unaroused, modest softness of its stem, its wreath of kinked hairs. Best of all, in love, in what he’s experienced of love, are those moments when you can watch the other’s self-forgetful delight.

She says, “I have to tell you something.”

In his work, he’s a good listener. More than that, he solicits the truth, asks the unasked, waits out the heartsick or intimidated silences every significant environmental lawsuit must transcend. Someone has to ask what has gone wrong, and if the thing that’s gone wrong has destroyed the marrow of a five-year-old’s bones, someone has to need that truth or it will never emerge from the haze of obfuscation. Of lying. But this isn’t work. This is his wife.

“I’m a little afraid,” she says. “I know that’s not like me. This is hard.”

“Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“Whatever it is?”

“You can tell me.”

“Whatever?”

“You can tell me.”

“I’m a Republican.”

He’s been blind to the syllogism chalked on the board: X is a corporate lawyer. All corporate lawyers are Republicans. X is a Republican. The outrage that blazes through him makes the leap to her. When she says, “I knew you couldn’t handle it,” her tone is prosecutorial.

“You waited until we were married.”

“Until I thought you could deal.”

Dismay is cranked so high his pulse ticks in his temples. “I’m having trouble believing this.”

“Calm down, calm down a little, try seeing it’s love, my telling you, it’s wanting no secrets between us.”

“The deception,” he says. “The hiding who you really are. When you know how I feel about lying.”

“I hated it too, every minute of it, but I couldn’t lose you.”

“This makes us like everyone else. Lying. Being lied to.”

“It doesn’t. We aren’t.” She catches hold of his wrist. “Are you all right?”

He waits until she lets go before saying, “Blind, wasn’t I. You must have thought He’s incredibly easy to fool.”

She changes tactics. “David. Let’s deal with the other issue first. Say the rug was in the office of some Los Alamos scientist, and one day somebody ran a Geiger counter over it, a random check, a sweep, cause they’re human, accidents happen, and despite the most thorough precautions—”

“They’re not thorough enough,” he says, and he knows.

“—traces of uranium stick to the soles of somebody’s shoes and get tracked across the rug, and out of fear for their jobs they decide to dispose of the rug in this furtive undocumented way, the sort of thing you’re always telling me about. You, the expert on how contaminants get into the air and the water and into people’s houses, you bring it home, into our house, with no clue why it was left in a trash can. This just isn’t wise.”

“I love you as the expert on wise decisions.”

“My politics are my own, and I could’ve gone on keeping them to myself. Ultimately I chose not to, because you and I tell each other everything.”

“One of us does.”

“So okay, right, you’re the honesty prince, but this is new territory for me. You’re the first person I’ve ever even wanted to tell everything to. I needed to work up to it. Is that a crime, to have needed time?”

“There’s nothing wrong with this rug,” he says. “You’re being paranoid.”

“There is something,” she says. “I can feel it.”

“For the first time,” he says, “how you feel doesn’t interest me at all.”

He’s let down when, without another word, Jade clicks off the light. If they were both wolves they’d be lying just like this, their senses on alert, their fur on end. How about a little red-in-tooth-and-claw sex? He wants her. But who is she? She may intend to amend the constitution to rule out gay marriage, or drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How can he fuck someone who wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? All the same, he’s hard. Postcoitally, he can convince her that caribou have rights to their ancient migratory routes. He’s not sure where she is in her progress toward sleep, and when he bends over her, the intense repose of her body on the bed tells him she’s wide awake. This treachery — another in her string of deceptions — exhausts him, and he gives up. He’s asleep.

Before dawn he’s startled by her cry. He can’t make sense of her naked, placatory stance in front of his computer, or his own accusation: “What did you do?” His voice is rough, his body recollecting their fight before his brain does.

“I walked across your rug and must’ve picked up some static electricity, because when I touched the computer, I got a shock, and—”

He scrambles from the bed, the rug’s nap pricking the soles of his feet.

“—it crashed. It made this little match-strike sound, and the screen went black. David. I wasn’t going to look.”

Well, then, what was she doing there? He never confides in her about his work. He’s tediously ethical that way. She could end up representing a corporation he’s going after.

“I wasn’t going to look.”

The repetition really scares him.

