Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Moby-Dick

Two weeks after the night we spied on Hannah (“Observed,” Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry clarified in The Conceit of a Unicorn [Lavelle, 1901]), Nigel found an invitation in the wastepaper basket in her den, the tiny room off the living room filled with world atlases and half-dead hanging plants barely surviving on her version of flora life support (twenty-four-hour plant lights, periodic Miracle-Gro).

It was elegant, printed on a thick, cream, embossed card.

“I think we should go,” Nigel announced that Friday at Jade’s.

“Me too,” said Leulah.

“You can’t,” Charles said. “She didn’t invite you.”

“A minor detail,” Nigel said.

In spite of Charles’ words of warning, the following Sunday, halfway through dinner, Nigel removed the invitation from his back pocket and brazenly placed it next to the platter of veal chops, without saying a word.

In that instant, the dining room became nail-bitingly unbearable (see Midday Face-Off at Sioux Falls: A Mohave Dan Western, Lone Star Publishers, Bendley, 1992). Dinners had already become a teensy bit unbearable since I’d gone to Cottonwood. I found it impossible to look at Hannah’s face, to smile gaily, to shoot the breeze about schoolwork or term papers or Mr. Moats’ penchant for textured shirts without envisioning Doc and his accordion legs, his wrinkled face like wood once infested with termites, not to mention the horror of their Hollywood Kiss, which, granted, had taken place offscreen, but was still scary. (It was two different movies crudely edited together—Gilda with Cocoon.)

Of course, when I considered Jade, Lu, and the handicapped stall, I also felt queasy; but with Hannah it was worse. As Dad said, the difference between a dynamic and a wasted uprising depends upon the point at which it occurs within a country’s historic timeline (see Van Meer, “The Fantasy of Industrialization,” Federal Forum, Vol. 23, Issue 9). Jade and Lu were still developing nations. And thus, while it wasn’t fantastic, it also wasn’t too terrible for them to have a backward infrastructure and a poor human development index. But Hannah — she was much further along. She should have already established a robust economy, peacefulness, free trade — and as these things weren’t yet assured, frankly, it wasn’t looking good for her democracy. She could very well struggle forever, with “corruption and scandal perpetually undermining [her] credibility as a self-ruled state.”

Milton had opened a window. A puppyish draft tore around the dining room, causing my paper napkin to fly off my lap, the flames to dance violently atop the candles like lunatic ballerinas. I couldn’t believe what Nigel had done, acted like a jealous husband presenting his wife with an incriminating cufflink.

And yet, Hannah gave no reaction.

She didn’t even seem to notice the invitation, concentrating instead on her veal chop, cutting it into identically sized pieces with an elegant handbag of a smile on her face. Her blouse, satin and sea-green (one of her few articles of clothing that didn’t carry itself like a refugee), clung to her as a languid, iridescent skin, moving when she moved, breathing when she breathed.

This uneasiness continued for what felt like an hour. I toyed with the idea of stretching my arms over my veal chop in the direction of the sautéed spinach, grabbing the thing, stealthily slipping it under my leg, but, to be honest, I didn’t have the moral aplomb to perform such things as The Sir Thomas More or The Jeanne d’Arc. Nigel was sitting in his chair staring at Hannah, and the way his eyes were buried behind his glasses, reflecting the candles, until he turned his head and they emerged for a moment like beetles in sand, the way he sat so straight, so small yet so substantial, he looked like Napoleon, especially the unappealing oil rendering of the diminutive French Emperor on the cover of Dad’s foundational seminar textbook, Mastering Mankind (Howards & Path, 1994). (He looked as if he could perform a coup d’état in his sleep and had no qualms being at war with every major European power.)

“I didn’t tell you,” Hannah said suddenly, “because if I did, you’d want to come. And you can’t. I’m inviting Eva Brewster, which makes your attendance out of the question if I’m to keep my job.”

Not only was her reaction surprising (also a bit of a letdown; I suppose I was in the stands, drinking Anis del Toro, awaiting the matador), but also remarkable and slick was the way she’d seen the invitation but appeared not to have seen it.

“Why’d you invite Eva Brewster?” asked Leulah.

“She heard I was planning the fund-raiser and asked if she could come. I couldn’t say no. Nigel, I don’t appreciate your going through my things. Please give me the courtesy of privacy.”

No one said anything. It was Nigel’s cue to explain himself, to give some semblance of an apology, attempt some flea-bitten joke about his sticky fingers or refer to Cool Parenting’s Chapter 21, “Teenagers and the Joy of Kleptomania,” quoting one of the surprising statistics, that it was common for teenagers to go through a period of “appropriation” and “embezzlement” (Mill, 2000). Sixty percent of the time it was something “the youngster eventually grew out of, like Gothic eye makeup and skateboarding” (p. 183).

But Nigel wasn’t paying attention. He was cheerfully helping himself to the last veal chop.

Soon the food was cold. We cleared the plates, collected our books, said weak good-byes into the monstrous night. Hannah leaned against the doorway, saying what she always did—“Drive home safely!”—but something in the timbre of her voice, that certain campfire quality, was gone. As Jade and I drove down the driveway, I looked back and saw her still standing on the porch, watching us, her green blouse in the gold light shivering like a swimming pool.

“I feel sick,” I said.

Jade nodded. “Utterly wretched.”

“Wonder if she’ll forgive him.”

“Of course she will. She knows him like the back of her hand. Nigel was born without the feeling gene. Other people have no appendix, not enough white blood cells. He doesn’t have enough feeling. I guess they did a scan of his brain when he was kid and where other people have emotion, he has a vacuum of total space, poor kid. And he’s gay, too. And sure, everyone’s openminded and accepting — all that jazz — but it still can’t be easy in high school.”

“He’s gay?” I asked in amazement.

“Earth to Retch? Hello?” She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights. “You know, sometimes I wonder if you’re all there, if you know what I mean. Have you ever gone to a doctor to make sure you have all your furniture upstairs? Because I have serious doubts about it, Gag. I really do.”

Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

One has only to consult the 2002 edition of R. Stanbury’s Illuminating Statistics and Cross-Century Comparisons, under “Grieving,” to learn that the very idea of being Brokenhearted, Wretched, Desolate and Despairing is a thing of the past, soon to take on the amusing novelty of such archaic things as the Jalopy, the Jitterbug and Jams. The average American widower in 1802 waited an average of 18.9 years before remarrying, while in 2001 he holds out for an average 8.24 months. (In the “By State” snapshot, you will see in California he holds out for a horrifying 3.6 months.)

Of course, Dad made it his business to rage against this “cultural anesthetizing,” this “ironing out of deep human sentiment, leaving only a flat, unwrinkled vacuity,” and thus he’d deliberately raised me to be an insightful, sensitive sort of person, someone aware, beneath even the most tedious surfaces, of good, evil and the smoky shades in between. He made sure I took the time between Muders, Ohio, and Paducah, Washington, to commit to memory not one or two, but all of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” and thus I couldn’t look at a fly buzzing around a hamburger without fretting, “Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?”

When I was with the Bluebloods, though, it was easy to pretend I hadn’t committed anything to memory except the lyrics of a thousand corn syrup R&B songs, that I’d never heard of anyone named Blake except that junior who always had his hands in his pockets and looked like he wanted to hit someone, that I could simply notice a fly and not think anything but shrill girlish expressions (Ew). Naturally, if Dad had known about my attitude, he would’ve called it “stomach-turning conformity,” maybe even “a disgrace to the Van Meers.” (It often slipped his mind he was an orphan.) Yet I saw it as thrilling, Romantic, if I allowed the current to take me along the “willowy hills and fields,” or wherever it wanted, regardless of the consequences (see “The Lady of Shalott,” Tennyson, 1842).

This was why I had no objections the following slattern Saturday night, November 22, when Jade made an entrance in the Purple Room wearing a black wig and a billowing white pantsuit. Colossal shoulder pads jutted off of her like the White Cliffs of Dover and she’d drawn duomo eyebrows over her eyes with what appeared to be a burnt sienna Crayola crayon.

“Guess who I am.”

Charles turned to survey her. “Dame Edna.”

“‘I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. You want The Girl Next Door? Go next door.’” She threw her head back and villain-laughed, falling onto the leather couch, and putting her feet with their big, dinghy-like black pumps in the air. “Guess where I’m headed.”

“Hell,” said Charles.

She rolled over, sitting up. A clump of wig stuck to her lipstick.

“The Burns County Animal Shelter cordially invites you to our annual—”

“Not a chance.”

“—charity soiray—”

“We can’t.”

“—RSVP—”

“Absolutely not.”

“Rowdy sex very possible.”

“No.”

“I’ll go,” said Leulah.

In the end, we couldn’t agree on a group costume, so Charles was Jack the Ripper (for blood, Leulah and I doused him with A.1. Steak Sauce), Leulah was a French maid (helping herself to the array of Hermès silk scarves in various equestrian motifs, folded into neat squares in Jefferson’s bureau), Milton, refusing to dress up, was Plan B (the ambiguous sense of humor that bubbled up whenever he smoked pot), Nigel was Antonio Banderas as Zorro (he used Jeff’s toenail scissors to cut small holes around the rhinestone ZZZZZs of her black sleeping mask), Jade was Anita Ekberg of La Dolce Vita complete with stuffed kitten (she duct-taped it to a headband). I was one very unlikely Pussy Galore in shrublike red wig and baggy, teal nylon bodysuit (see “Martian 14,” Profiling Little Green Men: Sketches of Aliens from Eyewitness Accounts, Diller, 1989, p. 115).

We were drunk. Outside, the air was supple and warm as a dance hall girl after her opening number; and in our costumes, we sprinted sloppily across the nighted lawn, laughing at nothing.

Jade, in her giant conch-shell gown, crunchy with crinolines, ruffles and ribbons, screamed and threw herself against the grass, rolling down the hill.

“Where are you going?” shouted Charles. “It started at eight! It’s nine-thirty!”

“Come on, Retch!” shouted Jade.

I crossed my arms over my chest and hurled myself forward.

“Where are you?”

I rolled. Grass needled me and my wig ripped off. Stars catapulted between dull pauses of ground, and at the bottom, the quiet hit me. Jade was lying a few feet away, her face serious and blue. Staring at the stars naturally encouraged one’s face to appear serious and blue, and Dad had a variety of theories explaining this phenomenon, the majority of which centered on human insecurity and sobering realizations of absolute smallness when measured against such unfathomable things as the Spiral, the Barred Spiral, the Elliptical and the Irregular Galaxy.

But I remember, I couldn’t recall a single one of Dad’s theories at that moment. The black sky, pinpricked with light, couldn’t help but show off like Mozart at five. Voices scratched the air, words wobbly and unsure of themselves, and soon Milton was hurtling through the darkness, and Nigel’s loafers rocketed past my head, and Leulah fell right next to me with a teacup sound (“Ahh!”). The silk scarf escaped her hair and settled over my neck and chin. When I breathed, it bubbled like a pond when something drowns in it.

“You bastards!” screamed Charles. “By the time we get there, it’ll be over! We need to leave now!”

“Shut up, Nazi,” Jade said.

“Think Hannah will be mad?” asked Leulah.

“Probably.”

“She’ll kill us,” said Milton. He was only a few feet away. When he breathed it was dragon breaths.

“Hannah shmanna,” Jade said.

Somehow, we peeled ourselves off the ground and trekked up the hill to the Mercedes, where Charles was waiting in a bad mood wearing Jade’s eighth-grade clear plastic raincoat so he wouldn’t get A.1. Steak Sauce all over the driver’s seat. I was the smallest, and Jade said it was necessary to take one car, so I acted as the human seat belt across Nigel, Jade and Leulah, who was making babies’ feet with her fist in the fogged window. I concentrated on the car light, my big white high heels touching the door handle, the cloud of smoke loitering around Milton’s head in the front seat where he smoked one of his joints thick as lipstick.

“Gonna be messy,” he said, “showin’ up there unannounced. Not too late to change the plan, friends.”

“Stop being mind-numbing,” Jade said, plucking the joint from his fingers. “We see Evita, we hide. Make like rugs. It’ll be fun.”

“Perón won’t be there,” said Nigel.

“Why not?”

“Hannah didn’t really invite her. She was lying. She said it just to have a valid reason why we couldn’t come.”

“You’re paranoid.”

Nigel shrugged. “She showed the classic signs of lying. I’d bet my life Eva Brewster will not be at the party. And if anyone asks her about it on Monday, she wouldn’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“You are the spawn of Satan,” Jade pronounced, then accidentally bumped her head against the window. “Ow.”

“Want some?” asked Leulah, handing me the joint.

“Thanks,” I said.

At the risk of protesting too much, I’d become well acquainted with the crafty behavior of both ceilings and floors under the influence of nip, tipple, hooch, booze, jet fuel, grog, zip, ex, pippin, poison and snifter (the Tremble, the Swoop Out of Nowhere, the Apparently Sinking Ship, the Fraudulent Earthquake). Much of the time when I was with them, I was only pretending to take all those superhuman swigs from Milton’s silver M.E.B. flask full of his preferred liquid arsenic, Wild Turkey, passed around the Purple Room like a Native American Peace Pipe.

Unbeknownst to the others, midway through any given evening, I was not, as it appeared, throwing them back with the best of them. “Look. Hurl’s deep in thought,” Nigel once commented as I stared into space on the couch. I wasn’t deep in thought, I was trying to pin down a covert means via which I might dispose of Leulah’s latest potion, something she simply called “Claw,” a deceitfully clear concoction that charred one’s esophagus and entire digestive system. One of my preferred scenarios was walking outside unaccompanied for some “fresh air” and, with the porch light off, stealthily pouring whatever it was down one of Jeff’s bronze, open-mouthed lions, final gifts from Andy Warhol in January 1987, a month before he died from complications after a gallbladder operation. Obviously, I could have simply dumped it in the grass, but I found a certain woozy satisfaction in feeding it to the lions, who obediently held their giant mouths open and stared up at me as if hoping with this final batch I’d finish them off. I only prayed Jeff never decided the hulking beasts would look better by the front door; when she uprooted them, she’d drown in a tidal wave of nip, tipple, hooch, booze, jet fuel, poison and snifter.

Nearly an hour later, we turned down Hannah’s driveway. Charles expertly navigated the Mercedes through the corridor of empty cars parked along the road. Frankly, I was surprised he was able to drive so well given his state of impairment (see “Unidentified Fluid,” Chapter 4, “Engine Troubleshooting,” Automobile Mechanics, Pont, 1997).

“Don’t get a ding,” said Jade. “If you get a ding I’m in trouble.”

“She knows more people than we thought,” Leulah said.

“Shit,” said Milton.

“This is perfect,” said Jade, clapping her hands. “Absolutely ideal. We’ll blend. I just hope we don’t see Hannah.”

“You’re worried about seeing Hannah?” shouted Charles. “Then we need to go back, because let me give you the heads up, honey bunch! We’re going to see her!”

“Keep your eyes on the road. It’s fine.” Jade huffed. “It’s just…”

“What?” Charles slammed his foot on the brake. We all went forward and backward together like children on a bus.

“It’s just a party. And Hannah won’t really mind. We’re not doing anything terrible or anything. Right?”

Anxiety, Doubt and Uncertainty had unexpectedly stood up in Jade’s voice and now they were meandering through it making Helluva Good Time quite nervous.

“Kind of,” said Leulah.

“No,” said Nigel.

“Could go either way,” said Milton.

“Somebody make a fucking decision!” shouted Charles.

“Let Gag decide,” said Jade. “She’s the responsible one.”

To this day, I’m not sure how or why I said what I did. Perhaps it was one of those uncanny occasions when it really isn’t you speaking, but Fate, who intervenes every so often to make sure that, rather than your choosing the easy road, recently paved, with clearly labeled street signs and maple trees, she, with the cruelty of drill sergeants, dictators, and office personnel, makes certain you stick to the dark, thorny path she’s already laid out for you.

“We’re going in,” I said.

Hannah was a Snowy Egret, and when one heard she was planning a social affair, one couldn’t help but expect a Snowy Egret kind of party — flutes of champagne, cigarette holders and a string quartet, people asking each other to dance with delicate rests of cheeks against shoulders and very few clammy palms, adulterous intrigues behind laurel hedges and grandiflora roses — the sort of elegant, whispery affair the Larrabees could host with their eyes closed, the kind Sabrina observed from her tree.

As we approached the house, however, and saw the weird crowd of animal, vegetable and mineral dribbling through the front yard and across the driveway, Milton suggested we cut into the woods and head to the other side of the house, maybe sneak in the door off the patio where Hannah had a kidney-shaped swimming pool, which she never used.

“We can still leave if we want to,” said Jade.

We parked the car behind a van and sat in the dark, at the edge of pine trees, watching in the loose light of fourteen tiki torches some fifty or sixty people crowding Hannah’s patio. They all wore surprisingly complicated costumes (ghouls, alligators, devils, the entire crew of the USS Enterprise), those in masks sipping straws in blue and red plastic cups, others eating pretzels and crackers, trying to make themselves heard over the meat-cleaving music.

“Who’re all these people?” asked Charles, frowning.

“I don’t recognize them,” said Jade.

“I guess they’re friends of Hannah’s,” said Leulah.

“You see her?”

“No.”

“Even if she was here,” said Milton, “it’d be impossible to tell which one she was. Everyone’s wearin’ masks.”

“I’m freezing,” said Jade.

“We should have masks,” Milton said. “That’s what the invite said.”

“Where the fuck are we going to find masks now?” asked Charles.

“There’s Perón,” said Lu.

“Where?”

“The woman with the sparkly halo thing.”

“That’s not her.”

“Seriously,” said Jade uneasily, “what are we even doing here?”

“You guys can sit here all night,” said Nigel, “but I, for one, am going to enjoy myself.” He was wearing his Zorro mask and his glasses. He looked like an erudite raccoon. “Who else wants to have some fun?”

For some reason, he was looking at me.

“What do you say, old broad? Shall we dance?”

I adjusted my wig.

We left the others, hurrying across the yard — one nerdy raccoon and an inverted carrot — to Hannah’s patio.

It was jam packed. Four men dressed as rats and a mermaid beauty queen with a half-mask of blue sequins were actually in the swimming pool, laughing, throwing a volleyball. We decided to make our way inside (see “Walking upstream in the Zambezi River during a flood period,” Quests, 1992, p. 212). We crammed ourselves into a space between the plaid couch and a pirate talking to a devil oblivious to the repercussions of his massive sweaty back when he suddenly and without warning backed it into two much smaller people.

For twenty minutes, we didn’t do anything but sip vodka out of the red plastic cups and watch the people — none of whom we recognized — crawling, slithering, waddling their way around the room in costumes ranging from the teensy-weensy to the wholly insurmountable.

“Butterfly hazy!” Nigel shouted, shaking his head.

I shook my head and he repeated himself.

“This is totally crazy!”

I nodded. Hannah, Eva Brewster and the animals were nowhere to be found, only graceless birds, doughy sumo wrestlers, unvelcroed reptiles, a Queen who’d removed her crown and distractedly gnawed on it as her eyes strolled the room, probably searching for a King or Ace to come royally flush her.

If Dad had been present, he’d undoubtedly have commented that most of the adults present were “dangerously close to relinquishing their dignity” and that it was sad and disturbing, because “they were all searching for something they’d never recognize, even if they found it.” Dad was notoriously severe when it came to commenting upon the behaviors of all people other than himself. Yet, watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah’s neat stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you’re so busy waiting for, you don’t notice it never actually comes.

“What are they speaking?” Nigel shouted in my ear.

I followed his eyes to the astronaut standing a few feet away. He was holding his pressure helmet, a stocky man with a sideways sigma hairline () talking vigorously to a gorilla.

“I think it’s Greek,” I said, surprised. (“The language of the Titans, the Oracles, ” said Dad. (This last bit apparently meant “the language of heroes.”) Dad loved showing off his bizarre aptitude when it came to foreign languages. (He claimed to be fluent in twelve; yet fluent often meant yes and no, plus a few impressive phrases, and enjoyed repeating a certain witticism about Americans and their dearth of language skills: “Americans need to master lingual before they attempt bilingual.”)

“I wonder who that is,” I said to Nigel. The gorilla took off its head, revealing a small Chinese woman. She nodded, but answered in some other guttural language that made a person’s mouth break-dance. I wasn’t even sure I’d heard Greek in the first place. I leaned closer.

“Aye, Savannah,” said Nigel, squeezing my arm.

“Again,” I shouted.

“I see Hannah.”

He grabbed my hand and yanked me through two Elvises.

“So where’d you come from?” asked Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii. “Reno,” said a very sweaty Elvis on Tour drinking from a blue plastic cup.

“She went upstairs,” Nigel said into my ear, trying to get us past Sodom and Gomorrah, Leopold and Loeb, Tarzan and Jane, who’d just managed to find each other in this jungle and were talking with a great deal of clothing fiddling. I didn’t know why Nigel wanted to find Hannah, but midway up, I saw only a six-ton Tyrannosaurus Ex who’d unzipped his costume and sat down on his rubber head.

“Fuck.”

“Why do you want to find her?” I shouted, “I thought the—” and just as I turned to look out over the bobbing wigs and masks, I saw her.

Her face was eclipsed by the brim of a top hat (only a white sliver of chin and red mouth was visible) but I knew it was she, due to the oil and vinegar reaction her presence had with all backdrops, atmospheres and given conditions. The young, the old, the pretty and plain merged to compose some standard room of talking people, but Hannah was permanently separate and distinctive, as if there were always an unmistakable, thin black line drawn around her, or a YOU ARE HERE arrow discreetly floated in her wake reading, SHE IS HERE. Or perhaps, due to a certain relationship she had with incandescence, her face exerted a gravitational pull on 50 percent of all the light in the room.

She was dressed in a tuxedo and heading our way, leading a man up the stairs. She held his left hand as if it were expensive, something she couldn’t afford to lose.

Nigel saw her too. “Who’s she dressed as?”

“Marlene Dietrich, Morocco, 1930. We need to hide.”

But Nigel shook his head and held on to my wrist. As we were trapped by a sheikh waiting for someone to come out of the upstairs bathroom and a group of men dressed as tourists (Polaroids, Hawaiian shirts) I could do nothing but brace myself for what was coming.

I was marginally reassured, however, when I saw the man. If she’d been with Doc three weeks ago, at least she’d traded up and was now arm in arm with Big Daddy (see The Great Patriarchs of American Theatre:1821–1990, Park, 1992). Though he was gray haired, overweight in that Montgomery, Alabama way (when the stomach looked like a great big bag of loot and the rest of the body ignored that rude, uncouth section, going about its business of being perfectly fit and trim), something about him was satisfying, impressive. Dressed in a Red Army uniform (presumably as Mao Zedong), he had a chancellor’s posture, and his face, if not flat-out handsome, was at the very least splendid: rich, glistening and rosy, like a block of salted ham at a state dinner. It was also evident he was a little bit in love with her. Dad said being in love had nothing to do with words, action or the heart (“the most overrated of organs”), but with the eyes (“Everything essential concerns the eyes.”) and this man’s eyes couldn’t stop slipping and sliding off every curve of her face.

I wondered what she could possibly be saying to him, her profile puzzling into the space between his jaw and shoulder. Maybe she was wowing him with an ability to recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places, which I secretly thought would be sort of electrifying if some kid heatedly whispered it into my ear (“3.14159265…”). Or maybe she was repeating a Shakespearean sonnet, #116, Dad’s favorite (“If there are authentic words of love that exist in this English language, these are the ones people with any real affection should say, rather than the shopworn, ‘I love you,’ which can be uttered by any hebetudinous Tom, Dick or Moe”): “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…”

Whatever it was, the man was mesmerized. He looked as if he couldn’t wait for her to garnish him with fresh bay leaves, slice him, pour him all over with gravy.

They were three stairs away now, passing the cheerleader, the woman dressed as Liza Minnelli leaning against the wall with makeup clogging her eyes like rotten leaves in old gutters.

And then she saw us.

There was a skid of her eyes, a brief suspension of smile, a catch, a soft sweater snagging a tree branch. All Nigel and I could do was stand with lousy smiles safety-pinned to our faces like HELLO MY NAME IS name tags. She didn’t say anything until she was next to us.

“Shame on you,” she said.

“Hi,” said Nigel brightly, as if he thought she’d said, “Overjoyed to see you,” and to my horror, he was now extending his hand to the man, who’d turned his large, soggy face curiously in our direction. “I’m Nigel Creech.”

The man raised one white eyebrow and tilted his head, smiling good-naturedly. “Smoke,” he said. His eyes were a crisp seersucker blue, and shrewd — surprisingly so. Dad said you could tell how sharp someone was by the tempo of his/her eyes on your face when you were introduced. If they barely did the box step or took to being wallflowers somewhere between your eyebrows, the person had “the IQ of caribou,” but if they waltzed from your eyes to your shoes, not nervously, but with easy, untroubled curiosity, then the person had “a respectable acumen.” Well, Smoke’s eyes macumbaed from Nigel to me back to Nigel and I felt in that simple movement he grasped every embarrassment of our lives. I couldn’t help but like him. Laugh lines parenthesized his mouth.

“You’re visiting for the weekend?” Nigel asked.

Smoke glanced at Hannah before he answered. “Yes. Hannah’s been kind enough to show me around.”

“Where are you from?”

Nigel’s aggressive curiosity wasn’t lost on Smoke. Again, he looked at Hannah. “West Virginia,” he said.

And then it was horrifying because Hannah didn’t say a word. I could see she was angry: redness soaked her cheeks, her forehead. She smiled, somewhat shyly, and then (and I noticed this because I was one step up from Nigel and could see her entirely, her too-long cuff and sleeve, the cane in her hand) she squeezed, tightly, Smoke’s bicep. This seemed to be a signal of sorts, because he smiled again, and said in his bear-hug voice: “Well, nice meeting you. So long.”

They continued on, passing the sheikh and the tourists (“Not many people realize the electric chair’s not a bad way to go,” shouted one) and some private dancer, a dancer for money in a tiny silver dress and white go-go boots.

At the top of the stairs, they turned down the hall, out of sight.

“Shit,” said Nigel, grinning.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. I wanted to slap the smile off his face.

“What?”

“How could you do that?”

He shrugged. “I wanted to know who her boyfriend was. Could have been Valerio.”

Doc do-si-doed into my head. “I’m not sure Valerio exists.”

“Well, you, doll face, may be an atheist but I’m a believer. Let’s get some air,” he said, and then he grabbed my hand and yanked me down the stairs after him, stepping around Tarzan and Jane (Jane pressed against the wall, Tarzan leaning way in) and outside onto the patio.

Jade and the others had joined the crowd by now, which hadn’t thinned, but buzzed like a porch wasp nest after a housewife stabs it with a broom. Leulah and Jade shared a deck chair talking to two men who wore their swollen, fleshy masks as hats. (They depicted Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Clark Gable, or any renowned man over fifty with formidable ears.) I didn’t see Milton (Black could come and go like stormy weather) but Charles was by the barbecue flirting with a woman in a lioness costume who’d pulled her mane down around her neck and casually stroked it every time Charles said something. Abraham Lincoln threw himself against a jackrabbit, banging into the picnic table so a platter of wilted lettuce fireworked into the air. Rock music screamed from speakers rigged by the hanging plants, and the electric guitar, the roars of the singer, so many shrieks and laughs, the moon, a sickle stabbing the pine trees off to the right — it all fused into a strange suffocating violence. Maybe it was because I was a little drunk and my thoughts moved slowly like blobs in a lava lamp, but I felt it was a crowd that could attack, loot, rape, cause a “violent uprising that detonated like a bomb, and ended a day later with the whimper of a silk scarf pulled from the flabby neck of an old lady — as all rebellions do, if they arise purely from emotion and no forethought” (see “The Last of the Summer Whine: A Study of the Novgorod Rebellion, USSR, August 1965,” Van Meer, The SINE Review, Spring, 1985).

Sharp light from the tiki torches cut into the masks, turning even the sweet costumes, the cute black cats and tutu angels into ghouls with buried eyes and dagger chins.

And then, my heart stopped.

On the brick wall, staring out over the crowd, stood a man. He wore a black hooded cloak and a gold mask with a hooked nose. Not a centimeter of human was visible. It was that horrible Brighella mask, worn during carnivals in Venice and Mardi Gras — Brighella, the lascivious villain from the Commedia dell’arte — but the sick thing, the thing that made the rest of the beasts at the party shiver out of focus, was not that the mask was demonic, that it turned eyes to bullet holes, but the fact that it was Dad’s costume. In Erie, Louisiana, June Bug Karen Sawyer had coerced him into participating in her Junior League Halloween Fashion Show and she’d brought the outfit back for him from her trip to New Orleans. (“Is it me or do I look robustly absurd?” Dad had asked when he’d first tried on the velvet robe.) And the figure opposite me, far across the patio, as tall as Dad so he rose out of the crowd like a crucifix, what he wore was identical, down to the bronze color of the mask, the blistered nose, the satin trim around the hood, the tiny fish-eye buttons down the front. The man didn’t move. He seemed to watch me. I could see cigarette cinders in his eyes.

“Retch?”

“I see — my dad—” I managed to say. My heart rolling in my chest, I pushed through the Flintstones, red-faced Rapunzel, squeezing past shoulders and tinseled backs and elbows and stuffed tails stabbing me in the stomach. The wire edge of an angel wing knifed my cheek. “I — excuse me.” I pushed a caterpillar. “Screw you!” it shouted, its bloodshot eyes infected with glitter. I was shoved hard and fell onto the brick, snaring in sneakers and fishnet stockings and plastic cups.

Seconds later, Nigel was crouching next to me. “What a beaatch. I’d shout ‘catfight,’ but I don’t think you want to go there.”

“The man,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Standing on the wall. A tall man. I — is he there?”

“Who?”

“He’s wearing a mask with a long nose.”

Nigel looked at me, puzzled, but stood up, and I watched his red Adidas sneakers turn in a circle. He bent down again. “I don’t see anyone.”

My head felt as if it were unstitching from my neck. I blinked and he helped me up. “Come on, old girl. Easy does it.” Holding on to his shoulder, I craned my neck around the orange wig, the halo, to catch another glimpse of that face, to be sure, to realize I was only intoxicated, imagining impossible, highly dramatic things — but there were only Cleopatras on the brick wall now, their wide faces sweaty and rainbowed like oil puddles in parking lots: “Haaaaarveeeeey!” one screamed, shrilly, pointing at someone in the crowd.

