Surveillance

7

STORIES. For years, Lucy had been telling stories about the absent father in Alida’s life. She had sworn to herself that she would always try to tell the truth, but she allowed herself to ration, stretch, and gloss that truth as circumstance dictated.

Turning three, Alida had asked, “Do I have a dad?”

This, Lucy decided, was really two questions. The answer to the first, about a biological father, would obviously have to be yes. But a dad was something different. Dads read bedtime stories, took out the garbage, dabbed shaving foam on their kids’ cheeks. In this sense, she reasoned, Alida obviously didn’t have a dad, so the answer was a firm negative.

“No, honey, there’s just you and me.”

Alida seemed content with the idea of her immaculate conception until one day, riding home from preschool, she said that they’d been discussing dads in the Rainbow Room. “I said my dad was dead,” she said, sounding rather pleased with herself, and went on to talk about the kites they’d made. Good solution, Lucy thought, and there was no further mention of Alida’s paternity for several months.

Then it was, “Who was my dad?”

Tricky, this one, but Lucy was grateful for Alida’s use of the past tense.

“Well,” Lucy said, playing for time. “I really, really wanted to have a baby. I wanted to have you. But I needed someone to help me, so I found this guy.”

“Like a doctor?”

“Yes. Exactly like a doctor. And he helped me to have you.”

“Did you have to pay him money?”

“No, he did it for free,” Lucy said, remembering the bar tab, the Painted Table dinner, the nightcaps from the minibar in his suite. Alida’s conception must have cost him — or rather, his law firm — a couple hundred bucks at least.

“Did it take long?”

“Oh, no, just a few seconds. Like getting a shot.”

“I hate shots,” Alida said, and moved on.

Another year passed before she asked the hardest question so far: “Where is my dad?” which moved him firmly out of the past and into the present and gave him a potential location in actual space. Lucy had to avoid saying “I don’t know,” which would encourage Alida to imagine a mystery that might be solved by a quest, so she said, “He just flew in and out; he was only in Seattle for two days.”

She’d flubbed on that one, but Alida’s curiosity was so shallow and fleeting that almost any response, so long as it wasn’t “He’s in Tucson, Arizona,” would’ve allowed her to change the subject, which she did. Whatever dad-shaped hole there might have been in Alida’s world was filled so amply, so lovingly, by Tad that recent years had passed without a single question. When Father’s Day came around, Tad got the cards, the lopsided bits of pottery, the clumsily sewn hearts filled with potpourri. The accident of his name helped: he was so very nearly Dad in every sense.

Yet Lucy remained on guard, ready if necessary to field two dangerous questions so far unasked: “What’s my dad’s name?” and “Does he know I exist?” They would be hell to handle, but Lucy dreamed that when Alida was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, they’d be able to share the true story of her conception, woman to woman, fondly and without embarrassment. It wasn’t a story Lucy was the least bit ashamed about, and when Alida was grown up she ought to be able to prize it, laugh over it, tell it to her own lovers as a gift. But it had to be kept secret from her until she was of an age to understand.

It had begun with the Spanish Inquisition of fact-checking at The New Yorker. For eleven days, Lucy had undergone torture at the hands of two humorless peremptory inquisitors, Rosemary and Maureen. Usually the magazine assigned only one fact-checker to each case, but fear of Bill Gates’ phalanx of lawyers had led it in this instance to double the usual allocation of womanpower to the spiked chair, the iron maiden, the rack and the screw. She dreaded the phone ringing. “A couple of people here have read the piece and…” Or, “You mention traveling south on Elm. It’s one-way, going southeast.” Not a sentence of Lucy’s piece was left untouched. She had described visiting the Microsoft campus in heavy rain; a local TV meteorologist had been consulted, and the phrase emended to “steady drizzle.” She had written that talking with Gates had put her in mind of speaking with an autistic, given how he rocked in his chair and evaded eye contact; that passage had been struck out on the advice of a child psychologist, who had sternly opined that “the evidence supplied entirely fails to support the allegation.” Talking to people who’d known Gates in the past, she’d sometimes used a notebook rather than a tape recorder. Called by Rosemary or Maureen, they invariably denied every word they’d said, and, unless it was preserved verbatim on tape, out it went. For “legal reasons,” adjectives and adverbs fell from the piece like leaves from a tree in an October gale. Day by day the piece grew thinner, blander, less her own. She dreaded the ringing of the phone, the “just a couple of details,” the pitiless guillotining of every sentence she was proud of.

But even the Spanish Inquisition came to its eventual end, and, late on a Friday afternoon, her editor called to say that the issue had gone to press and her ordeal was over. “Everyone here likes the piece a lot.” Having come to hate it as a result of Rosemary and Maureen’s brutal ministrations, Lucy said, “I can’t think why — I just wish it could be published under a pseudonym. Why don’t the fact-checkers put their names on it?”

Yet putting the phone down, she was giddy with relief. She had to celebrate. She called Ron, then Jeff, then David, then Alice, but got only their voice mails. She’d try them from her cell later; in the meantime, she meant to down a large and richly deserved martini at the Bookstore Bar in the Alexis.