Her fingertips patter across the keyboard. Panic tenses her shoulders as she leans over his laptop, and her hair sticks up in tufts, dirty with yesterday’s gel — for the first time, he finds her unattractive. “Leave it,” he says; she says, “Let me just—” His chest hurts: Is this a problem, should he be paying attention? No, it’s okay, his heart. It’s only that his chest has constricted with frustration and another emotion, uglier, more imperative, pounding away. Fury.

“This weird thing happened.”

Sunday afternoons the boys and their belongings trek back to the house of Shane’s mother, Susannah, according to an agreement hashed out with Nina, Edmund’s mother, an academic on a year’s sabbatical in Paris. Nina trusts Susannah, but then so does almost everyone, including David. He sits with Susannah on her back steps, the boys dodging through the neglected garden whose sunflowers are ten feet high, yellow petals tattered and their brown, saucer-sized centers under attack by sparrows.

“—never make it out alive unless—”

“—we find a way to neutralize—”

Just hours ago Jade walked across the rug, acquiring a crackling charge of electrons that flew from her fingertips to his keyboard, cases compromised, the irreplaceable interviews, the painstaking documentation zapped, and yeah, he has some of it on disks, but not all, an uncharacteristic lapse, one he’s going to have a hard time forgiving himself for.

“When I finally got it to the guy I’ve always relied on, he said it’s permanently fried,” David tells Susannah. “Which is bound to cause problems in a number of cases. But the worst part is, I don’t know what she was doing with my computer. She has no business touching it.”

“Maybe she was looking for incriminating email. That’s the usual reason for fooling around with the other person’s computer. She must want to find out about your life before.”

“It’s not like that.”

“She could be looking for email from a previous relationship. Like with me. She could want to know how things stand between us.”

“I don’t think so. She hasn’t wanted the lowdown. She sees us more as a clean-slate kind of thing.” Or a lightning strike. An angel’s wing passing over their upturned faces.

From the shoes ranged on the wooden step — shoes with neon glyphs, striped shoes, shoes with soles thick as antelope hooves, shoes bristling with spikes — Susannah chooses one whose laces are a gray snarl and begins, with her dirty nails, to pick the knot. She says, “You do barely know her.”

Angry at her superbly divorced reasonableness, the very quality he loved a moment ago, he says, “The rug is evil.”

“Oh, David. Things aren’t evil. People are. And not that many of them, though I can see why your line of work leads you to think otherwise.”

Evil: he had continued pecking at the keyboard as if lucky ineptitude could conjure, from the dark portal, the blip of returning consciousness. Jade — exasperated by his manic persistence, in which she rightly detected anger meant for her — left for work. In the fugue state of technological thwartedness, he heard the scream, shock blazing down every dad-nerve, and danced backward to see out the French doors: Edmund hanging from a branch of the apricot tree, shrieking at his own daring. With this shriek ringing in his ears David lost his footing, and in a slow-motion trance of remorse went over backward. Falling, he seemed to view himself from above, and if he was helpless, his arms flung out and his mouth gaping, the back of his head about to connect with the floor, he was also suspended in a peaceable realm that had detached itself from terror. David had time to marvel at this double consciousness before the impact slammed it out of his skull.

“My god,” Susannah says. “You could have been really hurt”—and her palm on his nape radiates solicitude, but this kind of comforting costs her nothing, really: she can do it in her sleep. With the broad Norwegian planes of her wide-open face she’s so different from Jade, so accessible. “But you’re okay,” she says.

“Well, my back sort of—”

She turns his wrist to read his watch, and the kitchen telephone rings. The screen door bangs behind her sturdy freckled legs.

“Hi.

“You can’t?

“You can’t?

“I know but why does that have to—

“I know it is but why—

“I know.

“I know.

“I said I do know.

“Yes.

“I will.

“I won’t.

“Me too.

“Me too. Bye.”

She’s high enough from this abortive exchange to sit down beside David and confess, “I think I’m in love. After all this time. I mean, you’ve been through two wives since me. My turn, I guess.” The smile she gives him is expectant, but he’s having trouble reconciling the two realities, the reality before she vanished into her kitchen and this new version, because weren’t they still, until this confession, still, really, in spite of everything, married? She has eluded him, slipped away taking her critical possessive practical generous irreplaceable and beautifully accessible love with her, and David says miserably, “Oh.”

