Notes from the Fog: Stories

Cold Little Bird

It started with bedtime. A coldness. A formality.

Martin and Rachel tucked the boy in, as was their habit, then stooped to kiss him good night.

“Please don’t do that,” he said, turning to face the wall.

They took it as teasing, flopped onto his bed to nuzzle and tickle him.

The boy turned rigid, endured the cuddle, then barked out at them, “I really don’t like that!”

“Jonah?” Martin said, sitting up.

“I don’t want your help at bedtime anymore,” he said. “I’m not a baby. You have Lester. Go cuddle with him.”

“Sweetheart,” Rachel said. “We’re not helping you. We’re just saying good night. You like kisses, right? Don’t you like kisses and cuddles? You big silly.”

Jonah hid under the blankets. A classic pout. Except that he wasn’t a pouter, he wasn’t a hider. He was a reserved boy who generally took a scientific interest in the tantrums and emotional extravagances of other children, marveling at them as though they were some strange form of street theater.

Martin tried to tickle the blanketed lump of person that was his son. He didn’t know what part of Jonah he was touching. He just dug at him with a stiff hand, thinking a laugh would come out, some sound of pleasure. It used to work. One stab of the finger and the kid exploded with giggles. But Jonah didn’t speak, didn’t move.

“We love you so much. You know?” Martin said. “So we like to show it. It feels good.”

“Not to me. I don’t feel that way.”

“What way? What do you mean?”

They sat with him, perplexed, and tried to rub his back, but he’d rolled to the edge of the bed, nearly flattening himself against the wall.

“I don’t love you,” Jonah said.

“Oh, now,” Martin said. “You’re just tired. No need to say that sort of stuff. Get some rest.”

“You told me to tell the truth, and I’m telling the truth. I. Don’t. Love. You.”

This happened. Kids tested their attachments. They tried to push you away to see just how much it would take to really lose you. As a parent, you took the blow, even sharpened the knife yourself before handing it to the little fiends, who stepped right up and plunged. Or so Martin had heard.

They hovered by Jonah’s bed, assuring him that it had been a long day—although the day had been entirely unremarkable—and he would feel better in the morning.

Martin felt like a robot saying these things. He felt like a robot thinking them. There was nothing to do but leave the boy there, let him sleep it off.

Downstairs, they cleaned the kitchen in silence. Rachel was troubled or not, he couldn’t tell, and it was better not to check. In some way, Martin was captivated. If he were Jonah, ten years old and reasonably smart, starting to sniff out the world and find his angle, this might be something worth exploring. Getting rid of the soft, warm, dumb providers who spun opportunity around you relentlessly, answering your every need. Good play, Jonah. But how do you follow such a strong, definitive opening move? What now?

Over the next few weeks, Jonah stuck by his statement, wandering through their lives like some prisoner of war who’d been trained not to talk. He endured his parents, leaving for school in the morning with scarcely a goodbye. Upon coming home, he put away his coat and shoes, did his homework without prompting. He helped himself to snacks, dragging a chair into the kitchen so that he could climb on the counter. He got his own glass, filling it with water at the sink. When he was done eating, he loaded his dishes in the dishwasher. Martin, working from home in the afternoons, watched all this, impressed but bothered. He kept offering to help, but Jonah always said that he was fine, he could handle it. At bedtime, Martin and Rachel still fussed over Lester, who, at six years old, regressed and babified himself in order to drink up the extra attention. Jonah insisted on saying good night with no kiss, no hug. He shut his door and disappeared every night at 8 p.m.

When Martin or Rachel caught Jonah’s eye, the boy forced a smile at them. But it was so obviously fake. Could a boy his age do that?

“Of course,” Rachel said. “You think he doesn’t know how to pretend?”

“No, I know he can pretend. But this seems different. I mean, to have to pretend that he’s happy to see us. First of all, what the fuck is he so upset about? And, second, it just seems so kind of… grown-up. In the worst possible way. A fake smile. It’s a tool one uses with strangers.”

“Well, I don’t know. He’s ten. He has social skills. He can hide his feelings. That’s not such an advanced thing to do.”

Martin studied his wife.

“Okay, so you think everything’s fine?”

“I think maybe he’s growing up and you don’t like it.”

“And you like it? That’s what you’re saying? You like this?”

His voice had gone up. He had lost control for a minute there, and, as per motherfucking usual, it was a deal breaker. Rachel put up her hand, and she was gone. From the other room, he heard her say, “I’m not going to talk to you when you’re like this.”

Okay, he thought. Goodbye. We’ll talk some other time when I’m not like this, aka never.

Jonah, it turned out, reserved this behavior solely for his parents. A probing note to his teacher revealed nothing. He was fine in school, did not act withdrawn, had successfully led a team project on Antarctica, and seemed to run and play with his friends during recess. Run and play? What animal were they discussing here? Everybody loved Jonah, was the verdict, along with some bullshit about how happy he seemed. “Seemed” was just the thing. Seemed! If you were an idiot who didn’t know the boy, who had no grasp of human behavior.

At home, Jonah doted on his brother, read to him, played with him, even let Lester climb on his back for rides around the house, all fairly verboten in the old days, when Jonah’s interest in Lester had only ever been theoretical. Lester was thrilled by it all. He suddenly had a new friend, the older brother he worshipped, who used to ignore him. Life was good. But to Martin it felt like a calculated display. With this performance of tenderness toward his brother, Jonah seemed to be saying, “Look, this is what you no longer get. See? It’s over for you. Go fuck yourself.”

Martin took it too personally, he knew. Maybe because it was personal.

One night, when Jonah hadn’t touched his dinner, they were asking him if he would like something else to eat, and, because he wasn’t answering, and really had not been answering for some weeks now, other than in one-word responses, curt and formal, Martin and Rachel abandoned their usual rules, the guideposts of parenting they’d clung to, and moved through a list of bribes. They dangled the promise of ice cream, and then those monstrosities passing for Popsicles, shaped like animals with chocolate faces or hats, which used to turn Jonah craven and desperate. When Jonah remained silent and sort of washed-out looking, Martin offered his son candy. He could have some right now. If only he’d fucking say something.

“It’s just that you’re all in his face,” Rachel said to him later. “How’s he supposed to breathe?”

“You think my desire for him to speak is making him silent?”

“It’s probably not helping.”

“Whereas your approach is so amazing.”

“My approach? You mean being his mother? Loving him for who he is? Keeping him safe? Yeah, it is pretty amazing.”

He turned over to sleep while Rachel clipped on her book light.

They’d ride this one out in silence, apparently.

Yes, well. They’d written their own vows, promising to be “intensely honest” with each other. They had not specifically said that they would hold up each other’s flaws to the most rigorous scrutiny, calling out each other’s smallest mistakes, like fact checkers, believing, perhaps, that the marriage would thrive only if all personal errors and misdeeds were rooted out of it. This mission had gone unstated.

In the morning, when Martin got up, Jonah sat reading while Lester played soldiers on the rug. Lester was fully dressed, his backpack near the door. There was no possible way that Lester had done this on his own. Obviously, Jonah had dressed his brother, emptied the boy’s backpack of yesterday’s crap art from the first-grade praise farm he attended, and readied it for a new day. Months ago, they’d asked Jonah to perform this role in the morning, to dress and prepare his brother, so that they could sleep in, and Jonah had complied a few times, but half-heartedly, with a certain mysterious cost to little Lester, who was often speechless and tear-streaked by the time they found him. The chore had quickly lapsed, and usually Martin awoke to a hungry, half-naked Lester, waiting for his help.

Today, Lester seemed happy. There was no sign of crying.

“Good morning, Daddy,” he said.

“Hello there, Les, my friend. Sleep okay?”

“Jonah made me breakfast. I had juice and Cheerios. I brought in my own dishes.”

“Way to go! Thank you.”

Martin figured he’d play it casual, not draw too much attention to anything.

“Good morning, champ,” he said to Jonah. “What are you reading?”

Martin braced himself for silence, for stillness, for a child who hadn’t heard or who didn’t want to answer. But Jonah looked at him.

“It’s a book called The Short. It’s a novel,” he said, and then he resumed reading.

A fat bolt of lightning filled the cover. A boy ran beneath it. The title lettering was achieved graphically with one long wire, a plug trailing off the cover.

“Oh, yeah?” Martin said. “What’s it about? Tell me about it.”

There was a long pause this time. Martin went into the kitchen to get his coffee started. He popped back out to the living room and snapped his fingers.

“Jonah, hello. Your book. What’s it about?”

Jonah spoke quietly. His little flannel shirt was buttoned up to the collar, as if he were headed out into a blizzard. Martin almost heard a kind of apology in his voice.

“Since I have to leave for school in fifteen minutes, and since I was hoping to get to page one hundred this morning, would it be okay if I didn’t describe it to you? You can look it up on Amazon.”

Martin told Rachel about this later in the morning, the boy’s unsettling calm, his odd response.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, good for him, right? He wanted to read, and he told you that. So what?”

“Huh,” Martin said.

Rachel was busy cleaning. She hadn’t looked at him. Their argument last night had been either forgotten or stored for later activation. He’d find out. She seemed engrossed by a panicked effort at tidying, as if guests were arriving any second, as if their house were going to be inspected by the fucking UN. Martin followed her around while they talked, because if he didn’t she’d roam out of earshot and the conversation would expire.

“He just seems like a stranger to me,” Martin said, trying to add a lightness to his voice so she wouldn’t hear it as a complaint.

Rachel stopped cleaning. “Yeah.”

For a moment, it seemed that she might agree with him and they’d see this thing similarly.

“But he’s not a stranger. I don’t know. He’s growing up. You should be happy that he’s reading. At least he wasn’t begging to be on the stupid iPad, and it seems like he’s talking again. He wanted to read, and you’re freaking out. Honestly.”

Yes, well. You had these creatures in your house. You fed them. You cleaned them. And here was the person you’d made them with. She was beautiful, probably. She was smart, probably. It was impossible to know anymore. He looked at her through an unclean filter, for sure. He could indulge a great anger toward her that would suddenly vanish if she touched his hand. What was wrong? He’d done something or he hadn’t done something. Figure it the fuck out, Martin thought. Root out the resentment. Apologize so hard it leaks from her body. Then drink the liquid. Or use it in a soup. Whatever.

Jonah came and went, such a weird bird of a boy, so serious. Martin tried to tread lightly. He tried not to tread at all. Better to float overhead, to allow the cold remoteness of his elder son to freeze their home. He studied Rachel’s caution, her distance-giving, her respect, the confidence she possessed that he clearly lacked, even as he saw the toll it took on her, what had become of this person who needed to touch her young son and just couldn’t.

Then, one afternoon, he forgot himself. He came home with groceries and saw Jonah sprawled on the rug with Lester, setting up his Lego figures for him, such an impossibly small person, dressed so carefully by his own hand, his son—it still seemed ridiculous and a miracle to Martin that there’d be such a thing as a son, that a little creature in this world would be his to protect and befriend. Without thinking about it, he sat down next to Jonah and took the whole of the boy in his arms. He didn’t want to scare him, and he didn’t want to hurt him, but he needed this boy to feel what it was like to be held, to really be swallowed up in a father’s arms. Maybe he could squeeze all the aloofness out of the boy, just choke it out until it was gone.

Jonah gave nothing back. He went limp, and the hug didn’t work the way Martin had hoped. You couldn’t do it alone. The person being hugged had to do something, to be something. The person being hugged had to fucking exist. And whoever this was, whoever he was holding, felt like nothing.

Finally, Martin released him, and Jonah straightened his hair. He did not look happy.

“I know that you and Mom are in charge and you make the rules,” Jonah said. “But even though I’m only ten, don’t I have a right not to be touched?”

The boy sounded so reasonable.

“You do,” Martin said. “I apologize.”

“I keep asking, but you don’t listen.”

“I listen.”

“You don’t. Because you keep doing it. So does Mom. You want to treat me like a stuffed animal, and I don’t want to be treated like that.”

“No, I don’t, buddy.”

“I don’t want to be called buddy. Or mister. Or champ. I don’t do that to you. You wouldn’t want me always inventing some new ridiculous name for you.”

“Okay.” Martin put up his hands in surrender. “No more nicknames. I promise. It’s just that you’re my son and I like to hug you. We like to hug you.”

“I don’t want you to anymore. And I’ve said that.”

“Well, too bad,” Martin said, trying to be lighthearted, and, as if to prove his point, he grabbed Lester, and Lester squealed with delight, squirming in his father’s arms.

Do you see how this used to work? Martin wanted to say to Jonah. This was you once, this was us.

Jonah seemed genuinely puzzled. “It doesn’t matter to you that I don’t like it?”

“It matters, but you’re wrong. You can be wrong, you know. You’ll die, without affection. I’m not kidding. You will actually dry up and die.”

Again, he found he had to explain love to this boy, to detail what it was like when you felt a desperate connection with someone else, how you wanted to hold that person and just crush him with hugs. But as Martin fought through the difficult and ridiculous discussion, he felt as if he were having a conversation with a lawyer. A lawyer, a scold, a little prick of a person. Whom he wanted to hug less and less. Maybe it’d be simpler just to give Jonah what he wanted. What he thought he wanted.