Hoisting herself onto a stool, she noticed that the man two stools away was reading the “Talk of the Town” section of that week’s New Yorker. He said, she said, he said, she said (entirely free of the stutter that usually afflicted her when talking to strangers), and within minutes of getting her martini she’d told him she sometimes wrote for the magazine on retainer. He had the grace to claim that he remembered one or two of her pieces — even brought up, with no prompt from Lucy, her epic Kurt Cobain interview-epitaph. “I’m way too old for grunge rock, but you made him real to me. I found it very touching.”

His name was Edward; if he told her his last name, she’d forgotten it that very instant. When her cell phone rang in her bag, she reached inside to switch it off. By the time they agreed to have dinner together, she knew that he was an attorney, that his specialty was intellectual property rights, that he was in Seattle for a conference on copyright and the new media, that he’d gone to college at Williams, then on to Yale for law school. His manner was light, quizzical, self-deprecating. She liked his rather-too-big nose and not-too-preppy haircut.

Once they’d been served their first course — Dabob Bay oysters on the half shell — she knew that he had a wife and young son in Westchester County, but that he lived in an apartment in the East Village, traveling most weekends to Mount Kisco to keep in touch with the boy, Asher.

“We have to do something about it soon,” he said. “But as a lawyer I’m more afraid of the mechanics of divorce than most people. I’m like the dentist who neglects his own teeth for fear of the drill.”

For her part, Lucy spun the tale of Maureen and Rosemary into bright comedy, casting herself in the part of dupe. Edward probed her for details. He wanted to know the reason for every cut and change.

“Total bullshit,” he said, producing legal arguments that validated nearly all of Lucy’s original phrasings, elegantly wiping the floor with Rosemary and Maureen.

“God,” she said, “I wish I’d had you standing at my elbow for the last two weeks.”

“Honestly, there’s no place on Earth I’d rather have been.” He made the remark easily, with a smile, showing those glamorous metropolitan manners that surely reflected the enviable milieu in which he must move in Manhattan.

This was just after the halibut arrived.

Never once did he put the moves on her. The progression from dessert to nightcaps and coffee in his suite to the bedroom was a safe and relaxed glide, with much laughter along the route. From the moment she stepped into the elevator, she knew that he knew that she was going to spend the night, and that neither of them was going to make a fuss of it beforehand or after.

As they helped each other undress, Lucy pointed to her thighs. “Cellulite,” she said.

“You’re perfect, Lucy. I hate those bony sylphs.”

“Is your wife a bony sylph?”

“Bony, yes. Sylph, no.”

In sex, too, he was a paragon of good manners, both teasing and patient, waiting to come until after she did, which was surprisingly quickly and strongly. Still on East Coast time — midnight for her, three A.M. for him — he was asleep in minutes, with her snuggled up behind him, her arm crooked around his waist, her open palm on his very slightly paunchy stomach.

She woke before six, with no hangover, no bewilderment as to her whereabouts, no regrets. He was giving a paper that morning, and she had a hair appointment at 8:45. As she separated herself from him, limb by cautious limb, a phrase came into her head: “the tenderness of the one-night stand.” He stirred for an instant, then rolled back and began to snore.

She picked her clothes up from the floor and went into the living room to dress. She came back to the bedroom with a stub of old lipstick from the bottom of her bag, to write a message on his dressing-table mirror. That was so sweet…thank you. Talk well today. Must go (Dr.’s appt.) Fondly, Lucy. Then she wrote her phone numbers, landline and cell, in unmissably bold numerals. Before leaving, she rested her hand on his sleeping haunch through the bed linen. Snore, snore. She was glad he was sleeping in.

That afternoon, still in a buoyant mood, she traded in her old rust-bucket Honda for the Spider — a car she’d fancied, in its various incarnations and remodels, ever since she watched Dustin Hoffman drive one in The Graduate, a movie already ten years old by the time she saw a TV rerun in Missoula. Gingerly maneuvering the new car back to the Acropolis, she looked forward to showing it off to Edward. Perhaps they could go Dutch tonight at Ray’s Boathouse, which would give her an excuse to put the Spider through its paces.

He didn’t call. She told herself that it was perhaps best to leave things exactly as they were, a warm memory, unalloyed by complications. Having gone through one bicoastal romance, she’d sworn never to try another. So farewell, Edward, nice to have known you. Or so she tried to feel.

Three weeks later, she was four days late. The Rosemary/Maureen nightmare had probably fucked up her cycle. The night with Edward must have been at least three days before she started ovulating, but sperm have tenacious survival skills. She bought a test from Bartell’s, peed onto the stick thing, and saw lines in both windows. A blood test at the doctor’s the next day confirmed it. She was pregnant.

She was shaken by her own delight. At thirty-eight, with forty looming fast, she took the news as a pure, undeserved gift from gods in whose existence she had no belief at all. Of course she’d have the baby. How could she not?