“Oh? After I listen to the wonders of your love life for six years? Oh? That’s not trying, David. That’s not even — nice. Oh? That’s cold.”

“I need to ask you about something.”

Such a transparent grab at her vanished attention: she grimaces, exaggerating the expression but truly pissed off. “Were you even listening?”

“You’re in love. And it’s, from your side of the conversation, kind of complicated.”

“When isn’t it complicated?”

He uh-huhs prevaricatingly.

She says, “Oh, of course! Marrying somebody you barely know. That keeps everything nice and simple.”

“I’m in trouble, Suse.”

“You do know you are completely selfish.” But she’s curious. “What kind of trouble?”

“This is a hypothetical. What if someone you were in love with turned out to be a Republican. How bad would that be? Would it be a thing you’d leave them over?”

“That couldn’t happen.”

“Sure it could.”

“Nope. Because when you’re talking to a Republican, you can’t talk long before you hear something, some opinion, that makes your blood run cold. Like what Emily Dickinson said about poetry? It’s poetry if it makes you feel like the top of your head’s coming off? That’s how you know it’s a Republican.” As she’s been talking, she’s been processing. “Jade’s a Republican. David? She would be! But you’re an activist, you can’t possibly — whoa. Whoa! This changes things.”

“Of course it changes things.” But he’s confused. “What things?”

“How does she discipline, David? Are there bedtime prayers? I can’t believe how trusting I’ve been. How naive. Intimidated! I was intimidated by her. I never really believed she liked the boys. She was probably pretending to be into them out of some kind of phony family-values baloney. Or to get you.”

“Hey, you’ve seen her with the boys, you know she’s—” Well, wasn’t Jade a little detached, really? Confident, but maybe too offhand? He’d chalked it up to her heavy workload and to never having spent much time with kids before. “Suse, Suse, please. Come to the house. Because I don’t know whether I’m crazy to think the rug might be—” He can’t say evil twice in one conversation.

“It makes no sense to blame the rug. Blame Jade! That’s what you’re trying to avoid with this obsession. You’re resisting taking a hard look at a relationship that was flawed from its very inception.”

“If you see it and say There’s nothing wrong with this rug, that’s all I need to hear.”

“Is that how obsessions work, really?” She snaps her fingers. “Snap out of it, guy? That works?”

In her twice-weekly trips to this house to retrieve or deliver the boys, she has waited, eyes averted, outside the front door, and now, entering this bedroom, his and Jade’s, Susannah appears struck by emotions David could probably have predicted: jealousy, confusion, vengefulness. She gives the rug a perfunctory once-over, but the unmade bed gets her complete attention, and then, oh shit, an actual, daunting bra of Jade’s, silky cups upturned, and Susannah sits down on the rug and begins to cry. David rubs at his ill-shaven chin, weathering the storm, riding it out on his end of the rug. At last her crying peters out in breath-catches and little cries. He tears a tissue from a box on the nightstand and offers it.

“Thanks.” She blows her nose and shudders.

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“It wouldn’t help.”

“Want to try?”

“You tricked me. You went ahead and made this other life, and you’re hopeful. I was used to you being more or less despairing. It wasn’t like I wanted you to despair. But I was used to things going wrong for you. With women.”

He doesn’t intend to sit down beside her. On his feet he has some distance from the rug’s malign influence, which she’s succumbed to. At the same time, it’s kind of sexy, standing over Susannah like this, her head at crotch level. He quashes the thought.

“If you were your old self, you’d never trust her again. She lied! But I don’t understand how she got you in the first place. She might be able to get you back. How would I know how much you can forgive?”

“Suse, can you just—”

“See, I always thought that in life there was one person you got to know everything about. You get your one person, and it doesn’t really matter whether you end up living with them or not, because the way you know that person, nothing can undo or diminish it. There’s one single person out of everyone on earth who is your own private safe person, who you can talk to in your head and know what they’ll say. After we broke up, you were still my one safe person. You know? But if you can turn out to have a Republican wife and blame a run of bad luck on an evil rug, I guess I don’t know anything about anyone, not really. I’m in love and now you’ve made it so I have to distrust him. Will you tell me something, David? Tell me. Did I know you? Was I your person?”