Jonah seemed pensive, concerned.

“Does any of that make sense to you?” Martin asked.

“It’s just that I’d rather not say things that could hurt someone,” Jonah said.

“Well… that’s good. That’s how you should feel.”

“I’d rather not have to say anything about you and Mom. At school. To Mr. Fourenay.”

Mr. Fourenay was what they called a “feelings doctor.” He was paid, certainly not very much, to take the kids and their feelings very, very seriously. Martin and Rachel had trouble taking him seriously. He looked like a man who had subsisted, for a very long time, on a strict diet of the feelings of children. Gutted, wasted, and soft.

“Jonah, what are you talking about?”

“About you touching me when I don’t want you to. I don’t want to have to mention that to anyone at school. I really don’t.”

Martin stood up. It was as if a hand had moved inside him.

He stared at Jonah, who held his gaze patiently, waiting for an answer.

“Message received. I’ll discuss it with Mom.”

“Thank you.”

Without really thinking about it, Martin had crafted an adulthood that was essentially friendless. There were, of course, the friends of the marriage, who knew him only as part of a couple—the dour, rotten part—and thus they were ruled out for anything remotely candid, like a confession of what the fuck had just gone down in his own home. Before the children came, he’d managed, sometimes erratically, to maintain preposterous phone relationships with several male friends. Deep, searching, facially sweaty conversations on the phone with other semi-articulate, vaguely unhappy men. In general, these friendships had heated up and found their purpose around a courtship or a breakup, when an aria of complaint or desire could be harmonized by some pathetic accomplice. But after Jonah was born, and then Lester, phone calls with friends had become out of the question. There was just never a time when it was okay, or even appealing, to talk on the phone. When he was home, he was in shark mode, cruising slowly and brutally through the house, cleaning and clearing, scrubbing food from rugs, folding and storing tiny items of clothing, and, if no one was looking, occasionally stopping at his laptop to see if his prospects had suddenly been lifted by some piece of tremendous fortune, delivered via email. When he finally came to rest, in a barf-covered chair, he was done for the night. He poured several beers, in succession, right onto his pleasure center, which could remain dry and withered no matter what came soaking down.

The gamble of a friendless adulthood, whether by accident or design, was that your partner would step up to the role. She for you, and you for her.

But when Martin thought about Jonah’s threat—blackmail, really—he knew he couldn’t tell Rachel. In a certain light, the only light that mattered, he was in the wrong. The instructions were already out that they were not to get all huggy with Jonah, and here he’d gone and done it anyway. Rachel would just ask him what he had expected and why he was surprised that Jonah had lashed out at him for not respecting his boundaries.

So, yeah, maybe, maybe that was all true. But there was the other part. The threat that came out of the boy. The quiet force of it. To even mention that Jonah had threatened to report them for touching him ghosted an irreversible suspicion into people’s minds. You couldn’t talk about it. You couldn’t mention it. It seemed better to not even think it, to do the work that would begin to block such an event from memory.

The boys were talking quietly on the couch one afternoon a few days later. Martin was in the next room, and he caught the sweet tones, the two voices he loved, that he couldn’t even bear. For a minute he forgot what was going on and listened to the life he’d helped make. They were speaking like little people, not kids, back and forth, a real discussion. Jonah was explaining something to Lester, and Lester was asking questions, listening patiently. It was heartbreaking.

He snuck out to see the boys on the couch, Lester cuddled up against his older brother, who had a big book in his hands. A grown-up one. On the cover, instead of a boy dashing beneath a bolt of lightning, were the good old Twin Towers. The title, Lies, was glazed in blood, which dripped down the towers themselves.

Oh, motherfucking hell.

“What’s this?” Martin asked. “What are you reading there?”

“A book about 9/11. Who caused it.”

Martin grabbed it, thumbed the pages. “Where’d you get it?”

“From Amazon. With my birthday gift card.”

“Hmm. Do you believe it?”

“What do you mean? It’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“That the Jews caused 9/11 and they all stayed home that day so they wouldn’t get killed.”

Martin excused Lester. Told him to skedaddle and, yes, it was fine to watch TV, even though watching time hadn’t started yet. Just go, go.

“Jonah,” he whispered. “Jonah, stop. This is not okay. Not even remotely okay. First of all, Jonah, you have to listen to me. This is insane. This is a book by an insane person.”

“You know him?”

“No, I don’t know him. I don’t have to. Listen to me, you know that we’re Jewish, right? You, me, Mom, Lester. We’re Jewish.”

“Not really.”

“What do you mean, not really?”

“You don’t go to synagogue. You don’t seem to worship. You never talk about it.”

“That’s not all that matters.”

“Last month was Yom Kippur and you didn’t fast. You didn’t go to services. You don’t ever say Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah.”

“Those are rituals. You don’t need to observe them to be part of the faith.”

“But do you know anything about it?”

“9/11?”

“No, being Jewish. Do you know what it means and what you’re supposed to believe and how you’re supposed to act?”

“I do, yes. I have a pretty good idea.”

“Then tell me.”

“Jonah.”

“What? I’m just wondering how you can call yourself Jewish.”

“How? Are you fucking kidding me?”

He needed to walk away before he did something.

“Okay, Jonah, it’s actually really simple. I’ll tell you how. Because everyone else in the world would call me Jewish. With no debate. None. Because of my parents and their parents, and their parents, including whoever got turned to dust in the war. Zayde Anshel’s whole family. You walk by their picture every day in the hall. Do you think you’re not related to them? And because I was called a kike in junior high school, and high school, and college, and probably beyond that, right up to this fucking day. And because if they started rounding up Jews again they’d take one look at our name and they’d know. And that’s you, too, mister. They would come for us and kill us. Okay? You.”

He was shaking his fist in his son’s face. Just old-school shouting. He wanted to do more. He wanted to tear something apart. There was no safe way to behave right now.

“They would kill you. And you’d be dead. You’d die.”

“Martin?” Rachel said. “What’s going on?”

Of course. There she was. Lurking. He had no idea how long she’d been standing there, what she’d heard.

Martin wasn’t done. Jonah seemed fascinated, his eyes wide as his father ranted.

“Even if you said that you hated Jews, too, and that Jews were evil and caused all the suffering in the world, they would look at you and know for sure that you were Jewish, for sure! Buddy, champ, mister”—just spitting these names at his son—“because only a Jew, they would say, only a Jew would betray his own people like that.”

Jonah looked at him. “I understand,” he said. He didn’t seem shaken. He didn’t seem disturbed. Had he heard? How could he really understand?

The boy picked up the book and thumbed through it.

“This is just a different point of view. You always say that I should have an open mind, that I should think for myself. You say that to me all the time.”

“Yes, I do. You’re right.” Martin was trembling.

“Then do I have your permission to keep reading it?”

“No, you absolutely don’t. Not this time. Permission denied.”

Rachel was shaking her head.

“Do you see what he’s reading? Do you see it?” he shouted.

He waved the book at her, and she just looked at him with no expression at all.

After the kids were in bed, and the house had been quietly put back together, Rachel said they needed to talk.

Yes, we do, he thought, and about time.

“Honestly,” she said. “It’s upsetting that he had that book, but the way you spoke to him? I don’t want you going anywhere near him.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not for you to say. You’re his mom, not mine. You want to file papers? You want to seek custody? Good luck, Mrs. Freeze. I’m his father. And you didn’t hear it. You didn’t hear it all. You have no fucking idea.”

“I heard it, and I heard you. Martin, you need help. You’re, I don’t know, depressed. You’re self-pitying. You think everything is some concerted attack on you. For the record, I am worried about Jonah. Really worried. Something is seriously wrong. There is no debate there. But you’re just the worst possible partner in that worry—the fucking worst—because you make everything harder, and we can’t discuss it without analyzing your feelings. You act wounded and hurt, and we’re all supposed to feel sorry for you. For you! This isn’t about you. So shut down the pity party already.”

When this kind of talk came on, Martin knew to listen. This was the scold she’d been winding up for, and if he could endure it, and cop to it, there might be some release and clarity at the other end. A part of him found these outbursts from Rachel thrilling, and in some ways it was possible that he co-engineered them, without really thinking about it. Performed the sullen and narcissistic dance moves that, over time, would yield this kind of eruption from her. His wife was alive. She cared. Even if it seemed that she might sort of hate him.

He circled the house for a while, cooling off, letting the attack—no, no, the truth—settle. Any argument or even discussion to the contrary would just feed her point and read as the defensive bleating of a cornered man. Any speech, that is, except admission, contrition, and apology, the three horsemen.

Which was who he brought back into the room with him.

Rachel was in bed reading, eyes locked onto the page. She didn’t seem even remotely ready to surrender her anger.

“Hey, listen,” Martin said. “So I know you’re mad, but I just want to say that I agree with everything you said. I’m scared and I’m worried and I’m sorry.”

He let this settle. It needed to spread, to sink in. She needed to realize that he was agreeing with her.

It was hard to tell, but it seemed that some of her anger, with nothing to meet it, was draining out.

“And,” he continued. He waited for her to look up, which she finally did. “You’ll think I’m kidding, and I know you don’t even want to hear this right now, but it’s true, and I have to say it. It made me a little bit horny to hear all that.”

She shook her head at the bad joke, which at least meant there was room to move here.

“Shut up,” she said.

This was the way in. He took it.

“You shut up.”

“Sorry to yell, Martin. I am. I just—this is so hard. I’m sorry.”

She probably wasn’t. This was simply the script back in, to the two of them united, and they both knew it. One day, one of them would choose not to play. It would be so easy not to say their lines.

“No, it’s okay,” he said to her, climbing onto the bed. “I get it. Listen, let’s take the little man to the shop. Get him fixed. I’ll call some doctors in the morning.”

They hugged. An actual hug, between two consenting people. A novelty in this house.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m terrified. I don’t know what’s happening. I look at him and want so much to just grab him, but he’s not there anymore. What has he done to himself?”

“Maybe he just needs minor surgery. Does that work on 9/11 truthers?”

“Oh, look,” she said to him softly. “You’re back. The real you. We missed you.”

They talked a little and snuggled closer to each other in bed. For a moment, their good feeling came on them—a version of it, anyway. It felt mild and transitory, but he would take it. It was nice. He was in bed with his wife, and they would figure this out.

“Listen,” he said to her. “Do you want to just shag a pony right now, get back on track?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel gross. I feel depressed.”

“I feel gross, too. Let’s do it. Two gross people licking each other’s buttons.”

She went to the bathroom and got the jar of enabler. They took their positions on the bed.

He hoped he could. He hoped he could. He hoped he could.

He was cold and insecure, so he left his shirt on. And his socks.

They used a cream. They used their hands. They used an object or two. During the brief strain of actual fornication they persisted with casual conversation about the next day’s errands. In the early days of their marriage, this had seemed wicked and sexy, some ironic ballast against the animal greed. Now it just seemed efficient, and the animal greed no longer appeared. Minus the wet spot at the end, and the minor glow one occasionally felt, their sex wasn’t so different from riding the subway.

It turned out that there was a deep arsenal of medical professionals who would be delighted to consult on the problem of a disturbed child. Angry, depressed, anxious, remote, bizarre. Even a Jew-hating Jewish child who might very well be dead inside. Only when his parents looked at him, though. Only when his parents spoke to him. Important parameter for the differential.

They zeroed in on recommendations with the help of a high-level participant in this world, a friend named Maureen, whose three exquisitely exceptional children had consumed, and spat back out, various kinds of psych services ever since they could walk. Each of the kids seemed to romance a different diagnosis every month, so Maureen had a pretty good idea of who fixed what and for how much goddam moolah.

When they told her, in pale terms, about Jonah, she, as a connoisseur of alienating behavior from the young, got excited.

“This is so The Fifth Child,” she said. “Did you guys read that? I mean, you probably shouldn’t read that. But did you? It’s like a fiction novel. I don’t think it really happened. But it’s still fascinating.”

Rachel had read it. Happy couple with four children and perfect life have fifth child, leading to less-perfect life. Much, much, much, much less perfect. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, grief, and sorrow. Not really life at all.

“Yeah, but the kid in that book is a monster,” Rachel said. “So heartless. He’s not real. And he just wants to inflict pain. Jonah wouldn’t hurt anyone. He wants to be alone. Or, not that, but. I don’t know what Jonah wants. He’s not violent, though. Or even mad. I don’t think.”

“All right, but he is hurting you, right?” Maureen said. “I mean, it seems like this is really causing you guys a lot of pain and suffering.”

“I haven’t read the book,” Martin said. “But this isn’t about us. This is about Jonah. His pain, his suffering. We just want to get to the bottom of it. To help him. To give him support.”

In Rachel’s silence he could feel her agreement and, maybe, her surprise that he would, or even could, think this way. He knew what to say now. He wasn’t going to get burned again. But did he believe it? Was it true? He honestly didn’t even know, and he wasn’t so sure it mattered.

