Nowhere Man

6. The Soldiers Coming

CHICAGO, APRIL 199 7-

MARCH 1998

THE DOLPHINS

So I kissed Pronek’s forehead for good luck and sent him up.

Stage fright made his elbows shiver, but he ascended a long narrow staircase and stopped at the top. He looked down, visualizing himself tumbling, big head over small heels. He flexed his back, as if appreciating the unbrokenness of his spine. He opened the door that had a picture of a pretty green-and-blue globe — SAVE OUR MOTHER, the poster demanded. He thought of his mother and recalled her sitting with her feet propped on the coffee table, tufts of cotton between her toes, the arches of her feet symmetrical. The office smelled like ocean and pines and perspiration. He walked to the reception desk and a black woman with shorn hair told him to sit down and wait. In the corner there was a wizened palm of an uncertain green color, its flaccid leaves looking down at the pot. He looked at his hands, and they appeared bleached.

“My name is John,” the man said, “but everybody calls me JFK.” The Handbook of Good English was on someone’s desk. “Here is fine,” JFK said, and offered him the only chair, squatting in front of him, grasping a clipboard. In a whisper, he asked him why he wanted to work for Greenpeace, and Pronek delivered the mantra he repeated in many an unsuccessful interview: he had communication skills; he liked working with people; he thought this was the right invyromint for him, where he could develop to his full potential. JFK was rocking in his squat, and Pronek imagined pushing him over. A clot of tenebrous panic started forming in his stomach, as he realized he might not get the job, even though he was afraid that he might get the job. “Here is fine,” he repeated to himself. “Here is fine.” It was a demanding job, JFK said, canvassing door to door — he would have to talk to between twenty and forty people per night. Was he sure he could do it? Was he comfortable speaking English?

“I am evil,” she said.

“She is Rachel,” JFK said. “She will train you tonight.”

“E-V-O-L. Love in reverse.”

She wore a T-shirt with a tranquil candle below which DAYDREAM NATION was written.

“I am Jozef,” Pronek said. “Nothing in reverse.”

JFK tightened his lips and opened his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows, then vanished. Pronek did not know what to do with his hands — they overlapped over his genitals for a moment, then he deposited them on his hips and stood akimbo, as if reprimanding Rachel.

“Where are you from?” she asked him.

“Bosnia.”

“I am sorry.”

“But I live here now, for five years.”

“I am still sorry.”

“It is not your fault.”

She had short spiky hair, with a crest heaving over her forehead, above her sparkling eyes. Her upper lip, dark cherry red, had the shape of a musketeer mustache. She had a dimple in her chin. She had cheek apples Pronek wanted to touch.

“When you’re done staring at my face, I can show you my tits too.”

“I am sorry,” he said, looking toward a remote corner of the ceiling, where, he noticed, there was absolutely nothing.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I like your face too.”

“Can you turn that shit down?” Rachel snarled.

“It. Is. Radiohead,” Dallas slowly said, as if nobody could speak his language. “Black Star, man. It is awesome. It is rock ‘n’ roll.”

“It. Is. Stupid,” Rachel said.

Pronek sat in the back seat, next to Rachel, their thighs rubbing. He furtively glanced at her — her right earlobe was beautiful: the mazy curves inside it were perfect. He imagined himself curled and snug, pinkie-nail-sized, resting at the mouth of the ear funnel, singing a sweet song.

“Did you have rock ‘n’ roll in Yugoslavia?” Dallas shouted over Radiohead. The van was the slowest vehicle on the highway, overtaken by coffin-like Cadillacs steered by old ladies sunk in the front seat, passed by garbage trucks with black bags stuck between the rear-end teeth. Monster trucks honked at them furiously.

“Jesus, JFK,” Rachel said. “It’s like you’re pulling us in a Radio Flyer. Step on it.”

“Why are they calling you JFK?” Pronek asked. JFK was a large man, his meaty back spilling over the edges of the seat, hair sprouting from his neck.

“He’s the size of an airport,” Rachel said.

“’Cause my name is John Francis Kirkpatrick.”

“Did you?” Dallas shouted again. His arms were tattooed with dragons licking naked women, some of them singed by flames.

“See, there are many ways to get the money at the door,” Rachel said. “You can appeal to the sexual frustration of suburban housewives, flirting like a crass cowboy, as Dallas does. You. .”

“Fuck you,” Dallas said.

“Hey, hey, hey!” JFK said.

”. . can exhaust them with facts and moralistic appeals, until they pay you to go away, as JFK does. Or you can look at them with big, beautiful eyes, dazzle them with a smile, then strike like a cobra, as Vince does.”

Vince was sitting in front of Rachel, grasping a small red bag with Chip and Dale pictured on it. Pronek wanted to be nice to Vince, because Vince was black, but didn’t quite know what nice things to say, so he only smiled vaguely.

“I like blues,” he said, finally, but no one responded to his statement: Vince continued looking out the window; Dallas was using his knees as a snare-drum; JFK was slowing down, because half a mile ahead of him, there was a truck with an American flag spreading across its rear end. Only Rachel glanced at him, perplexed, then put her left foot on her right knee, exhibiting her boot sole to Pronek — there was pink chewing gum on the heel.

“Schaumburg is tough,” Rachel said. Pronek looked down a row of houses bending around an empty street. “This town has an ordinance prohibiting straight streets, because they want it to be more interesting, they say, more diversified.”

The houses were identical — pale plastic-blue walls; a white porch; a lattice with a nascent crawler; a figure on the lawn: a dwarf; a black jockey; a Virgin Mary.

“This, my friend, is called devo.”

“Devo,” Pronek repeated. The sky was car-commercial blue, with a lonely plane here and there, like a gnat without a swarm. The air was warm; spring buds on the trees exuded a syrupy smell.

“Just watch what I do first.”

Rachel touched his elbow tenderly, as if it were the source of his pain. There was a steel ball grinding Pronek’s bowels, and a tingle of paralyzing fear scurrying across his skin to his head, where it stopped to throb. He needed a cigarette. He imagined good Americans opening their doors, hating him for his foreign stupidity, for his silly accent, for his childish grammar errors. He imagined them swinging baseball bats at his elbows and smashing them, bone splinters flying around.

“I hate baseball,” he informed Rachel, but she was already pressing the bell button.

“Hi, I’m Rachel, and this is Joseph. We’re from Greenpeace.” Rachel beamed at the woman, pressing her clipboard against her chest, the Save-the-Whales leaflet facing out. The woman was skinny, her hair wet and hanging in springy curls. She was clasping the collars of her white robe, looking at Rachel, then cautiously glancing at Pronek, as if his presence there were secret.

“How are you today?” Rachel asked her, nodding.

“Who’s that?” a man hollered from somewhere inside the house. The house smelled of something familiar to Pronek — it contained paprika, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He could see a carpet with flat panthers gazing upward at him with their yellow eyes. A huge bowl of brownish popcorn stood on a glass-top table. A python was gulping down a mouse on the TV.

“We are not interested,” the woman said. There was a cavity at the bottom of her neck and a droplet of water in it, slowly sliding down.

“I’m sure you care about the environment,” Rachel said.

“No, thank you.”

“Who the heck is it?” the man yelled again. The woman closed the door and locked it, a wooden hand with flowers painted on it and the word “Welcome” swung first left, then right.

“Let me give you some advice,” Rachel said very quietly, her gaze grazing Pronek’s hip. “Never look inside while you are talking to them and never, never prop yourself on your toes to peek inside. They think you wanna rob them. Look them in the eyes.”

“In the eyes,” Pronek said. “Good.”

The man was in his underwear, with Rudolph-the-Red-Nose-Reindeer slippers — the red nose erected toward them. His shirt was unbuttoned, and Pronek could see the head of an eagle touching the left-nipple circle with its beak. Pronek tried to focus on the man’s droopy eyes, but could not help surveying the man’s whitish underwear with an intermittent yellow stain.

“I’m a hunter,” the man said. “I enjoy killing animals.”

“Many hunters support Greenpeace,” Rachel said.

“Well, I ain’t one of them,” the man said. “Now, leave my property.”

“I like your slippers,” she said.

“Thank you. Now get off my fucking property.”

—

“This is hell. I run out of smiles and kindness quickly.”

“It’s very hard.”

“Do you want to try?”

“No, not yet.”

“You gotta try it at some point.”

“Okay. Not yet.”

Pronek regarded Rachel as she was talking to a pimply Motôrhead teenager; or a Catholic lady with her index fingers stuck between the pages of the Bible; or a college boy wearing a baseball hat backward who told them he hated Chomsky. (“Who is that?” Pronek asked.) He watched her lips part — she would expose her lower teeth, tightening her chin, the dimple deepening, while making an important point. She would roll her lips into her mouth, after she had asked for money, waiting for an answer. He tried to imitate the smile she was flashing at a community-college professor who listened to her enthralled, with a pen and a checkbook in his hand, scrawny and bending forward, as if cancer were breaking his back as they spoke. The college professor glimpsed Pronek with the corner of his eye: Pronek was raising his eyebrows, stretching his eyelids and pulling his cheeks back, keeping his teeth close, replicating a Rachel smile.

“Are you okay?” he asked Pronek.

“Yes, I am,” Pronek said, and tidied up his face into a solemn expression.

They stood at the corner of Washtenaw and Hiawatha. Pronek was smoking, self-conscious, the cigarette tasteless. Rachel watched him, her head tilted.

“The important thing is to listen to them. They’ll tell you things, and they’ll give you money for listening.”

“Why do you call yourself evil?”

“E-V-O-L. Love in reverse. It’s a Sonic Youth album, my favorite.”

“I never listened them.”

“Listened to them.”

“Listened to them.”

“It’s kind of noisy, a lot of guitars.”

“I used to play the guitar.”

“Well, this is different.”

“What do you do in you life?”