Because if he answered her honestly the answer would be no, because he can’t bear to hurt her, from reckless solicitude, he rubs a palm down his fly. “Suse. Do you want to do something?”

“I want to do something,” she says, standing. “I want”—and, optimistically unzipping, he’s staggered by her swift backhanded blow, by the moan of protest that is neither his nor hers, causing them to turn, the ex-husband and — wife, to find their child standing in the doorway in his pajama bottoms. “Honey,” David says, “Shane,” but after a long and disbelieving gaze that pivots from mother to father and father to mother, Shane bolts. David touches his jaw and says, “He saw that. He was right there.”

“Did he see what was before? The zipper?”

“I don’t think so.” But he’s not sure.

“David. Let me take him home. I need to talk to him. Let me get this.”

He lets her get this. Edmund, discovered in the boys’ room, turns piously cooperative, as if to preserve what’s left of his family’s sanity. Jackets are tugged on, backpacks snatched up, as if the house is on fire, and Susannah is hustling both boys out the front door when they encounter Jade. The women’s voices spar in a little ecstasy of mutual dislike. David stands there, apprehensively feeling his jaw, holding his own, if barely, against an onslaught of guilt. Before it can drag him under, he sits down. Here is the rug. He straightens glasses knocked cockeyed by Susannah’s blow and trails a hand over its nap. Threads ran one way, a warp, and another, a woof. Jade slams the front door. “Okay, what’s going on?” she calls. “Why was Susannah so weird? She goes, ‘Make him put some ice on it.’” He closes his eyes to postpone her interrogation, meanwhile attending to the throbbing in his jaw.

“Shit!”

Jade does the instinctive hopping step that keeps one foot from touching down, and in the second before he understands she’s in pain he thinks she is goofily performing her fear of radioactive contamination.

“What’s wrong?”

“I stepped on something. Was there glass in this rug? Oh, why didn’t we vacuum?”

The trash can: the toxic seethe of its debris. David is half sick with guilt, driving her to the emergency room, because some shard from that roiling cauldron has driven itself into her darling foot, because he brought the thing home in order to impress her, to prove he is not merely a dutiful soldier slogging through muddy depositions but a hero capable of wresting beauty from chaos. The doctor is a sleekly handsome Indian with a tranquilizing lilt, but Jade won’t melt, and when the doctor leaves the cubicle and David explains in a low voice that the rug is behind everything that has happened, she shivers and commands, “Shut up.” The handsome doctor returns, bestowing on David a discreet frown of sympathy, an acknowledgment that Jade is not the only person suffering in this harshly illumined, far-from-soundproof cell. To explain that he’s fine, David touches his swollen jaw with two fingers, This?, and shrugs, This is nothing, and now, when the doctor frowns, there is no sympathy in it: Submit to spousal abuse if you will. A blush creeps up Jade’s throat and tints her ears, her shame exacerbated by the doctor’s indifference, for he, assuming she is a highly troubled individual, ably ignores her, bending to his task. Extracted from her heel, brandished under the hooded medical lamp, is a sliver of rusted metal. No, she can’t remember when she had her last tetanus shot. Hatred figures in the look she gives David when the needle goes in.

“We need to talk.”

“I have to get to the office.”

“With that foot?”

Left foot in a steep high heel, the injured right mummified in stretchy bandages and jammed into an old moccasin, she faces him asymmetrically. “Do you know why they do this? Make the bandages this sick beige? It’s the shade of cadaverous Caucasian flesh. It’s an intimation of mortality. It’s so you wrap your rotting foot in your own future dead skin.” In frustration, she kicks off the high heel and tries a flat. “I did hear what you said, and yes of course we’ll talk, but I seriously have no time, this morning’s the Kelsis thing.”

“Kelsis?” he calls. “Kelsis?”

“The thing,” she calls over her shoulder. “The thing I told you about.”

The thing she didn’t tell him about.