The doctor wanted to see them alone first. He told them that it was his job to listen. So they talked, just dumped the thing out on the floor. It was ugly, Martin thought, but it was a rough picture of what was going down. The doctor scribbled away, stopping occasionally to look at them, to really deeply look at them, and nod. Since when had the act of listening turned into such a strange charade?

Then the doctor met with Jonah, to see for himself, pull evidence right from the culprit’s mouth. Martin and Rachel sat in the waiting room and stared at the door. What would the doctor see? Which kid would he get? Were they crazy and this was all just some preteen freak-out?

Finally, the whole gang of them—doctor, parents, and child—gathered to go over the plan, Jonah sitting polite and alert while the future of his brain was discussed. They told him the proposal: a slow ramp of antidepressants, along with weekly therapy, and then, depending, some group work, if that sounded good to Jonah.

Jonah didn’t respond.

“What do you think?” the doctor said. “So you can feel better? And things can maybe go back to normal?”

“I told you, I feel fine,” Jonah said.

“Yes, good! But sometimes when we’re sick we think we’re not. That can be a symptom of being sick—to think we are well.”

“So all the healthy people are just lying to themselves?”

“Well, no, of course not,” the doctor said.

“Right now I never think about hurting myself, but you want to give me a medicine that might make me think about hurting myself?”

The doctor seemed uneasy.

“It’s called suicidal ideation,” Jonah said.

“And how do you know about that?” the doctor asked.

“The Internet.”

The adults all looked at one another.

“How come people are so surprised when someone knows something?” Jonah asked. “Your generation had better get used to how completely unspecial it is that a kid can look up a medicine online and learn about the side effects. That’s not me being precocious. It’s just me using my stupid computer.”

“Okay, good. Well, you’re right, you should be informed, and I want to congratulate you on finding that out for yourself. That’s great work, Jonah.”

Martin watched Jonah. He found himself hoping that the real Jonah would appear, scathing and cold, to show the doctor what they were dealing with.

“Thank you,” Jonah said. “I’m really proud of myself. I didn’t think I could do it, but I just really stuck with it and I kept trying until I succeeded.”

Martin could not tell if the doctor caught the tone of this response.

“But you might have also read that that’s a very uncommon symptom. It hardly ever happens. We just have to warn you and your parents about it, to be on the lookout for it.”

“Maybe. But I have none of the symptoms of depression, either. So why would you risk making me feel like I want to kill myself if I’m not depressed and feel fine?”

“Okay, Jonah. You know what? I’m going to talk to your parents alone now. Does that sound all right? You can wait outside in the play area. There are books and games.”

“Okay,” Jonah said. “I’ll just run and play now.”

“There,” Martin said. “There,” after Jonah had closed the door. “That was it. That’s what he does.”

“Sarcasm? Maybe you don’t much like it, but we don’t treat sarcasm in young people. I think it’s too virulent a strain.” The doctor chuckled.

“No offense,” Martin said to the doctor, “and I’m sure you know your job and this is your specialty, but I think that way of speaking to him—”

“What way?”

“Just, you know, as if he were much younger. He’s just—I don’t think that works with him.”

“And how do you speak to him?”

“Excuse me?”

“How do you speak to him? I’m curious.”

Rachel coughed and seemed uncomfortable. They’d agreed to be open, to let each other have ideas and opinions without feeling mad or threatened.

“It’s true,” she said. “I mean, Martin, I think you have been surprised lately that Jonah is as mature as he is. That seems to have really almost upset you. You know, you really have yelled at him a lot. We can’t just pretend that hasn’t happened.” She looked at him apologetically. “Aside,” she added, “from the scary things that he’s been saying.”

“Is it maturity? I don’t think so. Have I been upset? Fucking hell, yes. And so have you, Rachel. And not because he thinks the Jews caused 9/11 or because he threatened to report us for sexual abuse for trying to hug him, which, for what it’s worth, I spared you from, Rachel. I spared you. Because I didn’t think you could bear it.”

Rachel just stared at him.

“What you’re seeing is a very, very bright boy,” the doctor said.

“Too smart to treat?” Martin asked.

“I think family therapy would be productive. Very challenging, but worthwhile, in my opinion. I could get you a referral. What you’re upset about, in relation to your son, may not fall under the purview of medicine, though.”

“The purview? Really?”

“To be honest, I was on the fence about medication. Whatever is going on with Jonah, it does not present as depression. In my opinion, Jonah does not have a medical condition.”

Martin stood up.

“He’s not sick, he’s just an asshole, is what you’re saying?”

“I think that’s a very dangerous way for a parent to feel,” the doctor said.

“Yeah?” Martin said, standing over the doctor now. “You’re right. You got that one right. Because all of a parent’s feelings are dangerous, you motherfucker.”

At home that night, Martin stuffed a chicken with lemon halves, drenched it in olive oil, scattered a handful of salt over it, and blasted it in the oven until it emerged deeply burnished, with skin as crisp as glass. Rachel poured drinks for the two of them, and they cooked in silence. To Martin, it was a harmless silence. He could trust it, and if he couldn’t, then to hell with it. He wasn’t going to chase down everything unsaid and shout it into their home, as if all important messages on the planet needed to be shared. He’d said enough, things he believed, things he didn’t. Quota achieved. Quota surpassed.

Rachel looked small and tired. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure. He was more aware than ever, as she set the table and put out Lester’s cup and Jonah’s big-kid glass, how impossibly unknowable she would always be—what she thought, what she felt—how what was most special about her was the careful way she guarded it all.

No matter their theories—about Jonah or each other or the larger world—their job was to watch over Jonah on his cold voyage. He had to come back. This kind of controlled solitude was unsustainable. No one could pull it off, especially not someone so young. Except that his reasoning on this, he knew, was wishful parental bullshit. Of course a child could do it. Who else but children to lead the species into darkness? Which meant what for the old-timers left behind?

Dinner was brief, destroyed by the savage appetite of Lester, who engulfed his meal before Rachel had even taken a bite, and begged, begged to be excused so that he could return to the platoon of small plastic men he’d deployed on the rug. According to Lester, his men were waiting to be told what to do. “I need to tell my guys who to attack!” he shouted. “I’m in charge!”

At the height of this tantrum, Jonah, silent since they’d returned from the doctor’s office, leaned over to Lester, put a hand on his shoulder, and calmly told him not to whine.

“Don’t use that tone of voice,” he said. “Mom and Dad will excuse you when they’re ready.”

“Okay,” Lester said, looking up at his brother with a kind of awe, and for the rest of their wordless dinner he sat there waiting, as patiently as a boy his age ever could, his hands folded in his lap.

At bedtime, Rachel asked Martin if he wouldn’t mind letting her sleep alone. She was just very tired. She didn’t think she could manage otherwise. She gave him a sort of smile, and he saw the effort behind it. She dragged her pillow and a blanket into a corner of the TV room and made herself a little nest there. He had the bedroom to himself. He crawled onto Rachel’s side of the mattress, which was higher, softer, less abused, and fell asleep.

In the morning, Jonah did not say goodbye on his way to school, nor did he greet Martin upon his return home. When Martin asked after his day, Jonah, without looking up, said that it had been fine. Maybe that was all there was to say, and why, really, would you ever shit on such an answer?

Jonah took up his spot on the couch and opened a book, reading quietly until dinner, while Lester played at his feet. Martin watched Jonah. Was that a grin or a grimace on the boy’s face? he wondered. And what, finally, was the difference? Why have a face at all if what was inside you was so perfectly hidden? The book Jonah was reading was nothing, some silliness. Make-believe and colorful and harmless. It looked like it belonged to a series, along with that book The Short. On the cover a boy, arms outspread, was gripping wires in each hand, and his whole body was glowing.

Precious Precious

It was late in the wretched season, and there was a sweet chill in the halls at Thompson Systems, where the future was getting fondled by some of the most anxious and self-regarding minds of Ida Grieve’s generation.

Tonight a bunch of them were at drinks, because death was coming, and Foster, the wunderkind, whose official title at Thompson was Beekeeper, had ordered some nasty brew called Mud. It oozed up his glass and clumped in dark nuggets along the rim. When they asked the waiter what was in it, he seemed forlorn, as if he might soon bleed out on the carpet.

They watched him shuffle away, perhaps to go find out, or perhaps to throw himself from a cliff.

“Oh no. It’s like we just sent him to the principal’s office,” said Foster. “Hey,” he whispered toward the bar. “You’re not in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong. We love you.”

“Do we really love him, though?” said Aniel, a little too loudly. “I mean, we don’t. In some ways we hardly think of him as human, or people like him, even though we know not to admit that.”

“Jesus, Aniel,” said Foster. “Apparently we don’t really know not to admit that.”

At the table were the brooding engineers—Mort and Bummer and Cerise—youngish and facially steamrolled from all-nighters at their terminals, and if they were rich they still dressed cheap and drank cheap and lived in cheap, bullshit apartments up in the hills. Maury Beryl was there because he was always there, sipping some cloudy fizz, sometimes swishing it in his mouth, as if he might spit it in someone’s face. Ida felt that she could be sad around him, not that she’d tried. One day, maybe. She’d spill her moods over Maury Beryl and see what happened.

Sitting next to Maury was Harriet, about whom nothing could be said, or thought, or felt. Except that Harriet pushed a certain button of Ida’s that very nearly seemed like the size of her entire body. Harriet had to be met with force, or else you just became her backup singer.

A mysterious young man named Donny Wohl sat at the end of the table. He was possibly still a teenager, despite his pretty mustache, so Ida was afraid of him, even though he was strangely beautiful and she thought about him sort of a lot when she was alone. And alongside Donny, or maybe just accidentally sitting nearly inside Donny’s pants, and accidentally soothing a terrible itch of his under the table, Ida guessed, was Royce, who cock-blocked ideas in the pitch room at Thompson. It was Royce’s job to pump discouragement into the Thompson intellectual climate, through the tiny pink valve in her face. Ida felt reliably like shit after every encounter with Royce. To drink with Royce, though, that was different. She was competitively bleak, and even though she seemed to be indifferently molesting Donny right now, taking her turn with the little love child, Ida was glad she was there.

Foster took careful sips of his drink and tried to smile. A watery brown stain crested up his mouth.

“I will not even remark on the kind of grin you have right now,” said Aniel.

“Maybe the dirt is from somewhere and kind of, I don’t know, amazing for you,” said Harriet, pinging the glass with her finger. “The Dead Sea. Some legendary, healing mudflats.” She studied the menu.

“It doesn’t taste terrible,” he said. “I was expecting cream.”

Aniel got up and sniffed the drink. He struck a snobbish, wine-tasting face.

“It’s a superfood, dude,” he said. Aniel was older, which meant thirty-two or so, with all the shame that that entailed. He dressed young, but fancy young. Fifth Avenue Skate. He always seemed so well laundered.

“I was reading somewhere that certain regional soil samples have more protein than meat,” Aniel said. “Per cubic whatever.”

“Oh yeah. Read that too. In Scientific American, last August. That’s totally right.”

This was Bummer, a compulsive affirmer. Whenever Ida needed agreement at work, an ally or a second or a foil, a fall guy or a fool or a friend, or even just a live human being who bled on command, she sought out Bummer, but his inability to produce conversational friction had melted him into a puddle, contained, if barely, by a few odd bones.

“I don’t know,” said Harriet. “I could see that being true. If animals were buried in that soil, there’d be some protein in the sample. Vestigial.”

Ida laughed. “If? Isn’t that what soil is, ultimately? A compost of the dead? So, Foster, you’re really just drinking your grandfather.”

“No need to make it personal,” said Foster. “And my grandfather is still alive, so that’s gross.” He’d abandoned his drink and was glancing around. For help, maybe. For an escape.

Royce whispered something to Donny, and Donny’s face registered nothing. Donny was staring, it seemed, directly at Ida, and she squirmed in her seat. Activity seemed to accelerate under the table, as if Royce were solving a Rubik’s Cube without looking.

Ida wouldn’t have minded watching, without the table blocking their doings, but just in a casual way. Not sexual, exactly. Almost as you’d watch a short documentary at the museum. With others, on a bench, in a cool, dark room.

“I wish there was a more obvious way to make money off of that idea,” Maury said. “That the earth is simply compacted corpse material. A kind of condensed, spherical dead body.”

“Money!” shouted Bummer, and then a few of them repeated the word in different foreign accents, until they’d reduced it to a pirate’s growl. Ida wasn’t sure just how ironic they were being, and they probably weren’t either.

“Actually,” said Mort, and this set off a chorus of groans around the table.

“What? I was just going to say that that’s the plot of a science fiction novel. Really. I’m not kidding.”

“We know that, Mort,” said Harriet. “That’s what’s so depressing. That you are reminded of a book and now we have to hear about it.”

Cerise suggested that it wouldn’t hurt to hear the plot. That Mort deserved a chance.

Foster said that it might hurt. It had hurt before. “In the Middle Ages they described the plots of books to people as a form of torture.”