“In my life? What is this? Do you Balkan boys always ask questions like that?”

“I am sorry.”

“I do photography in my life.”

“Oh, I like photography.”

“Let’s work now. We gotta make some money.”

They avoided the dark houses, going only to the ones that had lit porches and windows, shadows gliding along the inside walls. She moved from door to door quickly, employing always the same serious, deep voice. Pronek marveled at her resolute moves, at the tautness of her muscles, at the determination in her stride as she hurried between houses, although she once tripped on a hose snaking on the lightless pavement, her clipboard spinning up, then falling and skidding along the pavement.

“Fuck,” she said, sitting on the ground. Pronek offered her his hand, and she snorted furiously, but then accepted it. “I just learned to walk last week.”

“I love Greenpeace,” the man said. “Greenpeace is the greatest.”

“Well, then you can give us a lot of money,” Rachel said.

The man laughed. He had a dark wart resembling a blackberry on his cheek.

“Go get your checkbook. You know we need your support.”

“I’d love to,” the man said, “but I spend all my money on the wolves.”

“On the what?”

The man was smoking. Pronek wanted to ask him for a cigarette, but instead surreptitiously inhaled the smoke coming out of the man’s nostrils and wafting toward him.

“You know, they want to shoot them in Wyoming, wipe them out.”

“Wolves are beautiful animals,” Rachel said. Pronek was grinning and nodding, joining in the wolf appreciation. He remembered the story his father had told him about their Ukrainian ancestor so bent on killing the wolf that had slaughtered all his sheep that he tied his wife to a tree in the middle of winter to lure the beast. But the poor woman wailed and wailed, her toes freezing, and the wolf stayed away.

The man was describing a dying wolf, running wounded from those choppers packed with armed assholes in cowboy hats, running until all his blood was drained and then just dropping down.

“Wow,” Rachel said, and lowered her clipboard to her stomach, crossing her hands over it. Pronek noticed that the man checked out her breasts, and it was the first time that Pronek looked directly at them — they were bulging, stretching her Daydream Nation T-shirt.

“Do you want to see my wolf? I got him in the garage. I’m driving out to the UP tomorrow, we’re going hunting together.”

The wolf’s fur was gray and linty and he looked lachrymose. When he saw the man, he started pacing frantically back and forth in a humongous cage in the space next to a pickup truck. The man put his hand inside the cage and the wolf stepped rapidly toward it. Pronek had an instant vision of the man’s hand being snapped off, blood spurting from the wrist veins. He imagined explaining the situation to paramedics who wouldn’t understand him because of his accent. But the wolf put his snout into the man’s hand and the man scratched it. “Look,” he said to Rachel, paying no attention to Pronek. She shook her head, her mouth agape in admiration.

“You can do it too.”

Rachel slowly put her clipboard on a lawnmower and offered her hand to the wolf’s nostrils — he sniffed and looked up at the man. Pronek was paralyzed — now he could envision both of Rachel’s hands torn off, and he noticed a full moon in the sky hovering over the thick darkness of the street. Rachel held the wolf’s snout, sticking out between the bars with one hand and stroked it with the other. She leaned over and kissed the wolf on the lips. She extended her lips symmetrically, like a flower opening, and the wolf showed his dagger teeth to Pronek. Pronek whimpered, and the man turned toward him and grinned, as if some sinister plan were being fulfilled.

As they were walking away from the house, Pronek decided he needed to busy Rachel with himself in order to make her forget the wolf.

“I like dogs,” he said.

“That wolf was so sad, the guy should just let him go.”

“I had a dog. His name was Lucky.”

“That wolf had some meat rotting inside him,” Rachel said.

Back in Chicago, they walked down Jackson, neon and street lights comfortingly glaring, Pronek half a step behind Rachel, as if trying to catch up. She had her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, so her elbows stuck out, like pool-ladder handlebars.

“Where are you living?” Pronek asked.

“Where do I live? No woman in this lovely city would tell a complete stranger where she lives. Don’t ask a single woman that question.”

“I am sorry,” Pronek said, looked down and fell another half step behind.

“But you’re a stranger no longer. I live in Uptown. Where do you live?”

“Rogers Park.”

They crossed Halsted. A policewoman, her chest encrusted with Kevlar, was frisking a man facing the wall, his left hand up, his right one gripping a walking stick. In the window of Zorba’s they saw a gyros chunk like a misshaped planet, slowly revolving.

“When did you come here?” Rachel asked.

“Nineteen ninety-two, just before the war.”

“Is your family there?”

“Yes.”

“Are they all right?”

“They are old.”

“You watch it on TV and feel nothing but numb helplessness. It just makes me angry.”

“I know.”

“It must have been hard for you.”

Pronek nodded, but he didn’t want her to pity him, yet he liked that she paid attention to him. She talked to him over her shoulder, her head twisted, and Pronek imagined her turning into a pillar of salt.

—

They took the same train. It sped underground, producing apocalyptic, isolating noise, as if everything above ground had just collapsed. Rachel was in the seat in front of him, next to a black woman grasping a tiny Bible in her hand, breathing heavily and mumbling between the breaths. The only words he could make out were “weeping for her children.” Rachel scratched her neck, her index finger coming down from her right ear toward the collar, leaving ruddy curves.

Pronek lay supine in the darkness, pressing his eyelids tight together, determined to force himself to sleep, feeling tension in his facial muscles, as if his face were ossifying. The man was screaming: “You ain’t gonna get me, motherfuckers!” A train rattled by and Pronek felt anger rising in him — he wanted silence, no crazies bellowing, no trains screeching, no sirens warbling maniacally. His kneecaps were sweaty and sticky — he turned sideways and put the blanket between them. He imagined walking Rachel home — strolling down her linden-tree-lined street, rich scents in the air, then sitting on her stairs and talking, then going upstairs and making love.

“You ain’t gonna get me, motherfuckers!”

Pronek jumped from bed, his hands curling into painful fists, and looked out: a preppy-white businessman in an orderly dark suit, holding a briefcase close to his chest, was stomping his feet, pointing his finger toward the sky every now and then. Pronek’s tension transformed into a clean, simple hatred of the man. He opened the window and glared at the man as if his hateful fury could be carried through the ether of the city.

“You ain’t gonna get me! Fuck no! I don’t fucking think so!”

Pronek wanted to think up a killer sentence, something that would make the man shut up instantly and think about his behavior. He juggled the words in his head, stressing them differently, inserting and re-inserting necessary curses, ascertaining the voice-power necessary to crush the man’s demented will. He huffed and puffed and finally, with the anger stuck in his throat, he opened his mouth and hesitantly shouted:

“That is not polite!”

The man stopped hollering, shook his head as if he had received a punch, and stood petrified for a moment. Then he slowly looked up at Pronek, pointed his finger at him, and thundered:

“And you ain’t never going to get me, because the Lord is with me, in all his might!”

Pronek retracted inside and stood near the window, afraid to move or look outside, the darkness throbbing around him, his knees giving way.

“Just be relaxed and look them in the eye,” Rachel said.

Pronek knocked on the door, once, then twice, although there was a buzzer in clear sight. A gaggle of croquet mallets was leaning on the fence and a family of wooden raccoons huddled on the porch. Pronek closed his eyes, because when he closed his eyes, there was an instant of hope that he was dreaming all this and that it would all vanish when he looked out again. The door opened and Pronek opened his eyes and there was a woman wearing sunglasses, her dark hair coiled up, wearing an oversized Hawaiian shirt, her face pallid, as if she were a vampire.

“Hello,” Pronek said. “I am Joseph and I am from Greenpeace. We like to talk to you.”

The woman said nothing.

“And this is Rachel. From Greenpeace too.”

It was unnerving not to know where the woman was looking. Perhaps she was blind.

“How are you?”

“I’m just dandy peachy,” the woman said, her voice coarse. “What can I do for you?”

Pronek wanted to look at Rachel to get a signal of approval, he didn’t know whether he was doing it right. But he didn’t dare take his eyes off the woman’s face, as if she should disappear if he did.

“We like to talk to you about envir—enviro—environment. Maybe you can help us.”

“Where are you from?”

She opened the door wider. Pronek could see the TV — a pair of hands was building something in silence.

“From Greenpeace.”

“No, what country are you from?”

Above a gas fireplace with flimsy flames flickering, there was a portrait of an Indian in profile with a huge feather, sunset orange the dominant color.

“I am from Bosnia.”

“Bosnia is far away,” the woman said, slurring the words. “But I like your accent.”

“Thank you.”

“So what can I do for you?”

“We like to talk to you?”

She pointed at Rachel: “Is this your girlfriend?”

“No. I don’t know. No.”

“Ma’am, we come out here to talk to you,” Rachel said, “and ask for your support.”

“You got my support.”

“Financial support.”

“Hey, I can give you a drink or a massage, but dough — no! I am a single woman.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Sorry to bother you.”

“Thank you. Sorry,” Pronek echoed.

“Come back any time,” the woman said, and stepped out on the porch, as they were walking down the driveway. “Any time.”

“One day,” Rachel said, “I am going to bring my camera and take pictures of these people. They are unbelievable.”

“I like them,” Pronek said.

“Okay, advice: don’t let them suck you into babbling. There are a lot of lonely people out here, you know, housewives, senior citizens, perverts, unemployed fratboys. They got nothing to do all day long.”

“It is hard. My English is bad.”

“Just be relaxed. If you speak English with an accent, you speak at least two languages and that is twice as many as the people in this godforsaken place. People who like you will give you money, and people who don’t won’t.”

It started raining again, reactivating the puddles on the street, raindrops shattering their surface.

“You know,” Pronek said wistfully, “I think that everywhere there is the home, you have the puddle where you see when it rains.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you look through the window when you don’t know if is it raining and you have your puddle where you can see the rain.”

“Yeah, I see. That’s nice.”