He needs to collect his wits, to shave skittishly around the swollen hinge of his jaw, to negotiate rush hour traffic with Zen serenity, to sit down at his desk and chart the decline of the black-footed ferret. He needs the escapism inherent in any ordinarily bad day. After lunch, he opens a fat packet that informs him he’s been hit with a SLAPP suit. Nobody else in EPIC is named in the suit, only him. He is married to a lawyer, and would solicit her ultracompetent advice except that, this morning, she said Kelsis, and Kelsis is a small mining operation near the Arizona border whose radioactive runoff has been turning up in wells in the next county. Even worse, his records for the prospective Kelsis suit, like all the files on his computer, have vanished. He goes through his desk drawers hoping to find penciled notes or a backup disk holding some pertinent trace, but no, there’s nothing, and in trying to reconstruct the basic outlines of the case, he loses track of time, and it’s well after midnight when he turns the key in his front door. As was his habit on certain dire nights in his previous two marriages, he eats a bowl of children’s cereal over the kitchen sink, then swallows a couple of aspirin to mute the ache in his jaw and the pain in his back, which has bothered him more in the last twenty-four hours than it has since he fell. When he glances into their room, Jade is sitting up in bed, a legal pad against her knees, spectacles on her nose, and though she knows he’s there, she doesn’t stop writing. This means either that she’s hot after an idea or that last night’s grievance — the belief that he was responsible for the needle’s piercing her foot — has festered during ten professionally hostile hours at her firm. The rug has disappeared from the floor, he notes, and notes, in himself, the absence of any reaction to the loss, for which Jade will manufacture some credible explanation, but why does she get to preside over what goes, what stays? The rug was his catastrophe, he should say how it ends. The door to the boys’ room is ajar, their nightlight on, Shane’s bed a mess, because Shane is a poor sleeper, rousing and turning at the slightest of sounds — the back of his mother’s hand connecting with his father’s jaw, say. Neither boy is there, of course. There’s no telling when Susannah will entrust them to this household again. The nightlight is a nautilus shell shielding a miniature bulb, and by its glow, David sits in the corner, wishing he could get the boys back. If he only had his boys here, asleep in their beds, he would know how to begin to set the rest of his world right. He would start with the sleep of his children and work outward.

When he comes back into the bedroom, Jade continues to scrawl her legal pad with corporate-attorney trickery, reasons radioactive well water is good for you, maybe, and if not that, then some other bullshit David or someone like him will have to contest, and with nothing left to lose, he lets his anger show. “What did you do with it?”

She takes off her glasses, folds them, sets them on the nightstand. He might be some witness she’s treating to this stilted performance whose essence is her offended disbelief. “How did we get here?” When he doesn’t answer she says, “You wanted it gone. You told Susannah things started going wrong when it came into the house.”

“When did you talk to Susannah?”

“I called her to ask what was up last night. Why she rushed off. How your face got hurt.”

“What did she say?”

He’s invested this question with telltale anxiety, and she frowns. “She said to ask you.”

“Tossing the ball around, and Shane threw a wild one. It looks worse than it is.”

She regards him gravely. “Also she wanted you to know Nina called. From Paris. She’s flying home and she intends to take Edmund back with her. Evidently I’m not to be trusted with either child.”

“But the boys have never been apart.”

“It looks like they will be, now. Because I’ll make them say bedtime prayers for the health of Dick Cheney. I’ll knit them little American flag sweaters, and mock Darwin.” She shakes her head. “When you didn’t come home, and you didn’t call, and your cell went right to voicemail, I couldn’t just sit here stewing, could I? I followed your map. That road is awful, it took me an hour each way, but I thought things would calm down if you knew the rug had gone back where it came from. ‘Evil.’ Susannah said you said, ‘Evil.’ You’ve been so irrational about the rug.”

What he wants to say: The whole world could have gone on lying. Gone on fucking up weather and watersheds and the marrow of little kids’ bones, and I could have stayed steady, I would have been able to bear it, day after day, as long as there was you, here in our house, you to come home to, you whole and sane and beautiful and telling me the truth. What he says, keeping his tone even: “Can you see why that bothers me? You should have waited to talk to me, we could have decided together how to deal with the rug. That’s how people who trust each other behave.”

“No, something needed to be done. You can trust me to see things as they are, and to act. You were used to such compliance, with Susannah. After her, Nina, Shmina, who from everything you say and despite her supposed feminist credentials was basically this mouse. Now there’s me, and, right, you and I don’t know everything about each other, and we never will, and what matters is how — you’re leaving? David?”