“Okay. Okay,” said Mort. “I’ll be fast and you will thank me. So the earth keeps swelling in circumference as people die and rot, adding to the mass of the planet. Right? Then it gets too big for its orbit and things go, uh, pretty wrong. I mean. There’s a company, called The Company, I’m not even kidding, that has to keep people from dying. They have this old, wet—”

“Shut up already,” said Harriet. “I didn’t come to a reading. Jesus.”

An obituary had just been written for their industry. And not just their industry—Thompson was a think tank that had turned into a make tank, which meant it was essentially just like any other company—but industry itself. Selling was old-school. Selling was done. The world may as well have worn black. The experts all signed off on it. The only thing left to fight about was the timing. Dead tomorrow, dead in a fortnight, dead before the solstice. A kind of rubbernecker’s thrill had resulted, even if Ida would be watching her own spectacular crash. They’d all be out of jobs. The whole idea of a job would be washed from memory. People would wander in the snow, which they couldn’t recall the name for, bleeding. Customers would no longer pay for anything. Customers had more power than ever. The word “customer” was, in fact, offensive. It was probably racist. You had to court these people personally, go to their houses and lather them in cream, rub their backs. That’s what they were all talking about now. What this would look like. Who would scrub in and chase the danger.

“Who volunteers?” asked Maury, cracking his knuckles.

No one spoke.

“I gave my last massage in ninth grade,” said Cerise. “Hit my quota early. I am pretty much done touching others. In that way.”

“We are too obsessed with people,” said Harriet.

Royce laughed. “Because they are the ones with the money?”

“And too obsessed with money. We are so obsessed with new products, new go-to-market strategies. What we need is to reinvent the customer. That’s where the next major disruption will take place.”

“The customer is always in flight,” mumbled Aniel.

“Oh dear god,” Royce said to Harriet. “Really? I truly hope that you are not getting paid for the things you say and do. I hope you are a secret intern, sent here to test us, to see how we respond to fatuous drool. Please, please tell me that you make no money for your ideas.”

“Okay, Royce, if that’s what you want to hear. I make no money for my ideas. But I’m only saying that to comfort you. You seem afraid and I don’t want to scare you. Anyway, it’s sort of true. Weirdly, since you are hardly ever right. ‘Money,’ per se, would be the wrong word—not nearly strong or frightening enough, too bound up in specific meaning—for what they heap on me in return for my services. I used to make money. A filthy amount of it, and I stashed it in a sock the size of your whole house. But then, well, ‘raise’ isn’t the word for what happened. There is no word for the kind of promotion I received. And now I’ve left any category you could even remotely comprehend. I’d have to physically carve a new gutter in your brain for you to understand any of this. With a surgical knife that would blind you to look at. But I still enjoy being your friend. I’m not so advanced that I can’t recognize what good people you are. Here’s to good people, who remind us of our origins.”

Harriet raised a glass, but the toast had few takers.

“That was funny at first, but then it got really long and tedious,” said Royce, who was using Donny as a pillow.

“Whereas I feel that it started out tedious and then grew sickening,” said Ida. “And we still don’t actually know what she gets paid.”

Harriet smirked, rubbing her fingers together to suggest currency.

“Speaking of people,” said Aniel. “There are a few of them I’d like to lick. Not at this table, though. No offense.”

It was getting late, and everyone started to look around at what, and who, there was to be had in the room. Or denied. It was that time of night, but maybe it was always that time of night. There was a collective obligation to try to find moisture, but they were often slow to suit up, sluggish to the starting line. They got tired. They felt slightly sick. Sometimes hooking up took so much work. In the end maybe they preferred to be alone. And yet even that didn’t scratch at the distant craving, not really.

Ida went home with Mort that night. She’d survived his mild trespasses a few times, and the embarrassment she’d initially expected over sex with a young, hairless engineer never really ignited. Maybe that counted for something. Sometimes, at the end of drinking sessions like tonight, each ashamed and regretful to an equal degree, Ida guessed—since they didn’t really stoop to disclosure—they stumbled into each other’s territory, Little Rascals style, providing a certain service. One day, supposedly, a Kind Friend could give them what they needed, and clean up after, and possibly even flush the shame from their systems as well. But for the time being they still had to endure the company of other fleshy need machines, human spouters and little bags of weepery. Mort was younger, and softer all around, but Ida didn’t mind consorting with him because he was erotically polite and nonthreatening and he devoted most of his fornicational energies confirming that everything was all right, as if each new timid push into her, his face ballooning above her like a parade float, might have suddenly changed the ethical terms of their encounter. Which, Ida thought, who knows, maybe it did?

Was it okay, was she okay, did this feel all right, did she mind, was it uncomfortable, did that feel nice? Would she like something else, something different, maybe even a person different from him, which he could possibly try to arrange? Ida pictured Mort on the street, half-naked with his sweet baby legs, soliciting civilians to come up to her apartment and make really, really nice. Mort would do that for her, even if it was secretly for him, to gratify some bottomless need to be solicitous and helpful. The desire to please and please and please. It was all a bit selfish, when you thought about it.

Was it okay, was she okay, did this feel all right? These were the questions a person deserved, Ida thought, but for some reason she only ever heard them naked, and even then not so often. Mort was a good egg, but that was just it. He was no more than that. Smooth and fragile and easy to take for granted.

Tonight Mort was especially soft, for which he blamed his diet and a deficiency in some vitamin buried deep in the alphabet. So there’d be no game of Bible study. He stared down at himself as if he should be able to troubleshoot the issue. “I did a cleanse and I’m fairly certain that I have not had an erection since then. I’ve been feeling weak and depleted. I probably should have done a run-through at home before coming over. I’ve just been too busy.”

“You didn’t connect it to your, uh,” Ida asked, trying to be funny, pointing at the stupid thing on his wrist that barked his inner workings at him all day long.

Mort looked at the watch and didn’t laugh. His wallpaper was of a cartoon bear, rubbing its belly.

So he’d managed to rid himself, through diet, of his male burden? Ida wondered. Could one say “manhood” anymore? It seemed problematic, but Ida wasn’t especially sure. A good deal of the language was mired in lunacy and it sometimes seemed better not to partake. When talking about sensitive matters, or, really, when talking at all, it was safer to just breathe loudly, in different accents, adding a little bit of body English with your face—then the transcript could never come back and fuck you down into the mud. What proof would there ever be? You had only sighed. You just kept sighing and sighing. How could anyone be offended by that? Even biological terminology had taken on a wobble and when you messed up and said something out loud, you dated yourself. You prepped yourself for the dumpster. It was a little bit like using your own tombstone as a sandwich board.

So Mort was soft and she was tired and the night was late, late, late.

“I’m sorry,” Ida said, in her flattest voice. It was stone-cold, she knew, but maybe Mort didn’t even catch the shade. His self-punishment techniques were too powerful. She was mostly relieved not to have to get sweaty with this remote coworker who often smelled like her third-grade homeroom teacher, which confused things a good deal, but she felt some vague pressure to take the situation personally. Torn a little bit. You know, he was impotent because of her. She had not inspired a proper baton. It was difficult not to play along and pretend that if only her ass had a steeper switchback, or her breasts didn’t spill to the side, Mort would be seesawing away at her with a diamond cutter. Except they’d consummated before, over the past few months, and her fun happy body, which she loved and loved with all of her blessed heart, oh yes she did, hadn’t changed much in the interval. It hadn’t spoiled or fallen apart or grown discolored or sloughed off a mild, gray powder from its lower parts. Nope, it sure hadn’t. So whatever and whatever and whatever to this young gentleman with his lifeless baby wiener.

She patted Mort on the back. Cleanup would be easier tonight, but what the hell was she supposed to do with this naked person sitting on her bed, on the verge of feeling sorry for himself? Mort was too polite to openly emote about his misfortune—young sensitive men had turned into such exemplars of emotional restraint!—but he parked on the bed as if it was here that his problem would be fixed, and Ida knew that no such thing was in the cards. Must. Get. Sad. Man. Out. Of. House. Now. She’d had her quota of emotions for the week, caring for her mother and father, and right now her store of pity, or really anything else, was empty. She wanted to feed a little, get high, and maybe let the bathtub faucet thunder down on her and finish her off.

Thompson Systems demanded regular physicals of their employees, maybe so you didn’t die at one of their cubicles and cause a lapse in productivity. Ida’s number was up, and in the course of a routine exam, she was prescribed a legacy drug called Rally. Not for moods, she was told, but possibly for the lack of them. This was not a new drug, the doctor stressed. She was to please not think for a moment that she was taking anything new. Sometimes only the older, forgotten drugs could touch that sweet spot, explained her doctor. And we do need our sweet spots touched, Ida had said back, laughing a little too loudly, though the doctor looked at her with boredom and said that the pills were especially hard to swallow. Don’t assume, he told her, that just because you have taken pills your whole life, that you can take these. It’s not that simple. He paused. She wasn’t sure what to picture. She couldn’t picture anything, just a field with dead people in it, for some reason. It wasn’t that the pills were so large, either, the doctor explained. They were just, trust him, really hard to swallow.

Ida signed in as a fake customer on the Thompson server—one of the hordes of false identities they cultivated in order to spread praise about themselves, along with a certain kind of low-key criticism, in order to build brand authenticity—and did a quick land grab on the drug, but instantly got bored reading about it. It had changed and ruined people’s lives, they loved and hated it. They were indifferent and sad and happy, near death and reborn. Some of them said that if you let the pill sit in your mouth for too long before swallowing it, rather than dissolve it grew larger. It could choke you out, but it also taught you to be a person. Others said it didn’t work and still others complained, at length, about the packaging. It was so soft and it crumbled into your hands and you’d never wash it off. As in ever. People seemed to agree that the drug could take years to kick in, a lifetime. Although some people claimed to be buzzing and cheerful and deeply changed after just one dose. An antidepressant for the afterlife, someone called it. Not a happy pill, no way. Not even really a pill. It works in your sleep. It might not affect you, but could leech over to a friend. Drugs like this, claimed one customer, were only for people who didn’t think they needed them. It wasn’t really a drug. It was more of a bomb, but it had no fuse and would never detonate. You never really swallowed it. You just held it inside you for a while. If you were lucky. We exist to give safe harbor to these pills, someone said. Your body is the bottle. Chemically the drug seemed kind of mild. More like a food than a drug. More like a sample of wind, trapped in a vial. Supposedly they were working on a cream.

Ida filled her prescription and took her bottle of Rally tablets home. With a toothpick she daubed some butter on her pill and it went down fine. But soon it had risen back into her mouth—it felt like a small insect crawling up her throat—and she had to take it out and butter it again. After that it stayed down, and as much as she wanted to claim some change over the next few weeks—to her mind, to her moods, to anything—she noticed nothing different whatsoever.

The next time Ida visited her mother at the nursing home, she asked her about Rally. Her mother had been a physician’s assistant before she retired, and would maybe have heard something, or seen this drug in action. It turned out that her grandfather had taken the same medication, which was called Forlexa back then, for his issue, which could only be described, after a long silence on the part of Ida’s mother, as estrangement.

Not the official diagnosis, Ida guessed, but still, it possessed a certain diagnostic elegance.

“Did it work?” Ida asked.

Her mother again paused, and it seemed she’d forgotten the question. Her clarity could be fleeting. Clearly she was thinking. And thinking and thinking. Her face strained so, and Ida felt bad about putting her mother through this. It wasn’t so important. She didn’t need to know. But another part of her was curious about how her mother’s thoughts sounded now, given the change. Or maybe how they ever sounded.

Of course at work they had talked and talked about a system of capture, an extraction tool, for thoughts. This was a big R&D area for companies like Thompson. The last frontier of privacy, blah blah blah. How hard could it be to finally reach into people’s faces and claw away at what they were thinking, and to turn that noisy chatter into a cogent transcription? Really stupendously hard, it turned out. But probably not entirely totally impossible. Probably just a matter of time, even if that meant that they’d all be dead and the world would be dead, just a cold and lifeless rock, but it would still happen. Maybe. Ida saw the appeal, and she’d done some grunt work on a mock interface, mostly just color blocking, building a palette, that might have been part of a black cloth project along those lines. She was on such a don’t-need-to-know basis at Thompson that she might as well have been wearing a blindfold. In the end, though, she didn’t want to live in a time when such tech came online and her own thoughts were on offer to the shimmering seals with human genitalia who seemed to encircle her with questions, punching straws into her head to draw out what little she had left. Her so-called thoughts. Her precious precious. She’d have to jump off a building, and she wasn’t in an especially big hurry to do that. Not always, anyway.

“Well, I would say yes, I suppose, it did help,” her mother answered finally.

“You suppose?”

“Grandpa never left us, no matter how much he threatened to. He remained. Sometimes he sat with us, far away, and you could very nearly set him on fire without him noticing. In fact I remember him burning. I do. Burning very prettily right there in his chair.” She pointed at the wall.

“Mother.” Ida touched her hand.

“But his distance from us, emotionally, became less threatening. How do you measure emotional distance? Miles? Days? That’s almost always the question, I think. I never asked Grandma about it. But because my father stayed I would say the medication worked for us. That’s what we all always said, anyway, and I guess that’s what I’m saying now.”

Her mother looked at Ida, bewildered.

“Is that what I’m saying, sweetheart?”