“I had one in Sarajevo, in front of my home.”

“I like that,” Rachel said.

“Hello,” Pronek said, “my name is Jozef and I am from Greenpeace. Do you care about the dolphins?”

The old man was sitting on the porch wrapped in a checkered blanket, with earmuffs pressing on his temples and wool-mittened hands gently deposited in his lap.

“Nope,” he said. “I couldn’t care less.”

His face was splattered with dun dead-skin blotches.

“Okay. Do you care about the rain forests?”

“Nah.”

Pronek noticed a little oxygen tank lying next to the chair, like a steel pet.

“Do you care about the clean air?”

“Where are you from?”

“Bosnia.”

“Bosnia? It’s hell there.”

“Not now. The war finished.”

“I see. So why are you here in America?”

Pronek looked for Rachel down the street. The street was littered with stray, soaked brown leaves stuck to the asphalt. The man took off his mittens.

“Because it is better here.”

“It sure is. Land of the free, home of the brave.”

“Anyway, sir, we come here to talk to you. .”

“So what was that war all about?”

“I don’t know. Many things.”

“Wasn’t it religion? Muslims fighting Christians?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Are you Muslim?”

Pronek didn’t want to answer this question, he hated this question.

“No. But I know many Muslims.”

“I killed a Muslim once.” The old man took off his earmuffs and pressed his thumb between his eyebrows. “But it was a car accident.”

“I am sorry,” Pronek said.

The old man banged the wall behind him with his knuckles, startling Pronek.

“Have you ever killed a Muslim?”

“No. I never killed nobody.”

“But you were fighting in that war, weren’t you?”

“No.”

“I fought in a war. I was a sharpshooter. Forty-six successful terminations.”

He banged the wall again, until a young woman came out, with a towel turban on her head and crescent pads under her eyes.

“What?” she asked peevishly through the screen door. She wore a black bra and panties; a rose was tattooed around her navel.

“Give this young man ten bucks. For the dolphins.”

“What dolphins?” She snarled and looked at Pronek.

“Just shut up and get the money.”

The young woman went back in. Pronek grinned stupidly glancing around: a wizened juniper tree leaned against the porch; a dog chain was coiled in the corner; a flag pole with a wet black flag fluttering in the wind stood in the center of the lawn.

“Dolphins, no dolphins,” the old man said, “one day we will all tumble down into the pits of hell.”

To a young couple in Evanston who sat on their sofa holding hands, Pronek introduced himself as Mirza from Bosnia. To a college girl in La Grange with DE PAW stretching across her bosom he introduced himself as Sergei Katastrofenko from Ukraine. To a man in Oak Park with chintzy hair falling down on his shoulders, the top of his dome twinkling with sweat, he introduced himself as Jukka Smrdiprdiuskas from Estonia. To an old couple from Romania in Homewood, who could speak no English and sat with their hands gently touching their knees, he was John from Liverpool. To a tired construction worker in Forest Park who opened the door angrily and asked, “Who the fuck are you?” he was Nobody. To a Catholic priest in Blue Island, with eczema and a handsome, blue-eyed boyfriend, he was Phillip from Luxembourg. To a bunch of pot-bellied Christian bikers barbecuing on a Walgreen’s parking lot in Elk Grove Village, he was Joseph from Snitzlland (the homeland of the snitzl). To a woman in Hyde Park who opened the door with a gorgeous grin, which then transmogrified into a suspicious smirk as she said, “I thought you were someone else,” he was Someone Else.

THE SECRET CITY

Black-tar rain glittered on the highway, soaked cars plowing through puddles. They passed forlorn warehouses brandishing billboards announcing happy sitcoms and talkless radio. They passed desolate stripped lots with herds of bulldozers and diggers, and cranes roosting on the edges. They saw impenetrable business buildings, encased in glass, reflecting nothing. They passed devo houses hiding behind tall fences, then strip-mall neon lights blinking irksomely under a sky crisscrossed with endless wires. They a saw lonely car disappearing into a lightless tree-lined street, then exposing the middle-class waste like lightning: mowers and rakes and footballs and plastic ghouls and solitary papers sitting on the stairs and swings hanging from a tall tree shuddering under the wind slaps. The car slowly penetrated the garage, the embers of its brake lights inhaling for the last time, fading out under the ashes of the night.

They left Chicago while it was still dark. Their van stopped at the Skyway toll booth, no other cars were around, then it ascended across the bridge. Casino billboards announced the loosest slots, fortune waiting in Indiana. Nobody said anything except for an excited radio broadcaster blurting out nonsense about depressed porn stars. When they reached Indiana, the sky was clear, the last few morning stars barely twinkling.

“You know,” Pronek said to no one in particular, “some of those stars maybe don’t exist.”

Rachel looked at him askance.

“You know,” she said, “it is too early in the morning for onto-logical doubts.”

“Sorry,” Pronek said.

They passed steel mills looming against the dawn, their squareness ominous, their smokestacks spewing tongues of fire and plumes of smoke. Vince coughed when the stench of liquid steel reached them. On the steel-mill parking lots there was an occasional, solitary pickup truck coated with dew, waiting for its master.

“Not to mention the stars you cannot see anymore and that don’t exist,” Rachel said.

“Yeah,” Pronek said.

“How can you see stars,” Dallas grumbled, “if they don’t exist.”

“Don’t know,” Rachel said, “ask our foreign resident philosopher.”

“They send the light, and then they die, and then the light comes to the earth.”

“Still don’t get it,” Dallas said.

“It could be another billion years before the light reaches the dark recesses of your fucking brain,” Rachel said.

Vincent chuckled, still looking out. They passed large white cisterns huddled by the road, ladders on their sides like scars.

“When I was a kid,” Rachel said, “my mother told me that these cisterns were full of orange juice, and that those steel mills produced cookies.”

“Maybe they are,” Pronek said.

“Don’t think so,” Dallas said.

“Yeah, mothers tell you things like that,” JFK said. “When I was a kid I fell off a pickup truck and was in the hospital for a month and my mom told me that it was because I didn’t pray enough.”

“Jesus,” Rachel said.

“Exactly.”

They drove through a wooded stretch where the cobwebby fog still clung to the feet of the trees. There were a couple of does grazing calmly in a ravine.

“Look!” Rachel exclaimed. Pronek leaned toward her window and their shoulders rubbed. His left hand was on the seat behind her, nearly touching her neck. He imagined his fingers gliding down the tip of her spine, then between her shoulder blades.

“I used to be very smart,” JFK said, “before I fell off the truck.”

—

It was cold in Ohio. The van pushed against the wind, smashing snowflakes on its windshield. Snow whorls fidgeted on the fringes of the road. A silhouette of a person followed by a silhouette of a dog walked across a prairie patch, a cloud of snow twirling around them. A silvery train glided across the horizon. In a car passing them, there was a boy asleep in the back seat, strapped and peaceful. Then a monumental truck cast its shadow over them, the word MOVING appearing in Pronek’s window, letter by letter.

“Let me tell you about Oak Ridge,” JFK said, one hand on the wheel, the other on his pate. “Although you probably know everything already.”

“Oh, enlighten us, our kind leader,” Rachel said.

“Let’s hear this song out first,” Dallas said. The voice was whining: “Mom and dad have let me down. .” JFK turned off the radio.

“It’s a great song.”

“Sorry, cowboy.” JFK cleared his throat. “Oak Ridge was built under a cloak of great secrecy during World War Two. It was part of the Manhattan Project. The plutonium they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Oak Ridge. A hell of a lot of plutonium they put in warheads after the war came from Oak Ridge.”

“Can we stop to piss?” Dallas said.

“Now they produce who knows what. So there’ll be an action there, we’ll do a little demo, some might get arrested, the usual stuff.”

“I can’t get arrested,” Pronek said.

“Can we stop to piss?”

“Perhaps you can be quiet?” Vince said, with a deep tranquil voice.

They stopped.

It was still cold — cloudlets of steam escaped their mouths. Pronek smoked, trotting in place, his left hand in his pocket. A man in a fedora was sleeping in a decrepit Cadillac in the parking lot, his hat pulled over his eyes. Vince and JFK were in front of a vending machine in the rest-stop building. Rachel embraced herself, lifting her gaze toward the sky, as if expecting something to come down. Pronek looked up, and there was nothing but endless grayness.

“My grandfather worked at Oak Ridge,” Rachel said.

Pronek shook his head, disbelieving her to make her tell more. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and put the other hand in his pocket.

Her grandfather, she said, survived Auschwitz. His entire family perished, except for an uncle who had moved to Chicago after World War I. Her grandfather was in his late twenties, but he looked older. He came to Chicago and stayed with his uncle, sharing a room with his two teenage cousins, boys who only cared about girls. They despised Rachel’s grandfather — he was skinny and rugged and exuded the scent of European death and sickness, the fetid refugee smell. They pegged their noses with their fingers when he walked in the room. He slept on their couch, and sometimes he would open his eyes and they would be leaning over him, sniggering. He left after a month — he had a biology degree and found a job in a butter factory. She imagined him walking between the vats of butter, Rachel said, his hands greasy, his heart soaked with sorrow.

“Let’s go,” JFK said.

He didn’t want to work in a butter factory. He wrote a letter to the University of Chicago. It was in broken English, but he managed to convey that he was a biologist and that he had studied with a famous scientist in Prague. He didn’t mention that he was an Auschwitz alumni, because he thought that they wouldn’t want to hire him.

“Where’s Dallas?” JFK asked them.

“He’s urinating,” Vince said.

“Right now,” Rachel said, “he’s holding in his hand what he likes most.”

They could see him at the far end of the parking lot, standing in the dry frozen grass up to his knees. He shook it off, zipped up, and ran toward them, flapping his arms as if flying.

“Why couldn’t you use the facilities like everybody else?” JFK grumbled.