“We have to get the fuck out of here or we might be trampled,” Nigel said. He tightened his grip on my wrist. I assumed he was going to lead me out into the yard, but instead he was pulling me back inside.

“I have an idea,” he said with a smile.

As a rule, Hannah’s bedroom door remained closed.

Charles once told me she was peculiar about it — she hated people in her “private space”—and, rather incredibly, none of them, in the three years they’d known her, had ever been inside or seen it, except at a passing glance.

I wouldn’t have intruded in a million Ming Dynasties if I hadn’t been tipsy and marginally catatonic after conjuring Dad as Brighella, or if Nigel hadn’t been there, hauling me up the stairs past the hippies and the cavemen, knocking three times on the closed door at the end of the hall. And though I certainly knew it was wrong to take refuge in her bedroom, I also felt, as I removed my shoes—“We don’t want heavy footprints on the carpet,” Nigel said, as he closed and locked the door behind us — that perhaps Hannah herself wouldn’t mind so much, if it was only this once, and besides, it was her fault everyone was so curious about her, so spellbound. If she hadn’t cultivated her own aire de mystère, always being reluctant to answer even the most humdrum of questions, maybe we wouldn’t have gone into her bedroom in the first place — maybe we’d have gone back to the car or even home. (Dad said all criminals have complicated means of rationalizing their aberrant behavior. This twisty logic was mine.)

“I’ll fix you right up,” Nigel said, planting me on the bed and switching on the bedside lamp. He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. Away from the music and ferocious crowd, I realized, with a little wonder, I was much more lucid than I’d thought, and after only a few sips of water, some deep breaths, staring at the starkness of Hannah’s bedroom, I began to come around, feel twinges of what was commonly known in paleontologist circles as “Dig Fever,” a blind, untiring enthusiasm for unearthing the history of life. (It was allegedly experienced by both Mary and Louis Leakey when they first wandered around Oldupai Gorge in the eastern Serengeti Plains of Tanzania, a location that would go on to become one of the most revealing archeological sites in the world.)

Her bedroom walls were beige, without a single picture or painting. The carpet under the bed was preppy green. Considering the rest of her house, muddled with animals, cat hair, oriental wall hangings, handicapped furniture, every National Geographic since 1982, the austere furnishings here were bizarre and, I felt, a definitive sign of something (“A man’s bedroom is direct insight into his character,” wrote Sir Montgomery Finkle in 1953’s Gory Details). The few pieces of humble furniture — chest of drawers, wooden Quaker chair, a vanity table — had been relegated to the corners of the room as if they’d been punished. The bed was queen sized, neatly made (although where I was sitting it wrinkled), and the comforter (or bedspread, as there was nothing comforting about it) was a thorny blanket the color of brown rice. The bedside table featured a lamp, and on the bottom shelf only a single well-worn book, I Ching, or The Book of Changes. (“There’s nothing more irritating than Americans hoping to locate their inner Tao,” Dad said.) Standing up, I noticed a faint but unmistakable smell hanging in the air, like a flashy guest that refused to go home: men’s musky cologne, the sort of persistent syrup a Miami hunk doused on his trunk-thick neck.

Nigel was having a look around too. He’d stuffed his Zorro mask into his pocket and had a subdued, almost reverential look on his face, as if we’d snuck into a monastery and he didn’t want to disturb nuns at prayer. He crept over to Hannah’s closet and, very slowly, slid open the door.

I was about to follow him — the closet was crowded with clothes, and when he tugged the string to turn on the light, a black pump fell from a shelf piled with shoe boxes and shopping bags — but then, I noticed something I’d never seen in the house before, three framed photographs positioned along the edge of the chest of drawers. They each strictly faced forward like suspects in a police lineup. I tiptoed over to them, but realized immediately they were not the obvious evidence of an extinct species (ex-boyfriend) or Jurassic period (fierce Goth phase) I’d been hoping to discover.

No, they each featured (one in black and white, the others in outdated 1970s colors, Brady Bunch brown, M*A*S*H* maroon) a girl who was presumably Hannah between the ages of, say, nine months and six, and yet the baby with hair like a squirt of icing on its bald cupcake head, the toddler wearing nothing but a diaper, looked nothing like her — not at all. This thing looked portly and red as an alcoholic uncle; if you squinted, it looked like it’d passed out in its crib from too much scotch. Even the eyes were dissimilar. Hannah’s were almond-shaped, and these were the same color, black-brown, but round. I was prepared to accept that maybe these pictures weren’t of Hannah, but a beloved sister — and yet, peering closer, particularly at the one of her at four, sitting atop a fierce Whitman-shaggy pony, the resemblance did surface: the perfect mouth, upper lip fitting with bottom lip like delicate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and as she stared down at the reins held tightly in her fists, that intense yet secret expression.

Nigel was still in Hannah’s closet — he seemed to be trying on shoes — so I slipped into the adjacent master bathroom and switched on the light. In terms of décor, it was an extension of the bedroom, austere, stark as a penitentiary cell: a white-tiled floor, neat white towels, the sink and mirror meticulous, without a single splatter or smear. Words from a certain book flashed into my head, the paperback June Bug Amy Steinman had left at our house, Stranded in the Dark, by P.C. Mailey, Ph.D. (1979). The book detailed in frantic, husky prose “the surefire signs of depression in single women,” one of which was “a stark living space as a form of self-torture” (p. 87). “A severely depressed woman either lives in squalor or in a strict, minimalist living space — without anything that could remind her of her own taste or personality. In other rooms, however, she certainly might have ‘stuff’ in order to appear normal and happy to her friends” (p. 88).

I found it somewhat disheartening. However, it was when I knelt down and opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink that I was really taken aback, and I don’t think it was the same joyful disbelief Mary Leakey felt in 1959 when she stumbled upon Zinjanthropus or “Zinj.”

Inside, assembled in a pink plastic basket, was a collection of prescription bottles that made anything Judy Garland had popped in her glory days look like a few rolls of Smarties. I counted nineteen orange containers (barbiturates, amphetamines, I was chanting to myself, Seconal, Phenobarbital, Dexedrine; Marilyn and Elvis would’ve had a heyday) but, rather frustratingly, it was impossible to know what they were; there wasn’t a single label, not even evidence they’d been ripped off. On each PUSH DOWN AND TURN cap was a piece of colored tape in blue, red, green or yellow.

I picked up one of the larger ones, shaking the tiny blue tablets, each marked with a tiny 50. I was tempted to steal it, then at home, try to decipher what it was by consulting the Internet or Dad’s twenty-pound Encyclopedia of Medicine (Baker & Ash, 2000), but then — What If Hannah had a secret terminal illness and this was the treatment that kept her alive? What If I swiped one of these vital drugs and tomorrow she couldn’t take her necessary dosage and lapsed into a coma like Sunny von Bulow and I thus became the shifty Claus character? What If I had to hire Alan Dershowitz who talked about me incessantly with his mob of irksome college students who stuffed themselves with spaghetti and ginger prawns while waxing poetic on Degrees of Innocence and Guilt while my life danced in their hands like a marionette poorly rigged with sewing thread?

I returned the container.

“Blue! Come here!”

Nigel was buried in the closet behind a few garment bags. He was one of those passionate yet chaotic excavators who shamelessly contaminated the site; he’d removed at least ten shoe boxes from the top shelf and left them heedlessly on the floor. Faded cotton sweaters had been strewn between balled up tissue paper, plastic bags, a rhinestone belt, a jewelry case, one sweat-petrified burgundy shoe. He was wearing a strand of fake pink pearls around his neck.

“I’m Hannah Schneider and I’m mysterious,” he said in a vampish voice, tossing the end of the necklace over his shoulder as if he were Isadora Duncan, the Mother of Modern Dance (see This Red, So Am I, Hillson, 1965).

“What’re you doing?” I asked, giggling.

“Window shopping.”

“You have to put this stuff back. She’s going to know we were here. She could come back—”

“Oh, check this out,” he said excitedly and plopped a heavy, intricately carved wooden case into my hands. Biting his bottom lip, he opened the lid. Inside glinted a silver machete approximately eighteen inches long, the sort of horrifying weapon rebels used to cut the arms off of children in Sierra Leone (“Romancing the Stones,” Van Meer, The Foreign Quarterly, June 2001). I was speechless. “There’s a whole knife collection up here,” he was saying. “She must be into S & M. Oh, I also found a picture.”

He cheerfully took back the knife (as if he were the enthusiastic manager of a pawnshop), throwing it on the carpet, and after digging through another shoe box, handed me a faded square photo.

“She kind of looked like Liz when she was young,” he said dreamily. “Very National Velvet.”

The picture was of Hannah when she eleven or twelve. It was a photo taken from the waist up so you couldn’t tell if she was outside or inside, but she was smiling hugely (frankly, I’d never seen her so happy). Her arm was mink-shrugged around the neck of another girl who was also probably quite beautiful, but she’d shyly twisted away from the camera, smiling, but blinking just as the photo was taken so you could only see into the foyer of her face (cheek, a bit of regal forehead, rumors of eyelash) and maybe a bit of parlor room (perfect ski slope nose). They wore the same school uniform (white blouse, a navy jacket — on Hannah’s, a gold lion insignia on the breast pocket) and it was one of those snapshots that seemed to have trapped not only an image but a grainy reel of life — their ponytails were full of static, stands of hair cobwebbed in the wind. You could almost hear their laughs twisting together.

And yet — there was something eerie about them. I couldn’t help but think of Holloway Barnes and Eleanor Tilden, the girls who’d conspired to murder their parents in Honolulu in 1964, subject of Arthur Lewis’ chilling nonfiction account, Little Girls (1988). Holloway killed Eleanor’s parents with a pick-ax as they slept and Eleanor killed Holloway’s with a rifle, shooting them in the face as if playing a game, hoping to win a stuffed panda, and in the photographs section in the middle of the book, there’d been a picture of the girls almost exactly like this one, the two of them in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, their arms pretzeled, their brutal smiles piercing their faces like fish hooks.

“Wonder who the other one is,” Nigel said. He sighed wistfully. “Two people that beautiful should die. Immediately.”

“Does Hannah have a sister?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

I moved back over to the three framed photographs on the chest of drawers.

“What?” he asked, walking up behind me.

I held up the picture for comparison. “It’s not the same person.”

“Huh?”

“These photos. They’re not of Hannah.”

“Aren’t those baby pictures?”

“But it’s not the same face.”

He leaned closer, nodding. “Maybe it’s a fat cousin.”

I turned over the picture of Hannah with the blonde. There was a date written in the corner in blue pen: 1973.

“Wait,” Nigel whispered suddenly, a hand pressed to the pearls around his neck, his eyes wide. “Oh, fuck. Listen.”

The music downstairs, which had been beating with the steadiness of a healthy heart, had stopped, leaving total silence.

I moved toward the door, unlocked it and peered down the hall.

It was deserted.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Nigel, with a small squeak, was already at the closet, madly trying to refold the sweaters and matching lids to shoe boxes. I considered swiping the photograph of Hannah and the other girl — but then, did Howard Carter blithely help himself to treasures in the tomb of Tutankhamen? Did Donald Johanson covertly pocket a piece of Lucy, the 3.18-million-year-old hominid? Reluctantly, I handed the photograph back to Nigel, who slipped it into the Evan Picone shoe box, standing on his tiptoes to return it to the shelf. We switched off every light, grabbed our shoes, did a final check of the room to make sure we hadn’t dropped something (“All thieves leave behind a calling card because the human ego craves recognition the way junkies crave smack,” noted Detective Clark Green in Fingerprints [Stipple, 1979]). We closed Hannah’s bedroom door and hurried down the hall.

The stairs were empty, and below, in the whirlpools of people, some sweaty bird in a crooked feather headdress was screeching something, a hysterical “Ooooooooo” that went on and on, cutting through the noise like a sword during any climactic fight scene. Charlie Chaplin was trying to restrain her. “Breathe! Fuckin’ breathe, Amy!” Nigel and I glanced at each other, baffled, then continued down the stairs, only to find ourselves drowning in a flood of feet, plastic masks, tails, wands, wigs, all of them trying to shove their way toward the back door, out onto the patio.

“Stop pushing!” someone shouted. “Stop pushing, motherfucker!”

“I saw it,” said a penguin.

“But what about the police?” wailed a fairy. “I mean, why aren’t they here? Did someone call nine-one-one?”

“Hey,” said Nigel, grabbing the shoulder of the merman pushing in front of us. “What’s going on?”

“Someone’s dead,” he said.

A Moveable Feast

When he was seven years old, Dad almost drowned in Lake Brienz. He claimed it was the second most illuminating experience of his life, trailing in significance only to one other occasion, the day he saw Benno Ohnesorg die.

In customary fashion, Dad was trying to outperform one Hendrik Salzmann, a twelve-year-old, another boy at the Zurich Waisenhaus. Although Dad “showed dogged endurance and athleticism” as he splashed past the weary Hendrik, when he was some thirty or forty meters beyond the swimmer’s boundary, Dad found himself too exhausted to go on.

The bright green shore floated far behind him. “It appeared to be waving good-bye,” Dad said. As he slumped into the gurgling darkness, arms and legs heavy as bags of stones, after an initial panic, which was “really nothing more than surprise, that this was it, what it all comes down to,” Dad claimed he felt what is frequently referred to as the “Socrates Syndrome,” a feeling of utter tranquility moments before death. Dad closed his eyes and saw not a tunnel, not blinding light, not a slide show of his short, Dickensian life, not even a Smiling Bearded White Man in a Robe, but sweets.

“Caramel truffles, marmalade,” Dad said, “Babel cookies, marzipan. I could smell them. I really believed I was falling not to my watery grave, but into a Café Conditorei.”

Dad also swore he heard, somewhere in the depths, Beethoven’s Fifth, which some beloved nun named Fraulein Uta (the first June Bug in recorded history, der erste Maikäfer in der Geschichte) played in her room on Saturday evenings. When he was wrenched from this sugary euphoria and hauled ashore by none other than Hendrik Salzmann (experiencing a heroic second wind), Dad said his first conscious thought was that he wanted to go back, down into the dark water, for dessert and the Allegro-Presto.

Dad, on Death: “When it’s your time — and naturally, none of us know when we’ll be drafted — there’s no use sniveling. Please. You should walk out a warrior, even if the revolution you waged in your life was for biology or neurology, the origins of the sun, bugs, the Red Cross, like your mother. Might I remind you of the way Che Guevara went out? He was a deeply flawed man — his pro-Chinese, pro-Communist viewpoints were blinkered, naïve at best. Yet”—Dad sat up in his chair and leaned forward, his hazel eyes huge behind his glasses, his voice rising up then plunging deep into himself—“on October 9, 1967, after a traitor alerted CIA operatives to the secret location of Guevara’s guerrilla encampment, after he was so badly injured he couldn’t stand and he surrendered to the Bolivian army and René Barrientos ordered his execution, after a lily-livered officer drew the short straw and, trembling so severely witnesses thought he was having a seizure, entered the windowless schoolhouse in order to put a bullet in Guevara’s head. He was going to murder, once and for all, the man who charged into battle for those he believed in, the man who said, ‘Freedom,’ and ‘Justice,’ without a hint of sarcasm, Guevara, who knew what was coming, he turned to the officer…” Here, Dad turned to an imaginary officer standing to his left. “They say he wasn’t afraid, sweet, not a bead of sweat, not the slightest tremor in his voice — he said, ‘Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.’”

Dad stared at me.

“May you and I aspire to such certainty.”

After Hannah told us about Smoke Harvey, with a raw voice and a certain grayness seeping around her eyes (as if something inside her had spilled), and her every detail about him laid a pink brick in the re-creation of his big, noisy plantation of a life, I found myself wondering about Smoke’s certainty. As he drowned, I tried to imagine what it was that wooed him, if not Dad’s childhood loves of sugar and Beethoven, then Cuban cigars, or his first wife’s doll hands (“She was so tiny she couldn’t wrap her arms all the way around him,” said Hannah), or a glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks (Blue Label probably, as Hannah said he enjoyed “the fine things”), anything to gently push him away from the fact that the culmination of his life, sixty-eight years lived with great vigor and force (“gusto” and “zest” Hannah said) was to be in her swimming pool, inebriated and dressed as Mao Zedong, drifting over a concrete floor eight feet under and no one noticing.

His full name was Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68. Not many people knew who he was, unless they lived in Findley, West Virginia, or used him as a Portfolio Manager when he worked at DBA LLC, or found the book he’d written in the 80-percent-off bin, The Doloroso Treason (1999), or browsed the two articles about his death in The Stockton Observer on November 24 and November 28 (see “West Virginia Man Drowns in Pool,” “Weekend Drowning Ruled Accidental,” Local News, 2B, 5B, respectively).

He was, of course, the distinguished gray-haired man Nigel and I had met with Hannah on the stairs, the one I’d liked (Visual Aid 12.0).

After we heard someone was dead, Nigel and I pushed our way to one of the windows overlooking the patio. We could only see the backs of people, all of them staring at something in front of them, as if watching a stirring street performance of King Lear. Most of them were half-birthed from their costumes, so they looked between species, and the ground was littered with pipecleaner antennae and beached-jellyfish wigs.

VISUAL AID 12.0

Screams from an ambulance ripped through the night. Red light hurtled around the lawn. Everyone on the patio was herded into the living room.

“Things’ll go quick soon as everyone gets quiet,” the blond police officer said from the door. He chewed gum. From the way he leaned against the doorjamb, rested one foot on Hannah’s jug of umbrellas and took seconds too long to blink, you could tell his body was present, but his mind was back at some red felt pool table where he’d missed an easy draw shot, or else, back with his wife in their swayback bed.

I was in an O-mouthed state of shock — wondering who it was, wanting to make sure it wasn’t Milton or Jade or any of them (if it has to be someone, it could be that sick caterpillar)—but Nigel was acting like a Boy Scout Leader. Grabbing my hand again, he forced us across the room, stepping on the hippies who’d sat down on the floor to give each other contrition massages. He ejected a sick Jane from the bathroom (she’d lost Tarzan) and, locking the door, instructed me to start drinking water.

“We don’t want to be asked by a flatfoot to take a Breathalyzer,” he said agitatedly. I was shocked by his intensity. Dad said emergencies created an elemental shift in everyone, and while most people liquefied immediately, Nigel was turning into a denser, somewhat more formidable version of himself. “I’m going to find the others,” he said with Rockette-kick fervor. “We have to come up with a good story as to why we’re here because they’re going to be securing the scene, taking names and addresses,” he said as he opened the door, “and I’ll be damned if I’m getting kicked out of school for some slob who can’t hold his liquor and never took a swimming lesson.”

Some people have a knack for finding themselves, if not the star of every Detective Film, Skin Flick, Love Story or Spaghetti Western, at the very least, one of the supporting players, or appearing in an unforgettable cameo for which they garner critical acclaim and considerable buzz.

Unsurprisingly, it was Jade who was cast as Unwitting Eyewitness. She was outside talking to Ronald Reagan, who, in a drunken desire to show off, flopped into the heated pool, and, backstroking in his blue suit, avoiding the four rats playing Marco Polo, shouted out names as Jade looked on, trying to guess who she was dressed as (“Pam Anderson! Ginger Lynn!”). He accidentally kicked the dark, submerged body with his foot.

“What the—?” The Gipper said.

“Someone’s unconscious! Call nine-one-one! Who knows CPR? Get me a fucking doctor!” Jade claimed she screamed, though Milton, who’d just returned to the patio after smoking the remainder of his joint in the woods, said she didn’t do or say anything until the Great Communicator and one of the rats hauled the great whale of a body out of the water, at which point she sat down in the deck chair and only watched, biting her nails while people began to murmur their “Oh, my fucking Gods.” A man in zebra print tried to resuscitate him.

Jade was still on the patio with Dutch and the other main characters waiting to be interviewed by the police, but Nigel returned to the bathroom with Charles, Milton and Lu. Charles and Lu looked as if they’d barely survived the War of 1812, but Milton looked as he always did, laid-back and lumpy, a smear of smile on his face.

“Who died?” I asked.

“A very large man,” Leulah said, sitting down on the edge of the bathtub, an unfocused look in her eyes. “And he really is dead. There’s a dead body on Hannah’s patio. He’s sopping wet. And this terrible blubbery color.” She pressed a hand to her stomach. “I might throw up.”

“Life, death,” sighed Nigel. “It’s all so Hollywood.”

“Did anyone see Hannah?” asked Charles quietly.

It was a grisly thought. Even if it was an accident, it was never a good thing for someone to die unexpectedly at one’s house while one is entertaining, for a person to “walk out of this outrageous world” (as Dad was fond of saying) on one’s property, in one’s kidney-shaped pool. None of us spoke. Behind the closed door, a few tadpole-words wriggled free of the noise (“Ow,” “Sheila!” “Did you know him?” “Hey, what’s going on?”), and through the open window by the tub, the police car radios fizzed, ceaseless and indecipherable.

“Well, I’d say run for it,” Nigel said, slipping behind the shower curtain, and hunching down as he peered out the window as if someone might open fire. “I doubt they even have a squad car at the end of the driveway. But we can’t leave Jade, so we’ll have to take our chances following police procedure.”

“Of course we can’t flee the crime scene,” said Charles irritably. “What are you — nuts?” His face was red. He was obviously worried about Hannah. I noticed, whenever Jade or Nigel did a little guesswork in the Purple Room about what she did on the weekends (if they so much as whispered “Cottonwood”), he became fiery and short tempered as a Latin American dictator. In a matter of seconds, his entire body — face, hands too — could go the pink of Tropical Punch.

Milton, as usual, said nothing, only chuckled as he leaned against the burgundy hand towels.

“It wouldn’t be a big deal,” Nigel said. “Drownings are obvious. They can see by the skin if it’s an accident or foul play and in this case, there’s a high rate of drownings that are linked to alcohol. Some bombed guy falls in the water? Knocks himself out? Dies? What can you do? He did it to himself. And it happens all the time. The Coast Guard’s always finding sloshed motherfuckers floating in the ocean who had too many rum and Cokes.”

“How do you know this?” I asked, though I’d read something similar in Murder in La Havre (Monalie, 1992).

“My mom’s a huge crime fiction fanatic,” he said proudly. “Diana could perform her own autopsy.”

When we decided we weren’t visibly drunk (Death had the effect of six cups of coffee and a dip in the Bering Sea), we returned to the living room. A new officer had taken charge, Officer Donnie Lee with globular, off-centered features reminiscent of a wrecked urn on a potter’s wheel. He was trying to line people up “in orderly fashion, folks,” with the sort of manic patience of an Activities Director on a cruise ship organizing a Shore Excursion. Gradually, the crowd ringed around the room.

“Let me go first,” said Nigel. “And don’t say anything. I’ll give you the advice my mom gave me. No matter what happens, look like you’re having a Christ experience.”

Officer Donnie Lee happened to have saturated himself in Paul Revere-like cologne (it rode far ahead of him, alerting all of his impending arrival) so by the time he came to Nigel, wrote down his name, phone number, and asked, “How old are you, son?” Nigel was prepared for the impending massacre.

“Seventeen, sir.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I assure you Ms. Schneider knew nothing about our showing up this evening. My friends and I mistakenly thought it’d be fun to crash an adult party. To see what it was like. Not, let me add, to partake in illegal substances. I’ve been a Baptist all my life, head of my own worship circle for two years, and it’s against my religion to partake in alcohol of any kind. Abstinence works well enough for me, sir.”

I thought his performance campy and over-the-top, but to my surprise, he went over like Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots. Officer Donnie Lee, those big wrinkles pressing through his great clay forehead (as if invisible hands were starting to rework him into a vase or ashtray), only tapped his end-chewed blue Bic pen on the side of his notepad.

“You kids watch yourselves. I don’t wanta hear or see you in this kinda venue again. Do I make myself clear?”

Without even waiting for our “Yes, sir, absolutely, sirs,” he moved on to take the contact details of the whiney Marilyn shivering next to us in her skimpy Seven Year Itch dress with a gruesome brown stain down the front.

“How long’s this gonna take anyway? I got a babysitter.”

“Ma’am, if you’d just bear with us now…”

Nigel grinned. “Nothing like a well-placed honey pot to attract flies,” he whispered.

Officer Lee didn’t let anyone leave until after 5:00 A.M. When we were finally allowed outside, we discovered a blued, tubercular morning: sky wan, grass sweaty, a cold breeze wheezing through the trees. Purple feathers roamed the lawn, chasing each other under the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, pestering a Hulk mask playing dead.

We followed the wearied procession to the parked cars, bypassing the crowd who wanted to stay to see something (a fairy, a gorilla, a blond golfer struck by lightning), the two police cars, the empty ambulance, the paramedic with dark, sunken eyes smoking a cigarette. Gold-chromed Nefertiti in front of us prattled on and on as she wobbled down the driveway in silver heels like ice picks: “There’s respons’bility comes with ownin’ a puwl,” she said, “second I got outta bed, I had a bad feelin’, I’m serius.”

In numb silence, we climbed into the car and waited another fifteen minutes for Jade.

“I made a statement,” she said proudly as she climbed into the backseat, mashing me against Nigel as she pulled the door closed. “It was exactly like TV only the cop wasn’t hot or tan.”

“What was he?” asked Nigel.

Jade waited until our eyes were crawling all over her.

“Lieutenant Arnold Trask was a pig.”

“You see the guy who died?” asked Milton from the front seat.

“I saw everything,” she said. “What do you want to know? First thing I’ll tell you, which I found really weird, was that he was blue. I’m not even kidding. And the arms and legs just flopped there. Arms and legs don’t usually flop, you know what I mean? He was inflated like a raft. Something had blown him up a little—”

“If you don’t stop I’m going to be sick,” said Leulah.

“What?”

“Did you see Hannah?” asked Charles, starting the car.

“Sure,” said Jade, nodding. “That was the worst of it. They brought her outside and she started screaming like some clinically insane person. One of the officers had to take her away. I felt like I was watching an after-school special about a mother who’s not granted custody of her kids. After that I didn’t see her. Someone said the guy from the ambulance gave her a sedative and she went to lie down.”

In the pale blued morning, hundreds of bare trees crowded the guardrail, nodding at us, extending condolences. I could see Charles clenching his jaw as he turned onto the highway, heading back to Jade’s. His cheek looked unusually hollow, as if someone had hacked at it with a knife. I thought about Dad, those awful instances he fell into a Bourbon Mood with The Great White Lie (Moon, 1969) or E. B. Carlson’s Silence (1987) slung over his corduroy knee. He was known to mention what he rarely mentioned, how my mother died. “It was my fault,” he’d tell not me but my shoulder or leg. “Honestly, sweetheart. It’s disgraceful. I should have been there.” (Even Dad, who prided himself on never dodging anything, like many people, preferred to address a body part when drunk and afflicted.)

And I hated those moments, when Dad’s face, the one thing I secretly believed strong and permanent, fixed as volcanic rock Head Sculptures on Easter Island (if anyone was still going to be standing after nine hundred years, it’d be Dad). For a brief moment, in the kitchen, or in some corner of smudged darkness in his study, I saw him fragile and smaller somehow, human certainly, but forlorn, frail as tissue pages in a motel Bible.

Of course, he always recovered splendidly. He mocked his self-pity, quoted something about Man’s worst enemy being Himself. And even though, when he stood up, he was Dad again, Dad, my Man of the Moment, my Man Who Would Be King, he’d been highly contagious because I was moody for hours afterward. It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody’s sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upwards, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody’s surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)

There was no dinner at Hannah’s that Sunday.

I spent the weekend in a swampy mood: stifling afternoons of homework, thoughts about Death and Hannah leaching my head. I hated when people participated in what Dad called “Sing-along Sorrow” (“Everyone’s eager to mourn so long as it’s not their child who was decapitated in the car accident, not their husband stabbed by a gutter binger desperate for crack.”); yet when I read the brief article about Smoke Harvey in The Stockton Observer, staring at the accompanying photo (some horrific Christmas shot: tuxedo, grin, a forehead shiny as chrome), I couldn’t help but feel, if not Loss or Sadness, then a sense of Missed Conversation, what one felt on the interstate when seeing an arresting person sleeping in the passenger seat of a passing van, a secret cirrus-smudge on the window.

“So tell me,” Dad said dryly, folding down a corner of The Wall Street Journal to look at me, “how were your Joycean hooligans? You didn’t fill me in when you got home. Have you made it to Calypso yet?”

I was curled up on the couch by the window, trying to get my mind off the costume party by reading the British chick-lit classic One Night Stand (Zev, 2002), hidden within the larger hardback Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1883–85), for Dad’s sake.

“They’re fine,” I said, trying to sound blasé. “How was Kitty?”

Dad had had a date with her, and the fact that their dirty wine glasses were still in the sink when I returned home (on the counter, an empty bottle of cabernet), I could presume whatever drunken delusion I’d entertained about Dad’s looming presence at Hannah’s party, decked out in the costume he himself had said made him “look like the love child of Marie Antoinette and Liberace,” was exactly that — a delusion. (Kitty wore copper lipstick, and judging from the bristly strand of hair I’d found clinging to the back of the couch in the library, she brutally assaulted her locks with Clorox. It was the color of a Yellow Page.)

Dad looked confounded by my question. “How shall I answer that? Let’s see. Well, she’s lively as ever.”

If I felt the Everglades, I couldn’t imagine what Great Dismal Swamp Hannah was trudging through, when she woke up in her strange blank bedroom in the night and thought about Smoke Harvey, the man whose arm she’d squeezed like a giddy teenager when she was on the stairs, a man now dead.

That Monday, however, I was marginally reassured when Milton found me at my locker after school. He said Charles had gone to see her on Sunday.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She’s okay. Charles said she’s still kinda in a state of shock, but otherwise peachy.”

He cleared his throat, stuck his hands in his pockets with ox-in-sun slowness. I suspected Jade had recently tipped him off to my feelings—“Gag’s gaga over you,” I could just hear her saying, “like so gone, like fixated”—because lately, when he looked at me, a shabby smile drifted across his face. His eyes circled over me like old flies. I suffered no hope, no daydreams, that he felt anything similar to the way I did, which wasn’t lust or love (“Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can’t be in love until you’ve flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times,” Dad said) but acute electricity. I’d spot him lumbering across the Commons; I’d feel struck by lightning. I’d see him in the Scratch and he’d say, “Howdy, Retch” instantly I was a light bulb in a series circuit. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, in Elton, when he trudged by my AP Art History class on his way to the infirmary (he was always on the verge of measles or mumps), my hair rose off my neck and stood on end.