“Yes, Mom,” said Ida. “That is. That’s what you’ve said.”

“Oh good.” She grabbed Ida’s hand. “I made sense, didn’t I?”

“You did. You absolutely did.”

“I want to. I so want to. You know that, right?”

“You always will to me, Mom.”

Her mother looked up at her with such kindness. Her eyes, though, showed something else, and she looked around as if she’d lost something.

“What is it, Mom? Are you okay?”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” she said, but she seemed nervous in front of Ida, or shy.

“I was just thinking, dear, that you are almost as beautiful as my daughter. I would very much like for you to meet her. She visits me here. She’s coming soon.”

She used to correct her mother, but she’d since been advised not to, and sometimes, lately, her mother’s phrasing made a strange sort of sense to her.

Ida smiled and took her mother’s hand. “I would like that, Mom. I really would.”

Together they stared at the door, but the only person to finally come in was the nurse, who said she had to swap out garbage cans because there was sort of a problem with one of them, and that problem, as it was poured out of her mother’s garbage can into a paper bag, was certainly nothing that Ida ever wanted to see again.

After work the next day, across town, Ida brought a spoonful of soup to her father’s lips.

“You think I’m an imbecile,” he said, staring past her hand at the TV.

“I don’t.”

“An idiot, at any rate. Don’t insult me.”

“No, Dad.”

“You look at me with utter disgust.”

Ida stroked her father’s forehead. He still had his hair. He had a broad, smooth forehead and if he could be made to stand upright, and dressed in a suit, he would be so handsome.

“Are you tired, Dad?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

It was a good answer. Ida was tired, too. Did anyone, when asked, ever say they weren’t?

As usual, her father was watching the news, but, as far as she could tell—from the colors on the TV and the old-fashioned clothing the newscasters wore—it was news from a good while ago. Did they show reruns of such things? Maybe this old news was suddenly relevant again?

“What’s this, Dad?”

“Just what it looks like. It’s a funeral. You have to listen very carefully.”

Ida couldn’t really understand the men on the screen. They spoke a foreign language, like one she might have learned in high school and since forgotten. She looked at her father and marveled that he seemed to be following this. He was utterly engrossed.

It seemed like a standard newscast. Four men at a table, a wireframe globe spinning behind them. Ida tried to settle in and just be there with her father, to relax and enjoy his company and do something with him. She had so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, but it was useless to think about it. She tried not to look too carefully around her father’s room. The bed, the little chair—far too small for anyone who might ever visit him—the window that needed to be cleaned. She focused with all her might on the TV.

“These men are not happy,” her father said. “They can’t say that because they will lose their jobs. Just look at them. They are holding it in. They always do that. They don’t say what they think, so they’re scared. No one is fooling me.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Probably? C’mon.”

She sat with her father and held his hand, which was heavy and dry.

Then her father said, “That one over there, the white man. I tell you what. He’s going to die. The rest of them don’t want to admit it, but he knows. Just look at him. He knows.”

Ida studied the one her father referred to. He had on a white suit, with white hair, but his face was bright red and sweaty. It was likely, given how old this show was, that this man was already dead. Perhaps his children, too, were dead by now. Anyone who loved or knew him. Or quite old by now, anyway, maybe in a room just like this one, sitting with someone somewhere. Hopefully sitting with someone.

It was getting late, and Ida probably knew better, but she had to try.

“I saw Mom yesterday,” she said.

“I’ve seen her before.”

“Well, I saw her yesterday. You know, when people matter to us we see them more than once. We make a regular habit of it.”

“I kicked the habit.”

“She’s doing well.”

“She always does well. That’s her specialty.”

“Well, but she hasn’t always. She’s been sick, she’s had some struggles.”

“You mean something didn’t go your mother’s way? Boy, I’d have loved to see that. What a spectacle. What a rarity. Woman fails to get her own way. World collapses.”

“I think illness is in a sort of different category.”

Her father didn’t respond for a long time.

“Illness is the only category,” he finally said.

It had gotten dark out. Her father didn’t like the overhead lights, so Ida had given him a little lamp, but she didn’t see it now. Whatever she brought in, a lamp, a radio, a vase of flowers, it was always gone when she returned. She used to leave some money in his drawer for outings, in case he wanted something, a piece of candy, a soda, but he would give it away or forget about it and then it too was gone. Only his clothes remained. His sweater, his robe, his pajamas. She had tried to replace the pajamas once but he had grown surly when he put on the new ones. He tore at himself and yelled, accusing her of trying to strangle him. He insisted that she get rid of them.

She tried to speak to the nurses. She knew they were overworked, exhausted, poorly paid, and that they had families of their own. She understood that. But when she asked them if there was something to be done, even if she paid extra, so that what she brought her father, even just the chocolates she knew he liked, might not vanish so quickly from his room, what they told her was that if she, Ida, were around more, if she visited more often, that sort of stuff was less likely to happen. You’re never here, they said to her. We never see you. Who knows what goes on in there?

Something seemed wrong with the picture on the TV in her father’s room. There were numbers unlike any Ida had seen before—so much prettier than the old ones. They floated over a young man’s face and formed a beautiful pattern: a flower, a galaxy. Was that Donny? The sound was down low, or her father’s room simply drank in speech until only a foreign garble swirled around, but when the man spoke the numbers seemed to pulse, to breathe.

She’d fallen asleep again. Oh, god. Who knew how late it was and she was afraid to check her phone. Because of calls and texts she didn’t want to receive, and actual human hands that would grab her and pull her down deep into the mud. Quietly she gathered her things, kissed her father’s forehead, and crept from the room.

“You don’t say good night?” asked her father. He was wide awake and he sounded cross.

“Good night, Dad,” she whispered. “I gave you a kiss.”

“I know that. I’m right here. I was here when you did it. I’m the person you kissed.”

“Okay. Okay.” She was whispering, even though there were loud voices in the hall, in the other rooms. No one anywhere was much trying to keep it down, despite the late hour. “I will see you soon.”

“When, honey?”

“Whenever you want, Dad.”

“Well, tomorrow works for me. Tomorrow and the next day. I’m free.”

“Okay, I think I can do that.” She had meetings upon meetings upon meetings for the rest of her life. Her calendar was dark with obligation.

She returned to his bed and gave his hand a squeeze, then leaned down to drop another light kiss on his forehead.

“A second kiss?” said her father. “I’m not sure that was warranted.”

And as Ida drove home, winding through the empty city streets out across the old highway and into the hills where she lived, she couldn’t help but think that her father might be right.

Sometimes Ida would forget, and she would appear at the office on Sundays, her face strangely delicate on her head, a visitor to her body. She would stare through the glass at the vast lobby of Thompson. The doors to work were locked on the weekends, of course, and after standing there a while, the intruder alert, which certainly went by a blander name, shot a jolt of current into Ida’s legs, sweetening them with pain, and she backed away onto the sidewalk.

If there was a movie playing, Ida bathed in it, alone in the back of the theater. The movies these days were troubling. Children go searching for parents, lost in the snow, and do not find them. A boat’s faulty navigation system leads it to an island not on any maps. The island turns out to be, well, everyone knew how these things went. A terrible place. A really unimaginably terrible place.

Here it was, summer, but something was off. In the air, on the faces of people. Just wherever you looked. The city of Chicago, if you could still call it that, was quiet on the weekend, pretty gusts of powder blowing around buildings, unmanned sweeper trucks docked in their charging pads. The restaurants were mostly open, but without too many other customers Ida felt odd bothering the staff.

Today she braved a diner, and sat and ate alone. She had a dark soup and some toast, and she listened to the prettiest piano music from the restaurant’s little speaker. Music from under water, from another world. Or maybe just from the next room. But when it came time to pay she couldn’t find her server, and no one answered when she politely whispered into the kitchen. She called out Hello, hello, until it started to sound strange. She peeked into the kitchen and found no one. The diner had emptied out and it was getting dark. Maybe they’d all gone home and forgotten to charge her, forgotten to lock up. That was a lot of forgetting. It was possible, maybe, but it didn’t feel right. She never carried very much cash, so she crept out as apologetically as she could, thinking that she should write a note, or that she might come back. Before leaving she turned to face the kitchen, in case there was a surveillance camera. She shrugged and made a series of gestures that, she hoped, might tell the whole story here, if that were even possible. She wanted to pay, she really did, but there was no one left to pay, and she had no money, and everyone seemingly everywhere had vanished.

For most of the night she walked the city, until that magic hour when the streetlights are given a rest, and the early risers are not yet chewing up space on their way to the great, savage feed. A text came in from Mort—up really early, or maybe, like her, having not yet gone to sleep. He’d been texting her a lot, and now he wanted to come over. He kept referring to a rematch. “I have finished my training,” he wrote, “if it pleases Madame.”

It sort of didn’t please Madame right now. Not really. She sent back a few little emojis, indicating that she was tired and busy, and she threw some other ones in that might make him feel better, some warm and bright little animals, smiling from ear to ear with wet human mouths.

Mort wrote back that he understood, and Ida figured that that was true. That was what was so wonderful about him. Mort probably understood far better than she did.

When June came there was a summer party at work, which meant that gray-faced cubicle worms tried to straighten their backs and stand at the punch bowl without crumbling into powder. The parents among the workforce clustered together, no doubt checking the coarseness of each other’s hair shirts. Ida suddenly found herself inside their crop circle.

They were young, still in their twenties, if barely, but their prison was real and gleaming, and even though they sang pretty songs from within, generally you knew to steer wide, clear, and away, tying yourself to a mast if need be. They were afraid to be alone. They wanted reinforcements.

People with kids tended to look at Ida with a mixture of envy and derision, which wasn’t so different from how she looked at herself. Right now one of them had singled her out. “I say this as a friend, as someone who just, like, completely loves you, I mean just as you are. You are amazing. Really. But you are nothing without kids. I’m sorry, it’s true. I’m so sorry!”

“Hear, hear,” a few of them said. “Well put.”

“I wish,” said Ida. “Nothing still seems like a long way off.”

She looked down at her hands, made little fists, held up her fingers as if she’d never seen them before. Hadn’t one of the big-time philosophers thrown himself from a window in order to prove that he existed?

“I don’t know. I look at pictures of myself from before,” said one of the parents, “and those pictures look, like, fake. Like they’ve been Photoshopped? I mean, who was that person? I am fairly certain that in most important ways I didn’t really exist back then.”

And now? Ida wanted to ask, looking at this smiling, tired bag of sauce in front of her. You’re sure you exist now?

“Well,” said Ida, trying to detach from orbit and find a childless friend elsewhere, someone to perhaps eat big, scary drugs with, “I do look forward to it some day. A child, wow. I know it would be, it might. I know that I.” Ida pictured herself cramming bread into a grown man’s mouth, or bathing an aging, unconscious wolf, waking up to terrible shouts. Parenthood?

They were smiling and nodding at her, showing teeth and possibly looking to pounce. “You will,” they said. “It does. We know. They just absolutely do. It is not at all, and it just isn’t and it isn’t and it isn’t. We fucking swear to you.”

Later in the party her phone buzzed, and she got a text from Donny.

The text read, “Do unto others, as much as you can. Just keep doing and doing and doing, until they can’t breathe. Until they stop moving.”

“Okay,” she wrote back. It didn’t sound so bad. “Where are you? Please help.”

He texted back: “The call is coming from inside the house.”

She stood on her toes, scanned the room, surveying and dismissing one disappointing face after another, but no Donny. It surprised her how much she wanted to see him. She checked room after room, but nothing, and as she started to leave, not so happy with this game, Maury barreled up, pawing some undertouched parts of her, drunk as fuck.

“Jesus, Maury, please. You’re totally groping me.”

“I know, Ida. I know I am!” He smiled in a way that wasn’t so endearing. It kind of creeped her out.

“Okay, well, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. It doesn’t feel good.”

Her voice surprised her.

“I did something terrible, Ida. I must confess.”

Must you, though? she thought. She really didn’t need to know whatever crummy deviance he’d allowed himself. Wasn’t there a service that absorbed your dirty secrets for a fee? She’d pay, for god’s sake. Did you have to test a friendship with such material?

For some reason he held up his phone. “I pretended to be someone else. I couldn’t help it. That was me, just now.”

She wanted to say, who else would it have been, when she figured out what he was trying to tell her. And then, as she was pulling herself away from him, she felt something tickle in her throat and suddenly it was too late. The pill slipped from her mouth and landed on the carpet between them, like a lost piece of bone.

“Oh my god,” she said.

Maury just blinked at her.

She grabbed the thing and made her excuses and got out of there. Fuck him, anyway. If he hadn’t been harassing her she wouldn’t have coughed the stupid thing up.

Ida was tired in some new kind of way. Cooked and done and smeared all over the road. She almost slept in her clothes. She couldn’t bear getting undressed. Her teeth and face would have to wait. She would clean them in the morning. So much washing would just happen another time, and everything would be fine. Jesus. Like a four-month bath. A retreat to an underwater cave. A vow of silence, a blood transfusion, followed by a four-year sleep. She opened a window, hoping to hear something, a bird, a siren, voices. Too much room tone in her own house, room tone that could just kill a girl. But nothing was out there. It was a perfectly quiet night.