“I’m Mother Nature’s son,” Dallas said.

“Well, Father Society might get you arrested and have your ass whupped,” Rachel said.

They filed into the van.

“I reject society,” Dallas said, “and its stupid rules.”

“Buckle up!” JFK ordered.

He got a letter from the University of Chicago and they offered him a job in the lab, studying the effects of radiation on living organisms. The person who offered him a job sent him back his letter with little grammar lessons in the margins. It was at the University of Chicago that he met her grandmother: she was an astronomy student, but worked part time as a secretary for the nuclear people. He asked her out and they went to the Aragon Ballroom, where he could not jitterbug or swing or whatever they danced, all he knew were waltzes and polkas. They fell head over heels in love. Rachel’s grandfather lived in a basement in Humboldt Park, and Grandmother lived with her parents, moral Hyde Park Jews, so all they could do was dance. Anyway he would go down to Oak Ridge. They would expose plants and mice to radiation, plutonium and isotopes and shit, and watch what would happen.

“Yeah,” JFK said, “there is an African-American community called Scarboro there, and they lived downstream from the lab, you know, kids swimming in a radioactive stream. Sometimes they’d let the steam out too. And they watched what would happen.”

“What happened?” Pronek asked.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff, kids born without a spine, cancer, tumors.”

“Shit!” Dallas said.

“Proud to be American,” Vince said.

Rachel’s grandfather went down to Tennessee every once in a while with a driver, because he didn’t want to drive. He sat in the back seat writing letters to Grandma, describing the landscape and all his thoughts and all his love. They would stop somewhere and he would mail the letter, and start a new one immediately. It took them two or three days to get down there and she would get ten, fifteen letters. He would stain the letter with grease and write “Kentucky grease” below. He would send her flowers and dry tree leaves pressed in the envelope. When he saved up money, he bought a camera and had the boys at Oak Ridge develop the film and make photos and he’d send them to her — he wanted to be with her all the time, all the time.

Rachel had seen the letters: his English was bad, no articles, no tenses, scrambled sentences, but they were beautiful, she said, brimming with old-fashioned, old-worldly schmaltzy love.

—

They passed houses tiny on the horizon, and clouds above them, a shadowy curtain of rain hanging down. They passed furrowed fields and mall clusters with gas stations and McDonald’s and Subways, then the van would sink between hills and go up and down into valleys with vapid ponds. Pronek imagined writing letters to Rachel, describing these hills and how they reminded him of places in Bosnia.

He would do his experiments thinking of Grandma. In those days, they didn’t care much about radioactivity — in fact, until the day he died, his bones rotten, he claimed that radioactivity was harmless. Anyway, he would stir uranium in a pot, as if cooking, no masks or gloves, nothing, and he would be thinking of Grandma, her alabaster thighs and her gentle hands, whatever, and a drop of uranium would leap out of the pot and land on his lip, and he would just wipe it off.

Rachel moved her thumb across her lips, slowly, then licked them, while Pronek watched, mesmerized.

“Where did you get that corny shit?” Dallas said.

“Shut up!” Vince said.

The spot where the uranium drop fell burned and he wrote to Grandmother that his lips were burning to kiss her.

They drove through Kentucky, over high bridges spanning lumpy red and ochre hills. They drove through towns consisting of boarded-up houses and a Jiffy Lube shop. They drove past tranquil grazing horses, tall and lean, raising their heads to look into the distance, then moving, trot by trot, until they were galloping in circles enclosed by a white fence. Pronek imagined them rising and jumping over the fence, but then was afraid that they might break their legs landing.

“I have the friend,” Pronek said, “who likes horses very much. My best friend in Sarajevo.”

“Does he have a horse?” Rachel asked.

“I had a horse,” Dallas said. “My grandfather in Texas—”

“That’s nice,” Rachel said. “Except nobody asked you.”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t,” Pronek said. “But he always dreamed about the horses. I will show you his letter that he wrote me. It is very sad.”

“The letter he wrote you,” Rachel said.

“Right,” Pronek said.

“Not his letter that he wrote you.”

“Okay.”

“I noticed,” Dallas said, “that you use a lot of the’s.”

“The what?”

“The none-of-his-goddamn-business the!” Rachel hissed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dallas slammed his hand against the dashboard — a puff of dust rose under the Kentucky-hill light.

“Nothing the fuck is wrong with me. I just can’t stand you.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” JFK said.

“I will read you the letter,” Pronek said. “I have it at the home.”

“At home,” Dallas said. “At home.”

They slept in the same tent, Pronek squeezed between Dallas and Rachel, JFK on the far end with Vince. They felt the chilly night pasting the frost on the tent, the moon scintillating through the walls. Pronek lay on his back, feeling the warmth of Rachel’s body through the sleeping bags. He heard her breathing, peaceful and deep. He inhaled the smell of her hair, her sweat, and her fatigue. Dallas was snoring, JFK was tossing and turning. Pronek turned toward Rachel and watched her face under the feeble, diffuse moonlight seeping through. Her forehead unwrinkled and her eyelids curved beautifully, her eyelashes still. Her lips were motionless, no word forming in her mouth. The sleeping-bag hood framed her face, as if holding it up for Pronek to see, a stray lock resting on her temple.

Then she opened her eyes.

Pronek was petrified. She gazed at him from her depths, she clearly knew he had been watching her. She blinked without fuss, comfortable with Pronek’s look stroking her face. She moved her head toward him, closed her eyes, and planted a kiss on his lips. Pronek was so frozen, the unreality of the moment stiffening the muscles in his back and neck, that he couldn’t respond, until he felt her tongue parting his lips and he let it in.

“If you press your dick against me one more time,” JFK said, “you’re going to have to sleep outside. How’s that?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dallas said, and turned toward Pronek. Pronek felt the heat of Dallas’s body on his back, but Rachel’s hand was moving across his face, and he closed his eyes, his lips burning.

They had a couple of hours before the protest, and JFK dropped them off at the American Museum of Science and Energy. Rachel made Pronek stand under an American flag, got down on her knees at his feet, and took a picture of his face, headed by his chin, the flag limp over him. Pronek had woken up that morning thinking that he might have dreamt it all. Rachel gave him no reassurance: she busied herself with excavating a toothbrush from her backpack. She’d look up at Pronek smilelessly, wearing the CONFUSION IS SEX shirt, which he could not help finding ominous. On their way to the museum, she sat in the front seat, and he was convinced that whatever peaks of love they had reached last night, whispering and softly kissing, they tumbled down to the bottom this morning. JFK drove them through the fields of forlorn malls, parking lots, and fast-food joints, like forts, on their edges. They went by a pond on which a couple of swans floated with their heads bowed, but Pronek could not tell whether they were plastic or real. The possibility that the world could never respond to his desires tortured him.

The museum was full of elderly women in floral jackets, their wrinkles made-up, their glasses magnifying their eyes. One of them said: “Well, if you want a chain reaction, you gotta have graphite,” with a thick Southern accent, and Pronek was afraid that they might address him in their general enthusiasm — his accent would sound even more foreign and conspicuous. He anchored himself to Rachel and followed her like a shadow, hoping all along that she would give him a signal that would make last night real. She paced slowly through The Secret City room, her hands in her back pockets.

There was a prophet, a panel on the wall said, whose name was John Hendricks. In the 1890s, the prophet had put his ear to the ground and heard a terrible voice saying that this valley would be flooded with strangers seeking salvation, arriving here to unleash the soul of the stars. Rachel frowned at the panel and walked on toward a poster of a red-haired forties beauty pouting her thick, gorgeous lips — WANTED! FOR MURDER! HER CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES! the poster read. But Pronek wondered about the prophet, what had happened to him. Had they hung him? Had they rolled him in tar and feathers? Had he become their leader? Could he have known what would happen in the end? Rachel was standing in front of black-and-white pictures of mud fields and “Negro Hutments” in their middles. There were pictures of a herd of smiling white-clad nurses; of women happily smoking in a prefabricated house; of uniformed, unsmiling guards searching through Santa’s bag, his hands up. Pronek wanted to ask her about last night and kept rehearsing the question, but could not get it right. The question-forming addled his brain and he stood in front of the pictures uncomprehending. There were boys playing marbles and a theater marquee reading IS EVERYBODY HAPPY? There were Geiger counters and nylon hoses in glass cases. There were army officers standing next to a uranium cache. Pronek could smell Rachel: the wet-autumn-leaves scent of unchanged clothes and slumber sweat, the scent that had entered his nostrils last night and would not leave. There were two young women, with their legs prudently together, sitting in front of a wall of containers populated with lab mice. In the Big Boy room, there were nuclear mushrooms swelling in leaps in the desert. Rachel stopped in front of the mushroom pictures and rolled her eyes and shook her head, and Pronek feared that the old Southern ladies might see her, think it unpatriotic, and start admonishing her for her behavior, just as he was about to ask her about last night. He caught up and stepped in front of her. “The last night. .” he murmured. She rose on her toes and kissed the Y between his eyebrows, her hands still in her pockets, as the old ladies ambled and swerved around them, scoffing.

Pronek watched a couple of Greenpeace people chain themselves to the gate of the Laboratory, while bodies lay strewn on the driveway, eager to passively resist, Rachel’s body in the center, her arms at her sides, her palms pressing the concrete. He stood across the road with the sign saying WE WANT THE FUTURE! and feared for Rachel. He saw security climbing over the gates, moving swiftly and angrily, yelling at the chained people. A couple of guards started cutting the chains, the rest started picking up the bodies and telling them their rights as a Black Maria came from around the curve as if it had been hiding there all along. “One two three four we don’t want no nukes no more!” Pronek chanted, standing next to a midgety guy with pork-chop sideburns and heavy boots. He occasionally corrected the chant: “One two three four we don’t want any nukes anymore!” and the midgety guy looked at him askance as if suspecting him to be an FBI spy. Two tough-looking security guards picked up Rachel, one grabbing her ankles (Pronek imagined them delicate and fragile), the other grabbing her armpits (Pronek knew the smell), and she slumped between them, her butt almost touching the ground. He closed his eyes, and mumbled to himself: “Bring her to me,” as if sending a telepathic message. But the men in uniform did not receive it and packed Rachel away into the Black Maria. Pronek envisioned himself in jail with Rachel, then getting away with her. They would drive across America together, and then sail across the Pacific.