“She wants to take us to dinner tonight,” he said. “Wants to talk about what happened. Can you make it at five?”

I nodded. “I’ll have to make up something good for my dad.”

He squinted. “What chapter are we on?”

“Proteus.”

He laughed as he turned away. His laugh was always a big bubble rising through a quagmire: one gurgle and it was gone.

Charles was right. Hannah was peachy.

At least she looked peachy initially, when Jade, Leulah and I were ushered by the maître d’ into the dining room and saw her waiting for us, alone at the round table.

She’d taken the others to Hyacinth Terrace restaurant before. It was where she took them for special occasions — birthdays, holidays, someone’s grand achievement on a Unit Test. The restaurant attempted, with the intensity of any dedicated Emergency Medicine physician, to resuscitate Victorian England with a “heady culinary voyage that artfully blends The Old with The New” (see www.hyacinthterracewnc.net). Housed in a pristine green and pink Victorian house, the restaurant was perched on one side of Marengo Mountain and resembled a depressed Yellow-shouldered Amazon Parrot desperate to return to its natural habitat. Walking in, one could see no sprawling view of Stockton from the giant fan-shaped windows, nothing but that notorious local fog frothing off the greasy chimneys of Horatio Mills Gallway’s old paper mill twenty-seven miles east (now Parcel Supply Corp.), a haze with a fondness for hitching a ride on a recurring Westerly and smothering Stockton’s valley like a maudlin lover in a humid hug.

It was early, approximately 5:15 P.M… and Hannah was the only one in the dining room apart from an elderly couple eating by the window. A gold, five-tiered chandelier at the center of the room hung like an upside-down duchess shamelessly exposing to the paying public her ankle boots and froufrou petticoat.

“Hello,” Hannah said, as we made our way to the table.

“The boys should be here in ten minutes,” said Jade, sitting down. “They had to wait for Charles to finish practice.”

She nodded. She wore a black turtleneck sweater, a gray wool skirt and the starched-and-pressed expression of someone running for office in the heat of an election, moments before he/she is to appear on a televised stage for a debate. There was a series of nervous gestures (a sniff, swipe of the tongue over teeth, a smoothing of skirt) and one weak attempt at conversation (“How was school?”) with ensuing lack of follow-up (“I’m glad.”). I could tell she was planning to say something very specific to us on this Special Occasion, and I grew worried as I watched her press her lips together and smile at her wineglass, as if mentally reviewing her cordial-yet-threatening greeting of the candidate of the opposing party.

I didn’t know what to do. I pretended to be enchanted by the giant menu with the dishes floating down the page in lacy handwriting: Puree of Parsnip-Pear Soup with Infusion of Black Truffle and Micro Greens.

My suspicions were confirmed when Charles and the others arrived, though she waited to deliver her speech until the skinny waiter took our orders then bounded away like a deer hearing rifle shots.

“If our friendship is to continue,” she said in a stiff voice, sitting too straight, sweeping her hair officially behind her shoulders, “and there were moments yesterday when I really thought it wouldn’t be possible — in the future, when I tell you not to do something, don’t do it.”

Staring at each of us, she let those words march all over the table, through the hummingbird plates and the wooden napkin rings and the bottle of pinot noir, around the glass centerpiece of roses craning their thin necks and yellow heads over the rim like newly hatched chicks desperate to be fed.

“Is that clear?”

I nodded.

“Yes,” said Charles.

“Yes,” said Leulah.

“Mmm,” said Nigel.

“What you did on Saturday was inexcusable. It hurt me. Deeply. On top of everything, everything so, so awful that happened, I still can’t quite fathom what you did to me. That you’d put me at risk, disrespect me so — because, let me tell you, in the only stroke of luck that night, Eva Brewster ended up not coming because her terrier was sick. So if it weren’t for a fucking terrier I’d be fired right now. Do you understand? We’d all be fired, because if she had come, if she’d seen any of you, you would’ve been expelled. I guarantee it. I’m sure you weren’t drinking fruit punch and I couldn’t have pulled strings to get you out of it. No. Everything you’ve worked for, college, it’d be lost. And for what? A prank you thought would be fun? Well, it wasn’t fun. It was sickening.”

Her voice was too loud. Also jarring was her use of the word fucking, because she never swore. Yet Hyacinth Terrace gave no surprised stares, no waiterly raised eyebrows. The restaurant was meandering along like some humming grandmother refusing to accept the fact that the price of milk had gone up 600 percent since Her Day. The waiters bowed, deeply immersed in table settings, and across the room, a turnip-haired kid in a loose tuxedo walked to the piano, sat down, began to play Cole Porter.

She took a deep breath. “Since I’ve known each of you, I’ve treated you as adults. As my equals and friends. That you would treat our friendship with such flagrant contempt, it knocks the wind out of me.”

“We’re sorry,” said Charles in a thimble-voice I’d never heard before.

She turned to him, lacing her long, manicured fingers together in perfect This-is-the-church-this-is-the-steeple architecture.

“I know you’re sorry, Charles. It isn’t the point. When you grow up — and from the looks of things, you have a while — you learn things never go back to normal simply because everyone’s sorry. Sorry is ridiculous. A good friend of mine is dead. And, and I’m upset…”

Hannah’s demoralizing soliloquy lasted all through the Appetizer and well into the Main Course. By the time our attending antelope sprung through the dining room to place dessert menus in front of us, we resembled a band of political dissidents in 1930s USSR after a year of laboring in Siberia and other brutal Arctic Lands. Leulah’s shoulders slumped. She looked harrowingly close to collapsing. Jade did nothing but stare into her hummingbird plate. Charles looked puffy and miserable. A doomed expression had torpedoed Milton and was in the process of sinking his entire bulky body under the table. Though Nigel showed no discernible signs of either sorrow or regret, I noticed he’d been able to eat only half of his Pride Hills lamb shank and had not touched his leek whipped potatoes.

I, of course, listened to every word she said and felt renewed sadness every time she looked at me without bothering to disguise her Utter Disappointment and Disillusion. Her Utter Disappointment and Disillusion didn’t seem as severe when she looked at the others, and I was certain my observation wasn’t an example of Dad’s “Theory of Arrogance”—that everyone always assumes they’re the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else’s Broadway play.

Sometimes, apparently so distraught, Hannah let go of the rope of her words and came to a dead stop in a silence that stretched on and on, arid and relentless as far as the eye could see. The restaurant with its shines and clinks, its fanned napkins and resplendent forks (in which you could identify microscopic things lodged in your teeth), its dowager duchess hanging there, desperate to be let down to go dance a quadrille with an eligible man of society — it all felt indifferent and damned, hopeless as a Hemingway short story teeming with mean conversations, hopes lost between their bullet point words, voices voluptuous as rulers. Perhaps it was because on my personal timeline there was a small red rectangle positioned solely between the years 1987 and 1992, discreetly labeled NATASHA ALICIA BRIDGES VAN MEER, MOTHER, but I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times You See Them. I felt certain this was a Last Time I See Them. We were going to have to say good-bye and this shiny place served as well a setting as any to be our terminus.

The only thing that kept me from melting onto my dessert menu was Hannah’s bedroom. The objects in that room annotated her relentlessly, gave me what I felt were secret insights into her every word and dart of her eyes, every crumple in her voice. I knew it was an appallingly professorial thing to do — Hannah finishing off an entire bottle of wine by herself illustrated how distressed she was; even her hair was exhausted as it slung itself across her shoulders and stopped moving — but I couldn’t help myself: I was Dad’s daughter and thus prone to bibliography. Hannah’s eye sockets looked gray, as if they’d been lightly shaded with one of Mr. Moats’ drawing pencils.¹ She sat schoolhouse-strict.² When she wasn’t berating us, she sighed, rubbed the stem of her wineglass between her thumb and forefinger the way commercial housewives notice dust.³ I sensed, somewhere within the context of these singular details, within her knife collection, empty walls, shoe boxes and thatch bedspread was Hannah’s Plot, her Principal Characters — most significantly, her Primary Themes. Maybe she was simply a matter of Faulkner: she had to be read very closely, word by painful word (never skimmed, pausing to make critical notes in the margin), including her bizarre digressions (costume party) and improbabilities (Cottonwood). Eventually, I’d come to her last page and discover what she was all about. Maybe I could even Cliffs Note her.

“Can you tell us about the man who died?” Leulah asked suddenly, without looking Hannah in the eye. “I don’t mean to be nosy and I understand if you don’t want to talk about it. But I think I’d sleep better if I knew a little about him. What he was like.”

Rather than replying in a bleak voice that, in light of our cavalier betrayal, it certainly was nosy and none of her business, after a thoughtful stare at the dessert menu (her eyes fell somewhere between the Passion Fruit Sorbet and the Petit Fours), Hannah drained the rest of her wine and began a surprising and quite captivating exposition of Smoke Wyannoch Harvey: The Life.

“I met him in Chicago,” she said, clearing her throat as the waiter vaulted forth to fill her glass with what little was left in the wine bottle. “The Valhalla chocolate cake with the…”

“White chocolate ice cream and caramel crème sauce?” he chirped.

“For everyone. And can I see your list of brandies?”

“Certainly, madam.” He bowed and retreated into his peachy grassland of round tables and gold chairs.

“God. It was ages ago,” Hannah said. She picked up her dessert spoon and began to somersault it in her fingers. “But, yes. He was a remarkable man. Excruciatingly funny. Generous to a fault. A great storyteller. Everyone wanted to be around him. When Smoke—Dubs, I mean, everyone important to him called him Dubs — when Dubs told a story you laughed so hard your stomach hurt. You thought you’d die.”

“People who tell a good story are amazing,” said Leulah sitting up eagerly in her chair.

“The house alone was straight out of Gone with the Wind. Enormous. White columns, you know, and a long white fence and big magnolias. Built in eighteen-something. It’s in southern West Virginia, outside of Findley. He called it Moorgate. I–I can’t remember why.”

“Have you been to Moorgate?” asked Leulah breathlessly.

Hannah nodded. “Hundreds of times. It used to be a tobacco plantation, four thousand acres, but Smoke only has a hundred and twenty. And it’s haunted. There’s an awful story about the house — what was it, I can’t remember. Something to do with slavery…”

She tilted her head, trying to remember, and we leaned forward like first graders during Story Hour.

“It was just before the Civil War. Dubs told me all of this. I guess the master’s daughter, beautiful, the belle of the county, she fell in love with a slave and became pregnant with his child. When it was born, the master had the servants take it down to the basement and put it in the furnace. So every now and then, during thunderstorms, or on summer nights when there were crickets in the kitchen — Smoke was very specific about the crickets — you can hear a baby crying, way, way down in the basement. In the walls. There’s also a willow tree in the front yard, which had supposedly been used for beatings, and if you go up to the trunk, carved faintly into the bark are the initials of that girl and the slave who loved each other. Dorothy Ellen, his first wife, hated the tree, thought it was evil. She was very religious. But Smoke refused to cut it down. He said you couldn’t pretend the terrible things in life didn’t happen. You can’t clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It’s how you learn. And try to make improvements.”

“That’s one old willow tree,” Nigel said.

“Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?” She happened to be looking at me with a very intense look, so I automatically nodded. But in truth, I did know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis — if you read their definitive biographies, you learned that even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron’s clubfoot, Maugham’s severe stutter, for example), which pushed them deep into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of only four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.

“He sounds dreamy,” said Jade.

“Sounded,” said Nigel very quietly.

“So were you two, uh…?” asked Charles. He let the sentence make its own way into that renowned motel bed with sandpaper sheets and proverbial shrieking mattress.

“He was a friend,” Hannah said. “I was too tall for him. He liked women who were little dolls, porcelain baby dolls. All of his wives, Dorothy Ellen, Clarisse, poor Janice. They were all under five feet.” She giggled girlishly — a much-welcomed sound — sighed and rested her head in her hand, the pose of an unknown woman one came across in some second-hand biography, in a black-and-white photo accompanied by the caption, “At a Cuernavaca party, late 1970s.” (It wasn’t her biography, but the portly Nobel Prize — winner she sat next to; but so arresting were the dark eyes, the sleek hair, the strict expression, one wondered who she was, and didn’t want to keep reading when there was no other mention of her.)

She talked on and on about Smoke Harvey, through the warm Valhalla chocolate cake, through the selection of English Farmhouse Cheeses, through two piano renditions of “I Could Have Danced All Night.” She was like Keats’ Grecian Urn left under a running faucet, overflowing, unable to stop herself.

The waiter returned her credit card and she still didn’t stop talking. Frankly, at this point, it made me a little edgy. As Dad said famously after his first date with June Bug Betina Mendejo in Cocorro, California (Betina managed to air her every piece of Dirty Linen at Tortilla Mexicana, telling Dad how her ex-husband, Jake, stole everything from her, including her Pride and Ego): “Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.”

“Anyone want the last selection of English Farmhouse Cheese?” asked Nigel, pausing only for a second before helping himself to the last selection of English Farmhouse Cheese.

“It was my fault,” Hannah said.

“No, it’s wasn’t,” said Charles.

She didn’t hear him. Sticky redness had oozed into her face. “I invited him,” she said. “We hadn’t seen each other in years, exchanged a few calls, sure, but, you know, he was busy. I wanted him to come to the party. Richard, whom I work with at the shelter, had invited some of his friends from all over the world — he’d worked in the Peace Corps for thirteen years, still keeps in touch with a lot of the people he worked with. An international crowd. It was supposed to be fun. And I sensed Smoke needed a break from things. One of his daughters, Ada, had just gotten a divorce. Shirley, another daughter, had just had a baby and named it Chrysanthemum. Can you imagine, a person with the name Chrysanthemum? He called me up, howling about it. It was the last thing we talked about.”

“What’d he do for a living?” asked Jade quietly.

“He was a banker,” Nigel said, “but he also wrote a book, didn’t he? Devil’s Treason or something.”

Again, Hannah didn’t seem to hear. “The last thing we talked about was chrysanthemums,” she said to the tablecloth.

The darkness in the fan-shaped window had soothed the room and the gold chairs, the fleur-de-lys wallpaper; even the dowager chandelier relaxed a little, like a family finally rid of an affluent guest and they could now squash the seat cushions, eat with their fingers, remove their stiff, uncomfortable shoes. The kid at the piano was playing “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man,” which happened to be one of Dad’s favorites.

“Some people are fragile as — as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them,” she went on. “Just because you can.”

She was staring at me again, minute reflections of light dancing in her eyes, and I tried to smile reassuringly, but it was difficult because I could see how drunk she was. Her eyelids sagged like lazy window shades and she was trying too hard to herd her words together so they jostled, bumped, stepped all over each other.

“Grow up in a country,” she said, “a house of — of privilege, endless commodity, you think you’re better than other people. You think you belong to a fucking country club so you can kick people in the face on your way to acquiring more things.” She was staring at Jade now and said things as if biting it off the end of a candy bar. “It takes years to overturn th — this conditioning. I tried my whole life and I still exploit people. I’m a pig. Show me what a man hates and I’ll show you what he is. Can’t remember who said that…”

Her voice went dead. Her teary eyes drifted toward the center of the table, bobbing around the rose centerpiece. All of us were sort of madly eyeing each other, holding our breaths in mutual queasiness — what people do in restaurants when a soiled drunk person walks in and starts shouting through a mouthful of kernel teeth about working for The Man. It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place. I’d never seen her speak or behave in this way, and I doubted the others had either; they stared at her with sickened yet fascinated expressions, as if watching crocodiles mate on the Nature Channel.

Her teeth snagged her bottom lip, there was a little manifestoed frown between her eyebrows. I was deathly afraid she’d go on about needing to go live on a kibbutz or relocating to Vietnam where she’d become a hash-smoking beatnik (“Hanoi Hannah,” we’d have to call her) or else she’d turn on us, chastise us for being like our parents, odious and square. Even more frightening was the possibility she might cry. Her eyes were wet, murky tide-pools where things unseen lived and glowed. I felt there were few things in the world more horrific than the adult weep — not the rogue tear during a long-distance commercial, not the stately sob at a funeral, but the cry on the bathroom floor, in the office cubicle, in the two-car garage with one’s fingers frantically pressing down on one’s eyelids as if there was an ESC key somewhere, a RETURN.

But Hannah didn’t cry. She lifted her head, looking around the dining room with the confused expression of someone who’d just woken up in a bus station with seams and the button of a shirtsleeve imprinted on her forehead. She sniffed.

“Let’s get out of this fucking place,” she said.

For the rest of the week, even a little bit after that, I noticed Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, was still sort of alive.

Hannah had brought him back to life like Frankenstein his Monster by her deluge of detail, and thus, in all of our heads (even that of the painfully pragmatic Nigel) Smoke didn’t really seem dead, but simply offstage somewhere, kidnapped.

Jade, Leulah, Charles and Milton had been outside on the patio as Smoke lurched to his death (Nigel and I simply told the others we were “amusing ourselves inside,” which technically was the truth). They were plagued by the If Onlys.

“If only I’d been paying attention,” said Lu.

“If only I hadn’t smoked the rest of that joint,” said Milton.

“If only I hadn’t been hitting on Lacey Laurels from Spartanburg who just graduated from Spartan Community College with a major in Fashion Merchandizing,” said Charles.

“Oh, pu-leese,” said Jade rolling her eyes, turning to stare at the freshmen and sophomores standing in line to buy their two-dollar hot chocolates. They appeared to be afraid of her gaze, as certain diminutive mammals must tremble at the thought of a Golden Eagle.

“I’m the one who was there. How hard is it to notice some green polyester person floating facedown in a pool? I could have dived in and saved the man, done one of those good deeds that more or less guarantees entry through the Pearly Gates. But no, now I’m going to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. I mean, it’s a possibility I never get over this. Not for years and years. And when I’m thirty I’ll have to be submitted into some asylum, with the walls all green, and I wander around in an unflattering nightgown with hairy legs because they don’t allow razors in case you feel the urge to tiptoe into the communal bathroom and slit your wrists.”

That Sunday, I was relieved to find Hannah back to her old self, spiriting around the house in a red-and-white floral housedress.

“Blue!” she called cheerfully as Jade and I walked through the front door. “Good to see you! How is everything?”

Hannah neither commented on, nor apologized for, her tipsy behavior at Hyacinth Terrace, which was fine, because I wasn’t so sure she needed to apologize. Dad said certain people’s sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called “going Chekhovian.” Some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs. “Once a year, they say Einstein had to blow off steam by getting so inebriated on hefeweizen, he was known to go skinny-dipping at 3:00 A.M. in Carnegie Lake,” Dad said. “And it’s perfectly understandable. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, in his case, the unification of all space and time — you can imagine it’d get quite exhausting.”

Smoke Harvey’s death—any death, for that matter — was as perfectly noble a reason as any for words to stagger out of one’s mouth, for eyes to take almost as much time to blink as it takes for an old man with a cane to descend stairs — especially if, afterward, you looked as epically spic and span as Hannah did. She busied herself with Milton setting the table, slipping into the kitchen to remove a shrieking kettle from the stove, swooping back into the dining room and, as she speedily folded the dinner napkins into cute geisha fans, holding a glorious smile up to her face like a glass during a wedding toast.

And yet I must have been overly zealous in my attempt to convince myself Hannah was all Fiddle Dee Dee and La Dee Da, that our dinners would return to the weightlessness of Pre-Cottonwood, Pre-costume-party days. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Hannah was trying too hard to make things chic and upbeat, and it was akin to beautifying one’s cell; no matter what kind of curtains you hung, or rug you placed by your cot, it was still prison.

The Stockton Observer had published the second and final article on Smoke Harvey that day, detailing what we’d already assumed, that his death had been an accident. There’d been “no indication of trauma to the body” and his “blood-alcohol level had been.23, nearly three times the North Carolina legal limit of.08.” It seemed he’d inadvertently fallen into the pool, been too drunk to swim or cry for help and, in less than ten minutes, he’d drowned. Hannah had been so eager to tell us about Smoke at Hyacinth Terrace, and was in such well-adjusted spirits now, I don’t think Nigel thought twice about bringing him up again.

“You know the number of drinks Smoke would’ve had to knock back to get his BAC to that level?” he asked us, tapping the end of his pencil against his chin. “I mean, we’re talking, for a man about what? Two hundred and fifty pounds? Like, ten drinks in an hour.”

“Maybe he was doing shots,” said Jade.

“I wish the article said more about the autopsy.”

Hannah spun around from the coffee table, where she’d just placed the tray of oolong tea.

“For God’s sake! Stop it!”

There was a long silence.

I find it difficult to sufficiently describe how strange, how disconcerting her voice was in that moment. It was neither outright angry (though anger was certainly in there somewhere) nor exasperated, neither weary nor bored, but strange (with the “a” of that word drawn out in “ayyy”).

Without saying anything more, head down, her hair quickly falling over the sides of her face like a curtain when a magic trick goes wrong, she vanished into the kitchen.

We stared at each other.

Nigel shook his head, stunned. “First she gets sloshed at Hyacinth Terrace. Now she just snaps—?”

“You are a fucking asshole,” said Charles through his teeth.

“Keep your voices down,” Milton said.

“Hold on, though,” Nigel went on excitedly. “That was exactly what she did when I asked her about Valerio. Remember?”

“It’s Rosebud again,” Jade said. “Smoke Harvey’s another Rosebud. Hannah has two Rosebuds—”

“Let’s not get graphic,” said Nigel.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Charles angrily. “All of you, I—”

The door thumped and Hannah emerged from the kitchen carrying a platter of sirloin steaks.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” Nigel said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes I get caught up in the drama of a situation and I don’t think about how it sounds. How it might hurt someone. Forgive me.” His voice I thought a little hollow and bland, but he went over with rave reviews.

“It’s okay,” Hannah said. And then her smile appeared, a promising little towrope for all of us to grab onto. (You wouldn’t be surprised at all if she said, “When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it anyplace,” or “It’s the kissiest business in the world,” one hand poised in the air, holding an invisible martini.) She brushed Nigel’s hair off his forehead. “You need a haircut.”

We never mentioned Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, around her again. And thus concluded his Lazarus-like resurrection, fueled by her boozey Hyacinth Terrace monologue, our If Onlys and Might Have Dones. Out of empathy for Hannah (who, as Jade said, “must feel like a person who killed someone in a car accident”) we tactfully returned the Great Man — a latter-day Greek hero, I liked to imagine, an Achilles, or an Ajax prior to going mad (“Dubs lived the lives of a hundred people, all at once,” Hannah had said, baton-twirling that dessert spoon expertly in her fingers like a late-night Swingin’ Door Suzie) — to that unknown place people go when they die, to silence and ever afters, to cursivy The Ends materializing out of black-and-white streets and his-and-her deliriously happy faces pressed together against a soundtrack of scratchy strings.

Rather, we returned him there for the time being.

Women in Love

I’d like to make a minor adjustment to Leo Tolstoy’s oft-quoted first sentence: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy.”

The Holiday Season was, without fail, a special time for the Van Meers.

Since I was very small, over any December dinner, during which Dad and I cooked our acclaimed spaghetti with meat sauce (J. Chase Lamberton’s Political Desire [1980] and L. L. MacCaulay’s 750-page Intelligensia [1991] were also known to join us), Dad was fond of asking me to explain, in great detail, how my latest school was getting into the Holiday Mood. There was Mr. Pike and his Infamous Yule Log in Brimmsdale, Texas, and Santa’s Secret Shoppe in the Cafeteria Featuring Twisty Rainbow Candles and Crude Jewelry Boxes in Sluder, Florida, the Forty-Eight-Hour Toymaker Village Hideously Vandalized by Spiteful Seniors in Lamego, Ohio, and one appalling recital in Boatley, Illinois, “The Christ Child Story: A Mrs. Harding Musical.” For some reason, this subject made me as sidesplitting as Stan Laurel in a two-reel comedy for Metro in 1918. Within minutes, Dad was in stitches.

“For the life of me,” he said between howls, “I cannot comprehend why no producer has realized its untapped potential as a horror movie, Nightmare of the American Christmas and such. There’s even enormous commercial promise for a number of sequels and television spin-offs. St. Nick’s Resurrection, Part6: The Final Nativity. Or perhaps, Rudolph Goes to Hell with a certain ominous tagline, ‘Don’t Be Home for Christmas.’”

“Dad, it’s a time of good cheer.”

“So I am thus inspired to good cheerfully inject fuel into the U.S. economy by purchasing things I don’t need and can’t afford — most of which will have funny little plastic parts that suddenly snap off, rendering them inoperative within weeks — thereby digging myself a debt of elephantine proportions, causing me extreme anxiety and sleepless nights yet, more importantly, arousing a sexy economic growth period, hoisting up droopy interest rates, breeding jobs, the bulk of which are inessential and able to be executed faster, cheaper and with greater precision by a Taiwanese-manufactured central processing unit. Yes, Christabel. I know what time it is.”

Ebenezer had very little criticism and no remarks at all on “the plague of American consumerism,” “corporate gluttons and their Botswana-sized bonuses” (not even a passing allusion to one of his choice social theories, that of the “Tinseled American Dream”) when I detailed how lavishly St. Gallway was celebrating the season. Every banister (even the one in Loomis, Hannah’s banished building) was wrapped in boughs of pine, thick and bristly as a lumberjack’s mustache. Massive wreaths had been posted Reformation-style with what had to be iron spikes to the great wooden doors of Elton, Barrow and Vauxhall. There was a Goliath Christmas tree, and, looping around the iron gates of Horatio Way, white lights blinking like demented fireflies. A brass menorah, staunch and skeletal, flickering at the end of second-floor Barrow stalwartly staved off, as best it could, Gallway’s Christian proclivities (AP World History professor Mr. Carlos Sandborn was responsible for this brave line of defense). Sleigh bells the size of golf balls fell around the handles of Hanover’s main doors and they jingle-sighed every time a kid hurried through them, late for class.

I believe it was the sheer force of the school’s festivities that allowed me to set the uneasiness of the preceding weeks a little bit off to the side, pretend it wasn’t there like a largish stack of unopened mail (which, when finally confronted at a belated date, indicated I’d have to declare bankruptcy). Besides, if Dad was to be believed, the American holidays were a time for “coma-inspired denial” anyway, an occasion of “pretending the working poor, widespread famine, unemployment and the AIDS crisis were simply exotic, tart little fruits that, mercifully, were out of season,” and thus I wasn’t completely responsible for letting Cottonwood, the costume party, Smoke, the unusual behavior of Hannah herself be upstaged by the encroaching cloud of Finals Week, Perón’s used clothing drive (the kid who brought in the most trash bags of clothes won a Brewster’s Gold Ticket, ten points added onto any Final Exam; “Hefty Cinch Sak Lawn and Leaf Bags,” she roared during Morning Announcements, “Thirty-nine gallons!”) and, most dizzying of all, Student Council President Maxwell Stuart’s pet project, the Christmas formal, which he’d rechristened “Maxwell’s Christmas Cabaret.”

Love, too, had something to do with it.

Unfortunately, little of it was my own.

The first week of December, during second period Study Hall, a freshman entered the library and approached the desk in the back where Mr. Fletcher sat working on a crossword.

“Headmaster Havermeyer needs to see you immediately,” the boy said. “It’s an emergency.”

Mr. Fletcher, visibly annoyed he’d been pried away from The X-word X-pert’s Final Face-off (Pullen, 2003), was led out of the library and up the hill toward Hanover.

“This is it!” shrieked Dee. “Fletcher’s wife, Linda, has finally attempted suicide because Frank would rather do a crossword than have sex. It’s her cry for help!”

“It is,” cooed Dum.

A minute later, Floss Cameron-Crisp, Mario Gariazzo, Derek Pleats and a junior I didn’t know the name of (though from his alert expression and soggy mouth he looked like some sort of Pavlovian response) entered the library with a CD player, a microphone with amplifier and stand, a bouquet of red roses and a trumpet case. They proceeded to set up for a rehearsal of some kind, plugging in the CD player and microphone, relocating the tables in the very front to the side wall by the Hambone Bestseller Wish List. This included relocating Sibley “Little Nose” Hemmings.

“Maybe I don’t want to move,” Sibley said, wrinkling her perky, symmetrical nose, which, according to Dee and Dum, had been handcrafted for her face by an Atlanta plastic surgeon who’d fashioned a host of other high-quality facial features for some CNN anchors and an actress on Guiding Light. “Maybe you should move. Who are you to tell me? Hey, don’t touch that!”

Floss and Mario unceremoniously picked up Sibley’s desk scattered with her personal belongings — her suede purse, a copy of Pride and Prejudice (unread), two fashion magazines (read) — and carried it to the wall. Derek Pleats, a member of the Jelly Roll Jazz Band (with whom I also had AP Physics), was standing off to the side with his trumpet, playing ascending and descending scales. Floss started to roll back the cruddy mustard carpet and Mario crouched over the CD player, adjusting the sound levels.

“Excuse me,” said Dee, standing up, walking over to Floss, crossing her arms, “but what exactly do you think you’re doing? Is this an attempt at anarchy, to, like, gain control of the school?”

“Because we’ll tell you right now,” said Dum, striding over to Floss, crossing her arms next to Dee, “it’s not going to work. If you want to start a movement you’ll have to plan better because Hambone’s in her office and she’ll summon the authoritates in no time.”

“If you want to make a strong personal statement, I suggest you save it for Morning Announcements when the whole school is all in one place and can be held captive.”

“Yep. So you can make your demandations.”

“And the administration knows you’re all a force to be reckoned with.”

“So you can’t be ignored.”

Floss and Mario acknowledged neither Dee’s nor Dum’s demandations as they secured the rolled-back rug with a few extra chairs. Derek Pleats was gently shining his trumpet with a soft purple rag and the Pavlovian response, tongue out, was absorbed with checking the microphone and amplifier: “Testing, testing, one, two, three.” Satisfied, he signaled to the others and all four of them huddled together, whispering, nodding excitedly (Derek Pleats doing fast flexing exercises with his fingers). Finally, Floss turned, picked up the bouquet and without saying a word, he handed it to me.