Her phone buzzed as she crawled into bed. Another text from “Donny.”

“Mine comes out sometimes too,” the text read. “Smiley face. (Sorry, I don’t know how to make emoji symbols!)”

“Oh. Thank you. Is this Maury?”

“Hi. I’m sorry I lied. And I felt so bad when your pill came up. I hate that! Sometimes after I oil my pill I dip it in sand. I know that sounds weird. But it works! What kind of oil do you use?”

Ida snuggled into bed. It was a lot more pleasant dealing with Maury this way, or at least it wasn’t repulsive. The bar had gotten lower. “Sometimes when I cough one up,” wrote Ida, “I wonder if it’s that day’s pill, or one from before.”

“Oh my god, I have wondered that too.”

“Have you ever thought of marking the pills before you swallow them?”

“No I have not!”

“Then you could know.”

“That’s true,” wrote Maury. “You would definitely know. Tag those little guys. Name them. That way you would never lose track. I would hate to lose one. I think I would feel sad.”

Summer burned out early and a little bit of icy wind curled over the city. Ida was breathing into her hands before too long, dragging herself from work to home, work to home. She saw her parents when she could, and if they didn’t always see her, at least they felt her next to them. Or they felt someone, a body, a person, who spoke and touched them and smiled when she could.

It wasn’t a romance that started with Donny, so much as a cluster of unrelated encounters after work, usually close to silent, in which it became easier and easier to meld her body with his. Donny was lithe and graceful and so endlessly mysterious, which maybe only meant that she no longer knew what to think of anyone. He hardly spoke and they didn’t laugh together and she felt no need to reveal herself to him. But his silence made her feel good and safe, and she looked for him, more often than not, to mute some larger ruckus that seemed to be stalking her no matter where she went. She worried that when she undressed him she’d find, instead of the usual gray meat that made up a man, a small golden animal in place of his groin, or a fairy, or just some moss. In all the best ways he didn’t seem human.

“I’m not someone you want to be investing any feeling in,” he told her one day, with the brightest possible smile. “Try to look right through me. There’s someone behind me and he’s coming for you, I’m sure. I’m just in the way.”

“Okay, Donny,” she said. “I appreciate the advice.” It’s as if you’re already not here, she didn’t say. It’s as if I imagined you.

“Ida,” he said.

“Yes?” She looked at his clean, young face.

“For now, there’s nothing better than this.”

He crawled on top of her and she could feel him breathing. He was so light, so thin, so small, no more than the weight of an extra blanket or two, really.

For now, for today, for this very minute, it was certainly okay, she thought. It would do.

It was October, her father’s birthday, and she showed up on a Saturday afternoon with chocolates, the ones littered with the kind of salt that looked like shards of glass. She brought flowers for his night table, and new clothing, too, but she didn’t show it to him. It could wait in his closet, and if it vanished maybe that wasn’t so bad, as long as it ended up somewhere, covering someone, keeping them warm or dry or cozy.

“I always thought that if I worked in a think tank, I would drown,” her father said, sucking on a chocolate.

“Yes, well. That is a danger, Dad.”

“You think I don’t know what you do.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Yes you do. You think I don’t know and you think you can’t talk about it and you think I won’t understand. Don’t insult me. I’m not an idiot.”

“No, Dad, I know that.”

“You think I’ve already died. You visit me here like you’re visiting my grave. You come to sit at my grave. You even bring flowers. But here I am. Look. I’m right here.”

Her father was a beautiful man, really. Tall and fine-featured and still elegant in his nursing home bed.

“I see you. I’m very happy you’re alive.”

“This isn’t a grave, it’s a bed. There’s a window. No one has a window in their coffin. No one can look out their window at a parking lot or a hill. No one has sheets and a pillow in their coffin. You don’t get to sit up and eat a sandwich.”

“I know that.”

“Do you see a tombstone in here?”

“No.”

“Feel free to look. I’m not hiding anything. Take a look around.”

“I don’t need to, Dad. I believe you.”

“Think tank.”

“I know.”

“You don’t work at a think tank.”

“You might be right, Dad. Sometimes even I don’t know what I do. They don’t always tell us what things are for.”

“No one will ever tell you what something is for. For Christ’s sake. We don’t get that information. Don’t expect that.”

“I guess I shouldn’t. But I spend my life there. It’s okay if you don’t know. You don’t work there. But what about me? Shouldn’t I know?”

“What about you? Don’t start to get sad. That’s not what this is about, being sad. Your sadness isn’t the issue here, Ida. That’s a distraction. Don’t change the subject.”

Her father was right. It could be heavily distracting. She finished feeding him, patted his arm, and left his room for a little while. Maybe some air or some sun or an area free of people would be nice, if such a thing existed. There were hallways and hallways in this home, with room after room, and if she ever made a mistake, and looked inside one, really looked, she saw people in beds all alone, connected to bags, mouths agape, struggling to breathe. She saw men in ill-fitting gowns, sprawled on the floor. Women with no hair, sobbing in their chairs. Now in the hallway she kept her head down, watching her feet, and soon she was outside, where there was a little bit of lawn ringing the parking lot.

The light was funny today, catching surfaces just so. Little sparkling things glimmered from the grass, from the parking lot, everywhere. Like jewels that had dropped from somewhere, which was stupid, she knew. Probably just little stones, maybe washed up over everything from a recent rain. She thought she might sit down, but there was her car, just waiting, and maybe she’d had enough for the day. Maybe it was time to go. She’d visited a little bit, and it was possible that her father would fall asleep soon, anyway.

A nurse approached Ida just as she was reaching for her keys.

“You here to see your father?”

“Yes I am. How are you today?”

Maybe if she showered this person with kindness, something would unlock in the tough, ungiving dispositions of the nurses, and maybe they’d look after her dad better when she wasn’t around.

“If you’re here to see him, why are you outside?”

“I just came out for some air.”

“There’s air inside. There’s air everywhere. That’s what the world is.”

“I know.”

“He can’t see you if you’re out here. You can’t see him. You might as well be at home.”

“I’m going back in.”

“You weren’t, though. You were going to leave.”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me. I see your face. I can read your thoughts. You think I can’t?”

Ida scanned up at her father’s window. He would never be looking out. He didn’t do that. He didn’t really stand up anymore, although he did love his window. But she wouldn’t want him to see this just the same. He wouldn’t understand, not that she did either.

“Anyway, there aren’t too many thoughts to read,” the nurse said. “Just one big one. I gotta get out of here. I gotta go. Where’s the door. That’s the only thought anyone has ever had. In all of history. It’s not just you.”

For no reason that she could think of, Ida told the nurse that her mother was also in a home.

“Everybody’s somewhere,” said the nurse.

“She’s at the Sullivan Gardens.”

“That’s a place.”

“I go back and forth.”

“How else would you do it?”

“My mother and my father.”

“I don’t imagine you’d visit any other kind of person in a place like that.”

“No, I guess not.”

The nurse almost smiled at her. “I know you’re leaving, so you can go ahead and leave. I’m not going to stop you.”

“I might have to,” said Ida. “I don’t feel so great.”

“Your father will die soon.”

“I know.”

“You won’t be here. Chances are. People are never here. They know not to be. People aren’t stupid. They wake up that day and they know to stay away. You don’t go into a burning house. You feel the heat. You keep walking.”

“So it’s not just me.”

“Nothing is just you, dear. Trust me.”

“I’d like to try to be here. When that happens.”

“You’ll get a phone call. It might be me calling you. It might be someone else. I make the phone calls when I’m here, but I’m not always here. If I’m here, I’ll call you. We have your number. Your number is first. You’re the emergency contact. But it won’t be an emergency. The emergency will have already happened. It will have come and gone. I’ll say hello, and I’ll ask to speak to you. You’ll probably say that it’s you on the phone. Some people, fancy people, say This is she, or This is he. And that’s when I say, It’s about your father. That’s how the call will go up to that point.”

“Okay, well, I guess it’s good to know this. I appreciate the information. May I ask your name?”

“It’s Lorraine.”

Ida took the nurse’s hand. “Lorraine,” she said. “I am really pleased to meet you.”

The nurse pulled back her hand. “Don’t be pleased. If you get a phone call, and the person says that it’s Lorraine from Sweethill Village, then it’s me calling, and you should never be happy to hear from me.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t be happy when I call.”

“I won’t be,” said Ida. “I promise.”

And then, in her throat, Ida felt the familiar crawling, the little pill surging up, filling her mouth. This time she managed to get her hand up, to block it from getting out, but she had to double over and clench her teeth together.

Then she felt the nurse’s hand rubbing her back, so softly, so gently, that she relaxed in some way that startled her, and her mouth opened and the pill rolled out onto the asphalt.

Ida and the nurse looked at it, shining like a perfect white tooth. It was hard to imagine that it had been in her stomach all day. It looked perfect, even cleaner and whiter than when she’d swallowed it.

“It’s okay,” the nurse said. “You can leave it there.”

“I’d better not.”

“Leave it. Trust me. Just look around for a minute. Everyone else is leaving theirs. It makes the world look prettier. Why keep something like that for yourself?”

Those shiny things in the grass, the glittering crystals in the parking lot, the glinting everywhere she looked. Like the tiny white skulls of birds. Tablets strewn everywhere, glowing at her feet.

Blueprints for St. Louis

It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Helen’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of Daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn’t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve math like that?

Helen wasn’t particularly concerned, because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right? And screw Roy if he’d fallen down a brightly colored porn hole, pummeling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around nude, in grown-up crotch gear, in a cartoon fairyland. Internet histories weren’t her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them. Anyway, if her husband’s use-case viability on the marital graph had taken a nosedive, then so, too, had her own burden. She had her friends, she had her work on the memorial, and she had the showerhead. When she and Roy first got married, whenever ago, Helen’s mother had told her that if people don’t visit, you don’t have to host. Period, full stop. And even though Helen’s take on this advice now was off-label, it applied just fine to her touchless union. The body unloved, the body unhandled and unseen. The body as a ghost in training for whatever soiled world came next. Anyway, wasn’t left-alone the best place to wind up?

Maybe old age and the cold blue death of the groin would solve that. Maybe Helen would inherit a sweet and useless Roy, post-pornography, sitting politely behind a drool cloth, swaddled in food-stained sweaters. She’d feed him until he cooed and maybe sometimes they would run out of gruel and she would watch his hunger grow, watch his eyes turn small and sad. Would it be so terrible? The sexual urge would be merely an embarrassing spasm of the past. They’d been friends once, before they’d gotten into designing memorials for unspeakable catastrophes. Intense and respectful partners in their architectural firm. Mutually committed cattle prodders of each other’s darker, stranger brains, torturing out each other’s best ideas, before the chemical repulsion and bed-death had struck. Maybe by old age they’d return to form, be ideal dance partners again, if only they could stay alive long enough.

The problem was today and tomorrow and the next huge bunch of days, the entirety of their middle age, really, which shouldn’t be just a rotten footbridge you had to navigate, with a creepy old troll beating off underneath it. Roy was technically handsome, but he preened, and he moped, and he fished for so many compliments that Helen was fished out, empty, unable to spray any favorable speech over his prim, needy body. Lately he’d been taking himself to the gym with more ambition and lust than he showed for their collaborative design work, and he was all cut up now, a strange, Photoshopped musculature slipped over his bones like a bronzed wet suit. She should have wanted to handle the new body he’d built, use it to snuff out her baser urges, not that Roy offered it to her, but she asked that he keep it covered. In loose-fitting layers, please. It stank of his not-so-hidden effort to attract a mammal outside the home. To sport with it and lick its fur, no doubt. Plus, she had tolerated her husband better when he wasn’t such a vain custodian of the ephemeral—one mustn’t fawn over that which will rot, someone important probably once said.

What consumed them both right now was the situation in St. Louis, for which their firm had been ceremoniously commissioned to design the memorial. Months after the bombing, the city was still digging out. Thirty dead souls, the news had said when it happened. But everyone knew that number wasn’t real. It was low by a couple of decimal points. For days, the toll did not breach a hundred, which seemed impossible. Where did these cautious estimates come from? Maybe from actual bodies. Maybe this meant that the other, more plentiful dead were simply nowhere to be found, in the same way that wind can’t be found. What you did was you factored in the missing, and privately you did not call them “missing.” Thousands of people had not suddenly left their homes that morning and vanished to the mountains. When you watched the footage of the bombing, the dark slab of glass folding over itself like a blanket, then erupting into a pale brown flower of smoke, and you calculated the typical occupancy, not just of the office tower but of the surrounding plaza, with its underground restaurants and shops, its perimeter of cafes, along with the time of day, the number thirty was a violent piece of wishful thinking, heavy, heavy, heavy on the wish.

“10k+,” Roy had texted Helen from wherever he was the day it happened.