The South Side factories still spewed fire and smoke. Pronek saw the Chicago skyline on the horizon, the boxy shapes alight against the navy-blue sky, cold and splendid.

“This is pretty,” he said, to no one in particular, as everybody except JFK was asleep: Vince put his Chip-and-Dale bag under his cheek and leaned against the window. Dallas drooled in the front seat. Rachel had her head on Pronek’s shoulder, her hand touching his thigh. Warm air was coming out of her nostrils down his arm, her hair tickling his cheek. His back was tight and it hurt, but he didn’t want to move.

“Yeah, it’s pretty,” JFK said.

Rachel slept on the El, still pressing her temple against the tip of Pronek’s shoulder, despite the hellacious noise and a posse of kids rapping over it about their life in the Robert Taylor homes. Two young women sat close in front of them, their long dark hair falling over the handlebars. Pronek saw the left one leaning toward her friend, touching her ear with her lips ever so slightly and saying: “I love you.” The train surfaced from the underground and the lights of the city glared through the grimy windows. The women got off at Belmont, holding hands.

Rachel got off at Lawrence, drowsy and barely conscious. She said she would see him tomorrow, and tomorrow seemed so distant to Pronek that he wanted to weep. He watched her descending the stairs and vanishing — he was already pining for her, the argon-neon lights making his face red.

When he unlocked the door of his studio, everything was in its place: the coffee mug that said KISS ME, I’M IRISH he had whimsically bought in a thrift shop still on the verge of the table; the map of the world still taped to the wall; the clock shaped like a pumpkin, which someone had left in the laundry room, still ticking; a pair of brown shoes turning away from each other in disgust; the washed plate in the rack leaning over the sink, as if wanting to see its own reflection — everything was precisely as he had left it. The amazing thing was, he thought, that when he wasn’t there, nobody was there — the space he occupied was empty when he was elsewhere. But the smell was different — he could sense a pungent, plastic scent, wholly unfamiliar to him. He moved, sniffing, stepping carefully on the tips of his toes, not turning on the light, ready for an attack, like a wolf returning to his violated den, his body tense and cocked, his eyes scorched with fatigue. He pussyfooted into his bedroom — his shirt stretched on the mattress as if playing dead. He went back to the kitchen, touched the bottom of the empty sink (a cockroach slipping into the hole), headlights flickering on the walls. He dropped to his knees and smelled the carpet in the middle of the room and under the radiator, but he couldn’t locate the source. He imagined someone sneaking into his place and browsing crassly and impatiently through everything in this little museum of his life: a green toy chopper he had stolen from someone’s porch; a tin windup frog; a frame with a picture of his parents, raising glasses, drunk; a puny wooden bowl full of marbles; a piece of wooden board with nails in it resembling the outline of the Great Bear. He imagined the intruder trying on his clothes, buttoning up his shirts. What would the intruder think of him, Pronek wondered, of his life? He moved on to the bathroom, where there was a new shower curtain the landlord had put in, exuding a sharp, chemical odor, shimmering in the dark.

DEATH IN VENICE

Pronek woke up with a vague, flabby erection and an itchy feeling that his life was happening to someone else. He sat at the table drinking coffee from the Irish mug, watching the people at the El stop waiting: a woman reading a book on a bench; a teenage boy twitching his head, following an obscure rhythm; a man with a straw hat and a sallow face, bending forward as if the morning were a sack of cement; a teenage girl with a palm of hair on top of her head and concentric gold chains on her chest. They stood far apart, not looking at one another. The sun glittered on the rails. This moment, Pronek thought, would not be remembered by anybody but him, and one day it would vanish from his memory too.

William stood at Pronek’s door in his dancing-teddy-bears underwear, his head huge, his face armored with acne. His phone was disconnected, and he needed to use the phone, he said, to respond to a singles ad.

William was from Portland and had come to Chicago to break into the improv comedy business, but was currently delivering pizzas and working in a moving company, his hands bruised every time Pronek saw him. After a small-talk session in the elevator, whereby William detected foreignness in Pronek’s curt responses, he had knocked at Pronek’s door and wanted to pick up Pronek’s accent for his improv routine. He had asked Pronek the standard questions (When and whence he came to the US?), then tried to imitate him, improvising a situation in which he was a foreign taxi driver. Pronek had listened to him and his morbidly unfunny performance that included idiotic grimaces and an accent that to Pronek sounded Irish. He felt his chest hollowing with fear and sorrow, while William kept laughing at his own lamentable jokes.

Pronek let him in and stood leaning against the kitchen counter, while William called the dating service. Pronek could see the sink cockroach emerging from the hole, then cautiously scurrying toward the stove, but he didn’t move.

“Hi, my name is William. Uhmm, I like Pulp Fiction and Asian cuisine and David Sedaris.”

He stuck his head into the bathroom, stretching the phone cord to the end, slowly pulling the phone off the table.

“There is nothing I want more than to give you a foot massage by the fireplace, sipping a foreign beer, singing my favorite song, which is, uhmm, ‘Yesterday.’ It would go like this. . Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. .”

William sang in a feeble, flat voice, occasionally reaching the hoarse pitch of a tubercular baritone. The bathroom echoed the awful sounds and Pronek imagined the person listening to this hapless message, cringing. He remembered when he used to sing this song and was suddenly retroactively ashamed — he recalled himself with a guitar, strumming, trying to express the deep emotions contained in the song, and his skin crawled at the horror of his own stupidity, at the times when he thought that “Yesterday” was anything but a sappy song, at the times when he was someone else.

“Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be, there’s a shadow hanging over me. .” sang William, pulling up the edge of his boxers to scratch his thigh and revealing a pimple clearly evolving toward a boil. The phone slid off the table and crashed on the floor.

Rachel canvassed on the other side of the street. He could see her going up to the porch and ringing the bell, then looking around at the mailbox stuffed with magazines, at the lawns with wooden ducks and marble frogs and plastic angels and sprinkles, aluminum spiders with long green tails. He watched her head moving left and right as she spoke to the people who opened the door. Occasionally, she smiled and waved at him, walking between houses, the light diffused by yellow leaves softening the pallor of her face.

Pronek stood in front of a closed door, procrastinating, and when he rang the bell he prayed to the gods of corporate employment that nobody be home. He tried to talk about the dolphins to the people who opened the door, but they stared at him with dim contempt and no interest whatever. Door after door was slammed in his face and anger accumulated in his stomach. He kicked a neon-green plastic bucket and it banged against the picket fence.

“Come on in,” the woman said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

She was short and frail, a humongous scarf coiled around her neck. Pronek stepped into the house, reluctantly, particles of something crackling under his shoes. The screen door banged him in the back, as if hurrying him inside.

“Are you hungry?” she asked Pronek. The house had a humid noodly smell. A fat little Buddha sat on a bookshelf, grinning next to a hedgehog of incense sticks. There was a mirror above the mantelpiece and Pronek stared at himself for a moment.

“No, thank you,” Pronek said.

“But I made the won-ton soup you like,” she said, “and some fried chicken too.”

Won-ton soup was Pronek’s favorite, and fried chicken too.

“Thank you,” he said, his stomach suddenly empty.

“Johnny and Grace might join us,” the woman said. “I might need you to go and get some sprouts.”

Let me suggest that if Pronek were a building with an elevator sliding up and down the chute between his brain and his stomach, at that particular moment the elevator would have dropped a hundred floors, pulled down by horrendous gravity, and it would have slammed into the ground, collapsing whoever was in that elevator into a painful, mushy pile.

“And you could have called me to say you would be late,” the woman said. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head admonishingly.

“I am not,” Pronek said, his throat tight, “who you think I am.”

“Oh, I know you better than anyone,” the woman said, waved her hand toward him and frowned benevolently.

A jungle of lush plants was arrayed on the windowsills. A calendar with a picture of a street in Saigon and things written in an impenetrable alphabet hung on the wall, smiley faces in some date boxes. The woman’s skin was dark and she had a wide, cheeky face, framed by thick black hair. She might be Vietnamese, Pronek thought, but who am I?

“I am with Greenpeace,” he said to the woman, and exhibited as evidence his clipboard with a green-and-blue-planet leaflet. The year on the calendar was 1975, Pronek realized.

She laughed heartily, clapping her hands, applauding his performance.

“You always make me laugh,” she said, and touched her stomach, as if laughing hurt her.

“Ma’am,” Pronek tried again, but had no will to push it further, as he could not remember how he got here, how he had become what he was. He sat down into an embracing armchair facing an extinguished TV. There was a pair of man’s slippers, blue and soft, carefully aligned next to the armchair, within his reach. He closed his eyes, hoping that the woman would vanish when he opened them. But she was still there. What would happen, Pronek thought, if he simply took off his shoes and put the slippers on his feet, swollen from walking? If he had some of that won-ton soup? Who would get hurt? Pronek saw himself trudging to the kitchen in his slippers, taking his seat and eating his soup, the woman gently rubbing his back. Why couldn’t he be more than one person? Why was he stuck in the middle of himself, hungry and tired?

“Ma’am,” he said, still hesitant, whispering, his words teetering on the edge of silence. “I am very sorry, but I am not somebody you know.”

“Don’t worry about it so much,” the woman said, softly, moving closer to him, a touch away. “The soup is getting cold.”

Rachel unlocked the door, and a large cat tried to push its way through, only to be pushed back by her foot.