“Oh, my God,” said Dee.

I held the flowers dumbly in front of me as Floss spun on his heels and jogged away, disappearing around the corner in front of the library doors.

“Aren’t you going to open the card?” Dee demanded.

I ripped open the small, cream-colored envelope and pulled out a note. The words were written in a woman’s handwriting.

LET’S GROOVE.

“What’s it say?” asked Dum, leaning over me.

“It’s some kind of threat,” said Sibley.

By now everyone in second period Study Hall — Dee, Dum, Little Nose, the horse-faced Jason Pledge, Mickey “Head Rush” Gibson, Point Richardson — swarmed around my table. Huffing, Little Nose grabbed the card and reviewed it with a pitying look on her face, as if it were my Guilty verdict. She passed it to Head Rush, who smiled at me and passed it to Jason Pledge, who passed it to Dee and Dum, who huddled over the thing as if it were a piece of WWII intelligence encrypted by the German Enigma Cipher Machine.

“Too weird,” said Dee.

“Totally—”

Suddenly, they were quiet. I looked up to see Zach Soderberg bent over me like a windswept rhododendron, his hair plummeting dangerously across his forehead. I felt as if I hadn’t seen him in years, probably because ever since he’d talked to me about A Girl, I’d gone out of my way to look zealously preoccupied in AP Physics. I’d also strong-armed Laura Elms into being my laboratory partner until the end of the year by offering to write up her lab reports as well as mine, never copying or even using an identical turn of phrase (in which case I’d be suspended for cheating), but faithfully adopting Laura’s restricted vocabulary, illogical mind-set and blubbery calligraphy when I wrote the report. Zach, no longer wanting to partner with his ex, Lonny, had to partner with my old partner Krista Jibsen, who never did her homework because she was saving for a breast reduction. Krista worked three jobs, one at Lucy’s Silk and Other Fine Fabrics, one at Bagel World and one in the Outdoors department at Sears, the minimum-waged drudgery of which she felt pertinent to the study of Energy and Matter. Thus we all knew when one of her coworkers was new, late, sick, stealing, let go, jerking off in the storeroom, also that one of her managers (if I remember correctly, some poor overseer at Sears) was in love with her and wanted to leave his wife.

Floss reached down and pressed the Play button on the CD player. Robotic sounds from a 1970s disco exploded out of the speakers. To my infinite horror, while watching me (as if on my face he could see his reflection, monitor his tempo, the height of his kicks), Zach began to take two steps forward, two steps back, pulsing his knees, the boys shadowing him.

“Let this groove. Get you to move. It’s alright. Alright,” Zach and the others sang in falsetto along with Earth, Wind & Fire. “Let this groove. Set in your shoes. So stand up, alright! Alright!”

They sang “Let’s Groove.” Floss and the boys shrugged, snapped and foxtrotted with such concentration, one could almost see the moves running through their brains like Stock Exchange ticker tape (kick left front, touch back left, kick left, step left, kick right front, knee right). “I’ll be there, after a while, if you want my looove. We can boogie on down! On down! Boogie on down!” Derek on his trumpet was playing a rudimentary melody. Zach sang solo with the occasional side step and shoulder lunge. His voice was earnest yet awful. He spun in place. Dee squeaked like a crib toy.

A sizable crowd of sophomores and juniors gathered in front of the library doors, watching the Boy Band with their mouths open. Mr. Fletcher reappeared with Havermeyer, and Ms. Jessica Hambone, the librarian, who’d been married four times and resembled Joan Collins in her more recent years, had emerged from her office and was now standing by the Hambone Reserves Desk. Obviously, she’d intended to shut down the disturbance because shutting down disturbances, with the exception of fire drills and lunch, was the only reason Ms. Hambone ever emerged from her office, where she allegedly spent her day shopping www.QVC.com for Easter Limited-quantity Collectibles and Goddess Glamour Jewelry. But she wasn’t coming over to the scene with her arms in the air, her favorite words, “This is a library, people, not a gym,” darting out of her mouth like Neon Tetra, her metallic green eye shadow (complementing her Enchanted Twilight Lever-back earrings, her Galaxy Dreamworld bracelet) reacting against the overhead fluorescent lights to give her that explicit Iguana Look for which she was famous. No, Ms. Hambone was speechless, hand pressed against her chest, her wide mouth, deeply lip-lined like the chalk outline of a body at a crime scene, curled into a soft, wisteria-fairy-pin of a smile.

The boys were diligently Lindy Hopping behind Zach, who spun in place again. Ms. Hambone’s left hand twitched.

At last, the music faded and they froze.

It was silent for a moment, and then everyone — the kids at the door, Ms. Hambone, those in second period Study Hall (all except Little Nose) — erupted into mind-numbing applause.

“Oh, my God,” said Dee.

“That did so not happen,” said Dum.

I clapped and beamed as everyone stared at me with big astonished faces as if I were a Crop Circle. I beamed at Ms. Hambone dabbing her eyes with the frilly cuff of her Rococo poet’s blouse. I beamed at Mr. Fletcher, who looked so happy you’d think he had just finished an exceptionally grueling crossword, like last week’s Battle of Bunker Hill, “Not Waving but Drowning?” I even beamed at Dee and Dum, who were staring at me with incredulous yet fearful looks on their faces (see Rosemary at the end of Rosemary’s Baby when the old people shout, “Hail Satan!”).

“Blue van Meer,” said Zach. He cleared his throat and approached my desk. The fluorescent lights made a soured halo around his hair so he looked like a hand-painted Jesus one finds hanging on clammy walls of churches that smell of Gruyère. “How about going to the Christmas formal with me?”

I nodded and Zach didn’t pick up on my acute reluctance and horror. A Cadillac-sized smile drove away with his face as if I’d just agreed to pay him “in cayash,” as Dad would say, for a Sedona Beige Metallic Pontiac Grand Prix, fully loaded, two grand over sticker price, driving it off the lot right then and there. He also didn’t pick up on — no one did — the fact that I was experiencing a very severe lost Our Town feeling, which only intensified when Zach left the library with his Temptations, a supremely satisfied look on his face (Dad had described a similar look on Zwambee tribesmen in Cameroon after they’d impregnated their tenth bride).

“Think they’ve had sex?” asked Dum with slitty eyes. She was sitting with her sister a few feet behind me.

“If they had sex, you think he’d be skadiddiling over her? It’s publicized knowledge the nanosecond you have sex with a guy you go from being a headline to being all blurbatized in the obituary section. He just Timberlaked in front of our very eyes.”

“She must be insane in bed. She must be man’s best friend.”

“It takes six Vegas strippers and a leash to be man’s best friend.”

“Maybe her mom works at The Crazy Horse.” They began to laugh shrilly, not even bothering to quiet down when I turned around to glare at them.

Dad and I had seen Our Town (Wilder, 1938) during a torrential downpour at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch (one of his students was making his Flitch stage debut as the Stage Manager). Although the play had its share of faults (there seemed to be great confusion with the address, as “In the Eye of God” came before “New Hampshire”) and Dad found the carpe diem premise much too syrupy (“Wake me up if someone gets shot,” he said as he nodded off), I still found myself more than a little moved when Emily Webb, played by a tiny girl with hair the color of sparks off railroad tracks, realized no one could see her, when she knew she had to say good-bye to Grover’s Corners. In my case, though, it was skewed. I felt invisible though everyone had seen me, and if Zach Soderberg and his mantelpiece hair were Grover’s Corners, I could think of nothing I’d rather do than get the hell out of town.

This grim feeling reached a record high when, that same day, as I walked to AP Calculus in Hanover I passed Milton walking hand in hand with Joalie Stuart, a sophomore, one of those highly petite girls who could fit into a carry-on suitcase and look at home on a Shetland pony. She had a baby-rattle laugh: a jelly-bean sound that irked even if you were minding your own business about a light year away. Jade had informed me Joalie and Black were a magnificently happy couple in the Newman and Woodward tradition. “Nothing will come between those two,” she said with a sigh.

“Hey there, Hurl,” Milton said as he passed me.

He smiled and Joalie smiled. Joalie was wearing a blue icing sweater and a thick brown velvet headband that looked like a giant woolly worm was rummaging behind her ears.

I’d never contemplated relationships very much (Dad said they were preposterous if I was under twenty-one and when I was over twenty-one Dad considered it Fine Points, Minutiae, a question of transportation or ATM location in a new town; “We’ll figure it out when we get there,” he said with a wave of his hand) and yet, in that moment, when I moved past Milton and Joalie, both of them smiling confidently in spite of the fact that at distances greater than fifteen feet they looked like a gorilla walking a teacup Yorkie, I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount. And this mathematical conundrum started its long division in my head at breakneck speed, so by the time I sat down in the front row of AP Calculus and Ms. Thermopolis at the dry-erase board was trying to wrestle to the ground a robust function from our homework, I was left with a disturbing number.

I suppose it was why, after years of playing the odds, some people cashed in their measly chips for their Zach Soderberg, the kid who was like a cafeteria, so rectangular and brightly lit there wasn’t a millimeter of exciting murk or thrilling secret (not even under the plastic chairs or behind the vending machines). The only saturnine miasma to be found in him was maybe a bit of mold on the orange Jell-O. The boy was all creamed spinach and stale hot dog.

You couldn’t make a grisly shadow on his wall if you tried.

I suppose it was just one of those December Dog Day Afternoons, when Love and its wired cousins — Lust, Crush, Eat Up, Have It Bad (all of whom suffered from ADHD or Hyperkinetic Syndrome) were on the loose and in heat, terrorizing the neighborhood. Later that day, when Dad dropped me at home before heading back to the university for a faculty meeting, I was only five minutes into my homework when the telephone rang. I picked it up and no one said anything. A half hour later, when it rang again, I switched on the answering machine.

“Gareth. It’s me. Kitty. Look, I need to talk to you.” Click.

Less than forty-five minutes later, she called again. Her voice was cratered and barren as the moon, exactly as Shelby Hollow’s voice had been, and Jessie Rose Rubiman’s before her, and Berkley Sternberg’s, old Berkley who used The Art of Guiltless Living (Drew, 1999) and Take Control of Your Life (Nozzer, 2004) as coasters for her potted African violets.

“I–I know you don’t like it when I call, but I do need to speak to you, Gareth. I have a feeling you’re home and choosing not to pick up. Pick up the phone.”

She waited.

Whenever they waited, I always pictured them on the other end, standing in their yellowed kitchens, twisting the telephone cord around an index finger so it turned red. I wondered why it never occurred to them I was the one listening, not Dad. I think if one of them had said my name, I would’ve picked up and done my best to console them, explained that Dad was one of those theories you could never know for certain, never prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And though there was a chance you could be struck by the lightning of genius it took to solve the man, the odds were so infinitesimal, so unbearable, the act of trying only had the effect of making one feel very small (see Chapter 53, “Superstrings and M-Theory, or Mystery Theory, the Theory of Everything,” Incongruities, V. Close, 1998).

“Okay. Call me when you get a chance. I’m at home. But you can reach me on my mobile if I go out. I might go out. I need eggs. On the other hand, I might stay home and make tacos. Okay. Forget this message. Speak to you soon.”

In a seemingly astute statement Socrates wrote, “The hottest love has the coldest end.” By these words, by their very definition — because I’m sure Dad never lied to them, never pretended his affections were anything not perfectly encapsulated by the words lackadaisical and lukewarm—every one of Dad’s ends should have been a sun-drenched, rosy affair. They should have been polo matches. They should have been picnics.

I don’t think Dad ever quite understood it himself, treating these sobs as he did, with a muddle of embarrassment and regret. When he came home that night, he did what he always did. He played the messages (turning down the volume when he realized who it was) and deleted them.

“Have you eaten, Christabel?” he asked.

He knew I’d heard her messages, but like Emperor Claudius in 54 A.D. upon hearing the thrum of Roman rumor that his dear wife, Agrippina, was plotting to poison him with a dish of mushrooms presented to him by his favorite eunuch, for some unknown reason, Dad chose to ignore these signs of impending doom (see Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius, 121 A.D.).

He never learned.

Two weeks later, the Saturday night of Maxwell’s Christmas Cabaret, I was being unlawfully detained at Zach Soderberg’s house. I was wearing one of Jefferson Whitestone’s old black cocktail dresses, which Jade claimed Valentino himself had designed specifically for her, though when they feuded for the affections of “a shirtless bartender at Studio 54 named Gibb,” she’d furiously ripped out the label, leaving the dress an amnesiac. (“This is how empires fall,” Jade had said, sighing dramatically as she and Leulah pinned the armholes and waist so the thing no longer fit like a life jacket. “Trust me. You start breeding with the nimrods and that’s the end of your civilization. But I suppose you couldn’t help it. I mean, he asked you in front of all the whole school. What could you say, except that you’d be ecstatic to be his saltine? I feel sorry for you. That you have to spend an entire evening with the coupon.” It’s what they called Zach now, “the coupon,” and it fit him. He really was all bar code, all Great Savings, all $5 Off with Proof of Purchase.)

“Have some bonbons,” said Zach’s dad, Roger, holding out a bowl of powdery chocolates.

“Don’t force her to eat,” said Zach’s mom, Patsy, shooing his hand.

“You like chocolate? You must. Everyone likes chocolate.”

“Roger,” protested Patsy. “No girl wants to eat before a party, when she’s got the jitters! Later’s when she gets the munchies. Zach, make sure she eats something.”

“Okay,” said Zach, blushing like a nun. He raised his eyebrows and tossed me a repentant smile as Patsy got down on one knee in the snowdrift carpet of the living room and squinted at us through the Nikon’s viewfinder.

Unbeknownst to Patsy, Roge had moved to my left and was holding out the ceramic bowl again.

“Go on,” he mouthed, winking. It seemed Roge, in his yellow cotton sweater and khaki pants — creases down each leg, clear cut as the International Date Line — would make a very convincing wholesaler of junk, white girl, afghan black, billy whiz and joy powder.

I obliged, took one. It began to melt in my hand.

“Roger!” said Patsy, tisking (two dimples snagging her cheeks) as she took what was now our sixteenth picture, this one with Zach and me on the floral couch, our knees positioned at a perfect ninety degrees.

Patsy was a self-proclaimed “picture nut,” and all around us, covering every hard, flat surface like thousands of wet, unraked leaves in a gazebo, were framed photos of skew-smiled Zach, urn-eared Bethany Louise, a few with Roge when he had sideburns and Patsy when her hair was a redder brown, which she wore as an amaretto bundt cake atop her head, drizzled with ribbons. The only hard, flat surface in the living room devoid of pictures — the coffee table in front of us — supported a paused game of Parcheesi.

“I hope Zach didn’t embarrass you with his dance,” said Patsy.

“Not at all,” I said.

“He was practicing all the time. So nervous! He had Bethany Louise up all hours of the night going over the steps.”

“Mom,” said Zach.

“He knew it was risky,” said Roge. “But I told him to take that leap of faith.”

“It runs in the family,” said Patsy, nodding toward Roge. “You should have seen this one when he proposed.”

“Sometimes you just can’t help yourself.”

“Thank goodness for that!”

“Mom, we should get going,” said Zach.

“All right! All right! One more by the window.”

“Mom.”

“Just one. There’s gorgeous light over there. One. I promise.”

I’d never been inside a household full of! and even more!!! I wasn’t even aware these nests of goodwill, these bubble baths of clasps and cuddles actually existed, except in one’s head when one compared one’s own fitful family to the seemingly blissful one across the street.

An hour ago, as Zach and I drove up the driveway and I saw his wooden house — up-front as an open-faced sandwich, served to the sky on skinny wooden stilts — Patsy in her beetle-green blouse scurried down the porch steps to greet us before Zach had even parked the car (“You said she was pretty, you didn’t say drop dead! Zach never tells us anything!” she exclaimed. And that was her voice, even when she wasn’t greeting people on the driveway, an exclamation).

Patsy was pretty (though some twenty-five pounds heavier than her bundt cake days) with a cheerful, round face suggestive of a fresh vanilla cake blessed with a cherry and placed lovingly in a sweet shoppe’s window. Roge was handsome, but in the opposite way of Dad. Roge (Have enough gas in the car, Zachary, Just had her filled, Good boy) displayed the sparkling air of a brand new bathroom fixture in sought-after White Heat tile. He had sparkling blue eyes and skin so clear, you almost expected to see your own reflection winking back at you when you peered into his face.

Finally, after logging photo number twenty-two (Patsy made that word all her own, foe-toe) Zach and I were granted permission to leave. We were heading out of the living room into the neat beige foyer when Roge stealthily passed me a cloth napkin full of bonbons he ostensibly hoped I’d traffic out of the house.

“Oh, wait,” said Zach. “I wanted to show Blue the Turner. I think she’d like it.”

“Of course!” said Patsy, clapping her hands.

“Just for a second,” Zach said to me.

Grudgingly, I followed him up the stairs.

For the record, Zach had held up remarkably well during his encounter with Dad when he picked me up in his Toyota. He’d shaken Dad’s hand (from the looks of things it wasn’t a “wet washcloth,” Dad’s pet peeve), called him “Sir,” jumpstarted a conversation about what a beautiful night it was going to be and what Dad did for a living. Dad gave him the thrice-over and answered in stark replies that would’ve frightened Mussolini: “Is it?” and “I teach civil war.” Other dads would have felt sorry for Zach, recalling their own wobbly days of adolescence, and they’d take pity, try to Make the Kid Feel Comfortable. Unfortunately, Dad decided to Make the Kid Feel Small and Less Than a Man, simply because Zach hadn’t known, innately, what Dad did for a living. Even though Dad knew the readership of Federal Forum was less than 0.3 percent of the United States and hence only a handful of individuals had scoured his essays or noted his romantic (a June Bug would say “rugged” or “dashing”) black-and-white foe-toe on display in “Contributors of Note,” Dad still didn’t like to be reminded that he and his educational efforts weren’t as recognizable as, say, Sylvester Stallone and Rocky.

Yet Zach displayed the optimism of a cartoon.

“Midnight,” decreed Dad as we walked outside. “I mean it.”

“You have my word, Mr. Van Meer!”

At this point, Dad wasn’t bothering to hide his You’ve-Got-to-Be-Kidding face, which I ignored, though it quickly dissolved into his This-Is-the-Winter-of-My-Discontent look, and then, Shoot-If-You-Must-This-Old-Gray-Head.

“Your dad’s nice,” Zach said as he started the car. (Dad was an infinite number of things, yet clammy-handed, sigh-by-night Nice was the one thing the man absolutely wasn’t.)

Now I trailed after him, down the airless, carpeted hallway, which he presumably shared with his sister if one went by the his-n-her hallkill along the floor and the onslaught of sibling odor (smell of athletic socks bullying peach perfume, cologne competing with fumes off a limp gray sweatshirt and threatening to go tell mom). We walked by what had to be Bethany Louise’s room, painted gum pink, a pile of clothes on the floor (see “Mount McKinley,” Almanac of Major Landmarks, 2000 ed.). We then passed a second bedroom, and through the crack of the not-quite-closed door I made out blue walls, trophies, a poster of an overcooked blonde in a bikini. (Without much imagination, I could fill in the other obvious detail: held captive under the mattress, a ravished Victoria’s Secret catalogue with the majority of its pages stuck together.)

At the end of the hall, Zach stopped. In front of him was a small painting, no bigger than a porthole, illuminated by a crooked gold light on the wall.

“So my father’s a minister at the First Baptist Church. And when he did one of his sermons last year, ‘The Fourteen Hopes,’ there was a man in the congregation visiting from Washington, D.C. A guy by the name of Cecil Roloff. Well, this guy was so inspired he told my dad afterward he was a changed man.” Zach pointed at the painting. “So a week later this came by UPS. And it’s real. You know Turner, the artist?”

Obviously I was familiar with the “King of Light,” otherwise known as J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), having read Alejandro Penzance’s eight hundred-page X-rated biography of the man, published only in Europe, Poor and Decayed Male Artist Born in England (1974).

“It’s called Fishermen at Sea,” Zach said.

Nimbly I stepped around the pair of green plastic gym shorts dead on the floor and leaned in to examine it. I guessed it probably was real, though it wasn’t one of the “light fests” where the artist “screwed convention and took painting by the testicles,” as Penzance described Turner’s hazy, almost completely abstract work (p. viii, Introduction). This painting was an oil, yet dark, depicting a tiny boat seemingly lost in a storm at sea, painted in hazy grays, browns and greens. There were slurpy waves, a wooden boat forceful as a matchbox, a moon, wan and small and a little bit of an acrophobe as it peered fretfully through the clouds.

“Why is it hanging up here?” I asked.

He laughed shyly. “Oh, my mom wants it close to my sister and me. She says it’s healthy to sleep close to art.”

“A very interesting use of light,” I said. “Faintly reminiscent of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. Especially in the sky. But a different palette obviously.”

“My favorite part’s the clouds.” Zach swallowed. A soup spoon had to be stuck in his throat. “Know what?”

“What.”

“You kind of remind me of that boat.”

I looked at him. His face was about as cruel as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off (and he’d had a haircut so his Panama-hat hair didn’t slant quite so low over his forehead) but his remark still made me — well, suddenly unable to stand him. He had likened me to a diminutive vessel manned by faceless dots of brown and yellow—poorly manned at that, because in a matter of seconds (if one took into account the oiled swell curled to strike down with vengeance), the thing was about to go under and that brown smudge on the horizon, that unwitting passing ship, wasn’t coming to rescue the dots anytime soon.

It was the cause of many of Dad’s outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi. It was the grounds for many of his university colleagues going from nameless, harmless peers to individuals he referred to as “anathemas” and “bête noires.” They’d made the mistake of abridging Dad, abbreviating Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, watering Dad down, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).

Four years prior, at Dodson-Miner College’s opening day World Symposium, Dad had delivered a forty-nine-minute lecture entitled “Models of Hate and the Organ Trade,” a lecture he was particularly fond of, having traveled in 1995 to Houston to interview one mustachioed Sletnik Patrutzka who’d sold her kidney for freedom. (Through tears, Sletnik had showed us her scars; “Steel hurts,” she’d said.) Immediately following Dad’s speech, College Provost Rodney Byrd scuttled across the outdoor stage like a shooed cockroach, dabbed his sloppy mouth with a handkerchief and said, “Thank you, Dr. Van Meer, for your keen insight into post-Communist Russia. It is very rare that we have a bona fide Russian émigré on campus”—he said it as if it were some mysterious individual who was a no-show, a very elusive Ms. Emmie Gray—“and we look forward to spending the semester with you. If anyone has a question about War and Peace I suspect he’s your man.” (Of course, Dad’s lecture had covered the organ trade rife in Western Europe and he’d never set foot in Russia. Though proficient in other languages, Dad actually knew no Russian at all except, “,” which meant, “Trust in God, but lock your car,” a well-known Russian proverb.)

“The act of being personally misconstrued,” Dad said, “informed to one’s face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline — well, it can gall the most self-possessed of individuals.”

There was no sound in the claustrophobic hallway except Zach’s breathing, which heaved like the interior of a conch shell. I could feel his eyes dripping down me, coursing through the folds of Jefferson’s crispy black dress, which resembled an upside-down shiitake mushroom if you squinted at it. The silvery-black fabric felt flimsy, as if it could stiffly peel away like tinfoil around cold fried chicken.

“Blue?”

I made the grave error of glancing up at him again. His face — head light-bright from the light on the Turner, eyelashes absurdly long like those of a Jersey Cow — was heading straight toward me, drifting on down like Gondwanaland, the giant Southern landmass that inched toward the South Pole 200 million years ago.

He wanted our tectonic plates to collide, forcing one on top of the other so molten material from the earth’s interior gives rise to a wild and unstable volcano. Well, it was one of those sweaty moments I’d never had before except in dreams, when my head was in the cul-de-sac of Andreo Verduga’s arm, my lips by his alcoholic cologne in the dead end of his neck. And as I stared up at Zach’s face hovering at the intersection of Desire and Shyness, patiently waiting for a green light (even though there wasn’t a soul around), you’d think I’d flee, run for my life, lie back and think of Milton (throughout the evening, I’d been engaged in covert Neverlanding, fantasizing it’d been he who’d met Dad, his mother and father who’d squirreled around the living room), but no, at this bizarre moment, Hannah Schneider slipped into my head.

I’d seen her at school just that afternoon, right after sixth period. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black wool dress, a tight black coat, moving unevenly down the sidewalk toward Hanover carrying a cream canvas bag, her head bent toward the ground. While Hannah had always been thin, her figure, particularly her shoulders, looked unusually hunched and narrow, dented even — as if she’d been smashed in a door.

Now, caught in some gluey moment with this kid, feeling like I was still in Kansas, the reality of her getting so close to Doc she could count the number of gray hairs on his chin felt gruesome. How could she stomach his hands, his rocking-chair shoulders or the next morning, the sky sterile as a hospital floor? What was wrong with her? Something was wrong, of course, yet I’d been too preoccupied with myself, with Black and the number of times he sneezed, with Jade, Lu, Nigel, my hair, to take it to heart. (“The average American girl’s principal obsession is her hair — simple bangs, a perm, straightening, split ends — to the breathtaking rebuff of all else, including divorce, murder and nuclear war,” writes Dr. Michael Espiland in Always Knock Before Entering [1993].) What had happened to Hannah to make her descend into Cottonwood the way Dante had willfully descended into Hell? What had caused her to perpetuate a marked pattern of self-annihilation, which was obviously replicating at an alarming rate with the death of her friend Smoke Harvey, the drinking and swearing, her thinness, which made her look like a starved crow? Misery multiplied unless it was treated immediately. So did misfortune, according to Irma Stenpluck, author of The Credibility Gap (1988), which detailed on p. 329 one had only to suffer a tiny misfortune before one found one’s “entire ship sinking into the Atlantic.” Maybe it was none of our business, but maybe it was what she’d been hoping for all along, that one of us would unstick from our self and ask about her for once, not out of snoopy intrigue but because she was our friend and obviously crumbling a little bit.

I hated myself, standing there in the hallway, next to the Turner and Zach still hovering on the edge of his dry canyon of a kiss.

“You have something on your mind,” he quietly observed. The kid was Carl Jung, fucking Freud.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said harshly, taking a small step backward.

He smiled. It was incredible; his face had no expression for anger or annoyance, just as some Native Americans, the Mohawks, the Hupa, had no word for purple.

“You don’t want to know why you’re like that boat?” he asked.

I shrugged and my dress sighed.

“Well, it’s because the moon shines right on it and nowhere else in the picture. Right here. On the side. She’s the only thing that’s incandescent,” he said, or some other word-of-the-day response to that effect, full of oozing lava, lumps of rock, ash and hot gas I opted not to stick around for because I’d already turned and headed down the stairs. At the bottom, I again encountered Patsy and Roge, positioned right where we’d left them like two shopping carts abandoned in the cookie aisle.

“Isn’t it something?” Patsy exclaimed.

They waved good-bye as Zach and I climbed into the Toyota. Big smiles fireworked through their faces when I waved and shouted out the unrolled window, “Thank you! Look forward to seeing you again!” How strange it was that people like Zach, Roge and Patsy floated through the world. They were the cute daisies twirling past the mirror orchids, the milk thistle of the Hannah Schneiders, the Gareth van Meers snared in the branches and the mud. They were the sort of giddy people Dad loathed, called fuzz, frizz (or his most contemptuous put-down of all, sweet people) if he happened to be standing behind one of them in a checkout aisle and eavesdropped on what was always a painfully bland conversation.

And yet — and I didn’t know what was wrong with me — though I couldn’t wait to unload Zach as soon as we arrived at the Cabaret (Jade and the others would be there, Black and Joalie too, Joalie, I hoped, suffering from an unforeseen skin irritation that refused to budge, even with persistent entreaties of various over-the-counter medications) I sort of marveled at the kid’s buoyancy. I’d approached his would-be kiss with no less dread than if a plague of locusts had started to descend upon my lands, and yet, now, he smiled at me and cheerfully asked if I had enough leg room.

Incredibly too, at the bottom of the driveway, when we were about to make a right, I glanced back, up the sharp wooded hill toward his house, and saw that Patsy and Roge were still standing there, most likely with their arms still snug around each other’s waist. Patsy’s green blouse was visible, shredded by the matchstick trees. And though I’d never confess it to Dad, I did wonder, for a second, as Zach turned up the pop song on the radio, if it was really so atrocious to have a family like that, to have a dad who twinkled and a boy with eyes so blue you wouldn’t be shocked to see sparrows winging through them, and a mother who stared, unwaveringly, at the last place she’d seen her son like a dog in a supermarket parking lot, never taking its eyes off the automatic doors.

“Are you excited about the dance?” asked Zach.

I nodded.

“The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”

The Christmas Cabaret was held in the Harper Racey ’05 Cafeteria, which, under Student Council President Maxwell’s iron fist, had transformed into a sweltering, Versailles-styled nightclub with imitation-Sèvres vases on the side tables, French cheeses and pastries, gold tinsel, big, crudely painted posters of deformed girls on makeshift swings affixed over the “World Enough and Time” Wall (Gallway class photos from 1910 to present), which were meant to evoke the flouncing fiddle-dee-dee of Fragonard’s The Swing (c. 1767), but inadvertently conjured The Scream (Munch, c. 1893).

At least half of all St. Gallway faculty had shown up, those who’d been asked to chaperone, and there they were, the Mondo-Strangos, turned out in their monkey suits. Havermeyer stood next to his pale, rawboned wife, Gloria, in black velvet. (Gloria only rarely made public appearances. They said she hardly left the house, preferring to laze around, nibbling marshmallows and reading romance novels by Circe Kensington, a beloved author of many June Bugs, and thus I knew the most popular title, The Crown Jewels of Rochester de Wheeling [1990].) And there was bulge-eyed Mr. Archer gripping the window ledge, neatly fitted into his navy suit like an invitation into an envelope, and Ms. Thermopolis talking to Mr. Butters in flighty Hawaiian oranges and reds. (She’d done something to her hair, a styling mousse that turned locks to lichen.) There was Hannah’s favorite, Mr. Moats, nearly as tall as the door frame by which he stood, wearing a jacket in Prussian Blue and plaid pants. (His was a disastrous face; his nose, puffy mouth, chin, even most of his cheeks seemed to crowd into the lower half of his face, like passengers on a sinking ship trying to avoid sea water.)