He wasn’t wrong. It emerged that explosives had been buried in the foundation of the tower when it was being built, two years before, by some slithering motherfuckers on the construction crew. Stashed down there the night before the footings were poured, apparently, and then triggered when the building was finished and stuffed to the gills with people. In burning daylight, a time of high commerce, maximum human traffic. Not a government building, so far as anyone knew. Just as dense a cluster of people as any in the Midwest, excepting one or two zones in downtown Chicago. And so, and so. They had the perpetrators on video, brutes in hard hats. Except that they were skinny and they laughed a lot and were often seen hugging one another. Four of them had walked off the job on the same day, before the building had even started to rise up out of the concrete. How that very act—quitting in a group, never to be seen again—hadn’t been some sort of security trigger was beyond Helen, but whatever, hindsight was a foul drug. And now everyone was asking, Who were these men and where had they gone? Oh, please, Helen thought, whenever this particular investigation blistered onto the screen. The St. Louis Four. The villains of Missouri. Can we please not believe that finding these men will matter at all? Please?

“Terrorism” wasn’t really the term anymore. Helen found that it soured in her mouth, like a German word for some obscure feeling. “Tax” seemed to be a finer way to put it. A tax had been levied in St. Louis. In New Orleans last year, in Tucson three years back. Et cetera. A tax on comfort, safety. A price paid for being alive, for waking up. Occasionally the tax collector came. Not just occasionally. Quite a lot these days. You could run out of breath trying to name all the cities that had been hit in this country. The collector came, and people were subtracted from space. Buildings withered into rubble. One’s imagination needed to frequently dilate in order to accommodate the ways and means, and otherwise-smart men and women were busy with their scuffed and crummy crystal balls trying to figure out what was next, and how, and how. As if this forecasting ever… oh forget it. Soon you knew not to be surprised, and this awareness was chilling. A low hum could be heard during the day, the night, at all times. You walked in a space that might not really be there. There was no longer anything proverbial when it came to danger, nothing to invent, no more fiction of dark days to come. The dark days were here. They were now.

In light of this, it was somehow Roy and Helen’s calling to honor the site with a memorial. Or to try to, to actually compete for this kind of work, squirming through town halls and public debates, spinning a story about their vision, which was only ever a humble story to the effect that nothing anyone did could ever be enough. Their track record so far wasn’t the worst, which was not much of a feel-good fact for either of them, even if a sort of undertaker’s renown had attached itself to their firm over the years. They made their mark by designing large public graves where people could gather and where maybe really cool food trucks would also park. There was money for this, and money for this, and money for this. Hooray. Except that now Helen found it hard to view any other kind of design commission—for a vanilla-white office building in their own downtown Chicago, for example—as anything other than a future headstone, a kind of sarcophagus that would briefly house living, glistening people before they were lowered into the earth or scattered out over the lake in a burst of powder. If you were an architect, you designed tombs, for before or for after. What was the difference?

Helen kept a map pinned above her desk because she thought she might see something in the pattern of fallen cities: a story. Detectives did this to solve crimes. She thought it might tell her what to build. But sometimes, when she and Roy marveled at it, it seemed to them like a coloring book that hadn’t been filled in all the way yet. Sure, there were some spaces still to shade, whole cities left strangely untouched, but not that many. And there was always tomorrow.

St. Louis should not have been high on the list of targets, maybe not on the list at all, but that seemed to be the point these days, in the year of our sorrow. The years and years of it. A new and unspoken list of vulnerable sites had emerged: sweet zones, soft parts of the American body that could be knifed open and spilled out by the most skilled urban surgeons the world had ever seen.

Six months after the St. Louis attack, Roy and Helen had been invited to submit a proposal, and they’d gone through their usual tangled brainstorm, smoothing over the sharper ideas of their junior staff, whiteboarding a design that would appear sufficiently nonthreatening in the space, a kind of tranquilizing maze of low walls and open rooms for visitors to throw themselves around in and grieve. Roy called it the sanatorium aesthetic, and he wasn’t that far off.

One day, as the deadline loomed, they walked along the lake, which was flat and black, even as the wind pounded them. They started, brokenly, to drill down toward what they might possibly build, what it would look and sound like, what sort of feelings they were trying to create. Usually you had to dance around the stakeholders to determine the emotional bolus of a work, as they called it. But the stakeholders for this project? Only the entire population of the United States of America.

Helen didn’t want to aim high, she started to say, so much as she wanted to aim into a kind of hidden space. “I don’t want you to be able to picture it when I talk about it,” she told Roy. “You shouldn’t be able to photograph it. I mean, like the lake—you wouldn’t even want to photograph it. You shouldn’t be able to draw it. That’s my problem.”

“Gosh, that really is your problem.”

“I don’t know,” she said, gesturing at the sky, which was not particularly pretty or interesting that afternoon. It was not the kind of sky you would ever take a picture of, and Helen found that compelling. “Is there a better memorial than that? The sky?”

“Ha,” Roy said. “It’s good. It’s moody. Maybe it’s a bit obvious, though?”

“Isn’t the sky just a gravestone,” Helen said, “and we’re all buried under it?”

“Oooh. Not bad. I see what you did there. But, no offense, why are we talking about this?”

Helen had to do this, to think too grandly or wrongly in order to maybe get closer to what was called for. “It’s almost like,” she said, “what if you had to design the afterlife exactly as you really think it is. Not something aspirational, some bullshit heaven. Not a religious fantasy. The truth.”

“Yeah?” Roy said. “As in… oblivion? You want to build an oblivion theme park?”

He didn’t care about any of this right now, Helen could tell, and maybe he had a point.

“I assume you don’t believe in, well, anything?” When she thought back to their first conversations in grad school, prickly and intense and flirty, she wasn’t sure if this had ever come up. Was that possible? She had adored and then admired him for so long and now she knew him inside and out, and she felt she understood him to the core. Was it possible that he harbored private, unknowable ideas about his own death and whatever might happen after?

“Okay, let’s assume that you’re agnostic,” Helen said. “We die and there’s nothing.”

“Sometimes there’s nothing before you die,” Roy cut in. “Don’t forget that. A foreshadowed nothingness.”

“Okay, let’s say that you want to make an experiential piece that invites people to inhabit that sort of emptiness. How do you do it?”

Roy looked up. “How? As in, how do certain midwestern architects make a credible design of the one, true afterlife? Jesus, Helen. Are we really having this conversation?”

He seemed to give it some thought, but there was something unnatural about how theatrically he pondered, as if he already knew what he was going to say but was pausing for effect. This was the Roy who spouted off at arts panels, who was about to spray fine, floral bullshit across the auditorium.

“I like the question,” he said. “It reveals something important, and I see where you’re going with it. If you make a space like that you connect visitors with the dead, which is a pretty big artistic win.”

Helen winced. Big artistic win.

“In the end,” Roy said, “the question falls apart because the answer is just too easy. It’s too obvious. Why not just kill them? Then they’ll get the real and true afterlife. Who needs to simulate anything when you have the real thing? Someone already designed death. We were beaten to the punch.”

He smiled at her and very nearly seemed to be gloating.

Okay. God. “This isn’t a battle of wits, Roy,” she said. But then she wondered if maybe it was, and that was what was wrong. Partly. When one person thinks it’s not a contest.

They stopped and looked out over the lake.

“I was hoping we could produce work without a body count, though. A modest goal.”

“Oh, you mean because too many people have died already?”

“Jesus, Roy.”

“None of this works if I can’t be honest with you,” he whispered.

“There are other reasons that none of this works,” she said.

“Helen, I was joking. I was trying to be funny.”

But why? She didn’t say. To what end? And aren’t we supposed to be doing this together?

“I don’t know, Roy. Can we think about a tranquil space, not heavy on physical material, not oppressive and thick, that isn’t just a New Age wank space with wind chimes and shit? Can we do that?”

Roy admitted that this sounded good, that this was something they could shoot for.

The memorial planning went on for weeks. They mocked up models, strung wire through their studio and tuned it to different tensions, just to explore suspended structures that might allow for a subterranean feeling without actually trapping people underground. Haunt the viewers but don’t stress them out. And almost every day, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the very early morning, they walked the city together, looking at space and light, growing ever more certain of what they didn’t want the memorial to be.

Roy was kind and gracious, suppressing his own ideas while generously fielding every wild and unbuildable notion from Helen, perhaps knowing that her interest in reality, in plausibility and practicality, could be low. She couldn’t help herself; she went on and on about the mourners. They were still here, she was saying, in this world, but they were conflicted. They were pulled elsewhere, to the place where their loved ones were. Wherever that was. Survivors lived in both places. That was what she wanted this monument to say. She wanted it to feel like that, the tension between two worlds.

“That’s some Schrödinger’s cat bullshit,” Roy said. “And I love it. That’s what I want, too. That’s exactly right.”

For a little while they walked arm in arm, and for a little while things seemed different. But what had they really agreed on? Helen wondered. What were they even talking about?

All the while Roy must have known that there was no building design behind this idea, that time was really upon them and something had to take shape on paper. The office was waiting to pounce at their go-ahead, and he needed to ring the bell. Helen realized that he’d been slowly laying the groundwork for his own plan, which maybe he’d had in his head all along. It was simple and obvious and probably inevitable, and he told it to her in pieces, over the course of a few days. It was to be a hollow square glass museum, low on the plaza, with a center that could not be accessed or even seen. A black void where the building and the shops had been. Right. There were details and details and details, and a narrative had to be written, because, well, yeah, but this was a square with a hole in it. To Helen, it resonated just a wee bit of other memorials, built and unbuilt, which was probably shrewd, on Roy’s part. He wanted their work to get the go-ahead, whereas sometimes she suffered the classic ambivalence of an architect. Maybe her designs had a kill switch on purpose.

They went home and had dinner, and that night Roy was already calling it a lock, commissioning renderings, and speccing out site maps and plans and all the work that had to happen even to get this thing ready for the review board.

There was really just one more thing to deal with for now, and they had both been dreading it.

They had to finally sit down and look at bids from the pharmaceuticals, which were fighting their way onto the proposal, vying to be the providers of the chemical component that every memorial these days was more or less expected to have: a gentle mist to assist the emotional response of visitors and drug them into a torpor of sympathy. Not garment-rending sympathy, but something more dignified. A mood was delivered via fog. Discreetly, and mildly, with microdoses misting through carefully arranged spouts, the way an outdoor mall in the summer might be air-conditioned. You didn’t see it and you didn’t smell it. You strolled through a field or a plaza or a series of dark, marble tunnels, whatever, sipping the sorrow-laced air, and, when you finally departed, a kind of low-grade catharsis had been triggered. You were bursting with feeling. Big artistic win.

It was sponsorship and it was gross, but because it was essentially invisible, and because people genuinely seemed to seek it out—attendance had undeniably spiked—Roy and Helen had been looking the other way and letting it happen and now they really didn’t have a choice. It was an inevitable shortcut, or even a stage of evolution, in architecture, assisting the public’s reaction and securing that most prized of currencies: human fucking feeling. How to create it, how to create it? And why not use all the help you could get?

But here was Roy saying that he didn’t want to agree to anything yet, and to hell with these companies for trying to leverage a sacred memorial with their goddamned money. “Maybe we only consent to a zoned dispensary this time,” he said. “There should be an area, cordoned off, where the feelings are more intense.”

“Intense how?”

“Like harder, more honest.”

“Oh, some feelings aren’t honest?”

“None of them are, Helen. It’s fake, right? It’s a drug spout in the ground. Or it’s a gas stream pulsing from the ass of a mechanical bird flying a figure eight around the burial ground. Isn’t that the idea, that we can’t make people feel exactly what we want with our work, with what we make, so we poison them instead?”

“Poison.”

“Sure, it’s poison. In high enough doses.”

“Like water, then. Like oxygen.”

“Exactly like water and oxygen. A perfect comparison. You just read my mind.”

“I couldn’t help it. The door to your face was open and the text was scrolling inside. Impossible to miss.”

Roy shook his head. “On the other hand, why not put people in a more pensive or reflective state? Why not even stoke their anger a bit?”

“Because those are the moods they bring to us. Those are the moods we correct.”

“Okay, do you hear how that sounds, Helen? We correct their feelings? Really? I guess I’m just saying that right now we are therapists. We are not designers. We try to make people feel better.”

“You make that sound dirty.”

“I guess I’m not sure why we’re even arguing about this,” Roy said. He sounded defeated. “I don’t think the ingredients are within our purview. I don’t think we can edit those parameters.”

“Not with chemicals, we can’t,” Helen said.

“Meaning?”

“Look, I don’t care how happy or blissed out or in touch with the one true good earth you are, if you walk into a certain space, situated on a certain site, and that space has been shaped to the nth fucking degree, your mood, if we want it to, will freaking collapse like a lung.”

“I don’t know. Drugs are stronger than buildings.”

“Maybe we make our buildings more potent, then,” Helen said. “We increase the dosage.”

Roy smiled at her. He raised an empty hand in a toast. Such a small and delicate hand. “Cheers,” he said, and he softly pawed the air.