“This is the cat,” she said.

“What is her name?” Pronek asked.

“I call him the cat. He’s Maxwell’s cat. He calls him Zora.”

“Who is Maxwell?”

“My roommate.”

“Oh.”

Rachel turned on the light and locked the door behind her. The Cat sniffed Pronek’s shoes, then looked up at him. “Zora” he said, “means very early morning in my language.”

The walls were painted turquoise with a thick red line going wall to wall along the middle. The Cat leapt on the sofa and crawled under a cushion.

“Well, he’s no early morning. Maxwell spoils him beyond words.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“Maxwell is beautiful,” she said. “Unfortunately, he’s gay.”

“Oh.”

Rachel then dimmed the lights. Pronek slumped onto the sofa and felt fatigue dropping to his pelvis and his thighs.

“Maxwell’s a musician, plays the trumpet. Has a jazz band with his boyfriend Aaron. He thinks he’s the hip-hop Miles.”

“Who is the hip-hop Miles?”

“You know, Miles Davis, the hip-hop version.”

“Oh.”

There was a black-and-white photo of a man crossing the street, slouched, one of his feet about to land on the ground, as if he were stepping on a spider. Rachel sat next to Pronek, put her hand on his thigh, and said:

“Would you like something? To drink?”

Her eyebrows were converging toward each other, the gossamer glistened on the convex slope above her nose, her eyeballs glossy — he imagined touching them with the tip of his tongue and thought: Blago.

“No.”

“Well, I would. A man can use some whiskey after a hard day’s work.”

“Okay, give me one whiskey.”

It was while Rachel was in the kitchen — glasses clinking, water running, indeterminate noises ebbing — that he imagined himself imagining himself in this room, dimly lit, waiting for a woman who could only know what he told her in his sloppy English and distorting accent. He saw clearly that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons. He imagined himself doubled, the two of them sitting next to each other on the damn sofa. The Cat was suddenly across the table, nestling in the armchair, panning from Pronek to his twin and back. Rachel appeared out of the dark hall with two glasses and said: “Let’s go to my room.” Pronek slowly got up, pushing himself with his fists off the sofa.

I wait for a moment, then lurch forward, scaring the Cat. I follow him to Rachel’s bedroom, and slip in before they shut the door.

They sit on the bed, Rachel backlit with the bedside lamp, Pronek’s back to me, as I soundlessly deposit myself at her desk in a dark corner, breathing in through my mouth and out through my nose, barely, inaudibly.

They sip the whiskey, in desirous silence, probably looking into each other’s eyes. Rachel kisses his mouth, then pulls back, waiting for his move. Pronek gulps his whiskey then leans toward her and grabs her pate, pushing her face toward him. In his other hand, the glass is slowly leaning on his knee, until the diluted whiskey starts dripping on the floor.

They slowly stretch on the bed, their feet still on the floor. Oh, I’ve seen it many times before, the foreplay. I know the disbelief, the doubt as he’s peeling off layer upon layer of her clothes, as she unbuttons his shirt. I look at the things on her desk: a message from one Daren, a Ciccione Youth CD; an application for an ESL teaching position. There are contact copies with small photos of an empty picture frame; of a light post broken in half, like a pencil; of an anonymous suburban porch; of Pronek looking out of the picture, the American flag limp above his head. There is a thick stack of papers with notes scribbled on them in handwriting leaning down, like wheat in the wind. I read them:

They swallowed cheeseburgers like pills. Yet they were sad.

My violence is a dream.

Rachel is taking off her shoes, having some trouble untying them, giggling.

Jozef had a blues band back home. He is a good man, but there are bubbles coming up from the creature at his bottom.

Fall arrived August 28, around noon. Suddenly the light was soft, the sun rays were coming at you with their heads bowed, chaffing their cheeks against your sides like a purring cat.

Rachel has unbuttoned Pronek’s shirt, her legs are bare, I can see her crotch and her panties. Pronek is looking down at her hands. She slides the shirt down his shoulders, then pulls up his undershirt, laughing and shaking her head. “I was cold,” Pronek says. She kisses his chest and tickles his left nipple with her tongue. Pronek gasps.

Dog eyes crusted with dog tears.

Pronek works on unfastening her bra, as she rakes his hair with her fingers. “It is dirty,” Pronek says. “Not yet,” Rachel says, and laughs again, leaning back just as Pronek solves the bra riddle — her breasts lunge forward.

Outside I can hear squirrels cackling. How can I know they are not talking to me if I don’t know their language?

Slowly and carefully, as if an unsoft touch would break everything, Pronek pulls Rachel’s panties down her thighs, over her knees, until she wiggles her feet through the loops. She is naked now, a beautiful body to look at, the light scintillating on her skin. “Let’s put a condom on,” she says.

Everything in the supermarket has a non-negotiable name. Love will tear us apart.

Pronek is ripping the condom wrapper, like an excited puppy, his back arched, his spine saw-toothed. “I hate condoms,” he says, and bites into the wrapper again. Rachel chortles: “If we start dating seriously you can get the washable kind and never take it off.” Pronek produces a grim laugh, the condom still unconquered. “Oh, give it to me,” Rachel says, and the condom is offered on her palm in no time. “And let me put it on.”

Oh, what is that sound which so thrills the ear

Down in the valley, drumming, drumming?

Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,

The soldiers coming.

“Can I turn off light?” Pronek says.

“The light.”

“What?”

“Can I turn off the light?”

“Turn off the light.”

Rachel turns off the light.

I sit in the darkness, only an occasional headlight mirage appearing on the walls and perishing fast. I listen to their sobs and pants, the tossing and turning and wrestling, the collision of flesh with flesh, a wheeze, a word: yes, blago, no, slowly. I cannot help being aroused, hearing their bodies wrangling in the darkness. I have to breathe timing the intake to coincide with the noises of their passion, the hand of lust gripping my throat, my loins burning. I move and the chair screeches.

“What is that?” Pronek says.

“Nothing. It’s okay. Come here.”

“I heard something.”

“It’s nothing. Let’s fuck.”

She starts producing a submerged squeal, which then turns into a fitful roar, while Pronek produces a sibilant, teeth-clenched sound as if someone were punching him in the chest. Then, to my relief, it is over — they come in duet.

Silence.

“Did you enjoy it?” Pronek says.

“Quiet.”

The room smells of their sweat and clothes. I can feel Pronek’s untense body and the tension slowly rebuilding itself — he is flexing his fingers, crushing an imaginary object.

“Can I smoke?” he pleads.

“Not here. On the deck.”

Then there is a short knock on the door and someone bursts into the room. Pronek lurches out of bed and falls on the floor and stays down.

“Rachel,” the man said.

“For God’s sake, Maxwell. I am not alone. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Shit,” Maxwell said, and stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him.

“Sorry,” he said behind the closed door. “Rachel, I need a condom, I’m out.”

“Oh, God,” Rachel said, and got out of bed.

Pronek lay facedown on the floor, his heart beating so hard he imagined it trying to dig its way out with its little paws.

Rachel would not hold hands — it made her feel like a little girl, she said. But they walked all around Uptown: they looked at the old houses on Beacon, imagining crazy old ladies sheltering hundreds of cats; they sneaked into the Uptown National Bank, admiring its marble counters and high-domed ceilings, fantasizing about robbing it like Bonnie and Clyde; they strolled through the park, past a homeless camp, Rachel taking pictures, past the squash-shaped Russian ladies gibbering up soft consonants. They went to Montrose Harbor and watched the waves slamming into the embankment. She liked to take photos of the back of his neck, Pronek facing the lake, the cresting waves and a few displaced clouds lingering over the thin horizon, moving toward the skyscrapers, Rachel’s camera clicking behind him, like a hiccuping clock. At dusk, they gazed at the downtown skyline twinkling in the moist mist and were hypnotized by the dotted-light snake slithering up Lake Shore Drive, cars on their way home.

“I love you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But I love you. I never felt the love like this.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ruin it.”

“Ruin what?”

“This.”

“What is this?”

“Just hold me and kiss me.”

Kiss.

“What is that?”

“What?”

“That sound.”

“What sound?”

“That sound like somebody digs.”

“Somebody is digging.”

“Who is digging?”

“Somebody is digging, not somebody digs.”

“What is the difference?”

“Well, one is right, the other is wrong.”

“Okay, who is digging?”

“Well, it sounds more like scratching and moving. It’s probably a mouse.”

“Can I smoke?”

“Not here.”

The floor was cold, and Pronek regretted being barefoot — he couldn’t afford to get sick. He saw himself lying alone in bed, sweating and sneezing, his head throbbing, waiting for Rachel to come back from work. The thought of being separated from her had become unbearable. He trudged into the kitchen, tiptoeing like an elephant ballerina to protect his soles from the cold. Maxwell was washing a throng of wineglasses, naked, his springy dreadlocks falling on his shoulders.

“Good morning, Maxwell,” Pronek said, but was not sure that he heard him.

“Hey, good morning,” Maxwell said, glancing at Pronek, but not turning toward him. Pronek wanted orange juice, but all the glasses were being washed by the naked Maxwell, so he sat at the kitchen table, trying not to look at him. But his shoulders were wide, the blades resembling armor plates; his biceps shapely and round, twisting toward his elbows, the morning light absorbed by their brownness; his spine curving into a shallow valley above the half-moons of his butt. He turned toward Pronek.

“You’ve never seen a black man’s body, have you?”

Pronek was terrified — he didn’t want Maxwell to think he was gay.

“No.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it.”

Pronek felt an urge to run out of the kitchen, toward the safety of the bedroom, but was paralyzed. Maxwell’s body was beautiful. The only move he could make was a slight turn toward the neutral zone of the blank opposite wall. The chair shrieked, stressing the ominous silence. Maxwell’s nipples were pierced, the two rings akin to door knockers. He looked straight into Pronek’s eyes and said:

“Would you like to touch it?”