Jade and the others had promised (sworn on a range of grandparents’ graves) they’d show up at nine, but now it was ten-thirty and there was no sign of them, not even Milton. Hannah was supposed to be here, too—“Eva Brewster asked me to drop by,” she’d told me — but she was nowhere. And thus I was stuck deep in the heart of Zachville, homeland of the Sticky Palm, the Hazardous Wingtip, the Rickety Arm, the Calcutta Breath, the Barely Discernible Off-Key Hum Annoying as Any Wall’s Drone of Electricity, largest city, cluster of freckles on his neck beneath left ear, rivers of sweat at his temples, in that small gorge at his neck.

The dance floor was meatpacked. To our right, less than a foot away, Zach’s ex-girlfriend, Lonny Felix, danced with her date, Clifford Wells, who had an upturned, elfin face and wasn’t as tall as she was. He didn’t weigh as much either. Every time she instructed him to dip her (“Dip me,” she coached) he gnashed his teeth together as he struggled to keep her from falling to the floor. Otherwise, she seemed to be enjoying her self-styled tornado-twirls, flinging her elbows and thorny bleached hair harrowingly near my face every time Zach and I completed one revolution, when I was facing the buffet table (where Perón was making Nutella crêpes, uncharacteristically subdued in a puff-sleeved Rhapsody in Blue) and Zach faced the windows.

Maxwell, a sort of mad Phineas T. Barnum in crimson velvet jacket and cane, completely ignored his date, Kimmie Kaczynski (a sad, dejected mermaid in green satin unable to lure her sailor) and presided with delight over his sideshow of freaks, the bleary-eyed, burnt-out Jelly Roll Jazz Band.

“Pardon me,” said a voice behind me.

It was Jade, my knight in shining armor. Immediately, however, I noticed something was wrong. Donnamara Chase in her unwieldy pink Liberty Bell dress and her date, lip-licking Trucker, and a few others, like Sandy Quince-Wood, Joshua Cuthbert and Dinky, a living, breathing booby trap, arms tightly clamped around the neck of poor, destined-for-captivity Brett Carlson, they’d all stopped dancing and were staring at her.

I saw why.

She was wearing a thin silk dress the color of tangerines, the neckline plunging down her front with the force of a skydiver’s free fall. She was drunk, in possession of neither a bra nor shoes, and though she surveyed Zach and me with a hand on her hip, her customary gesture of intimidation, now it simply looked as if she was doing her best to hold onto herself, in case her self fell over. She was holding a pair of black stilettos.

“If you don’t mind, coup — coupon”—she lurched forward; I was terrified she might fall—“I need to borrow Gag for a minute.”

“Are you okay?” Zach asked.

Quickly, I stepped forward and grabbed her arm. Force-feeding a smile to my face, I pulled her after me, hard, but not so hard she dissolved into a puddle of orange juice on the dance floor.

“Geez. I’m sorry I’m late. What can I say? I hit traffic.”

I managed to move her away from most of the faculty chaperones, and pushed her straight into a crowd of freshmen tasting the gâteaux au chocolat et aux noisettes and the French cheeses. (“This tastes like ass,” someone said.)

My heart was pounding. Within minutes, no, seconds, she’d be spotted by Evita and would be arrested, in Gallwanian terms, “roundtabled,” inevitable suspension, Saturday morning community service with men who licked their lips at her when she served them lukewarm vegetable soup — perhaps even expulsion. In my head, I began to stitch together an excuse, something to do with an accidental pill slipped into her 7-Up by some pimply psycho; there were plenty of articles I could reference on the subject. There was also, of course, simply pretending to be stupid (“When in doubt, feign oblivion,” Dad chanted in my head. “No one can fault you for being born with a lean IQ.”). But before I knew it, we were slipping past the buffet table and the bathrooms and out the wooden doors, undetected. (Mr. Moats, if you are reading this, I’m certain you saw us. I thank you for simply replacing your look of marked boredom with one of cynical delight, sighing, and doing nothing more. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, ignore the above.)

Outside, I yanked her across the brick patio ringed with wrought-iron love seats (“Ow. That hurts, you know.”) where Gallway’s most earnest couples were marooned.

Glancing over my shoulder to be certain no one followed, I yanked Jade across the lawn, down the mineral-gritty sidewalks, through the orange floodlights where our thin shadows dragged farther and farther behind us. I didn’t let go of her until we were in front of Hanover, where it was dark and desolate, where everything — the black windows, the wooden steps, a folded sheet of Algebra homework mumbling in its sleep — was nightwashed, uniformed in grays and blues.

“Are you out of your mind?” I shouted.

“What?”

“How can you show up like this?”

“Oh, stop yelling, Gag. Gaggle.”

“I — are you trying to get kicked out?”

“Fuck you,” she said, giggling. “And your little dog too.”

“Where is everyone? Where’s Hannah?”

She made a face. “At her house. They’re making apple pie and watching Heaven & Earth. You guessed it. They ditched you. Thought this scene would be a bore. I’m the one with loyalty. You should thank me. I take cash, check, MasterCard, Visa. No American Express.”

“Jade.”

“The others are traitors. In our midst. Aye too brew tays. And in case you’re wondering, Black and that little petunia are off somewhere doing the nasty in a cheap motel. He’s so in love I want to kill him. That girl’s a Yoko Ono and we’re going to break up—”

“Get a hold of yourself.”

“For Pete’s sake, I’m fine.” She smiled. “Let’s go somewhere. Some bar where the men are men and the women are hairy. And have smiles of beer.”

“You have to go home. Now.”

“I was thinking Brazil. Gag?”

“What.”

“I think I’m going to throw up.”

She did look ill. Her lips had faded into her face and she stared at me with huge nocturnal eyes, touching a hand to her throat.

I took her arm with the intention of directing her toward the crowd of now ill-fated young pines to our right, but suddenly, she made the short, high-pitched squeak of a kid when it didn’t want to eat some final piece of cauliflower or get strapped into a car seat, and she tore free, sprinting up the stairs and across the porch. I thought the doors would be locked, but they weren’t. She disappeared inside.

I found her in Mirtha Grazeley’s admissions bathroom on her knees in one of the stalls getting sick.

“I hate throwing up. I’d rather die. Kill me, would you? Kill me. I beg you.”

For fifteen sickened minutes, I held her hair.

“Better,” she said, wiping her eyes and mouth.

After she rinsed her face in the sink, she collapsed facedown on one of the couches in Mirtha’s Greeting Room.

“We should go home,” I said.

“Give me a second.”

Sitting there in the quiet, the lights off, the green floodlights from the M. Bella Chancery lawn spilling through the windows, it felt as if we were at the bottom of the ocean. The thin shadows from the bare trees outside stretched across the wooden floor like sea grass and sargassum weed, the grit dappling the windows, a little bit of zooplankton, the floor lamp in the corner, a glass-rope sponge. Jade sighed and turned over onto her back, her hair stuck to her cheeks.

“We should get out of here,” I said.

“You like him,” she said.

“Who?”

“Coupon.”

“Like I like noise pollution.”

“You’re going to run off with him.”

“Right.”

“You’re going to have tons of sex with him and have his gift certificates. Seriously. I know these things. I’m psychic.”

“Shut up.”

“Hurl?”

“What.”

“I hate the others.”

“Who?”

“Leulah. Charles. I hate them. I like you. You’re the only one who’s decent. The others are all sick. And I hate Hannah most of all. Ugh.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No. I pretend I don’t because it’s easy and fun to go over and have her cook and watch her act like St. Francis of friggin’ Assisi. Sure. Blah blah. But deep down I know she’s sick and repulsive.”

I waited for a moment, enough time for, say, a spinner shark to swim by seeking a school of sardines, for that peculiar word she used, repulsive, to disband, dissolve slightly, like ink from a cuttlefish.

“Actually,” I said, “it’s a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they’re familiar with. It’s the Derwid-Loeverhastel Principle. It’s discussed in Beneath the Associated—”

“Fuck David Hasselhoff.” She raised herself up on an elbow, narrowing her eyes. “I don’t like the woman.” She frowned. “You like her?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Why?”

“She’s a good person.”

Jade huffed. “Not that good. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but she killed that guy.”

“Who?”

Obviously, I knew she was talking about Smoke Harvey, but I chose to feign ignorance, volunteer only the barest words as a question, much in the reserved manner of Ranulph (pronounced “RALF”) Curry, the intemperate chief inspector of Roger Pope Lavelle’s three standoffish detective masterpieces composed in a decade-long fit of inspiration, from 1901 to 1911, works ultimately overshadowed by the sunnier tomes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a pretext artfully assumed by Curry while interviewing all eyewitnesses, bystanders, informants and suspects, and, more often than not, leading to the discovery of a certain sharp detail that ripped open the case. “Tut, tut, Horace,” says Curry in the 1017-page Conceit of a Unicorn (1901). “It is a capital error in the art of detection to insert one’s own voice into the ungoverned words of another. The more one speaks, the less one hears.”

“That Smoke person,” Jade went on. “Dubs. Knocked him off. I’m positive.”

“How do you know?”

“I was watching when they told her about him, remember?” She paused, staring at me, her eyes snatching, then holding on to what little light there was in the room. “You weren’t around, but I saw the performance. Completely overdone. She’s really the worst actress on the planet. If she was an actress she wouldn’t even make the B movies. She’d be in the D or the E movies. I don’t even think she’s good enough for porn. Of course, she thinks that she’s going on Inside the Actor’s Studio like next friggin’ week. She went over the top, shouting like a crazy person when she saw the guy dead. For a second I thought she was screaming, ‘The dingo ate my baby.’”

She rolled off the sofa and walked toward the kitchenette behind Mirtha’s desk. She opened the small refrigerator door and, crouching down, was illuminated by a rectangle of gold light so her dress became transparent and you could see, in this X-ray, how thin she was, how her shoulders were no wider than a coat hanger.

“There’s that eggnog in here,” she said. “Want some?”

“No.”

“There’s tons. Three full containers.”

“Mirtha probably measures how much is left at the end of every day. We don’t want to get in trouble.”

Jade stood up with the pitcher, banging the door closed with her foot.

“It’s Mirtha Grazeley, who everyone knows is the Mad freakin’ Hatter. Who’ll listen to her if she croaks there’s something missing? Besides. Most people just aren’t that organized. Isn’t that what you said the other soir, ‘no method to the madness’ and such?” She opened one of the cabinets and took out two glasses. “All I’m saying is that I happen to think Hannah got rid of the man like I happen to know my mother’s the Loch Ness Monster. Or Bigfoot. I haven’t decided what monster she is but I’m positive she’s one of the big ones.”

“What was her motive, then?” I asked. (“In my opinion,” said Curry, “it is also a very useful achievement to make certain the speaker remains on course, does not skirt around what he knows, prattling on about latchkeys and boilers.”)

“Monsters don’t need a motive. They’re monsters so they just—”

“I mean Hannah.”

She looked at me, exasperated. “You don’t get it, do you? No one needs a motive in this day and age. People look for motives and such because they’re afraid of like, total chaos. But motives are out like clogs. The truth is, some people just like to execute, like some people have a thing for ski bums with moles all over like God spilled peppercorns or paralegals with full-sleeve tattoos.”

“Then why him?”

“Who?”

“Smoke Harvey,” I said. “Why him and not me, for example?”

She made a sarcastic Ha sound as she handed me the glass and sat down. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it but Hannah’s completely obsessed with you. It’s like you’re her freaking lost child. I mean, we knew about you before you even freaking showed up at this place. It was so freaking weird.”

My heart stopped. “What are you talking about?”

Jade sniffed. “Well, you met her at that shoe store, correct?”

I nodded.

“Well, like, immediately after that, or maybe even the day of, she was talking on and on about this Blue person who was so amazing and wonderful and we’d have to become friends with you or like, die. Like you were the fucking Second Coming. She still acts that way. When you’re not around she’s always, ‘Where’s Blue, anyone seen Blue?’ Blue, Blue, Blue, for Christ sake. But it’s not just you. She has all kinds of abnormal fixations. Like the animals and the furniture. All those men in Cottonwood. Sex for her’s like shaking hands. And Charles. She’s completely fucked him up and doesn’t even realize it. She thinks she’s doing all of us a big favor by being friends with us, educating us or whatever—”

I swallowed. “Something really did happen between Charles and Hannah?”

“Hello? Of course. I’m like, ninety percent positive. Charles won’t tell anyone a thing, not even Black, because she’s brainwashed him. But last year? Lu and I went to pick him up and we found him crying like I’d never seen a person cry in my whole life. His face was screwed up like this.” She demonstrated. “He’d had a tantrum. The whole house was destroyed. He’d thrown paintings, attacked the wallpaper — huge chunks ripped right off the walls. We found him crying in a little ball by the TV. There was a knife on the floor, too, and we were afraid he was going to try to commit suicide or something—”

“He didn’t, did he?” I asked quickly.

She shook her head. “No. But I think the reason he was freaking out was that Hannah told him they’d have to stop. Or who knows, maybe it just happened the one time. I mean, it was probably an accident. I don’t think she set out to fuck him up, but she definitely did something, because he’s not himself anymore. I mean, you should have seen him last year, the year before. He was amazing. This really happy person everyone loved. Now he’s always pissed off.”

She took a long drink of the eggnog. The darkness hardened her profile so her face looked like one of the colossal decorative jade masks Dad and I observed in the Olmec Room at the Garber Natural History Museum in Artesia, New Mexico. “‘The Olmec people were a singularly artistic civilization, deeply intrigued by the human face,’” Dad read grandly from the printed explanation on the wall. “‘They believed that though the voice often lies, the face itself is never deceitful.’”

“If you really think these things about Hannah,” I managed to say, “how can you spend time with her?”

“I know. It’s weird.” She scrunched her mouth to one side, thinking. “I guess she’s like crack.” She sighed, hugging her shins. “It’s a mint chocolate chip ice cream thing.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, when she didn’t immediately elaborate.

“Well.” She tilted her head. “Have you ever felt that you loved, loved mint chocolate chip? That it was always your favorite flavor over every other in the entire world? But then one day you hear Hannah going on and on about butter pecan. Butter pecan this and butter pecan that and then you find yourself ordering butter pecan all the time. And you realize you like butter pecan best. That you probably liked it all along and just hadn’t known.” She was quiet for a moment. “You never eat mint chocolate chip again.”

At this point, I felt as if I was drowning in the shadowed floats and the holdfasts and the Blood Henry Starfish clinging to the overhead lamp, but I told myself to take a deep breath, remember I couldn’t believe all or any of what she said — not necessarily. Much of what Jade swore by, when she was drunk or sober, could be trapdoors, quicksand, trompe l’oeil, the hoax of light as it speeds through the air at a variety of temperatures.

I’d made the mistake of taking her words at face value for the first and last time when she confided to me how much she “hated” her mother, was “dying” to go live with her father, a judge in Atlanta, who was “decent” (despite having run off some four years prior with a woman she simply referred to as Meathead Marcy, about whom little was known, except that she was a paralegal with full-sleeve tattoos) and then, not fifteen minutes later, I watched her pick up the phone to call her mother, who was still in Colorado, happily trapped in some avalanche of a love affair with the ski instructor.

“But when are you coming home? I hate being looked after by Morella. I need you for my proper emotional development,” she said tearfully, before noticing me, shouting, “What the fuck are you looking at?” and slamming the door in my face.

Though lovable (her signature tic, that absentminded way of blowing her hair out of her face couldn’t be surpassed in charm by Audrey Hepburn), also blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat — graceful, unreasonable and impractical no matter what she was draped over, whether couches or people (a quality that didn’t diminish even when she was marginally torn and tatty, as she was now) — Jade was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor a solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory — Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot — she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.

Now she was on the floor with her filthy feet over her head, demonstrating a Pilates exercise that, she explained, “made more blood flow along the spinal cord.” (Somehow this translated into living longer.) I downed my glass of eggnog.

“I say we go to her classroom,” she said in a keyed-up whisper. She swung her skinny legs back onto the carpet in the fast, violent movement of a guillotine. “We could take a look around. I mean, it’s not completely insane to imagine that she’d keep evidence in her classroom.”

“Evidence of what?”

“I told you. Murder. She killed that Smoke person.”

I took a deep breath.

“Criminals put things where people are the least likely to look, right?” she asked. “Well, who’d think to look in her classroom?”

“We would.”

“We find something? Then we know. Not that it means anything. I mean, giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe Smoke had it coming to him. Maybe he clubbed seals.”

“Jade—”

“We don’t find anything? Who cares? No harm, no foul.”

“We cannot go to her classroom.”

“Why not?”

“Any number of reasons. One, we might get caught and kicked out of school. Two, it makes no logical sense—”

“Oh, fuck off!” she shouted. “Can you forget your fucking stellar college career for once and have a good time? You’re a fucking drag!” She looked furious, but then almost immediately, the anger slipped off her face. She sat up, an inchworm smile. “Just think, Olives,” she whispered. “We have a higher cause. Undercover investigations. Recon work. We could end up on the news. We could be America’s fucking sweethearts.”

I stared at her. “‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends,’” I said.

“Good. Now help me find my shoes.”

Ten minutes later, we were scurrying down the hall. Hanover had an old accordion floor, wheezing flat notes with every step. We pushed open the door, rushed down the hollow stairwell, outside into the cold, down the sidewalk trickling in front of the courtyard and Love. Stalactites of shadow grew around us, making Jade and me instinctively pretend we were nineteenth-century schoolgirls pursued by Count Dracula. We shivered and leaned into each other tightly, pretzeling our arms. We began to run, her hair splashing against my bare shoulder and face.

Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts — it was a setting that misled kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary, the sexual reproduction of a sunflower, for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators and a teacher’s face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand “everything and nothing,” Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and unfeeling, as darkness always was.

Two tall pines somewhere to our left inadvertently touched branches, the sound of a madman’s prosthetic limbs.

“Someone’s coming!” Jade whispered.

We raced down the hill, past silent Graydon, and the basement of Love Auditorium, and Hypocrite’s Alley, where the music classrooms with their long windows were vacant and blind like Oedipus after he hollowed out his eyes.

“I’m scared,” she whispered, tightening her grip on my wrist.

“I’m terrified. And freezing.”

“Have you seen School of Hell?”

“No.”

“Serial killer’s a Home Ec teacher.”

“Ow.”

“Baking 203. Bakes the students into soufflés. Isn’t that sick?”

“I stepped on something. I think it went through my shoe.”

“We have to hurry, Retch. We can’t get caught. We’ll die.”

She broke away from me and skipped up the steps of Loomis, yanking on the doors covered with dark, leafy announcements for Mr. Crisp’s production of The Bald Soprano (Ionesco, 1950). They were locked.

“We’ll have to go in another way,” she whispered excitedly. “Through the window. Or the roof. I wonder if there’s a chimney. We’ll pull a Santa, Retch. A Santa.”

She grabbed my hand. Taking cues from movies featuring cat burglars and silent assassins, we circled the building, crunching through the shrubs and pine needles, trying the windows. Finally, we found one that wasn’t latched, which Jade forced open into a narrow space of inward-leaning glass leading into Mr. Fletcher’s Driver’s Ed classroom. She slipped through the opening easily, landing on one foot. As I went through, I skinned my left shin on the window catch, my stockings ripped, and then I crashed onto the carpet, hitting my head on the radiator. (A poster on the wall featuring a kid wearing braces and a seat belt: “Always Check Your Blind Spot, on the Road and in Life!”)

“Move it, slowpoke,” Jade whispered and disappeared through the door.

Hannah’s classroom, Room 102, was located at the very end of the rootcanal hallway, a Casablanca poster taped to the door. I’d never been in her classroom before, and inside, when I opened the door, it was surprisingly bright; yellow-white floodlight from the sidewalk outside radiated through the wall of windows, X-raying the twenty-five or thirty desks and chairs and flinging long, skeletal shadows across the floor. Jade was already perched cross-legged on the stool at the front desk, one or two of the drawers hanging open. She paged intensely through a textbook.

“Find any smoking guns?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, so I turned and walked down the first row of desks, staring up at the row of framed movie posters on the walls (Visual Aid 14.0).

In total, there were thirteen, including the two in the back by the bookshelf. Maybe it was because of the eggnog, but it only took a minute to realize how odd the posters were — not the fact that every one was foreign, or an American movie in Spanish, Italian or French, or even that they were each spaced some three inches apart and straight as soldiers, a level of exactitude you learned never to expect from the Visual Aids caking the walls of a classroom, not even one of Science or Mathematics. (I went up to Il Caso Thomas Crown, moved back the frame and saw, around the nail, distinct pencil lines, where she’d made the measurements, the blueprint of meticulousness.)

With the exception of two (per un Pugno di Dollari, Fronte del Porto), all the posters featured an embrace or kiss of some kind. Rhett was there grasping Scarlett, sure; and Fred holding onto Holly and Cat in the rain (Colazione da Tiffany); but there was also Ryan O’Neal Historia del Amoring with Ali MacGraw; Charlton Heston clutching Janet Leigh, making her head fall at an uncomfortable angle in La Soif du Mal; and Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting a great deal of sand in their bathing suits. In a funny way too, I noticed — and I didn’t think I was getting too carried away — the way the woman was positioned in each of the posters, it could very well have been Hannah embraced from there to eternity. She had their same fine china bones, their hairpin, coastal-road profiles, the hair that tripped and fell down their shoulders.

VISUAL AID 14.0

It was surprising, because she’d never struck me as the dizzy type to surround herself with firework displays of untold passion (as Dad called it, a “big to-don’t”). That she’d so meticulously assembled these Coming Attractions that had come and gone — it made me a little sad.

“Somewhere in a woman’s room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetically,” Dad said. “With your mother, of course, it was the butterflies. Not only could you ascertain the extreme care she took in preserving and mounting them, how much they meant to her, but each one shed a tiny yet persistent light on the complex woman she was. Take the glorious Forest Queen. It reflects your mother’s regal bearing, her fierce reverence for the natural world. The Clouded Mother of Pearl? Her maternal instinct, her understanding of moral relativism. Natasha saw the world not in blacks or whites, but as it really is — a decidedly dim landscape. The Mechanitis Mimic? She could impersonate all the greats, from Norma Shearer to Howard Keel. The insects themselves were her in many ways — glorious, heartbreakingly fragile. And so you see, considering each of these specimens, we end up with — if not your mother precisely—at the very least, a close approximation of her soul.”

I wasn’t sure why, at this moment, I thought of the butterflies, except that these posters seemed to be the details that were Hannah, “wholly and unapologetically.” Maybe Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting sand in their bathing suits were her ardor for living coupled with a passion for the sea, the origin of all life, and Bella di giorno featuring Catherine Deneuve with her mouth hidden was her need for shiftiness, secrets, Cottonwood.

“Oh, God,” Jade said behind me. She threw a thick paperback into the air and it fluttered, crashing against the window.

“What?”

She didn’t say anything, only pointed at the book on the floor, her breathing exaggerated. I walked over to the windows and picked it up.

It was a gray book with the photograph of a man on the front, its title in orange letters: Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson (Ivys, 1985). The cover and pages were extremely tattered.

“So?” I asked.

“Don’t you know who Charles Manson is?”

“Of course.”

“Why would she have that book?”

“A lot of people have it. It’s the definitive biography.”

I didn’t feel like going into the fact that I had the book too, that Dad included it on the syllabus for a course he’d last taught at the University of Utah at Rockwell, Seminar on Characteristics of a Political Rebel. The author, Jay Burne Ivys, an Englishman, had spent hundreds of hours interviewing assorted members of the Manson Family, which, in its heyday, included at least one hundred and twelve people, and thus the book was remarkably comprehensive in Parts II and III explaining the origins and codes of Manson’s ideology, the daily activities of the sect, the hierarchy (Part I entailed a fastidious psychoanalysis of Manson’s difficult childhood, which Dad, not being a Freud aficionado, found less effective). Dad addressed the book, juxtaposed with Miguel Nelson’s Zapata (1989), for two, sometimes three classes under the lecture title “Freedom Fighter or Fanatic?” “Fifty-nine people who encountered Charles Manson during his years living in Haight-Ashbury went on the record saying he had the most magnetic eyes and most stirring voice of any human being they’d ever encountered,” Dad boomed into the microphone at the lectern. “Fifty-nine different sources. So what was it? The It-factor. Charisma. He had it. So did Zapata. Guevara. Who else? Lucifer. You’re born with, what? That certain je ne sais quoi, and according to history, you can move, with relatively little effort, a group of ordinary people to take up guns and fight for your cause, whatever cause it is; the nature of the cause actually matters very little. If you say so — if you toss them something to believe in — they’ll murder, give their lives, call you Jesus. Sure, you laugh, but to this day, Charles Manson receives more fan mail than any other inmate in the entire U.S. penitentiary system, some sixty thousand letters per year. His CD, Lie, continues to be a mover on Amazon.com. What does that tell us? Or, let me rephrase that. What does that tell us about us?”

“There’s no other book in here, Gag,” Jade said in a nervous voice. “Look.”

I walked over to the desk. Inside the open drawer were a pile DVDs, All the King’s Men, The Deer Hunter, La Historia Oficial, a few others, but no books.

“I found it in the back,” she said. “Hidden.”

I opened the shabby cover, flipped through a few pages. Maybe it was the stark light in the room, slashing and deboning everything, including Jade (her emaciated shadow fell to the floor, crawled toward the door), but I felt genuine chills skidding down my neck when I saw the name written in faded pencil in the upper corner of the title page. Hannah Schneider.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said, but noticed, with surprise, I was trying to convince myself.

Jade’s eyes widened. “You think she wants to kill us?” she whispered.

“Oh, please.”

“Seriously. We’re targets because we’re bourgeois.”

I frowned. “What is it with you and that word?”

“It’s Hannah’s word. Ever noticed when she’s drunk everyone’s a pig?”

“She’s just kidding,” I said. “Even my Dad jokes about that sometimes.” But Jade, her teeth bricked into a tiny wall, grabbed the book from my hands and started furiously spinning through the pages, stopping at the black-and-white photographs in the middle, tilting them so they caught the light. “‘Charles called Susan Atkins Sexy Sadie,’” she read slowly. “Ew. Look how freaky this woman looks. Those eyes. Honestly, they kind of look like Hannah’s—”

“Stop it,” I said, snatching the book from her. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with you?” Her eyes were narrowed, tiny incisions. Sometimes, Jade had a very severe way of looking at you that made you feel as if she were a 1780 sugarcane plantation owner and you, the branded slave on the Antiguan auction block who hadn’t seen your mother and father in a year and probably never would again. “You miss your coupon, is that it? You want to give birth to food stamps?”

At this point, I think we would have broken into an argument, which would have ended with me fleeing the building, probably in tears, her laughing and shouting a variety of names. The terrified look on her face, however, caused me to turn and follow her stare out the windows.

Someone was walking down the sidewalk toward Loomis, a heavy-set figure wearing a bulging, bruise-colored dress.

“It’s Charles Manson,” Jade whimpered. “In drag.”

“No,” I said. “It’s the dictator.”

In horror, we watched Eva Brewster move to the front doors of Loomis, yanking on the handles before turning and walking out onto the lawn by the giant pine tree, shading her eyes as she peered into the classroom windows.

“Oh, fuck me,” said Jade.

We leapt across the room, to the corner by the bookshelf where it was pitch black (under Cary and Grace, as it so happened, Caccia al ladro).

“Blue!” Eva shouted.

The sound of Evita Perón shouting one’s name could make anyone’s heart lurch. Mine thrashed like an octopus thrown to the deck of a ship.

“Blue!”

We watched her come to the window. She wasn’t the most attractive woman in the world: she had a fire-hydrant’s bearing, hair the fluffy texture of home insulation and dyed a hideous yellow-orange, but her eyes, as I’d observed once in the Main Office in Hanover, were shockingly beautiful, sudden sneezes in the dull silence of her face — big, wide-set, in a pale blue that tiptoed toward violet. She frowned now and deliberately pressed her forehead to the glass so it became one of those Ramshell Snails feeding on the side of aquariums. Although I was petrified and held my breath and Jade dug her nails into my right knee, the woman’s puffy, slightly blued face, flanked by large, garish pine-cone earrings, didn’t look particularly angry or devious. Frankly, she appeared more frustrated, as if she’d come to the window with the express hope of glimpsing the rare Barkudia Skink, the limbless lizard notorious among the reptilian elite as something of a Salinger, gallingly incommunicado for eighty-seven years, and now it was choosing to stay hidden under a moist rock in the exhibit, ignoring her no matter how many times she shouted, tapped on the glass, waved shiny objects or took flash pictures.

“Blue!” she called again, a little more emphatically, craning her neck to glance over her shoulder. “Blue!”

She muttered something to herself, and hurried around the corner of the building, ostensibly to search the opposite side. Jade and I couldn’t move, our chins conjoined to our knees, listening for the footsteps that reverberate down the linoleum asylum corridors of one’s most terrifying dreams.

But the minutes dripped by and there was only silence and the occasional coughs, sniffs, and throat clearings of a room. After five minutes, I crawled past Jade (she was frozen solid in fetal position) and moved toward the window where I looked out and saw her again, this time standing on the front steps of Loomis.

It would have been a stirring view, one of the Thomas Hardy variety, if she’d been someone else — someone with decent posture, like Hannah — because her cottony hair was blowing up off her forehead and insistent wind had seized her dress and pushed it far behind her, giving her the wild, secret air of a widow staring at the sea, or a magnificent ghost, pausing for a moment before continuing a sad search along the mottled moors for relics of dead love, a Ruined Maid, a Trampwoman’s Tragedy. But she was Eva Brewster: stout and sobering, bottlenecked, jug-armed and cork-legged. She tugged at the dress, scowled at the dark, took a last look at the windows (for a harrowing second, I thought she saw me) and then turned, heading briskly back down the sidewalk and disappearing.

“She’s gone,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Jade lifted her head and pressed a hand to her chest.

“I’m having a heart attack,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s possible. My family has a history of heart failure. It happens just like this. Out of the blue.”

“You’re fine.”

“I feel a tightness. Here. That’s what happens when you’re having pulmonary embrosis.”

I stared out the window. Where the sidewalk twisted out of sight around Love Auditorium, a lone tree stood guard with a thick black trunk, its shivering, thin limbs with the tops bent backward into tiny wrists and hands, as if feebly holding up the sky.