After they won the bid, with a forty-eighth-iteration proposal that was mildly tolerated by all—a black granite labyrinth, inset with dark transparencies, as if panels of the stone itself were made of glass, which, however badass that would have been, they weren’t—Roy went out to St. Louis. Roy was the face, the body, the organism. Maybe he had sweet young people he fucked; Helen couldn’t be sure. He caught the temperature of the place and tried to decode the deeper desires of the city, which could then be met or thwarted so that the appropriate tension might infuse the final project. He photo-documented and did flyovers and he stuck his finger into the client’s collective rotten body to determine where the hard command center was. These kinds of projects often blew up in your face. You were fired while you slept. So Roy, with his temper and his charm and his fit little body, stayed out there and fought like a mongrel to keep them in the game.

Helen spent that time getting lost at the drafting table, sketching mostly, working from the gut, ignoring what she knew in order to make way for what interested her far more—what she didn’t know. For instance, she knew that she felt tremendous sorrow for the dead and thought about them often, if vaguely. What she didn’t know was why she wasn’t crippled with grief, stupefied at the scale of the atrocity, unable to move or speak. This was a mystery. She wanted to draw a purely empty space, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Heavy lines were required, of all things, and not just for framing the so-called void, as people in her profession loved to say, but for actual fucking substance. She had to ready the space for haunting. Purity was called for. This was a tombstone for a city, a funeral for a feeling of safety that was now gone. Leaving a blank page was not the same thing. That was a cop-out, and, anyway, you couldn’t shit on the client that way. Partly because she herself was the client, and Roy was the client, and so was everyone they knew, and everyone they didn’t. Now you had to view the world, the air itself, as something that could be torn away to reveal an eerier sort of place. Maybe that sounded like bullshit, but sometimes, sometimes, this process—if followed strictly and without concern for hovering meddlers—led to a wild, unstable kind of vacuum that you were not always prepared to be sucked into, Helen thought, even if you thought you were curious, even if you thought you couldn’t be shocked.

That was what she tried to draw, and that was sometimes what she and Roy tried to build, even though “build” was a strange word, and you sounded like a punk if you said “erase” or something pretentious like that. Like, in my work, I erase the landscape in order to reveal the true terrain of the world. Yeah, uh, no. Maybe it didn’t make sense, any of it, but it didn’t have to. Sometimes it just had to sort of look pretty and make you sad and thoughtful. That was Memorial Theory 101. In the end, no one cared what you thought, or said, about a memorial you made. That sort of verbal posturing was for students and the simperingly boneless teachers who floated over them, gushing endless praise out of their open necks.

Roy phoned from St. Louis, early in the process, and even though a working design had been approved, the understanding—Helen’s understanding, anyway—was that certain, uh, changes could still be made, and these changes could, caveat, significantly alter and enhance and improve the original, shit-sucking plan, which she suddenly thought might better belong, in miniature, on the wall of a Starbucks.

What Helen envisioned, she told Roy, was a series of soft columns swelling out of the plaza, but almost imperceptibly. You almost wouldn’t even know they were there.

“You know how there are some people who think that if they could only sharpen their vision they would see ghosts?” Helen asked.

“I didn’t know that,” Roy said. “Interesting.”

The plaza itself, Helen went on, would be poured from a spongy material, so that visitors might feel as though they were sinking as they walked along. Playground rubber, maybe? The columns would be slab-like, but ephemeral—Helen emphasized this word: “You know, very nearly not there,” she told him—fabricated out of a kind of stable, nearly elastic, she didn’t know how else to put it, smoke.

“You can admire them as sculpture—they will be beautiful, and up close the smoke will reveal a texture, sort of like porcelain, with streaks and veins and imperfections in the surface. But, from farther away, they may just look like clouds. Rogue clouds that have fallen from the sky.”

Roy was quiet for a while. She thought she could hear him typing. “That sounds nice,” he finally said. “Aside from wondering how this remotely relates to the approved plan, am I supposed to be asking how you’ll achieve this?”

“Other than the obvious way?”

Roy was rummaging at the other end of the line. Talking to someone or watching TV. Helen listened into the room and listened and listened, on the verge of hearing something clear. Maybe he was falling from an airplane. She wasn’t even kidding. There was so much wind around him.

“I mean, how serious are you?” he said. “This sounds maybe more speculative? Which is cool. Which is, you know, I know it’s part of your process but I’m living in reality right now. I’m in an actual hotel room, in the actual real world. I’m talking to the board, or, really, they’re talking to me, very sternly—they are literally holding my hand like I’m a child—and I’m talking to the mayor and the city and the state, and in my downtime I am having nonconsensual elevator sex with the donors, who are huge hairy creatures with indeterminate genitalia, because they get to have whatever little thing they want from me.”

“How nice for you.”

“I don’t have a choice, Helen. Seriously, how possible is this, your sticky smoke? Are we really spitballing this idea right now, at this fucking late date? Am I supposed to be telling people that this is what we are doing?”

“Well, whatever you do, please don’t refer to it as sticky smoke. It sounds like a carnival attraction. With a little bit of work, we can find some seductive language. That’s never so hard.”

She wanted to laugh. Never so hard. Finding seductive language was the hardest thing in the world. There wouldn’t be language for this. Not in her lifetime.

“Jesus, Helen. The tech—and you know this very well—doesn’t allow for what you’re talking about. I mean, right? Suddenly I’m the bad guy because of physics?”

Helen sighed. “That’s not why you’re the bad guy, Roy.”

They covered other topics, because they had a stupid business to run, and so many details to haggle over—zoning and permissions and negotiations with contractors, along with political tensions that Helen couldn’t even fathom—and then, just as they were saying good night, Helen said she needed to ask him a question.

Roy was still distracted; he would always be. Some muscle in his face produced the word “yeah,” but otherwise nobody was home. After finding out what he needed to know from Helen, he’d moved on to gather information from other sources. This was Roy spreading himself so thin that you could see through him. At least in person he knew to tilt his face into postures of interest, taming his little mannequin body. So Helen was silent for a while. She heard the same dull murmur in the background. A voice or a bird or the wind, or just some subvocal turbulence on the phone line. It was almost pretty.

“What?” Roy said, suddenly impatient. “What do you want to ask me?”

“I just wanted to know… who’s that with you?”

“What?”

“Next to you, Roy. Just look. In the bed. Touching you while you talk. What a curious creature. Who is that? I’d really like to know.”

As she said this, she pictured someone, something, crawling over her husband’s body. The most gorgeous living thing.

Roy said nothing. Maybe he turned off the television, or maybe something else caused a rapid drop in room tone, because now the sheer silence was staggering. It was shocking to Helen. Like, you’d need a machine to achieve that kind of quiet. The world had been scrubbed of noise, just because she’d said a bunch of words. That was what a spell was, maybe. Had a mere sentence of hers ever had such an effect before? She could hear Roy breathe; she could hear the churn of his body.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Helen.”

It wasn’t like she expected a different answer, or particularly cared. Confessions and denials were equally troubling. Answers in general were so often disappointing. Was there any speech at all that didn’t, in the end, cause a little bit of dejection?

“No, I guess you don’t,” she said.

“I mean, if I could show you, I would.”

“Show me, Roy. Switch over to video. Show me the room and the closets and the hallway. That’d be great. Thanks.”

“Uh, okay. I’ll have to call you back. I’ll call you back.”

She laughed out loud, but it came out a little bit off, like a shout.

“Good night, Roy,” she said. “Sleep well.” And she hung up.

The apartment was cold and she couldn’t wait to crawl under the covers. “Oh, and by the way,” Helen said to no one, as she readied herself for bed. “You can bleed smoke into a clear skin, no problem.” She laughed softly. It was not as strange as it might have been to be talking out loud to herself. “You’d want to use a large-field polymer, of course. Totally transparent and ridiculously thin. I guess it’s a kind of windowpane balloon, in a way, but its contours can be fixed nonspherically, which gives it any shape you want, including tufts and wisps and whatnot, like a cloud. A sort of scientific version of a balloon animal. Low-tech, really. And what you get is a shape made of smoke with the barest hint of skin—a person, a column, a cloud, anything. You could even make a maze, and fill the walls of the maze with dark black smoke.

“So, yeah,” she whispered, turning out the light in her empty apartment. “That’s how you’d do it, if you were to do it. The physics aren’t an issue. But honestly I’m not sure anymore that that’s the way to go.”

It was late and she was very tired. She could hardly even hear herself, as she started to fall asleep.

“I just can’t honestly say that it’s the right idea for this particular project.”

When Roy returned from St. Louis he didn’t come home. Helen wouldn’t have minded seeing him, to shake hands maybe, to perform some soft footwork that might approximate closure, but Roy had apparently made his decision, and soon some sweethearts from the office came for his things, operating with a list, leaving behind only an old pair of shoes. The transaction was either respectfully nonverbal, Helen thought, or calmly hostile. Was there much of a difference? It was interesting when a set of feelings went so unspoken for so long that they drifted into the unknown. Did they expire or fester? Maybe one day she’d find out.

Construction was under way on the memorial, and the opening wasn’t that far off, but rather than hover in St. Louis and fret, micromanaging the construction of their sorrowful mall, as she’d started to think of it, Helen stayed in Chicago and took walks along the lake. More often than not she ended up in one of the older graveyards of the city. For research, she told herself. Because wasn’t that really all they did anymore, build new graveyards? She had no family dead in these places, no one to mourn. Everyone she grieved these days was unknown to her, which made her grief seem more like self-pity. Was that true of all grief? Who the hell knew. She toured the marked paths and cut across the grass when she could, because that was where you could start to feel something, however fleeting. Sometimes there were woods to traverse and then she’d burst out into a patch of graves on the other side. More dead to consider. Folks who died long before she was born. Cemetery design had not changed in some time. The aesthetic was pretty resilient. Maybe it wasn’t an aesthetic. Just an instinct for shelter. She marveled at the sight lines, at the effortlessly endless rows of dead, each name, each life, hollowed out in space.

Of course it was too late. You couldn’t simply plant grass in St. Louis and design the simplest of headstones. There were too many dead. A technical problem. But a headstone could shrivel into a narrow granite pin, with a name inscribed vertically. Didn’t that solve the issue? Of course it didn’t, because no one even knew what the issue was. And whatever slick and welcoming thing she and Roy built for the plaza, there would still be a graveyard beneath it, the way there is a graveyard beneath everything. It would just take generations of people to find it, clawing down into the earth year after year until they touched stone.

A fog of birds passed over the Eberlee Plaza in St. Louis on the morning the memorial opened.

Helen sat at some distance from the ceremony. Roy had said that she was, of course, expected to be there, and here she was, alone on a bench with a perfect view of what she had wrought.

The birds didn’t go away. They swished and darted and soon struck a steady, gliding orbit over the plaza, a kind of dark and clotted halo, like barbed wire in the air. Had they come for the sweet sedatives that were no doubt pumping into the area from underground cylinders? Would the dosage be too strong for a bird, and was there any concern about this? Was anyone in charge of the most basic shit?

Helen sat, by chance, just across from the long, snaking plywood wall of the missing. The weather over the last two years had done a job on the wall. It was mostly stripped of posters by now. The remaining posters were scarred and wind-bleached and almost impossible to decipher. On a few, the photos had eroded but the text had endured, so there were blank sheets that simply said “Missing,” with a white space below, as if it were the white space itself that had vanished and could no longer be found.

When the ceremony began, she saw Roy. He looked good. Half the size of the large, sweaty men who surrounded him, as if he were a child being herded by giants. He was shaking hands, talking, laughing, and several times, as Helen watched from the bench, she saw Roy applauding vigorously, even though no one, as far as she could see, was speaking or performing. It was just her husband, alone in the square, clapping his hands as hard as he could.

Mostly Helen watched the birds, which seemed bizarrely determined, certain of something that she would never know. There was a theory of bird vision that came to mind: that birds saw the world through a grid, bisected down to the finest detail. Not a mosaic so much as a shattered image, with white tracers boiling in the spaces in between, or so Helen imagined, so that all the bird really saw was a kind of luminescent netting. Aglow or afire or whatever. No need to poeticize it, but still. Sort of hard not to. You didn’t see the mouse, if you were a bird, but a mouse-shaped mesh of light that contained it. She was butchering the science, she knew, but this was the general gist. A kind of shining wire bag we’re all trapped in, which might explain some things, right? Or, Helen thought, deepen the mystery. It was a structural view of space, and it treated objects as an afterthought. Objects described the light, not the other way around. Yes, it was speculative, since, whatever, it posited the sensory experience of a goddamned bird, but it seemed to have been endorsed by some of the more distinguished eggheads from expensive, self-regarding universities. One particular scientist claimed that this bird vision revealed the true, unmediated world, something that we humans couldn’t handle. We humans! Helen thought. Us! Is there anything we can handle? Our desire for sense and order, our sentimental belief that we are not hurtling through space in tiny pieces, has served as a kind of biological propaganda for our visual apparatus, leading to the sentimentalized, so-called whole-world on view in front of us.

In other words, fear, and more fear, and, yeah. Wouldn’t there one day, just by chance, Helen thought, be a little person who came along and didn’t feel afraid? Someone who saw this world of speeding pieces just as it was? Wasn’t that bound to happen, and what on earth, she thought, as she watched everyone walking past her into the mirage, was taking so long?