He made a step toward Pronek, who leaned back, glancing around, pretending that he didn’t see and didn’t care. Maxwell’s thighs were thin, curls strewn over their curves.

Aaron walked in, naked, his penis dangling, long and thick, his skin pink. Pronek looked away, at the friendly blank wall.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” Aaron said. Maxwell raised his hands, turned toward Pronek, and shrugged.

“Are you trying to seduce my boyfriend?”

Pronek licked his lips, spotted a strawberry-shaped fridge magnet, and affixed his gaze to it. “No,” he whimpered.

“You foreigners think you can just walk in and take our men,” Aaron said. “But I understand — he is beautiful.”

Pronek blinked rapidly, as if blinking itself were to produce a witty retort. But all he could say was:

“I am sorry.”

Maxwell bent forward and burst out laughing. Aaron threw his head back and gave out a cough-like chortle. They high-fived, then hugged and kissed, their lips pressed hard — it all seemed like a well-rehearsed dance. Pronek was trying halfheartedly to laugh, still determinedly staring at the strawberry magnet, his back in rigid pain. He wanted to cross his legs, but it would have been conspicuous — they might think he was having an erection — whereupon the thought overwhelmed him that he might in fact get an erection. He heard Rachel coming out of the bathroom and she walked in, wearing a blue silk bathrobe, her hair wet, her face bright and beautiful.

“Jesus,” she said, “this is like a fucking beach. All you need is a volleyball net.”

“You’ll never understand male bonding,” Maxwell said.

Aaron filched a pomegranate seed from Maxwell’s cereal bowl. Pronek claimed he wasn’t hungry, even though he was starving because he didn’t want them to watch him while he was eating.

“Jozef used to have a band too,” Rachel said. “Didn’t you. Jozef?”

“No kidding!” Aaron said. “What kind of band?”

“Blues,” Pronek said.

“A blues band?” Maxwell shook his head. “Wait a minute, did you come from a family of slaves?”

“No,” Pronek said, “but the Bosnian music is like the blues.”

“Bosnian music is like blues,” Rachel said.

“Oh, leave him alone,” Aaron said. “It is frightfully cute.”

“So did you, like, have a blues name? Like, Blind Joseph Jefferson or something?”

“Well,” Pronek said, and sighed, “it was Blind Jozef Pronek. That’s me, Jozef Pronek.”

Aaron and Maxwell high-fived each other and guffawed. Pronek tried to laugh too, but his throat was hoarse and Rachel wasn’t laughing. It seemed that he had been stuck in the kitchen all day long.

“Oh, boy,” Aaron said, and wiped his eyes. Maxwell examined Pronek’s face, then Rachel’s: “Blind Joseph Jefferson and Evol, love in reverse. You breeders crack me up.”

Aaron was drumming on the steering wheel with his fingers, and Maxwell was slapping his thighs along with the music.

“Do you know what this is, Jefferson?” Maxwell said.

“No,” Pronek said.

“It’s Bitches Brew, the bitchin’ Miles,” Aaron said. It sounded hysterical to Jozef, but he said nothing.

“Stop calling him Jefferson,” Rachel said.

“Hey, Blind Joseph Jefferson, the Czech blues singer, it’s no joke,” Aaron said, and cackled.

“I also was in the band that played the Beatles music.”

“Man, how old are you — sixty-seven?”

They drove through a maze of bending suburban streets — ghouls and pumpkins and plastic tombstones still strewn on dun lawns. The sky was gray, the drizzle sparkled under headlights. They could see porch lights going on and empty living rooms flickering around the TV, a silhouette moving across the window frame.

“Hundreds of serial killers are breeding in these basements as we speak,” Maxwell said.

“You grew up in the suburbs,” Rachel said.

“He just hasn’t been caught yet,” Aaron said.

“Hey, it was different, it was a loving family.”

“Sure it was. You had a green lawn and a garage, unlike anybody else,” Aaron said, and turned up the music.

There was a single plastic skeleton hanging on the lightless porch. Pronek had a vision of a body hanging, its flesh rotting and falling off in chunks, and he coming up to the door to canvass.

“I canvassed this house,” he said, to no one in particular.

“That wasn’t you,” Rachel said.

The door opened and a flood of light fell on them. A shorn-haired woman with wide hips and narrow shoulders stood in the middle of it, like an apparition. The steel ball in Pronek’s stomach started grinding his intestines.

“Hello, Mom,” Rachel said, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Howdy, Rebecca,” Aaron and Maxwell said in unison.

“Good evening,” Pronek said.

“This is Blind Joseph Jefferson,” Aaron said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Maxwell said. “Every night he gets naked with your daughter and does naughty, naughty things. Naughty.”

Rachel’s mom looked at Pronek stone-faced, her lips straight and tight — Pronek could see the sinews on her neck tensing.

“Is that true?”

Pronek gulped and glanced at Rachel, who was looking at Maxwell and shaking her head.

“Yes,” Pronek said, “but. .”

“Oh, stop it!” Rachel said.

“I’m just kidding,” Rachel’s mom said. “Come in.”

“I was in Sarajevo once,” Rebecca said. “Long time ago, in the sixties. I was on my way to Dubrovnik.”

“Dubrovnik is very beautiful,” Pronek said, although he had been there only once, for half a day.

“I liked the old town in Sarajevo, those old Turkish shops and beautiful mosques. People were very nice.”

“He’s nice too,” Rachel said. “Too nice.”

“Did they have, like, little curtains over their faces?” Aaron asked.

“Oh, no,” Pronek said. “That was long time ago.”

“I met a Bosnian man there. He took me to these coffee shops and we drank strong, oh, my God, strong coffee from little cups and there was this sad music coming from the radio. He told me — very good English — he told me I must enjoy life because life is short.”

“He just wanted to get into your pants,” Aaron said.

“Jesus,” Rachel said.

“Well, he did,” Rebecca said, and threw her head back, releasing a fluttering laughter-bird toward the ceiling.

“What kind of music was that?” Maxwell asked.

“I don’t know.” Rebecca shrugged and pointed at Pronek. “Ask the native. It was very sad is all I remember.”

“It was probably the sevdalinka. It is sad, but it is so sad that it makes you free. It is like the Bosnian blues.”

“Do you know any of those songs?” Maxwell asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sing.”

“No.”

“Why don’t you sing us a song?” Rebecca said.

“No, thank you.” Pronek’s palms were sweating.

“If you do,” Aaron said, “Rebecca will let you get naked with her daughter and do naughty things.”

“Fuckin’ naughty,” Maxwell said.

“Please!” Rachel said and blushed, smiling.

Pronek cleared his throat.

Snijeg pade na behar na voe;

Snijeg pade na behar na voe;

Neka Ijubi ko kod koga hoe;

Neka ljubi ko god koga hoe. .

Ako nee nek’ se ne namee

Ako nee nek’ se ne namee

Od nameta nema selameta

Od nameta nema selameta. .

He finished in a soft sussurous voice, allowing the last breaths to leave his lungs before he closed his mouth.

“That was beautiful,” Rebecca said, and clapped.

“That’s a beautiful song,” Maxwell said. “What is it about?”

“I don’t know how to translate,” Pronek said.

“Try,” Rachel said. “Please.”

“The snow falls on the flowers in the spring and the fruit, and it is strange time.”

“That is strange,” Aaron said.

“And one dog wants to become the wolf. He goes to the forest and is free, but some men want to kill him.”

“Why?” Rebecca asked.

“I don’t know,” Pronek said. “Because they have guns. And then it later says like this: If the dog is lucky as he is unhappy, he would go back home and be free.”

“That reminds me of a Chinese proverb,” Rebecca said, “that says: It’s better to be rich and happy for a hundred years than to be poor and miserable for one day.”

Rebecca kissed Pronek on the cheek and he could smell her perfume and alcohol breath. He wanted to kiss her too, but instead just said: “Thank you.” It was cold outside, snow flurries flying out of the darkness into the light, like moths, some of them sticking to their clothes and then melting away with a sparkle.

“I loved that song.”

“Thank you.”

“I never knew you could sing like that.”

“Thank you.”

“My mom liked you.”

“I liked her.”

“You know, Maxwell and Aaron are moving in together. They found a place in Evanston.”

“Good.”

“I’ll have to find a roommate.”

“I see.”

“My dad moved in with my mom the day they met.”

“The same day?”

“Yeah. She met him in a bus station. He had no place to stay so she took him home.”

“How long he stayed?”

“Twelve years.”

They heard Maxwell and Aaron playing their trumpets, the plaintive wails coming from the kitchen. Pronek was a little drunk and when he closed his eyes he could see flashing spirals, and he could smell Rachel’s hair, her elbow touching his ribs.

“I’m happy we are together,” she said.

Some of his cracked chairs and the shabby table he left by the Dumpster, along with cracked dishes, permanently smudged glasses, and a rotten mattress, which Pronek suspected was home to a fresh brood of cockroaches. The rest fit into five boxes, which he carried upstairs one at a time. He put the towels in the dresser, next to his underwear. He hung up his clothes in his half of the closet. He put the box of Mirza’s letters under the bed. He positioned a couple of picture frames on the TV: Pronek on stage with Dead Souls; his drunk parents holding hands awkwardly. He deployed the toy chopper on the bookshelf and the marble bowl on the coffee table. He hung up the map of the world in the kitchen and scattered other things that belonged to him around the apartment, marking his territory, like a dog pissing on trees — wherever he looked there was a trace of him. And when he was brushing his teeth while Rachel waited in bed, it exhilarated him that he was in the bathroom while she was in the bedroom.