“That was really strange, huh?” Jade made a face. “How she called your name like that — wonder why she wasn’t calling my name.”

I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant, though in truth I felt ill. Maybe I had the gauzy constitution of a Victorian woman who fainted because she heard the word leg, or perhaps I’d read L’Idiot (Petrand, 1920) too attentively with its lunatic hero, the sickly and certifiable Byron Berintaux, who saw in every upholstered armchair his upcoming Death waving at him enthusiastically. Maybe I’d simply had too much darkness for one night. “Night is not good for the brain or the nervous system,” contends Carl Brocanda in Logical Effects (1999). “Studies show neurons are constricted by 38 percent in individuals who live in locations with little daylight, and nerve impulses are 47 percent slower in prison inmates who go forty-eight hours without seeing the light of day.”

Whatever it was, it wasn’t until Jade and I crept our way outside, sneaking past the cafeteria, still lit but silent (a few teachers lingered on the patio, including Ms. Thermopolis, a dying ember by the wooden doors), hightailing it out of St. Gallway in the Mercedes without encountering Eva Brewster, roaring down Pike Avenue past Jiffy’s Eatery, Dollar Depot, Dippity’s, Le Salon Esthetique — when I realized I’d forgotten to return the Blackbird book to Hannah’s desk. I was actually still holding it and in my haste, confusion, the darkness, only dimly aware I’d been doing so.

“How come you still have that book?” Jade demanded as we swung into a Burger King drive-thru. “She’s going to know it’s gone. Hope she doesn’t dust for fingerprints — hey, what do you want to eat? Hurry and decide. I’m starved.”

We ate Whoppers drenched in the acid light of the parking lot, barely speaking. I suppose Jade was one of those people who flung handfuls of wild accusations into the air, smiling as they rained on everyone’s head, and then the festivities were over and she went home. She looked contented, refreshed even, as she jostled fries into her mouth, waved at some scab making his way to his pick-up balancing a tray of Cokes in his arms, and yet, deep in my chest, unavoidable as the sound of your heart when you stopped to hear it beating, I felt, as deadbeat gumshoe Peter Ackman (who had a weakness for the chalk-tube and flutes of skee) said at the end of Wrong Twist (Chide, 1954), “like the bean-schnozzle been jammed far up my lousy, threatening to sneeze metal.” I stared at the wrinkled cover of that book, where, despite the faded ink, the creases, the man’s black eyes rose off the page.

“So these are the eyes of the Devil,” Dad remarked thoughtfully once, picking up and scrutinizing his own copy. “He looks out and sees you — doesn’t he?”

Sweet Bird of Youth

There was an anecdote Dad recounted like clockwork whenever he had a colleague over for dinner. Having a guest was rare, occurring only once every two or three towns in which we lived. Customarily, Dad found it difficult to withstand the echoing howls of his associates at Hattiesburg College of Arts and Science, the displays of chest-beating rampant among his Cheswick College cronies or professors at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch, eternally absorbed with feeding, grooming and being territorial to the exclusion of all else. (Dad regarded silverbacks — professors over sixty-five who had tenure, dandruff, rubbery shoes and quadrangle glasses that bugified their eyes — with particular disdain.)

Once in a while, however, under the wild oak trees, Dad bumped into his own kind (if not his exact subspecies or species, at least the same genus), a compatriot who’d made his way down from the foliage and learned to walk on two feet.

Naturally, this person never was as sophisticated an academic as Dad, nor as handsome. (The man was almost always saddled with a flattish face, an extensive, slanted forehead and an awning brow.) But Dad would cheerfully extend a Van Meer dinner invitation to this uncommonly advanced lecturer; and on a quiet Saturday or Sunday night, big, fig-eyed Professor of Linguistics Mark Hill would turn up, with his hands enduringly tucked into the patch pockets of his shapeless dinner jacket, or Associate Professor of English Lee Sanjay Song, with his quince-and-cream complexion and teeth in a traffic jam, and somewhere between the spaghetti and the tiramisu Dad treated him to the story of Tobias Jones the Damned.

It was a straightforward tale about a nervous, pale-skinned chap Dad encountered in Havana working at OPAI (Organización Panamaricana de la Ayuda Internacional) during the hot rum-soaked summer of 1983, a British kid from Yorkshire who, in the span of a single luckless week in August, lost his passport, wallet, wife, right leg and dignity — in that order. (Every now and then, to elicit even more extreme cries of amazement from his audience, Dad reduced the tragedy to a neat span of twenty-four hours.)

Never one for paying attention to physical details, Dad was disappointingly hazy on what the face of the Exceedingly Ill-fated looked like, but I was able to discern, out of Dad’s poorly lit verbal portrait, a tall, pale man with stalklike legs (after he was hit by the Packard, leg), maize-colored hair, a clammy gold pocket watch repeatedly removed from his breast pocket and blinked at disbelievingly, a propensity for sighing, for cufflinks, for lingering too long in front of the chrome metal fan (the only one in the room) and for spilling café con leche on his trousers.

Dad’s dinner guest listened in rapt attention as Dad narrated the beginning of the ill-starred week, which found Tobias showing off his new fiesta linen shirt to his coworkers at OPAI while a pack of gente de guarandabia ransacked his bungalow back at Comodoro Neptuno, all the way to the tale’s miserable end, a mere seven days later, with Tobias prostrate in his lumpy bed at el hospital Julio Trigo missing a right leg and recuperating from an attempted suicide (fortunately, the attending nurse had been able to pry him off the window ledge).

“And we never knew what happened to him,” Dad said in closing with a thoughtful sip of wine. Professor of Psychology Alfonso Rigollo stared dolefully at the edge of the dinner table. And after he muttered, “Shit,” or “Tough luck,” Dad and he would discuss predestination, or the waywardness of a woman’s love, or how Tobias might’ve had a chance for canonization if he hadn’t tried to kill himself and had stood for something. (According to Dad, Tobias had definitely performed one of the three miracles required for sainthood: back in 1979 he’d somehow convinced the ocean-eyed Adalia to marry him.)

Within twenty minutes, though, Dad would twist the conversation around to the real reason he’d brought up Tobias Jones in the first place, to detail one of his favorite theories, “The Theory of Determination,” because his final position (related with the intensity of Christopher Plummer murmuring, “The rest is silence.”) was that Tobias was not, as it might appear, a defenseless victim of fate, but a victim of himself, of his own “sallow head.”

“And thus we are faced with the simple question,” said Dad. “Is man’s destiny determined by the vicissitudes of environment or free will? I argue that it is free will, because what we think, what we dwell upon in our heads, whether it be fears or dreams, has a direct effect upon the physical world. The more you think about your downfall, your ruin, the greater the likelihood that it will occur. And conversely, the more one thinks of victory, the more likely one will achieve it.”

Dad always paused here for dramatic effect, staring across the room at the trite little daisy landscape hanging on the wall, or the pattern of horse heads and riding crops running up and down the faded dining room wallpaper. Dad adored all Suspensions and Silences, so he could feel everyone’s eyes madly running all over his face like Mongol armies in 1215 sacking Beijing.

“Obviously,” he continued with a slow smile, “it’s a concept that has been bastardized of late in Western Culture, associated with the runny-nosed Why-Nots and How-Comes of self-help and PBS marathons that drone on into the wee hours, begging you to pledge money and in return, receive forty-two hours of meditation tapes one can chant to when one is mired in traffic. Yet visualization is a concept that was once considered not so frothy, dating back to the founding of the Buddhist Mauryan Empire, around 320 B.C. History’s great leaders understood it. Niccolò Machiavelli tipped Lorenzo de’ Medici off to it, though he called it ‘prowess’ and ‘foresight.’ Julius Caesar understood it — he saw himself conquering Gaul decades before he actually did so. Who else? Hadrian, Da Vinci certainly, another great man, Ernest Shackleton — oh, and Miyamoto Musashi. Take a look at his The Book of Five Rings. Members of Nächtlich, The Nightwatchmen, also followed it, of course. Even America’s most dashing leading man, the circus-educated Archibald Leach, understood it. He is quoted, in that funny little book we have, what is it, the—”

“Talk of the Town: Hollywood Heroes Have Their Moment,” I chirped.

“Yes. He said, ‘I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.’ In the end, a man turns into what he thinks he is, however large or small. It is the reason why certain people are prone to colds and catastrophe. And why others can dance on water.”

Dad obviously thought he was one of the ones who could dance on water, because for the next hour or so, he went on to discuss his premise in meticulous detail — the necessity of discipline and reputation, the curbing of emotion and feeling, modes for quietly implementing change. (I’d sat in the wings during so many performances, I was a natural choice for the understudy, though Dad never missed a show.) Although Dad’s concert was filled with sweetness and light, none of his melodies were all that groundbreaking. He was pretty much summarizing the French ghostwritten La Grimace, a funny little book on power published in 1824. His other ideas were cherry-picked from H. H. Hill’s Napoleon’s Progress (1908), Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, 1886), The Prince (Machiavelli, 1515), History Is Power (Hermin-Lewishon, 1990), obscure works like Aashir Alhayed’s The Instigations of a Dystopia (1973) and The Con Game (1989) by Hank Powers. He even referenced a few folktales by Aesop and La Fontaine.

Our dinner guest was nothing more than a cavity of reverential silence by the time I served coffee. His mouth was always open. His eyes resembled harvest moons. (If it’d been 1400 B.C. there was a chance he’d have crowned Dad leader of the Israelites and asked him to lead the way to the Promised Land.)

“Thank you, Dr. Van Meer,” he said as he was leaving, vigorously shaking Dad’s hand. “It’s been a — a pleasure. Everything you talked about — it — it was informative. I’m honored.” He turned to me, blinking in surprise, as if he was seeing me for the first time all evening. “It was a privilege to meet you as well. I look forward to seeing you again.”

I never did see him again, nor any of the others. For these colleagues, the Van Meer dinner invitation was like Birth, Death, the Senior Prom, a once in a lifetime event, and though there were enthusiastic promises of some future rendezvous shouted into the cricketed night as Teaching Assistant to Poetic and Narrative Forms dizzily lumbered to his car, in the ensuing weeks, Dad’s kind always withdrew into the concrete corridors of the University of Oklahoma at Flitch or Petal or Jesulah or Roane, never to emerge again.

Once, I asked Dad why.

“I don’t think the man’s presence was titillating to the degree that I wish to put myself through a repeat performance. He was neither dope, money nor jiggy with it,” he said, barely glancing up from Christopher Hare’s Social Instability and the Narcotics Trade (2001).

I found myself thinking about the story of Tobias the Damned quite often, in particular, when Jade drove me home after the Christmas Cabaret. Whenever anything strange happened, even the most trivial of occurrences, I found myself sort of going back to him, secretly afraid with just a little heave-ho I might turn into him — by my own fear and nervousness, setting off some awful spiral of misfortune and misery, thereby severely disappointing Dad. It’d mean I’d missed every one of the principles of his beloved Determination Theory, with its extensive section on handling emergencies. (“There are very few men who have the shrewdness to think and feel beyond the commotion of the present moment. Try,” he commanded, recapitulating Carl von Clausewitz.)

As I walked up the lighted path to our porch, I could think of nothing I wanted to do more than forget Eva Brewster, Charles Manson, everything Jade had told me about Hannah, and simply disintegrate into bed, in the morning, maybe curl up next to Dad with The Chronicle of Collectivism. Maybe I’d even help him trek through a few student essays on future methods of war or have him read aloud The Waste Land (Eliot, 1922). Normally I couldn’t stand it — he did it in a very grandiose way, channeling John Barrymore (see “Baron Felix von Geigern,” Grand Hotel). But now, it seemed like the perfect antidote to my gloom.

When I opened the front door and walked into the foyer, I noticed the lights were still on in the library. I quickly tucked the Blackbird book into my backpack, still slumped next to the stairs where I’d heaved it Friday afternoon, and hurried down the hall to find Dad. He was in his red leather armchair, a cup of Earl Gray tea on the table next to him, head bent over a legal pad, doubtlessly scribbling another lecture or an essay for Federal Forum. His illegible handwriting tangled down the page.

“Hi,” I said.

He glanced up. “Know what time it is?” he asked pleasantly.

I shook my head as he checked his watch.

“One twenty-two,” he said.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I—”

“Who was it that dropped you off?”

“Jade.”

“And where is Joe Public?”

“He’s — well, I’m not sure.”

“And where is your coat?”

“Oh, I left it. I forgot it at the—”

“And what in God’s name did you do to your leg?”

I looked down. Blood had crusted around a cut on my shin, and my stockings had seized the opportunity to Go West, Young Man, ripping all the way up and around my leg, staking a claim somewhere in my shoe.

“I skinned it.”

Dad slowly removed his reading glasses. He placed them delicately on the table next to him.

“We’re through here,” he said.

“What?”

“Finito. Kaput. I’ve had enough of the deceit. I’ll tolerate it no longer.”

“What are you talking about?”

He stared at me, his face calm as the Dead Sea.

“Your fabricated Study Group,” he said. “The flagrant bravado you’ve cultivated when it comes to lying, which, to be frank, is more than a little pedestrian in its execution. My dear, Ulysses is an implausible choice for a study group in a secondary institution, however academically progressive. I think you might have done better with Dickens.” He shrugged. “Austen perhaps. But as you’re standing there in stunned silence, I’ll go on. The returning at all hours. The running around town like a hairless stray dog. The alcoholic binges, which, granted, I have no proof of, but can infer with little difficulty from the innumerable tales of America’s wayward youths saturating the airwaves and those unattractive caves around your eyes. I have said little, every time you so eagerly ran out of that door resembling a Cocoa Puff, wearing what the freethinking world would unanimously identify as a piece of Kleenex, because I assumed—unwisely it seems — that given the advanced degree of your education, you’d eventually come to the realization at the end of this hootchy-cootchy-with-the-ho-dawgs game, that these friends of yours, these puppy fats with whom you choose to pal around, are a waste of time, their thoughts about themselves and the world, stale. Instead, you seem to be suffering from a severe case of blindness. And poor judgment. I have to step in for your sake.”

“Dad—”

He shook his head. “I’ve accepted a position at the University of Wyoming for next term. A town called Fort Peck. One of the best salaries I’ve seen in years. After your final exams next week, we’ll orchestrate the move. You can call Harvard Admissions on Monday and notify them of the change of address.”

“What?”

“You heard me quite well.”

“Y — you can’t do this.” It came out a shrill, quivering whine. And it’s embarrassing to admit, but I was trying not to cry.

“And that is precisely my point. If we’d had this conversation a mere three or four months ago you would have recognized this as an opportunity to quote Hamlet. ‘O! that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.’ No, this town seems to have affected you like television on Americans. It’s turned you into a side order of sauerkraut.”

“I won’t go.”

Thoughtfully, he twisted the cap on his ink pen. “My dear, I understand in full the melodrama that is about to transpire. After you inform me you’re running away to go live at the Dairy Queen, you’ll go to your room, sob into your pillow that lahf ain’t fair, throw things — I suggest socks; we’re renting — tomorrow you’ll refuse to speak to me, a week from today you’ll have fallen into a pattern of one-word replies and amongst your Peter Pan playas you’ll refer to me as the Red Mafia, one whose life’s sole intent is to reduce to rubble your every chance at happiness. This pattern of behavior will doubtlessly continue until we blow this here town, and after three days in Fort Peck, you’ll be speaking again, albeit between eye rolls and grimaces. And in a year, you’ll thank me. Tell me it was the best thing I ever did. I thought by having you read The Annals of Time we’d circumvented such sludge. Scio me nihil scire. But if you still insist on putting both of us through this tedium, I suggest you get the ball rolling. I have a lecture to write on the Cold War and fourteen research papers to grade, each penned by a student with no concept of irony.”

He sat there, his face burnt-tan and brutal in the gold lamplight, supremely arrogant and unapologetic (see “Picasso enjoying the fine weather in the South of France,” Respecting the Devil, Hearst, 1984, p. 210). He was waiting for me to retire, retreat, as if I were one of his limp-jawed students who’d shown up during Office Hours, interrupting his research to pose some crackpot question about right and wrong.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to take a fire poker to his too, too solid flesh (anything hard and pointy would have done) so his hard-bitten face would deform in fear and out of his mouth, not that perfect piano sonata of words, but a strangled, soul-ripped Ahhhhhhhhh! the kind of sob one hears reverberating through damp chronicles of medieval torture and the Old Testament. Hot tears had begun their exodus, making their slow, stupid way down my face.

“I–I’m not leaving,” I said again. “You go. Go back to the Congo.”

He gave no indication he’d even heard me, because his cherished lecture on the ABCs of Reaganism had already snagged his attention. His head was down, glasses returned to the end of his nose, an implacable smile. I tried to think of something to say, something huge and thrilling — a hypothesis of some kind, an obscure quotation that would knock him off his seat, turn his eyes to quarters. But as so often happens when one is thinking and feeling in the commotion of the present moment, I couldn’t think of a thing. All I could do was stand with my arms at my sides, arms that felt like chicken wings.

The next few moments transpired in a detached haze. I felt the same sensation convicted murderers saturated in inmate orange describe in detail when asked by a keen news reporter wearing crummy bronze makeup how he/she, so seemingly average a human being, came to brutally wring the life out of a certain harmless person. Such offenders speak, a little dizzily, of the lonely clarity that settled over them on that fateful day, light as a swooping cotton sheet, an awake anesthesia that permitted them for the first time in their quiet lives to ignore Prudence and Discretion, to give Good Sense the cold shoulder, to snub Self-Preservation and look right through Second Thoughts.

I walked out of the library, down the hall. I stepped outside, closing the front door behind me as softly as I could, so the Prince of Darkness didn’t hear. I stood for two or three minutes on the steps, staring at the barebones trees, the strict light from the windows quilting the lawn.

I began to run. It was awkward at first in Jefferson’s high heels, so I took them off, flung them over my shoulder. I hurried down the driveway and then down the street, past the empty cars and the flower beds cruddy with pinecones and dead flower stalks, past the potholes and mailboxes and the fallen branches grasping the street and the greenish puddles of light leaking from the streetlights.

Our house, 24 Armor Street, was buried in a densely forested section of Stockton known as Maple Grove. Though it wasn’t one of those Orwellian gated communities like Pearl Estates (where we lived in Flitch) with identical white houses lined up like post-orthodontics teeth and the entry gate an aging actress (shrill, rusty, temperamental), Maple Grove still boasted its own exclusive Town Hall, Police Force, Zip Code and its own Unfriendly Welcome Sign (“You are now entering the Township of Maple Grove, an elegant and private residential community”).

The fastest way out of the Grove was to cut directly south off our street, head into the woods and skulk through some twenty-two elegant and private backyards. I carefully made my way, hiccupping and crying at the same time, the houses noiseless and sedate, slumped against the smooth lawns like dozing elephants on ice rinks. I crawled through a barricade of blue spruce, scrambled through a reef of pines, shimmied down a hill, until I was unceremoniously emptied out, like water from a gutter, onto Orlando Avenue, Stockton’s answer to the Sunset Strip.

I was without plan, plum out of ideas, at a loss. Even within fifteen minutes of running away from home, unmooring oneself from one’s parent, one was struck by the vastness of things, the typhoon ferocity of the world, the frailty of one’s boat. Without thinking, I hurried across the street to the BP gas station and pushed open the door to the Food Mart. It dinged a pleasant hello. The kid always working, Larson, was incarcerated in the front in his bulletproof holding pen, talking to one of his girlfriends dangling in front of his window like an air freshener. I ducked into the nearest aisle.

Well, it just so happened Hello, My Name Is LARSON was a kid Dad took to like a Surinam Cockroach to bat droppings. He was one of those unsinkable eighteen-year-olds, with a Hardy Boy face no one had anymore, all freckles and gee-whiz grin, thick brown hair that grew around his face like an urn plant and a lanky body in constant motion as if he were being operated by a ventriloquist on speed (see Chapter 2, “Charlie McCarthy,” The Puppets That Changed Our Lives, Mesh, 1958). Dad found Larson wondrous. And that was the thing with Dad: he’d teach Modes of Mediation to a thousand John Dorys he was barely able to stomach, and then he’d pay a kid for berry-flavored Tums and fall head over heels, declaring him a veritable dolphin who’d spiral through the air when you whistled. “Now that’s a promising young man,” said Dad. “I’d exchange every Happy, Sleepy and Doc to teach him. He has spark. You don’t find that often.”

“If it ain’t the girl with the dad,” announced the store intercom. “Innit past yer bedtime?”

Doused in the dead light of the Food Mart, I felt absurd. My feet hurt, I was wearing an overcooked marshmallow and my face (I could see it plainly in the reflective shelving) was decaying by the minute into an unstable mess of crusty tears and bad makeup (see “Radon-221,” Questions of Radioactivity, Johnson, 1981, p. 120). I was also festooned with one billion pine needles.

“Come on over here and say hello! Whatcha doin’ out so late?”

Reluctantly, I made my way to the cashier window. Larson was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt that read MEAN REDS, and he was grinning. And that was the thing with Larson; he was one of those people who grinned all the time. He had ticklish eyes too, which had to explain the multitude of nutty-eyed peanut-butter parfaits thawing all over his Food Mart on any given night. Even when you were standing in front of his window innocuously paying for gas, his eyes, the clear-cut color of milk chocolate or mud, had a way of oozing all over you, so you couldn’t help but have a feeling he was seeing something private about you — you stark naked, for example, or you saying humiliating things in your sleep, or worst of all, you in your favorite dumb fantasy, in which you walked a red carpet and wore a long beaded gown everyone took great pains not to step on.

“Lemme guess,” he said. “Boyfriend trouble.”

“Oh. I, uh, had a fight with my dad.” I sounded like scrunched aluminum foil.

“Yeah? Saw him the other day. Came by with his girlfriend.”

“They broke up.”

He nodded. “Hey, Diamanta, go get her a Slurpee.”

“Whut,” said Diamanta, making a sour face.

“Seventy-ounce. Any flavor. On me.”

Diamanta, in glittery pink shirt and sparkly jean miniskirt, was Pixy-stick skinny and had that wan, white parchment skin through which, in harsher lights, you could glimpse thin blue veins swimming through her arms and legs. Scowling at me, she removed her black platform boot from the bottom of the greeting card stand, turned and twinkled down the aisle.

“Sure,” Larson said, shaking his head. “Old mans. They can be tough. When I was fourteen my pops cleared out. Left me nothin’ but work boots and his subscription to People magazine, I kid you not. Two years? Did nothin’ but glance over my shoulder, look for him every place. Think I’d see him ’cross the street. Passin’ by on a bus. An I’d tail the bus one enda town to the other, thinkin’ it was him, waitin’, waitin’ like a crazy man, just for him to get out at the stop. Only when he got out, it was someone else’s old man. Wudn’t mine. Things turned out, though, what he did? Best thing ever happened to me. Wanta know why?”

I nodded.

He leaned down, hitching his elbows on the counter.

“Cuza him I kin play King Layer.”

“What flavor?” yelled Diamanta by the Slurpee machine.

“What flavor?” asked Larson. Without blinking, he recounted the names like an auctioneer overseeing a livestock sale. “Rootbeer, Blue Bubbagum, 7-Up, 7-Up Tropicale, Grapermelon, Crystallat, ’Nana Split, Code Red, Live-War—”

“Rootbeer is fine. Thanks.”

“Lady without shoes would like Rootbeer,” he said into the intercom.

“King what did you say?” I asked.

He grinned, revealing two severely crooked front teeth, one peeking out from behind the other as if it had stage fright.

“Layer. Shakespeare personage. Contrary to popular belief, person needs heartbreak an’ betrayal. Else you got no stayin’ power. Can’t play a lead for five whole acts. Can’t play two performances inna day. Can’t fashion a character arch from Point A ta Point G. Can’t get through the denewment, create a convincin’ through line — all that stuff. See whut I’m sayin’? Person’s gotta get banged up. Gotta get jerked around, lived in. So he’s got somethin’ to use, see. Hurts like hell. Sure. Feels bad. Not sure you wanna go on. But that gives way to what they commonly call emotive re-zone-ance. An emotive rezonance makes it impossible fer people to take their eyes offa you, when yer onstage. Ever turned round in a good movie and seen the faces? Pretty intense. Diamanta?”

“Ain’t coming out right,” she cried.

“Turn off the machine, put it back on and try again.”

“Where’s the switch at?”

“On the side. Red.”

“Looks all nasty,” she said.

I stared up at him. Dad was right. There was something riveting about the kid. It was his outdated earnestness, the way his eyebrows did the polka when he talked and his mountain accent, which made the words jut out like pointy, slippery rocks on which he might get hurt. It was also the thousands of copper freckles dusting him head to toe as if he’d been dipped in glue, then in fine, penny-iridescent confetti.

“See,” he said, leaning in and widening his eyes, “ya ain’t felt pain, you kin only play yerself. And that ain’t gonna move people. Maybe yer good for toothpaste, hemorrhoid commercials and such. But that’s it. You’ll never be a legend in yer own time. Ain’t that what ya wanna be?”

Diamanta shoved the gigantic Slurpee into my hands and resumed her droop by the greeting cards.

“Now,” Larson said, slapping his hands together, “ya got to tell us what yer name is.”

“Blue.”

“Got to tell us. Blue. Came to my doorstep tonight in yer hour a’ need. Whud we do now?”

I looked from Larson to Diamanta, back to Larson again.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Ya turned up here ona dark stormy night. At”—he glanced at his watch—“2:06.” He peered at my feet and nodded. “No shoes. Swut they call dramatic action. Swut happens in the beginnin’ of a scene.”

He stared at me, his face grave as any photo of Sun Yat-sen.

“Gotta tell us if we’re in a comedy or a mellow drama or a whodidit or what they call a theater of the absurd. Ya just can’t leave us standin’ on stage with no dialogue.”

I was aware of a certain convenience-store calm coursing through me, steady and ho-hum as the thrum of the beer fridge. Where I wanted to go, whom I had to talk to, was plain as the mirrored windows, the display of gum and batteries, Diamanta’s hoop earrings.

“It’s a whodunit,” I said. “I was wondering if I could borrow your car.”

Laughter in the Dark

Hannah was wearing a housedress the color of sandpaper, crudely scissored off at the hem so tiny threads hula-danced around her shins when she opened the door. Her face was bare as an unpainted wall, but it was obvious she hadn’t been sleeping. Her hair hung serenely by her cheekbones and her bright black eyes bumblebeed from my face to my dress to Larson’s truck to my face — all in a matter of seconds.

“Goodness,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Blue.”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” I said. It was the sort of thing you said when you arrived on someone’s doorstep at 2:45 A.M.

“No, no — I was awake.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile, more of a cardboard cutout, and instantly I wondered if I’d made a mistake in coming, but then she put her arm around me. “God, come on in. It’s freezing.”

I’d only ever been in her house with Jade and the others, with Louis Armstrong warbling like toads, the air full of carrots, and it felt claustrophobic now, forsaken and dim like the cockpit of an old crashed plane. The dogs peered at me from behind her bare legs, their gaunt army of shadows slowly advancing toward my feet. There was a light on, the goosenecked lamp in the living room, and it spotlighted papers on the desk, bills, a few magazines.

“Why don’t I fix you some tea?” she asked.

I nodded and after squeezing me again on the shoulder, she disappeared into the kitchen. I sat down on the lumpy plaid armchair next to the stereo. One of the dogs, Brody with three legs and the face of a senile sea captain woofed in disgust, then hobbled over to me, pressing his cold wet nose into my hand, smuggling a secret. Pots coughed behind the kitchen door, a tap whimpered, a few moans from a drawer — I tried to concentrate on these mundane sounds, because frankly, I wasn’t feeling all that marvelous about being there. When she’d opened the door, I’d expected a terrycloth bathrobe, her hair a hornet’s nest, a heavy-eyed, “Sweet Jesus, what’s happened?” Or, hearing the doorbell, she should have taken me for a mulleted highwayman thirsty for gruel and a warm lady, or a livid ex-boyfriend with tattoos on his knuckles (“V-A-L-ER-IO,” it spelled).

I had not foreseen the stiff, clapboard manner with which she’d greeted me, the bare bones welcome, the whisper of a frown — as if I’d been wired for sound all night and she’d been privy to every defamatory chat, banter and tête-à-tête, including the one in which Jade accused her of Mansonian ties, and the one from my head, when the reality of Cottonwood smashed into the reality of Zach Soderberg and I was temporarily manslaughtered. I’d driven to her house (40 mph, barely able to merge, out of my mind when passing a semi or what resembled a wall of tulip poplars) because I loathed Dad, and could think of no other decent place to go, but I also sort of hoped seeing Hannah would lay to rest those other conversations, render them funny and invalid, the way a single scientific sighting of a Mysterious Starling (Aplonis marvornata) could tear it right off the Extinct Species list, throw it up on the dire, but decidedly more encouraging Critically Endangered.

Seeing her, however, had made it worse.

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one saw them in the Mind’s Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic — their pessimism or insecurity (sometimes really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean) — and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.

A gasp of the kitchen door, and she reappeared, carrying a tray piled with a sagging piece of apple pie, a wine bottle, a glass, a pot of tea.

“Let’s turn on some lights,” she said, pushing with her bare foot a National Geographic, a TV Guide and some mail off the coffee table before sliding the tray across it. She switched on the yellow lamp by an ashtray, cruddy with dead-worm cigarette butts, and thick light splashed all over me and the furniture.

“I’m sorry to be bothering you like this,” I said.

“Blue. Please. I’m always here for you. You know that.” She said the words and the meaning — well, it was there, but it was also sort of grabbing its suitcase and heading for the door. “I’m sorry if I seem a bit…out of sorts. It’s been a long night.” She sighed, and staring at me, reached forward and squeezed my hand. “Really, I’m glad you showed up. I could use the company. You can stay in the guest room, so forget about driving home tonight. Now tell me everything.”

I swallowed, jittery about where to begin. “I had a fight with my dad,” I said, but then to my surprise — just as she picked up the paper napkin and, biting her lip a little, set about folding it into an isosceles triangle — the phone began to ring. It sounded like human screams — Hannah had one of those bleating 1960s telephones, probably picked up for a dollar at a yard sale — and the sound made my heart throw itself melodramatically against my ribs (see Gloria Swanson, Shifting Sands).