The road unwinds before him in moonlight, rough as ever, and he takes its curves too fast, absorbing the adrenaline hit whenever a clump of cholla looms in the headlights, or a redoubt of sandstone. Once a coyote ghosts across the road, and the station wagon fishtails to a halt, swallowed in its own dust. The wipers squeal, clearing the haze, dirty rivulets rippling horizontally as David picks up speed, the desert laid out for him in luminous swipes, loss a particular taste in his mouth, a rising bitterness he can’t swallow away, his heartbeat manic, though it had been calm enough while he stood listening to Jade. There are no boys in the car to heed the warning, but David lectures. Careful, careful. You’ll get there. You’ll find it. It was there once, it will be there again. Have a little faith.

But the oil drum perched on the spur of rock is empty, turned over on its side, rocking when he nudges it with a toe, its trash blown over the rim, he supposes, scattered across the floor of the arroyo, rags fluttering from prickly pear, shards variously glinting. She left the rug here, she said. That must have been around sunset. It’s unlikely that anyone has driven the road since then. The wind has been hard at work, lashing and moaning: Could the rug have been lifted and sailed over the rim? Here is the trail, wide enough to suit deer or two small boys but tricky for a grown man, stones kicked loose by his missteps, preceding him in clattering showers, his descent entirely audible, if there was anyone to hear. The interior of that listing refrigerator is pierced by spokes of moonlight: bullet holes. Paperbacks cartwheel past, shedding pages. When he picks his way among the wreckage, he meets another moon, hanging in the unsmashed headlight of a wrecked truck, the starry refraction of light coming from some earthly source. David makes for that glow eking out from under the tilted wing of an airplane. The throb in his jaw is worse, the pain in his back nagging, but apart from that, he feels good, looser, a little winded but freer, defiant, trying to recall the last time he pursued something, some aim or intention, under the night sky. Twenty years ago. With the other four, his brothers, prowling a mesa in the dark, tossing survey stakes over the rim after pouring sugar in a backhoe’s gas tank. Nothing he does now can compare with the satisfaction of that sabotage, with its clean, unequivocal high. He’s grown old, tame as office air. Jade had revived him, for a time. Ow. When a chip of stone grazes his chest, its sting — and the primal weirdness of being struck by a flying object in the dark — brings David entirely awake, but when he squints around, there’s only the gusting sand, cholla rearing up spookily to his left, his shadow dipping and lengthening as he hikes toward the glow — a campfire, maybe. Something pelts his chest again, then his arm, and before he can shield his eyes he’s assailed by a whirlwind of grit and twigs. Bewildered, he walks right into it, grazed, poked, showered with debris, leaves, twigs, and flying sand. If she were with him, Jade would hide her face against his chest, and he’d shelter her as best he could, her ferocious lawyer-hair lashing his face, and even with the wind whipping and scouring they could protect each other. David reels along blindly, and from the way his lungs strain he understands he must be shouting, though he can’t hear himself over the wind. This is what he has seen happen to small bald-headed children: death blows you away while you struggle, the truth, the outrage, dying in your throat. Flinging a last handful of grit, the blast relents. David has passed among the cholla unscathed, and here is the shelter under the airplane’s wing, from which a lantern is suspended, shining down on a boy and a girl, entwined on his rug, its arabesques dimmed, its choir of blues bleached to lunar grays and faint violet. The boy is fast asleep, but not the girl. The girl is awake. She tightens her arms around her boyfriend, and lifts her chin defiantly. She’s got the inky hair favored by punked-out runaways, a fright wig trailing sharp fangs over her forehead, the pinched-together brows and eyeholes whose expression can’t be deciphered. When he takes another step toward his rug, she flashes a palm. Stop. He takes another step, and gets both palms. She wants nothing more than to stop him, and he stops. It all stops, moon, love, breath, heartbeat. David sprawls there, feeling the hardness of the ground, the nerve-revival of panic, the terror that she won’t know what to do, that she’s stoned and can’t help. The wind dies down and the moonlight blinks and he doesn’t know what comes next on earth. No one knows. But there are footsteps coming toward him, and if there is any chance of saving a life through the sheer force of one’s love for it, he is already saved.