Rachel said: “I’ll wait here.” Pronek went through a maze of walls, then through low, arched gates, and he realized he was inside a castle. He found his way to a locker room and was waiting in front of a locker for it to open, but then decided to tinker with the lock. He was sticking a graphite pen into it, when someone walked in. He quickly collected himself and with a perfect American accent, so perfect it seemed someone else was speaking, as if he were a soul-infested ventriloquist’s dummy, he said: “Do not trespass on my domain!” The trespasser was Sila the Drummer, wearing a green beret, a snare drum hanging from his neck. “This place stinks with foreigners,” Pronek said. “Damn right!” Sila said. Then Pronek was rummaging through the locker, which had a bedroom and a bathroom and a garden with an ear-shaped bird bath. He took a silver cell phone from the garden and a roll of film from the bedroom, and a condom from the bathroom and put them in his pocket. Then he was crawling along the inside walls of the castle and was out in no time. He saw people going down the craggy hill backward, everybody holding on to their own rope. It was some kind of pilgrimage in reverse — somehow he knew that at the bottom of the hill there was a bleeding saint who had tumbled down. Everybody was carrying their possessions in their hands, still managing to hold on to the rope — he saw Maxwell carrying a kite; he saw Dallas carrying a shoe box with a nuclear reactor and a banjo. He saw his father dragging a dead, rotten Rottweiler on a leash. There was a herd of three-year-old boys with hairy chests, each of them holding a swarm of flies forming different shapes in their hands: a banana, a revolver, the shape of Yugoslavia. He saw strangers carrying downhill things he recognized as his own: the guitar he had sold before coming to America; the blue UNHCR letters he had received from Mirza; a jar full of marbles in different colors. He saw a couple of Siamese twins, joined at the hip, a box in their four hands containing a soulless football; a broken-boned umbrella; some sacred scrolls; a bundle of shoes with crescent soles. One of the twins shot a vicious glance at Pronek and Pronek understood that he had broken into their locker. He got terribly afraid, he sped up running backward down the hill, faster and faster, the rope burning his palms, and he couldn’t see where he was going — all he could see was the huge rock on the top of the hill the saint had pushed up and left there.

Pronek listened to Rachel’s even breathing, trying to calm down, but his heart was pounding, the balls of his feet sore, the arches tense, as if he had just stopped running.

“Rachel, what is that sound?”

He leaned over her. Her face was calm, her eyelids relaxed, she murmured something he could not understand and for a moment he hated her because she could sleep so peacefully, so far away from him, dreaming different dreams.

“Rachel, what is it?”

He touched her shoulder and she shuddered, yelped, and snapped her eyes open. She looked at Pronek with frightened surprise as if she couldn’t recognize him.

“Rachel, it’s me.”

She pushed him away and sat up in bed, suddenly snorting and breathing heavily.

“Rachel, what is that sound?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen!”

There was nothing to hear. They were motionless, silent, in the darkness.

“Go to sleep, Jozef.”

“No. Listen.”

There was scraping and scuffling, barely audible, somewhere in the hall. Pronek leapt out of bed and tiptoed out of the bedroom, then turned the hall light on abruptly.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Rachel put on her robe and followed him out. Pronek was advancing toward the kitchen, his body taut and ready in his flannel pajamas.

“It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake.”

Pronek turned on the light in the kitchen, then determinedly got on all fours and crept along the floor. Rachel stood at the door, barefoot and cold.

“Listen.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

Pronek went under the table in the corner, she could see only the soles of his feet. “Mouse!” he shouted, and banged his head against the table. Something darted past Rachel’s cold feet and she trotted for an instant as if dancing. It ran along the walls of the living room and went behind the sofa. Pronek got out from under the table holding his pate and got up.

“It’s the mouse,” he said.

“It’s behind the sofa.”

Pronek strode toward the sofa, then pushed it away from the wall. The mouse was in the corner shivering, huddled, a light-tentacle reaching its tail.

“Give me something,” Pronek said. The mouse was fat, a short evolutional step from a rat, its cheeks bulging as if it had been caught eating and still was chewing the food.

“What do you want?”

“Something.”

Rachel grabbed a book off the shelf: “Here.”

Pronek took the book, looked at the title page, and flipped through it — it was The Idiot.

“Not this one.”

“You gotta be kidding me! What difference does it make?”

“Not this.”

She put the book back on the shelf and stood, with her hands pressing against her back, choosing another one:

“Do you want fiction or biography?” she asked, irked.

The mouse dared to move, its back against the wall, but Pronek stomped his foot.

“Here is Death in Venice” she said.

Pronek grasped the book — it was a small paperback, thick and reeking of library must. He slammed the mouse — once, twice. The mouse squealed and squeaked and writhed as Pronek kept hitting it until it stopped moving and producing sounds.

“God!” Rachel said.

“I think it’s dead.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

He was still holding Death in Venice, his eyes fiery — he had just killed a living creature and felt nauseated, as if he had swallowed blood. Rachel came back with a broom and a dustpan and offered them to Pronek.

“Why me?”

“All right, step back.”

She pushed the mouse onto the bin with the broom and it rolled over, but then it shook its head and flexed its legs, as if waking up from a long sleep.

“Jesus, it’s alive,” she grunted.

“Fuck,” Pronek said, and realized that if someone were listening he’d think Pronek was saying it like a real American. “Motherfucker,” he said.

“Get a bucket and fill it up with water,” Rachel said.

Pronek found a tin bucket in the bathroom, emptied it of rags and sponges, and filled it up halfway with water — he watched the deluge coming out of the faucet and imagined himself at the bottom of the bucket, the water coming down crashing on him.

Rachel was pressing the mouse down on the pan with the broom. She dropped it into the bucket. For a moment the mouse floated on its back, a grin of horror on its little pointy face, but then it turned over and started swimming. The water was clear, they could see the bottom. The mouse was scratching the walls with its claws, trying to climb up, but it was clearly hopeless.

“Drown it,” Rachel said.

“I can’t.”

“Drown it!” She pressed the mouse’s head with her index finger, the mouse sank but then resurfaced. She pressed it again, but then recoiled when it tried to grab her finger. The mouse flapped around with its tiny paws, its tail snaking behind. When it reached the bucket wall, it scratched it frantically.

“Maybe we can leave it there,” Pronek said.

“I don’t think so. I don’t want to listen to its death throes all night long.”

“Maybe we can throw it outside.”

“No, it has to die.”

“I have never seen the mouse like this.”

“A mouse like this.”

“What?”

“A mouse like this. Not the mouse like this.”

“Why you have to correct me all the time?” He stood up and turned away in anger from Rachel and the bucket.

“Why do you have to correct me all the time?”

“What’s difference? You understand me.”

“What’s the difference.”

“Stop it!” he yelled.

“Don’t you yell at me!” Rachel screamed back.

The mouse was swimming in circles. Pronek felt rage leavening in his stomach, something pushing the inside of his temples, the heat swarming in his eyeballs. He stood facing Rachel, who looked at him with belligerent disgust. It became clear to him at that moment that he didn’t want to be there — the thought spread out before him like a ski slope — and there was nowhere he wanted to be. He heard the mouse scraping the bucket, the horrible din. And then, with a motion of his foot that seemed incredibly slow to him, but startled Rachel, he kicked the bucket and it flew toward the wall, the water splashing and sloshing around, stray droplets sparkling. He felt the release inside — the fury deluge broke the dam in his stomach and flooded his body as the bucket smashed into the wall.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Rachel grabbed her hair and pulled it.

“Correct this!” he screamed, and flung The Idiot across the room. He grabbed the marble bowl and emptied it on the floor — the marbles cackling hysterically and rolling away in myriad directions. He smashed a flowerless vase against the wall. He swept the picture frames off the TV and they crashed on the floor, the shards scattering around. He kicked the pumpkin-shaped clock like a soccer ball and it landed on the sofa. He walked over the shards toward the Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish mug and pitched it at the floor. He flung the tin frog toward the kitchen, stomping over the shards, cutting his soles. In the kitchen, he ripped the map of the world off the floor and stamped on it, leaving bloody smudges.

“What are you doing? I’ll call the police!”

He grabbed a pomegranate and smashed it against the wall, the pomegranate exploding like a head, the crimson brains everywhere.

“Call the goddamn police. Let them throw me out of this fucking country!”

He snatched Rachel’s photos off the wall and smashed them. He pulled books off the shelves, tore them apart, and launched the pages toward the ceiling. And all along there was a tranquil nook inside him, from which someone else was calmly observing him wreaking havoc.

“What got into you?” Rachel cried. “I love you! What did I do to you?”

He pulled the phone cord and the receiver split from the phone and fell on top of the book pile. He pushed the TV off the stall and it came down with a thud. Rachel ran toward the bedroom, and Pronek followed her, ready to do the bedroom too. He punched the bedroom door, bloodying his knuckles.

She emerged from the room with the camera. She started pressing the camera button frantically, saying: “What did I do to you?” and Pronek saw the aperture blinking.

“You want to take a picture of me? You want to take a picture of me?”

He started ripping his pajamas apart, the buttons flying like ricocheted bullets. He ripped off his undershirt, then his underwear, and stood naked, the sweat glistening on his skin. He tottered toward the camera, with his hands extended toward it.

“You want to see me? You want to see the real me?”

He banged his chest with his fists, as if trying to break it open.

“Here! Here!” he screamed, until he lost his voice.

And here we are: he is down on his knees, bleeding; he is surrounded by the debris. Dizzy with the violent adrenaline, he closes his eyes, and waits for Rachel to stop taking pictures and touch his cheek, redeeming him. A hand touches his face, tenderly, delicately, sliding its tips across the hollow of his cheek. He gasps and slowly, one sob at a time, he starts to cry.

But he doesn’t know that the hand stroking his cheek is mine. He cannot hear me saying to him: “Ne plai. Sve e biti u redu.” Calm down, I’m telling him, everything will fall into place. Let us just sort through this destruction. Let us just remember how we got here. Let us just remember.