“Oh, God,” she whispered, visibly annoyed. “Hold on.”

She disappeared into the kitchen. The ringing stopped.

I strained to hear her voice, but there was nothing to eavesdrop on, only silence and the pings of the dogs’ collars; they nervously raised their heads off the floor.

Almost immediately, she reappeared, again with that small smile shoved onto her face like a tiny child forced onstage.

“That was Jade,” she said, returning to the couch. With secretarial concentration she became absorbed with the teakettle, lifting the lid, scrutinizing the floating tea bags, tapping them with one finger as if they were dead fish.

“I take it you two had quite a night?” she asked. Glancing at me, she poured the tea, handed me the I HEART SLUGS coffee mug (not reacting when some hot water dripped off the side onto her knee) and then, as if I’d been begging her all night to pose for an oil portrait, she stretched out across the entire couch, glass of red wine in hand, her bare feet pushed beneath the cushions (Visual Aid 16.0).

“You know, we had a terrible fight,” she said. “Jade and I. She left here absolutely enraged with me.” She was speaking in an odd, teacherish voice, as if explaining Photosynthesis. “I don’t even remember what it was about. Something mundane.” She tilted her head toward the ceiling. “I think it was college applications. I told her she needed to get organized or she might not make it. She flew off the handle.”

She took a sip of wine and I sipped my oolong tea feeling pangs of guilt. It was harrowingly clear Hannah knew the things Jade had said about her — either for certain, if Jade had called her and confessed (Jade could never be a confidence woman, mortgage shark or shyster due to her overwhelming need to explain things to her victim), or simply assumed it given their argument. Most spectacular of all, though, Hannah was visibly irked by it. Dad said people do all kinds of odd things when they’re on the defensive, and now Hannah was frowning as she rubbed her thumb around the rim of her wineglass, and her eyes, they kept moving between my face and the wineglass and the piece of apple pie (that looked like it’d been stepped on) back to her wineglass.

VISUAL AID 16.0

I couldn’t help but stare at her (her left arm boa-constricting her hip) like an investigator inspecting fingerprints on a bedpost, desperate to find the truth — if only a smudge of it. I knew it was an absurd thing — lunacy, guilt and love couldn’t be eked out by connecting freckles, or shining a tiny light in the dugout of a collarbone — but I couldn’t help myself. Some of the things Jade had said had stuck to me. Could she have purposefully drowned that man? Had she really slept with Charles? Was there a lost love hiding somewhere in her outskirts, her periphery — Valerio? Even when she was in a sullen, distracted mood, as she was now, Hannah still grabbed one’s headlines, shoved other less captivating stories (Dad, Fort Peck) to page 10. FADE OUT: Dad, Fort Peck (my dream he’d go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). FADE IN: Hannah Schneider twisted along the couch like a piece of shimmering trash that had washed up on a beach, her face speckled with sweat, her fingertips nervously playing with the seam meandering through her dress.

“So you didn’t make it to the dance?” I probed, my voice flimsy.

The question shook her awake; it was obvious she’d forgotten the question of why I was here, that I’d just shown up in a four-door Chevy Colorado truck in Sunburst Orange, unannounced, with no shoes. Not that I minded; Dad was a man who always assumed he was the Primary Subject, Group Focus, Chief Plan Under Discussion, so the fact that Hannah, after I’d mentioned my fight with him, blatantly snubbed him, shook him off as a nonevent — it was kind of fantastic.

“Things ran late,” she said blandly. “We made pie.” She looked at me. “Jade went, didn’t she? She stormed out of here saying she was going to find you.”

I nodded.

“She can be a strange girl. Jade. Sometimes she can say things that are — how should I…well, they’re horrifying.”

“I don’t think she means anything by it,” I suggested quietly.

Hannah tilted her head. “No?”

“Sometimes people say things simply to fill silence. Or as a way to shock and provoke. Or as exercise. Verbal aerobics. Loquacious cardio. There are any number of reasons. Only very rarely are words used strictly for their denotative meanings,” I said, and yet Dad’s comments from “Modes of Oration and the Brawn of Language” weren’t making the slightest dent in Hannah. She wasn’t paying attention. Her gaze was snagged somewhere near the piano in the dark corner of the room. And then, scowling (lines I’d never noticed before darting through her forehead), she reached over the arm of the couch, yanked open the end-table drawer and seized a half-empty pack of Camel cigarettes. She tapped one out, windmilled it agitatedly between her fingers and looked at me with anxious interest, as if I were a dress on sale, the last in her size.

“Surely, you must realize,” she said. “You’re such a perceptive person; you don’t miss anything”—she interrupted herself—“or maybe not. No. She hasn’t told you. I think she’s jealous — you speak so lovingly of your father. I’m sure it’s hard for her.”

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“Do you know anything at all about Jade? Her history?”

I shook my head.

Hannah nodded, and sighed again. She fished a pack of matches from the drawer and lit the cigarette quickly. “Well, if I tell you, you have to promise me you won’t say anything to any of them. But I think it’s important that you know. Otherwise, on nights like this, when she comes to you so angry…she was drunk, wasn’t she?”

Slowly, I nodded.

“Well, on occasions like — well, like tonight, I can understand if you’d feel”—Hannah thought hard about what’d I’d feel, biting her lip like she was deciding what to order off a menu—“confused. Disturbed, even. I know I would. Knowing the truth will put everything into context for you. Maybe not immediately. No — you can’t understand what something is when you’re close to it. That’s like looking at a billboard an inch away. We’re all…what do they say…farsighted…or is it near — but later, no, that’s when”—she was talking all of this over with herself—“yes, that’s when it always becomes clear. Afterward.”

She didn’t immediately continue. She contemplated, with narrowed eyes, the fuming end of her cigarette, the tatty ears of Old Bastard who’d crept over to her, licked her kneecap and then slumped to the rug, tired as a summer fling.

“What do you mean?” I asked softly.

A shy, sort of mischievous smile was sneaking into her face — though I couldn’t be certain of this; every time she moved her head the yellow lamplight raced across her cheekbones and mouth, but when she faced me fully it dashed away.

“You can’t tell anyone what I tell you,” she said sternly. “Not even your father. Promise me.”

I felt a nervous knife-stab in my chest. “Why?”

“Well, he’s protective, isn’t he?”

I supposed Dad was protective. I nodded.

“Yes, well, it’d traumatize him, I’m sure,” she said distastefully. “And what’s the point of that?”

Fear began to course through me. It made me woozy, like I’d injected it into my arm. I found myself rewinding the last six minutes, trying to figure out how we’d taken this bizarre detour. I’d shown up, intent to perform a quiet, un-choreographed routine on Dad, but I’d been shoved into the wings, and here she was, the seasoned artiste commanding the stage, about to begin her monologue — a terrifying monologue by the sound of things. Dad said it was imperative to avoid people’s fervent confidences and confessions. “Tell the person that you must leave the room,” he instructed, “that you ate something, that you’re ill, that your father has scarlet fever, that you feel the end of the world is imminent and you must rush to the grocery store to stock up on bottled water and gas masks. Or simply fake a seizure. Anything, sweet, anything at all to rid yourself of that intimacy they plan to lay on you like a slab of cement.”

“You won’t say anything?” she asked.

For the record, I did consider telling her Dad was riddled with smallpox, that I had to race to his bedside to hear his humble and heartfelt Final Words. But in the end, I found myself nodding, the unavoidable human response when someone asks if you’d like to hear a secret.

“When Jade was thirteen, she ran away from home,” she said, waiting for a moment, letting those words land somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the room before continuing.

“From what she told me, she was raised to be a very rich, spoiled girl. Her father gave her everything. But he was the worst kind of hypocrite — he was from oil money, so he had the blood and suffering of thousands on his hands, and her mother”—Hannah raised her shoulders, shivered theatrically—“well, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting her, but she’s someone who doesn’t bother to get dressed. She wears a bathrobe in the middle of the day. Anyway, Jade had a best friend growing up — she told me this — a beautiful girl, fragile. They were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun — you know, the kind of friend everyone wants but never has — for the life of me, I can’t remember her name. What was it? Something elegant. Anyway”—she flicked ashes off her cigarette—“she was considered problematic. Was caught stealing for the third or fourth time. She was going to be sent to a juvenile detention center. So she ran away. Made it all the way to San Francisco. Can you imagine? Jade? Atlanta to San Francisco — she was in Atlanta at the time, before her parents divorced. That’s twenty-nine-hundred miles. She hitchhiked with truckers and families she encountered at rest stops and was finally picked up by the police at a drug store — Lord’s Drugstore, I think it was. Of all names, Lord’s Drugstore.” Hannah smiled and exhaled, the smoke tripping over itself. “She said it changed the course of her life. Those six days.”

She paused for a moment. The living room seemed to have sunk a few inches deeper into the ground, weighed down with the story.

As she’d started to speak, her voice weirdly relentless, trudging its way through the words, instantly my head switched off the lights and film-reeled: I saw Jade in grainy twilight (tight jeans, umbrella-thin) marching determinedly through the weedy junk along a highway — one in Texas or New Mexico — her gold hair ignited by the headlights, her face red from the unblinking eyes of the cars. But then, when I barreled past her in my mental eighteen-wheeler, I looked back and saw with surprise, it wasn’t Jade: only a girl that looked like her. Because “hitchhiked with truckers” didn’t sound like her and neither did the “beautiful, fragile” friend. Dad said it took a certain, rare revolutionary spirit to abandon “one’s home and family, however bleak the conditions, and hurtle oneself into the unknown.” Sure, every now and then, Jade slipped into handicapped stalls with hombres taking their fashion Must Haves off of Wanted posters, got so drunk her head hung from her shoulders like a squirt of glue, but for the girl to take such a chance, a running leap into the air and not be sure where she’d land, if she’d even make it to the other side — it seemed unbelievable. Of course, no detailed history of a human being could be laughed at or dismissed out of hand: “Never presume to know what a person is, was, or will be capable of,” Dad said.

“Leulah was in a similar situation,” Hannah continued. “Ran away with her math teacher when she was thirteen, too. She said he was handsome and passionate. In his late twenties. Mediterranean. I want to say Turkish. She thought she was in love. They made it all the way to — where was it…Florida, I think, before he was arrested.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, letting the smoke drool out of her mouth as she talked on. “This was at her school before St. Gallway, somewhere in South Carolina. Anyway, Charles was a ward of a state for most of his life. His mom was a prostitute, junkie — the usual fare. No dad. Finally, he was adopted. Nigel, too. Both of his parents are in a Texas prison for killing a police officer. I can’t remember the exact circumstances. But they shot him dead.”

She raised her chin, staring at the cigarette smoke cowering above the lamp. It seemed deathly afraid of Hannah — as I was, in that moment. I was afraid of her tone of voice, which threw out these secrets impatiently as if she’d been forced to play a dull game of horseshoes.

“It’s kind of funny,” she continued (and she must have sensed my alarm because her voice was now pasteled, the harsher edges shaded with fingertips), “the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life — your success — depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary.” Her lips curled into a laugh before there was sound. (She’d been poorly dubbed.) “But it doesn’t, you know. You wouldn’t believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on. Some people pull the trigger and it all explodes in front of them. Other people run away. And you have no idea what you’ll do until you’re there. When your moment comes, Blue, don’t be afraid. Do what you need to do.”

She pulled herself upright, swung her bare feet onto the carpet, stared at her hands. They sat on each leg crumpled and useless like Dad’s discarded lecture beginnings. A piece of her hair had fallen over her left eye, turning her into a pirate, and she didn’t bother tucking it behind her ear.

Meanwhile, my heart was trying to crawl into my mouth. I didn’t know if it was right to passively sit there, listening to these awful skin-and-bones confessions, or to try to run for it, scramble to the door, fling it open with the force of Scipio Africanus when he ruthlessly sacked Carthage, sprinting to the truck, taking off into the pillaged night, gravel flying, tires wailing like captives. But where would I go? Back to Dad, like some president’s middle initial no one remembered, like some day in History on which nothing groundbreaking occurred apart from a few Catholic missionaries arriving in the Amazon and a minor native uprising in the East.

“And then Milton,” Hannah said, her voice sort of caressing his name. “He was involved in that street gang — I can’t remember what it was, something ‘night’—”

“Milton?” I repeated. I saw him immediately: junkyard, leaning against a chain-link fence (he was always swaybacked against something), combat boots, one of those scary nylon scarves in red or black knotted over his head, his eyes tough, his skin faintly rifle colored.

“Yes. Milton.” She repeated, mimicking me. “He’s older than everyone thinks. Twenty-one. God — don’t let on you know. He had a few lost years, blackouts, when he doesn’t even remember what he did. He lived on the streets…raised hell. But of course, I understand. When you don’t know what to believe, you feel like you’re sinking, so you grab on to as many different ideas as possible. Even the crazy ones. Eventually one will keep you afloat.”

“So this was when he was in Alabama?” I asked.

She nodded.

“So that must be why he got his tattoo,” I said.

I’d seen it by now — the tattoo — and the breathtaking occasion in which he’d shown it to me had become a timeless film clip I replayed incessantly in my head. We’d been alone in the Purple Room — Jade and the others had gone to the kitchen to make pot brownies — and Milton was fixing himself a drink at the bar, plopping ice cubes into his glass, leisurely, as if counting out ducats. He’d pushed up the long shirtsleeves of his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, so on his right bicep I could just make out the black toes of something. “You wanta see it?” he’d asked suddenly, and then strolled over to me, whiskey in hand, sitting down, hard, so his back collided with my left knee, the couch wincing. His brown eyes stapled to mine, he pulled up the sleeve, sloooowly — obviously enjoying my rapt attention — to reveal, not the crude black splotch everyone at St. Gallway whispered about, but a cheeky cartoon angel the size of a beer can. She was winking like a lascivious grandpa, one chubby knee in the air, the other leg straight down as if she’d frozen solid doing a jackknife off a diving board. “There she is,” Milton said in his drooping voice, “Miss America.” Before I could speak, hunt and gather a few words, he’d stood, pushed the sleeve down and wandered from the room.

“Yes,” Hannah said abruptly. “So anyway,” she was tapping out another cigarette, “they all had things happen to them, earthquakes, you know, when they were twelve, thirteen, things most people don’t have the guts to recover from.” She lit it swiftly, tossed the matches onto the coffee table. “Know anything about The Gone?”

Hannah, I noticed, had been about to run out of gas when she talked about Milton. If she’d started out in a slick and self-assured Monte Carlo roadster with Jade’s story, by the time Milton’s yarn rolled around, she was in one of those rusty jalopies panting along the side of the highway, hazards on. I sensed she was experiencing pangs of remorse about what she was doing, weighing me down with this confession; her face looked like a pause between sentences as her mind ran back over to the words she’d just said, poking them, listening to their little heartbeats, hoping they weren’t fatal.

But now, with this new question, she seemed to have regained speed. She stared at me, a fierce look on her face (her eyes gripping my eyes, not letting go), a look that reminded me of Dad; as he combed supplemental textbooks on Rebellion and Foreign Affairs in order to find that bright bloom of evidence that, when transplanted into his lecture, would have the capacity to stun, to intimidate, make the “little shits melt in their seats, leaving them mere stains on the carpet,” he often sported this militant look, making his features look so hard, I felt if I was blind and had to run my hand over his face to recognize him, he’d feel like a bit of stone wall.

“They’re missing persons,” Hannah said. “They fall through those ubiquitous cracks, in the ceiling, on the floor. Runaways, orphans, they’re kidnapped, killed — they vanish from public record. After a year, the police stop looking. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that’s forgotten in the end. ‘Last seen in the evening hours of November 8, 1982, as she was completing her shift at an Arby’s in Richmond, Virginia. She drove away in a blue 1988 Mazda 626, which was later found abandoned on the side of the road, in what was possibly a staged accident.’”

She fell silent, lost in memory. Certain memories were like that — swamps, bogs, pits — and while most people avoided these muggy, unmapped, wholly uninhabited recollections (wisely understanding they were liable to disappear in them forever), Hannah seemed to have taken the risk and tiptoed into one of hers. Her gaze had fallen, lifeless, to the floor. Her bent head eclipsed the lamp and a thin ribbon of light clung to her profile.

“Who are you talking about?” I asked as gently as I could. Noah Fishpost, MD, in his captivating book on the adventures of modern psychiatry, Meditations on Andromeda (2001), mentioned one had to proceed as unobtrusively as possible when questioning a patient, because truth and secrets were cranes, dazzling in size yet notoriously shy and wary; if one made too much noise, they’d disappear into the sky, never to be seen again.

She shook her head. “No — I used to collect them as a girl. I’d memorize the listings. I could recite hundreds of them. ‘The fourteen-year-old girl disappeared on October 19, 1994, when she was walking home from school. She was last seen at a pay telephone booth between 2:30 and 2:45 on the corner of Lennox and Hill.’ ‘Last seen by her family in their residence in Cedar Springs, Colorado. At approximately 3:00 A.M. a family member noticed the television still on in her bedroom, but she was no longer inside.’”

Goose bumps pinched my arms.

“I think it was why I sought them out,” she said. “Or they sought me — I can’t even remember anymore. I was worried they’d fall through the cracks, too.”

Her gaze finally picked itself up and I saw, with horror, her face was red. There were giant tears looming in her eyes.

“And then there’s you,” she said.

I couldn’t breathe. Run for Larson’s truck, I told myself. Run for the highway, for Mexico, because Mexico was where everyone went when they had to escape (though no one ever got there; they were all killed tragically, mere yards from the border) or if not Mexico, then Hollywood, because Hollywood was where everyone went when they wanted to reinvent themselves and end up a movie star (see The Revenge of Stella Verslanken, Botando, 2001).

“When I saw you in that grocery store back in September, I saw a lonely person.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, just let those words rest there like tired workmen on a curb. “I thought I could help.”

I felt like a wheeze. No — I was a cough, a bed creak, something humiliating, the frayed ruffle on discolored pantaloons. But just as I was going to glue together some childish excuse to run out of her house, never to return (“The most catastrophic thing to befall any man, woman or child is abject pity,” wrote Carol Mahler in the Plum Award — winning Color Doves [1987]) — I glanced over at Hannah and was struck dumb.

Her anger, irk, aggravation — whatever that mood was she’d been mired in since I’d first arrived, when the phone screamed, when she’d sworn me to secrecy, even the apparent melancholy of moments ago — had fizzled. She was now disturbingly peaceful (see “Lake Lucerne,” A Question of Switzerland, Porter, 2000, p. 159).

True, she’d lit yet another cigarette, and smoke tangled out of her fingers. She’d also fluffed her hair and so it swayed one way, then the other across her forehead as if seasick. But her face, rather bluntly, boasted the relieved and somewhat satisfied expression of a person who’d just accomplished something, a harrowing feat; it was a face of slammed-shut textbooks, doors dead bolted, switched-off lights, or else, after a bow, amidst a drizzle of applause, heavy red curtains swinging closed.

Jade’s words slammed into my head: “She’s really the worst actress on the planet. If she was an actress, she wouldn’t even make the B movies. She’d be in the D or the E movies.”

“Anyway,” Hannah went on, “who cares about any of that now — the reasons for things. Don’t think about it. Ten years from now—that’s when you decide. After you’ve taken the world by storm. Are you sleepy?” She asked this quickly and evidently had no interest in my answer because she yawned into her fist, stood up, and stretched in the lazy royal way of her own white Persian cat — Lana or Turner, I wasn’t sure which — who, with a heralding thrash of tail, strolled out of the darkness beneath the piano bench and meowed.

The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales

I couldn’t sleep.

Oh, no — now that I was alone in a strange, stiff bed, a pale morning soaking through the curtains, the overhead lamp a giant eye staring down at me, The Histories of the Bluebloods began to creep out of the underbrush like exotic nocturnal animals at nightfall (see “Zorilla,” “Shrew,” “Jerboa,” “Kinkajou” and “Small-Eared Zorro,” Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.). I had very little experience dealing with Dark Pasts, apart from close readings of Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847) and Rebecca (Du Maurier, 1938) and though I’d always secretly seen splendor in melancholic chills, ashy circles stamped under the eyes, wasted silence, now, knowing each of them had suffered (if Hannah could be believed), it worried me.

After all, there was Wilson Gnut, the calmly handsome kid I knew at Luton Middle in Luton, Texas, whose father hanged himself on Christmas Eve. Wilson’s own ensuing tragedy had nothing to do with his father, but in the way he was treated at school. People weren’t mean to him — quite the contrary, they were sweet as pie. They held open doors, offered homework to plagiarize, allowed him to cut in line at all water fountains, vending machines and gym uniform distributions. But lurking within their benevolence was the universal understanding that because of his father, a Secret Door had been opened for Wilson, and anything and everything dark and deviant could fly out of it — suicide, sure, but other frightening things too, like Necrophilia, Polyorphantia, Menazoranghia, maybe even Zootosis.

With the quiet precision of Jane Goodall alone at her observation post in a tropical forest of Tanzania, I observed and documented the array of looks elicited in Wilson’s presence by students, parents and faculty alike. There was the Relieved Glance of “Darn Glad I Ain’t You” (after smiling amiably at Wilson, performed covertly to a commiserating third party), the Sorry Look of “He’ll Never Git Over It” (performed to the floor and/or immediate space around Wilson), the Meaningful Gaze of “Kid’ll End Up Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg” (performed deep into Wilson’s brown eyes) and the Simple Gawk of the Unbelieving (mouth open, eyes unfocused, overall demeanor near vegetative, performed at Wilson Gnut’s back as he sat quietly at his desk).

There were gestures too, like the Just-Whistlin’-Dixie Wave (performed after school in car windows as students drove away with their parents and noticed Wilson still waiting for his mother, who had stringy hair and a goat laugh and wore beads, a gesture always accompanied by one of three remarks: “So sad, what happened,” “Cain’t imagine what he’s goin’ through” or the bluntly paranoid, “Dad’s not goin’ kill himself anytime soon. Is he?”). There was also the That’s-Him-Thar Point, the That’s-Him-Thar Point in the Opposite Direction of Wilson Gnut (a Texan’s attempt at subtlety) and worst of all, the Quick Conniption (performed by students when Wilson Gnut’s hands accidentally touched theirs, on door handles, for example, or passing Unit Tests around class, as if Wilson Gnut’s misfortune was an illness transmitted via hands, elbows or fingertips).

In the end — and this was the tragedy — Wilson Gnut ended up agreeing with everyone. He, too, began to believe a Secret Door had been opened just for him and awaited something dark and deviant, which, any moment now, would come flying out. It wasn’t his fault, of course; if the world insinuates you’re a Dog That Don’t Hunt, a Cowboy With No Shit Kickers, In Low Cotton, you tend to believe it’s true. Wilson stopped spearheading basketball games at break, disappeared from Olympics of the Mind. And even though, on multiple occasions, I overheard a few well-meaning kids asking him if he wanted to accompany them after school to KFC, Wilson avoided eye contact, mumbled, “No, thanks,” and disappeared down the hall.

I thus concluded, with the same awe of Jane Goodall discovering the chimpanzees’ nimble use of tools to extract termites, it really wasn’t so much the tragic event itself, but others having knowledge of it that prevented recovery. Individuals could live through almost anything (see Das unglaubliche Leben der Wolfgang Becker, Becker, 1953). Even Dad was in awe of the human body and Dad was never in awe of anything. “It really is staggering, what the corpus can withstand.”

After this observation, if he was in a Bourbon Mood and feeling theatrical, Dad did Brando as Colonel Kurtz.

“‘You have to have men who are moral,’” droned Dad, slowly turning his head toward me, widening his eyes in an attempt to portray Genius and Insanity simultaneously, “‘and at the same time, able to use their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment…’” (Dad always raised his eyebrows and stared at me pointedly on “judgment.”) “‘Because it’s judgment that defeats us.’”

Of course, I had to question the soundness of what Hannah had told me, of Hannah herself. There had been an undeniable sound-staginess to her words, evidence of fake palms (vagueness over exact locations), a prop warehouse (wineglass, endless cigarettes), wind machines (tendency to romanticize), publicity stills (heavy gazes at the ceiling, the floor) — theatrical flairs that brought to mind the lovelorn posters caking her classroom. It was also true, plenty of confidence men were capable of spinning grim fairy tales under pressure, replete with backstory, artful cross-reference, dashes of irony and twists of fate without a single flick of the eyes. And yet, while such villainous scheming was remotely plausible, it didn’t exactly seem feasible for Hannah Schneider. Sharpies and shortchangers concocted such elaborate fictions to escape the slammer; what was Hannah’s motivation for making up forlorn pasts for each of the Bluebloods, brutally pushing them outside, locking the door, making them stand in the rain? No, I felt certain there was a basic truth to what she’d told me, even if it had Hannified studio lighting and white people in pancake makeup playing savages.

With these thoughts, morning sneaking toward the windows, flimsy curtains whispering to a draft, I fell asleep.

There’s nothing like a bright and chipper morning to briskly send running all demons of the night before. (Contrary to popular belief, Unease, Inner Demons and Guilt Complexes were remarkably unsure of themselves and usually fled in the strong presence of Ease and Squeaky-Clean Conscience.)

I woke up in Hannah’s tiny guest room — walls the color of bluebells — and slumped out of bed. I pulled back the thin white curtain. The front lawn shivered excitedly. Blue sky ballooned overhead. Crisp brown leaves, en pointe, were busy practicing glissades and grand jêtés down the driveway. On Hannah’s moldy bird feeder (usually as forsaken as a house with asbestos insulation and lead paint) two fat cardinals lunched with a chickadee.

I made my way downstairs and found Hannah dressed, reading the newspaper.

“There you are,” she said cheerfully. “Sleep well?”

She gave me clothes, old gray corduroy pants she said had shrunk in the wash, black shoes and a pale pink cardigan with tiny beads around the neck.

“Keep this stuff,” she said, smiling. “It looks adorable on you.”

Twenty minutes later, she drove behind me in her Subaru all the way to the BP gas station, where I left Larson’s truck and keys with Big Red, who had raw-carrot fingers and worked mornings.

Hannah suggested we grab a bite to eat before she drove me home, so we stopped at Pancake Haven on Orlando. A waitress took our order. The restaurant had an uncomplicated frankness: square windows, worn brown carpet that stuttered Pancake Haven Pancake Haven all the way to the bathrooms, people sitting quietly with their food. If there was Darkness or Doom in the world, it was remarkably courteous, waiting for everyone to finish breakfast.

“Is Charles…in love with you?” I asked suddenly. It shocked me, how easy it was to ask the question.

Her reaction wasn’t outrage, but amusement. “Who told you that — Jade? I thought I explained it last night — her need to exaggerate everything, pit people against each other, make everything more exotic than it is. They all do it. I have no idea why.” She sighed. “They also have me pining after some person — what’s the name…Victor. Or Venezia, something out of Braveheart. It begins with V—”

“Valerio?” I suggested quietly.

“Is that it?” She laughed, a loud flirty sound, and a man in orange flannel sitting at the table next to us looked over at her, hopeful. “Believe me, if my knight in shining armor was wandering around out there — Valerio, right? — I’d be hightailing it after him. And when I found him, I’d hit him over the head with my club, toss him over my shoulder, bring him back to my lair and have my way with him.” Still sort of giggling to herself, she unzipped her leather purse and handed me three quarters. “Now call your father.”

I used the payphone by the cigarette machine. Dad answered after the first ring.

“Hi—”

“Where in God’s name are you?”

“At a diner with Hannah Schneider.”

“Are you all right?”

(I have to admit, it was thrilling to hear the tremendous anxiety in Dad’s voice.)

“Of course. I’m having french toast.”

“Oh? We’ll I’m having a Missing Person’s Report for breakfast. Last Seen. Approximately two-thirty. Wearing. I’m not sure. Glad you called. Was that a dress you were wearing last night or a Hefty-Hefty Cinch Sak?”

“I’ll be home in an hour.”

“Delighted you’ve decided to again grace me with your presence.”

“Well, I’m not going to Fort Peck.”

“Eh — we can discuss it.”

And then it came to me, like Alfred Nobel his idea of a weapon to end all war (see Chapter 1, “Dynamite,” History’s Missteps, June, 1992).

“‘In fear, one flees,’” I said.

He hesitated, but only for a second. “A valid point. But we’ll have to see. On the other hand, I am in dire need of your assistance with these piteous student essays. If it meant putting myself at your disposal, say, trading Fort Peck for three or four hours of your time, I suppose I’d be willing to do so.”

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t say anything.

“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten a tattoo across your chest that reads ‘Raised in Hell,’” he said.

“No.”

“You’ve obtained a piercing.”

“No.”

“You wish to join a cult. A division of extremists who practice polygamy and call themselves Man’s Agony.“

“No.”

“You’re a lesbian and you’d like my blessing before asking out a field hockey coach.”

“No, Dad.”

“Thank God. Sapphic love, while natural and as old as the seas, is, regrettably, still considered by Middle America something of a fad, akin to the Melon Diet or Pantsuits. It wouldn’t be an easy way of life. And as we both know, having me for a father is no cakewalk. It’d be strenuous, I think, to shoulder both loads.”

“I love you, Dad.”

There was silence.

I felt ludicrous, of course, not only because when one throws out those particular words, one needs them to boomerang back without delay, not even because I realized the previous evening had turned me into a sap, a cuckoo, a walking For the Love of Benji and a living Lassie Come Home, but because I knew full well Dad couldn’t stomach those words, just as he couldn’t stomach American politicians, corporate executives who were quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying either “synergy” or “out of the box,” third-world poverty, genocide, game shows, movie stars, E.T., or for that matter, Reese’s Pieces.

“I love you too, my dear,” he said at last. “Really though, I thought you’d have figured that out by now. Yet I suppose it’s to be expected. The clearest, most palpable things in life, the elephants and white rhinos if you will, standing around quite plainly in their watering holes, chewing on leaves and twigs, they often go unnoticed. And why is that?”

It was a Van Meer Rhetorical Question followed by the Van Meer Pregnant Pause, so I simply waited, pressing the receiver against the bottom of my chin. I’d heard him use such oratorical devices before, the few times I’d gone to watch him lecture in one of the big amphitheaters with carpeted walls and buzzing light. The last time I’d heard him speak, on Civil Warfare at Cheswick College, I remember, quite distinctly, I was horrified. Without a doubt, I thought to myself, as Dad went on frowning center stage (occasionally breaking into a variety of showy gestures, as if he were a deranged Mark Antony or manic King Henry VIII), everyone could see, plain as day, Dad’s embarrassing truth: he wanted to be Richard Burton. But then I really looked around, and noticed every student (even the one on the third row who’d shaved an anarchy symbol into the back of his head) was behaving like a feeble white moth spiraling through Dad’s light.

“America is asleep,” Dad boomed. “You’ve heard it before — perhaps by a homeless man you passed on the street and he smelled like a Porta-John so you held your breath and pretended he was a mailbox. Well, is it true? Is America hibernating? Getting forty winks, a bit of shut-eye? We’re a country of boundless opportunity. Aren’t we? Well, I know the answer’s ‘yes’ if you happen to be a CEO. Last year, the average compensation for a Chief Executive Officer soared 26 percent, compared to blue-collar salaries inching up a pitiable 3 percent. And the fattest paycheck of all? Mr. Stuart Burnes, CEO of Remco Integrated Technologies. Tell him what he’s won, Bob! One-hundred-sixteen-point-four million dollars for a year’s labor.”

Here Dad crossed his arms and looked fascinated.

“What’s Stu doing to warrant such a windfall, a salary that would feed all of Sudan? Sadly, not much. Integrated missed fourth-quarter earnings. Stock prices fell 19 percent. Yet board members picked up the tab for the crew on Stu’s hundred-foot yacht, also paid the Christie’s curator fees for his fourteen-hundred-piece Impressionist art collection.”

Here Dad inclined his head as if hearing faint, far-off music.

“So this is greed. And is it good? Should we listen to a man wearing suspenders? With many of you, when you come and chat with me during office hours, I sense an air of inevitability, not of defeat, but resignation, that such iniquities are simply the way it is and they can’t be changed. This is America and what we do is grab as much cash as we can before we all die of heart disease. But do we want our lives to be a bonus round, a Money Grab? Call me an optimist, but I don’t think so. I think we hope for something more meaningful. But what do we do? Start a revolution?”

Dad asked this of a small brown-haired girl wearing a pink T-shirt in the front row. She nodded apprehensively.

“Are you out of your mind?”

Instantly, she turned six shades pinker than the T-shirt.

“You might have heard of various imbeciles who waged war on the U.S. government in the sixties and seventies. The New Communist Left. The Weather Underground. The Students for the Blah-Blah-No-One-Takes-You-Seriously. In fact, I think they were worse than Stu, because they smashed, not monogamy, but hope for productive protest and objection in this country. With their delusional self-importance, ad hoc violence, it became easy to dismiss anyone voicing dissatisfaction with the way things are as freaky flower chiles.

“No. I contend we should take a cue from one of the greatest American movements of our time — a revolution in itself really, nobly warring as it does against time and gravity, also accountable for the most widespread perpetuation of alien-looking life forms on Earth. Cosmetic surgery. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. America is in dire need of a nip-tuck. No mass uprising, no widespread revolution. Rather, an eye lift here. A boob job there. Some well-placed liposuction. A minuscule cut behind the ears, tug it up, staple it into place — confidentiality is key — and voilà, everyone will be saying we look mahvelous. Greater elasticity. No sags. For those of you who are laughing, you’ll see precisely what I mean when you do the reading for Tuesday, the treatise in Littleton’s Anatomy of Materialism, ‘The Nightwatchmen and Mythical Principles of Practical Change.’ And Eidelstein’s ‘Repressions of Imperialist Powers.’ And my own meager piece, ‘Blind Dates: Advantages of Silent Civil War.’ Do not forget. You will be pop quizzed.”

Only when Dad, with a small, self-satisfied smile, closed his worn leather folder full of chicken-scratch notes (placed on the lectern for effect, because he never looked at them), removed the linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and delicately touched it to his forehead (we’d driven through Nevada’s Andamo Desert in the middle of July and he hadn’t needed to blot his forehead like that a single time), only then did anyone move. Some of the kids grinned in disbelief, others walked out of the lecture hall with surprised faces. A few were starting to page through the Littleton book.

Now, Dad answered his own question, his voice low and scratchy in the receiver.

“We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things,” he said.

A Room with a View

The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844–1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments,1890–1901 (1902), “When one travels abroad, one doesn’t so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape or a terrain so treacherous one finds it’s best to forget the entire affaire and return home.”

I didn’t see Hannah during Finals Week and only encountered Jade and the others once or twice before an exam. “See ya next year, Olives,” Milton said when we passed each other outside the Scratch. (I thought I detected wrinkles in his forehead hinting at his advanced age when he winked at me, but I didn’t want to stare.) Charles, I knew, was off to Florida for ten days, Jade was going to Atlanta, Lu to Colorado, Nigel to his grandparents — Missouri, I think — and I was thus resigned to an uneventful Christmas vacation with Dad and Rikeland Gestault’s latest critique of the American justice system, Ride the Lightning (2004). After my last exam, however, AP Art History, Dad announced that he had a surprise.

“An early graduation present. A final Abenteuer—I should say, aventure—before you’re rid of me. It’s only a matter of time before you refer to me as — what do they say in that mawkish film with the cranky elderly? An old poop.”

As it turned out, an old friend of Dad’s from Harvard, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos (Dad affectionately called him “Baba au Rhum,” and thus I assumed he bore a resemblance to rum-soaked sponge cake), had, for some time, been entreating Dad to visit him in Paris, where he’d been teaching archaic Greek literature at La Sorbonne for the past eight years.

“He invited us to stay with him. Which we will, certainly; I understand he has a palatial apartment somewhere along the Seine. Comes from a family drowning in money. Imports and exports. First, however, I thought it’d be swell to stay a few nights in a hotel, get a taste of la vie parisienne. I booked something at the Ritz.”

“The Ritz?”

“A suite au sixième étage. Sounds quite electrifying.”

“Dad—”

“I wanted the Coco Suite, but it was taken. I’m sure everyone wants the Coco Suite.”

“But—”

“Not a word about the cost. I told you I’ve been saving for a few extravagances.”

I was surprised by the trip, the proposed lavishness, sure, but even more by the childlike zeal that’d overtaken Dad, a Gene Kelly Effect I had not witnessed in him since June Bug Tamara Sotto of Pritchard, Georgia, invited Dad to Monster Mash, the statewide tractor pull in which it was impossible for someone without trucker connections to get tickets. (“Do you think if I slip one of those toothless marvels a fifty, he’d allow me to get behind the wheel?” Dad asked.) I’d also recently discovered (crumpled paper sadly staring out of the kitchen trash) Federal Forum had declined to print Dad’s latest essay, “The Fourth Reich,” an offense which, under normal circumstances, would have caused him to grumble under his breath for days, perhaps launch into spontaneous lectures on the dearth of critical voices in American media forums, both popular and obscure.

But, no, Dad was all “Singin’ in the Rain,” all “Gotta Dance,” all “Good Mornin’.” Two days before our scheduled departure, he came home laden with guidebooks (of note, Paris, Pour Le Voyageur Distingué [Bertraux, 2000]), city shopping maps, Swiss Army suitcases, toiletry kits, miniature reading lights, inflatable neck pillows, Bug Snuggle plane socks, two strange brands of hearing plug (EarPlane and Air-Silence), silk scarves (“All Parisian women wear scarves because they wish to create the illusion of being in a Doisneau photo,” said Dad), pocket phrase books and the formidable, hundred-hour La Salle Conversation Classroom (“Become bilingual in five days,” ordered the side of the box. “Be the toast of dinner parties.”).

With the nervous expectation “one can only feel when one parts with one’s personal baggage and holds fast to the shabby hope of reuniting with it after journeying two thousand miles,” Dad and I, on the eve of December 20, boarded an Air France flight out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport and safely landed in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, the cold, drizzling afternoon of December 21 (see Bearings,1890–1897, Swithin, 1898, p. 11).

We weren’t scheduled to meet up with Baba au Rhum until the 26 (Baba was supposedly visiting family in the south of France), so we spent those first five days in Paris alone as we’d been in the old Volvo days, speaking to no one but each other and not even noticing.

We ate crêpes and coq au vin. At night, we dined in expensive restaurants crawling with city views and men with bright eyes that fluttered after women like caged birds hoping to find a tiny hole through which they might escape. After dinner, Dad and I entombed ourselves at jazz clubs like au Caveau de la Huchette, a smoky crypt in which one was required to remain mute, motionless and alert as a coonhound while the jazz trio (faces so sweaty, they had to have been lined with Crisco) ripped, riffed and warped with their eyes closed, their fingers tarantuling up and down keys and strings for over three and a half hours. According to our waitress, the place had been a favorite of Jim Morrison, and he’d shot up heroin in the same dark corner in which Dad and I were sitting.

“We’d like to move to that table there, s’il vous plaît,” said Dad.

Despite these rousing environs, I thought about home all the time, about that night with Hannah, the strange stories she told me. As Swithin wrote in State of Affairs:1901–1903 (1902), “Whilst man is in one location, he thinks of another. Dancing with one woman, he can’t help but long to see the quiet curve of another’s nude shoulder; to never be satisfied, to never have the mind and body cheerfully stranded in a single location — this is the curse of the human race!” (p. 513).

It was true. Contented as I was (especially those moments Dad was unaware of the bit of éclair at the corner of his mouth, or when he rattled off a sentence in “perfect” French and was met with confused stares), I found myself staying awake at night, worried about them. And, this is awful to admit, because the correct thing was to be wholly unfazed by what Hannah had told me — I really couldn’t help but see them all in a slightly different light now, a very severe overhead light in which they bore a startling resemblance to smudged street urchins who sang and marched in the chorus of “Consider Yourself” in Oliver!, which Dad and I watched over salty popcorn one dull evening in Wyoming.

After nights such as these, the next morning I found myself squeezing Dad’s arm a little tighter as we dashed in front of traffic crossing the Champs Élysées, giggling a little louder over his comments regarding fat Americans in khaki when a fat American in khaki asked the madame at the pâtisserie counter where the bathrooms were. I began to behave like someone with a grave prognosis, searching Dad’s face all the time, feeling on the verge of tears when I noticed the delicate wrinkles blooming around his eyes, or the prick of black in his left iris, or the frayed cuffs of his corduroy jacket — a direct result of my childhood, of my tugging on his sleeve. I found myself thanking God for these dusty details, these things no one else noticed, because they, fragile as spiderwebs and thread, were the only things separating me from them.

I must have thought about the others more than I realized, because they began to make Hitchcock cameos. I saw Jade on countless occasions. There she was, just in front of us, walking a haughty pug down Rue Danton — wheat-bleached hair, blunt red lipstick, gum and jeans — perfectly jaded. And there was Charles, the thin, sullen blond kid melting into the bar at Café Ciseaux, drinking his café, and poor Milton, beached outside the Odéon Métro with nothing but a sleeping bag and a recorder. With gnarled fingers he played a woeful Christmas song — some sad, four-note tune — his feet raw, his skin heavy as a wet pair of jeans.

Even Hannah made a brief appearance, in what turned out to be the only incident of our stay Dad had not planned (at least, not to my knowledge). There was a bomb scare in the early morning of December 26. Alarms screamed, hallways flashed, all guests in the hotel, as well as employees — bathrobes, bald heads, bare chests a-flying — were emptied out into Place Vendôme like cream of potato soup from a can. Smooth Efficiency, the implacable quality exuded by all Ritz staff, turned out to be nothing more than a flimsy magic spell, valid only when workers were physically inside the hotel. Dumped into the night, they pumpkined back into shivery humans, red-eyed, runny-nosed people with windswept hair.

Naturally, Dad found this dramatic interlude all very exciting, and as we awaited the arrival of the fire brigade (“I imagine we’ll be on France 2,” Dad speculated with glee) in front of a waxen bellboy, draped in rippling silk pajamas the color of peas, I spotted Hannah. She was much older, still slim, but most of her beauty had corroded. The sleeves of her pajamas were rolled up like a truck driver’s.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Eh,” said the frightened bellboy. “Je ne sais pas, madame.”

“What d’ya mean tu ne sais pas?”

“Je ne sais pas.”

“Does anyone know anything around here? Or are you all just a bunch of frogs on lily pads?”

(The “bomb scare,” to Dad’s evident displeasure, turned out to be nothing more than an electrical malfunction, and the following morning, our last in the hotel, Dad and I awoke to free breakfast in our suite and a note calmly printed in gold, apologizing for le dérangement.)

On the windy afternoon of the 26, we said good-bye to the Ritz and took our suitcases across the city to Baba au Rhum’s five-bedroom apartment, occupying the top two floors of a seventeenth-century stone building on Île St. Louis.

“Not bad, hmmm?” said Servo. “Yes, the girls enjoyed this old shed growing up. All their French friends wanted to come over every weekend, couldn’t get rid of them. How do you like Paris, mmm?”

“It’s extr—”

“Elektra does not like Paris. Prefers Monte Carlo. I agree. Tourists make life difficult for us true Parisians, and Monte’s a theme park you can’t enter unless you have, what, Soc — one, two million? Been on the phone with Elektra all morning. Calls me up. ‘Daddy,’ she says, ‘Daddy, they want me for the embassy.’ Salary they offered her, I fall off my chair. Barely nineteen, skipped three grades. They adore her at Yale. Psyche too. She just started as a freshman. And they still want her for all the modeling, did top modeling in the summers. Made enough to buy all of Manhattan, and what is his name with the underwear, Calvin Klein. He fell madly in love with her. Nine years old, she was writing like Balzac. Her teachers would cry when they read her work, they were always telling me she’s a poet. And poets are born, you see, they’re not made. Only one comes along in a single, what do they say? Mmm? A single century.”

Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos was a severely tanned Greek man of many opinions, tales and chins. He was overweight, in his mid-to late sixties with white sheep’s hair and dull brown dice eyes that never stopped rolling around a room. He sweated, suffered from the strange tic of slapping then rubbing in circular motions his own chest, threaded each of his sentences together with a belly-deep “mmm” and treated idle conversations that had nothing to do with his family as if they were termite-infested houses in dire need of being exterminated with another story about Elektra or Psyche. He moved speedily, in spite of the limp that warped his walk and the wooden cane that, after he propped it against some counter while ordering un pain au chocolat, came clattering noisily to the floor, sometimes hitting people on the shin or foot (“Mmmm? Oh, dear, excusez-moi.”).

“He always hobbled,” Dad said. “Even when we were at Harvard.”

As it turned out, too, he was severely averse to having his picture taken. The first time I removed my disposable camera from my backpack, Dr. Kouropoulos put his hand over his face and refused to remove it. “Mmmm, no, I don’t photograph well.” The second time, he disappeared for ten minutes in the Men’s Room. “Excuse me, hate, hate to break up the photo op, but, nature. She’s calling.” The third time, he threw out that shopworn detail people loved to repeat about the Masai people, thereby drawing attention to their sensitivity and savoir faire when it came to primitive cultures: “They say it steals the soul. I don’t want to take any chances.” (This factoid was painfully outdated. Dad had spent time in the Great Rift Valley, and said for five dollars, most Masai under seventy-five would let you steal their soul as many times as you wished.)

I asked Dad what his problem was.

“I’m not sure. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he was wanted for tax evasion.”

To imagine that Dad had deliberately chosen to spend five minutes with this man, let alone six days, was inconceivable. They were not friends. In fact, they appeared to loathe each other.

Meals with Baba au Rhum were not joyous affairs, but prolonged torture. He ended up so filthy after pulling apart his braised beef or leg of lamb, I found myself wishing he’d taken the gauche yet critical precaution of tucking his napkin around his neck. His hands behaved like fat, startled tabby cats; without warning, they’d pounce two to three feet across the table in order to seize the saltshaker or the bottle of wine. (He’d pour himself a glass first, then in a dull afterthought, one for Dad.)

My primary discomfort during these meals derived not from his table manners, but from the general repartee. Midway through the appetizers, sometimes even before, Dad and Servo became engaged in a strange, spoken locking-of-horns, a masculine battle of one-upmanship widespread among such species as the Rutting Bull Elk and the Sabre-toothed Ground Beetle.

From what I gathered, the competition sprang from Servo’s subtle insinuations that while it was all fine and dandy Dad had raised one genius (“When we go home, a little bird told me we’re going to find good news from Harvard,” Dad pompously unveiled during dessert at Lapérouse), he, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos, hailed professor of littérature archaïque, had raised two (“Psyche was tapped by NASA for the Lunar Mission V in 2014. I’d tell you more, but these things are classified. I must remain, for her sake and the sake of the world’s declining superpower, mum…”).

After considerable word-to-word combat, Dad showed signs of strain — that is, until he located Servo’s Achilles’ heel, some disappointing younger son apparently mislabeled Atlas, who’d been unable not only to shoulder the world, but a single freshman course load at Río Grande Universidad in Cuervo, Mexico. Dad made him admit the poor kid was now adrift somewhere in South America.

I did my best to ignore these ridiculous skirmishes, spending my time eating as daintily as I could, raising White Mercy Flags in the form of long, apologetic stares at the various aggravated waiters and cranky close-at-hand clientele. Only when there appeared to be a stalemate did I placate Dad.

“‘Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance. Our love of things of the mind does not make us soft,’” I said as gravely as I could after Servo’s forty-five-minute oration on the famous son of a billionaire (Servo couldn’t name names) who in 1996 fell madly in love with tan twelve-year-old Elektra in Cannes, as she sat on the beach making sandcastles with all the modern design sense and keen eye for craftsmanship of Mies van der Rohe. So haunted was the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor, Servo was afraid he’d have to get a restraining order, so the man and his four-hundred-foot yacht (which he was threatening to rename Elektra, replete with Pilates gym and helicopter landing pad) couldn’t come within a thousand feet of the mesmeric girl.

Hands folded in my lap, I tilted my head and set loose a Powerful Gaze of Omniscience across the room, a gaze reminiscent of the doves Noah set loose from the deck of his Ark, doves that returned to him with twigs.

“So said Thucydides, Book Two,” I whispered.

Baba au Rhum’s eyes bulged.

After three days of such agonizing meals, I deduced from the defeated look in Dad’s eyes he’d come to the same conclusion I had, that it was best we find alternative accommodation, because, although it was all well and good they’d had bell-bottoms and sideburn length in common back at Harvard, this was the era of the ohs, epoch of serious hair and cigarette pants. Being Bon Amis at Harvard in the late 1970s with shirts fashioned out of cheesecloth and a widespread popularity of clogs and clip-on suspenders was certainly not greater than or equal to being Bon Amis now with minimalist fitted shirts in cotton blends and a widespread popularity of collagen and clip-on headsets so one could give orders hands free.

I was wrong, however. Dad had been severely brainwashed (see “Hearst, Patty,” Almanac of Rebels and Insurgents, Skye, 1987). He cheerfully announced he was going to spend the entire day with Servo at La Sorbonne. There was an opening for a government professor at the school, which would be an interesting fit for him while I was marooned at Harvard, and as I’d undoubtedly find an entire day of faculty hobnobbing tedious, I was instructed to go amuse myself. Dad handed me three hundred euros, his MasterCard, a key to the apartment, scribbled down Servo’s home and mobile phone numbers on a piece of graph paper. We’d reconvene at 7:30 P.M.. at Le Georges, the restaurant on the top of the Centre Pompidou.

“It’ll be an adventure,” said Dad with faux enthusiasm. “Didn’t Balzac write in Lost Illusions that the only way to see Paris is on your own?” (Balzac wrote nothing of the kind.)

Initially, I was relieved to be rid of the two of them. Dad and Baba au Rhum could have each other. But after six hours of wandering the streets, the Musée d’Orsay, stuffing myself with croissants and tartes, at times, pretending I was a young duchess in disguise (“The gifted traveler can’t help but affect a traveling persona,” notes Swithin in Possessions,1910 [1911]. “Whilst at home he may merely be a hoi polloi husband, one of a million dull suited financiers, in a foreign land, he can be as majestic as he desires.”), my feet were blistered, I had a sugar nadir; I felt drained and entirely irritated. I decided to make my way back to Servo’s apartment, resolving (with more than a little satisfaction) to take the opportunity of Me Time to peruse a few of Baba au Rhum’s personal belongings, namely, to locate some mislaid foe-toe drowning at the bottom of a sock drawer that revealed his girls not to be the chiseled Olympians their father led everyone to believe, but flabby, pimpled mortals, with dim eyes shoved deep into their heads, mouths long and bendy like pieces of licorice.

Somehow I’d managed to walk all the way to Pigalle, so I entered the first métro I could find, switched trains at Concorde and was walking out of the St. Paul station, when I passed a man and a woman moving quickly down the stairs. I stopped in my tracks, turning to watch them. She was one of those short, dark, severe-looking women who didn’t walk, but mowed, with jaw-length brown hair and a boxy green coat. He was considerably taller than she, in jeans, a suede bomber jacket, and as she talked to him — in French, it seemed — he laughed, a loud but supremely lethargic sound, the unmistakable laugh of a person reclining in a hammock soaked with sun. He was reaching into his back pocket for the ticket.

Andreo Verduga.

I must have whispered it, because an elderly French woman with a floral scarf wrapping her withered face tossed me a look of contempt as she pushed past me. Holding my breath, I hurried back down the stairs after them, jostled by a man trying to exit with an empty stroller. Andreo and the girl were already through the turnstiles, strolling down the platform, and I would have followed, but I’d only purchased a single ride and four people were waiting in line at the ticket counter. I could hear the shudders of an approaching train. They stopped walking, far to my right, Andreo with his back to me, Green Coat facing him, listening to what he said, probably something along the lines of, YES STOP I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN STOP (OUI ARRETTE JE COMPRENDS ARRETTE), and then the train rushed in, the doors groaned open and he turned, chivalrously letting Green Coat enter in front of him. As he stepped into the car, I could just make out a splinter of his profile.

A smack of the doors, the train belched and pulled out of the station.

I wandered back to Servo’s apartment in a daze. It couldn’t have been he; no, not really. I was like Jade, making things more exotic than they actually were. I thought I’d noticed, as he moved past me, unzipping his jacket as he hurried down the stairs, a heavy silver watch hanging on his wrist, and Andreo the Gardener, Andreo of the Bullet Wound and Badly Fractured English wouldn’t have that kind of watch, unless, in the three years since I’d seen him (not counting the Wal-Mart sighting), he’d become a successful entrepreneur or inherited a small fortune from a distant relative in Lima. And yet — the shard of face I’d seen, the passing blur on the stairs, the muscular cologne that strolled through the air behind him like pompous tan men on yachts — it added up to something real. Or perhaps I’d just witnessed his doppelgänger. After all, I’d been spotting Jade and the others all over the city, and Allison Smithson-Caldona in her relentless study of all things double and dittoed, Twin Paradox and Atomic Clocks (1999), actually tried to scientifically prove the somewhat mystical theory that everyone had a twin wandering the planet. She was able to confirm this as fact in three out of every twenty-five examined individuals, no matter their nationality or race (p. 250).

When I finally eased open the front door to Servo’s apartment, I was surprised to hear Dad and Servo in the living room just off the dark foyer and hall. The bloom was finally off the rose, I noted with satisfaction. They were fighting like Punch and Judy.

“Highly hysterical over—” That was Dad (Judy).

“You can’t comprehend what it actually means—!” That was Servo (Punch).

“Oh, don’t give me—you’re hot-headed as — go, go—”

“—always content, aren’t you, to hide behind the lecture podium?”

“—you act like a hormonal preteen! Go take a cold shower, why—!”

They must have heard the door (though I tried to close it silently), because their voices cut off like a big ax had just swung down on their words. A second later, Dad’s head materialized in the doorway.

“Sweet,” he said, smiling. “How was the sightseeing?”

“Fine.”

Servo’s white round head bobbed into view by Dad’s left elbow. His shiny roulette eyes tripped ceaselessly around my face. He didn’t say a word, but his lips twitched in evident irritation, as if there were invisible threads knotted to his mouth’s corners and a toddler was yanking the ends.

“I’m going to take a nap,” I said brightly. “I’m exhausted.”

I shrugged off my coat, tossed my backpack to the floor and, smiling nonchalantly, headed upstairs. The plan was to remove my shoes, stealthily tiptoe back to the first floor, eavesdrop on their heated dispute resumed in irate hisses and fizz (hopefully not in Greek or some other unfathomable language) — but when I did this, standing stone still on the bottom step in my socks, I heard them banging around the kitchen, bickering about nothing more calamitous than the difference between absinthe and anisette.

That night we decided not to go to Le Georges. It rained, so we stayed in, watching Canal Plus, eating leftover chicken and playing Scrabble. Dad combusted with pride when I won two games in a row, hologram and monocular being the coups de grâcey that caused Servo (who insisted the Cambridge Dictionary was wrong, license was spelled “lisence” in the UK, he was sure of it) to turn crimson, say something about Elektra being president of the Yale Debate Team and mutter he himself had not fully recovered from the flu.

I hadn’t been able to get Dad alone, and even at midnight, neither of them showed signs of tiring or, regrettably enough, any residual bitterness toward each other. Baba was fond of sitting in his giant red chair sans shoes and socks, his chunky red feet propped in front of him on a large velvet pillow (veal cutlets to be served to a king). I had to resort to my A-Little-Bread-a-Crust-a-Crumb look, which Dad, frowning over his row of letters, didn’t pick up on, so I resorted to my A-Dying-Tiger-Moaned-for-Drink look, and when that went unobserved, A-Day! — Help! — Help! — Another-Day!

At long last, Dad announced he’d see me to bed.

“What were you fighting about when I came home?” I asked when we were upstairs, alone in my room.

“I would have preferred if you hadn’t heard that.” Dad shoved his hands into his pockets and gazed out the window where the rain seemed to be drumming its fingernails on the roof. “Servo and I have a great deal of lost baggage between us — mislaid items, so to speak. We both think the other is to blame for the deficiency.”

“Why did you tell him he was acting like a hormonal preteen?”

Dad looked uncomfortable. “Did I say that?”

I nodded.

“What else did I say?”

“That’s pretty much all I heard.”

Dad sighed. “The thing with Servo is — everyone has a thing, I suppose; but nevertheless, Servo’s thing—everything is an Olympic competition. He derives great pleasure from setting people up, putting them in the most discomforting of situations, watching them flounder. He’s an idiot, really. And now he has the absurd notion that I must remarry. Naturally, I told him he was preposterous, that it’s none of his business, the world does not revolve around such social—”

“Is he married?”

Dad shook his head. “Not for years. You know, I don’t even remember what happened to Sophie.”

“She’s in an insane asylum.”

“Oh, no,” Dad said, smiling, “when controlled, given parameters, he’s harmless. At times, ingenious.”

“Well, I don’t like him,” I pronounced.

I rarely, if ever, used such petulant one-liners. You had to have a strong, experienced, ain’t-no-other-way-’round-it face to say them with any authority (see Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments). Sometimes, though, when you had no sound reason for your sentiments — when you simply had a feeling—you had to use one no matter what kind of face you had.

Dad sat down next to me on the bed. “I suppose I can’t disagree. One can only take so much inflated self-importance before one feels ill. And I’m a bit angry myself. This morning, when we went to the Sorbonne, me with my briefcase full of notes, essays, my résumé—like a fool — it turned out there was no job opening as he’d led me to believe. A Latin professor had requested three months’ leave this fall, and that was it. Then came the actual reason we’d ventured to the school — Servo spent an hour trying to get me to ask Florence of the guttural r’s to dinner, some femme who was a leading expert in Simone de Beauvoir — of all hellish things to be an expert in — a woman who wore more eyeliner than Rudolph Valentino. I was trapped in her crypt-office for hours. I didn’t leave in love but with lung cancer. The woman chain-smoked like nobody’s business.”

“I don’t think he has children,” I said in a hushed voice. “Maybe just the one in the Colombian rain forest. But I think he’s making the others up.”

Dad frowned. “Servo has children.”

“Have you met them?

He considered this. “No.”

“Seen pictures?”

He tilted his head. “No.”

“Because they’re figments of his unhinged imagination.”

Dad laughed.

And then I was about to tell him about the other incredible incident of the day, Andreo Verduga with the suede jacket and the silver watch shuffling through the métro, but I stopped myself. I noticed how outlandish it was, such a coincidence, and reporting it in all seriousness made me feel stupid — tragic even. “It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality,” wrote Albert Pooley in The Imperial Consort of the Dairy Queen (1981, p. 233).

“Can we go home?” I asked quietly.

To my surprise, Dad nodded. “I was actually going to ask you the very same thing this afternoon, after my dispute with Servo. I think we’ve had enough of la vie en rose, don’t you? Personally, I prefer to see life as it actually is.” He smiled. “En noir.”

Dad and I said farewell to Servo, to Paris, two days before we were scheduled to depart. Perhaps it wasn’t so incredible a thing, Dad calling the airline and changing the tickets. He looked deflated, eyes bloodshot, his voice prone to sighs. For the first time since I could remember, Dad had very little to say. Saying good-bye to Baba au Rhum, he managed only “thank you” and “see you soon” before climbing into the waiting taxi.

I, however, took my time.

“Next time I look forward to meeting Psyche and Elektra in person,” I said, staring straight into the man’s hole-punched eyes. I almost felt sorry for him: the bristly white hair drooped over his head like a plant that hadn’t had nearly enough water or light. Tiny red veins were taking root around his nose. If Servo were in a Pulitzer Prize — winning play, he’d be the Painfully Tragic character, the one who wore bronze suits and alligator shoes, the man who worshipped all the wrong things so Life had to bring him to his knees.

VISUAL AID 18.0

“‘One’s real life is, so often, the life that one does not lead,’” I added as I turned toward the taxi, but he only blinked, that nervous, sly smile again twitching through his face.

“So long, my dear, mmmm, safe flight.”

On the drive to the airport, Dad barely said a word. He rested his head against the taxi window, mournfully staring out at the passing streets — such an unusual pose for him, I covertly took the disposable camera out of my bag, and while the taxi driver muttered at people dashing across the intersection in front of us, I took his picture, the last photo on the roll.

They say when people didn’t know you were taking their picture, they appeared as they really were in life. And yet Dad didn’t know I was taking his picture and he appeared as he never was — quiet, forlorn, somehow lost (Visual Aid 18.0).

“As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion — usually while he’s lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina,” writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts,1917 (1918). “It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.”