But then there was the question of Edward. It would take five minutes to locate him. No need to snoop through the Alexis guest register; all she had to do was get the list of speakers at his conference. But in the last three weeks, Edward had rather dwindled in her estimation. It wasn’t that he hadn’t phoned, more that in retrospect his charming, ironic manners had come to seem a bit too easy, too practiced, too ostentatiously East Coast. It was as if all he was was manners. When she thought about him, she realized that she didn’t know a person so much as Williams College, Yale Law School, Westchester, and the Village. If she were to tell him this news, she didn’t have an inkling as to how he might respond. Horror, as likely as not, and a gentlemanly offer to arrange for an abortion.

As the slogan said, it was the woman’s right to choose. And faced with this most personal, impulsive, and daring decision — the biggest decision of her life — Lucy thought that the last person she wanted to consult was a lawyer, especially one as quick-minded and fluently logical as Edward had shown himself to be at dinner. She was frightened that Yale Law School might be horribly adept at talking her out of it, even though she held out a distant hope that Greenwich Village might be more understanding of her need to have the baby.

She forced herself not to find out Edward’s last name. There had been times in the last few years when the thought did cross her mind that a New York lawyer dealing in intellectual property rights, the hottest specialty in the Internet age, must be unbelievably rich, and that she might sort of owe it to Alida to make her existence known to this legal tycoon. But each time the thought came into view, she quashed it: to follow up on it now would put her own behavior back then in a very bad light indeed.

Lucy was glad Alida had inherited Edward’s hair and height, and much relieved she hadn’t got his nose.

TAD WAS ANGRY. He was angry with himself, angry with the presidency, angry with the nation, angry with the century. That much was rational, justifiable. In his view, only the ignorant, the hopelessly self-preoccupied, the Halliburton fat cats, and the mad Christian zealots were in any position not to be angry. Decent people now were angry people, and what America needed at this low moment in its history was more anger, not less.

But lately his own anger had been metastasizing at such speed, and in all directions, that it frightened him. It felt terminal.

He was angry with the landlord, that smarmy shyster Chinese bully so obviously bent on robbing him, Alida, and everyone else of their rightful homes. He hated the man’s ill-fitting double-breasted suit, his droopy eyelids, his real estate jargon, his vile heh-heh-heh! laugh. His ownership of the Acropolis was a prime symbol of how the world had lately fallen into the hands of grifters, liars, and cheats.

He was angry with Lucy, so willfully deaf and blind to the reality of what was happening, with her smug little sarcasms, her tolerant smiles. Aren’t you overreacting? That drove Tad wild.

He was angry with total strangers. One day last week, two women yakking in a supermarket and blocking his passage with their carts had managed to rouse in Tad his inner murderer. When he saw moms on the school run driving Hummers, he wanted to fling bricks through their tinted fucking windows. A knot of lawyers in Armani suits and tasseled loafers, talking outside the Rainier Club after a long and evidently profitable lunch, made him want to reach for his thought machine-gun.

Such anger was alien to him. As a lifelong student of Stanislavski, Tad had always taken pride in losing himself inside a character. He believed that a certain capacity for self-abnegation was an essential part of the actor’s job. He’d gone to Zen workshops, to meditate himself nearly out of existence. Through dire professional disappointments, like the part he’d so nearly won in the New York premiere of Albee’s The Play About the Baby, as through grief after Michael’s death, he’d been able to find in himself a quiet, deep-breathing place from where he could contemplate the worst with something not too far from equanimity.

No more. Now he found himself raging like the most psychotic of the poor bastards down in the alley, waving his bottle and howling imprecations at blank windows.

Until Sunday, he’d been unaware of just how dangerously far his disease had spread. It felt closer to demonic possession than he could have conceived when he found his anger boiling up against Alida. He was astonished and terrified by himself.

Unthinkable. Yet the too-familiar shivering, the stiffening of muscles in his cheeks, the seismic disturbance in his foundations, were out of his control. The mad interloper standing in Tad’s shoes was raging internally at Alida the way it raged at the moms in the Hummers. It, not him. It was a thing, not a person — a cancer doing what cancers must.

He’d lain awake all night, pressing his fists into his eyes to stop the tears. It was futile and cowardly of him to blame his anger on the times, which were no excuse for his wanton fury with Alida. He wished he could pray, for redemption and absolution, but he despised sky-god religions; there was nobody up there to pray to. He ached for Michael, the most understanding and level-headed of confessors. At four he clambered out of bed to rummage through his narrow shelf of Buddha books, unopened for years.

Anger. One of the great obstacles to Nirvana, a delusion, a belief in a false I and a false object. “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned,” said the Buddha. “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” And here was the Dalai Lama:

If we examine how anger or hateful thoughts arise in us, we will find that, generally speaking, they arise when we feel hurt, when we feel that we have been unfairly treated by someone against our expectations. If in that instant we examine carefully the way anger arises, there is a sense that it comes as a protector, comes as a friend that would help our battle or in taking revenge against the person who has inflicted harm on us. So the anger or hateful thought that arises appears to come as a shield or a protector. But in reality that is an illusion. It is a very delusory state of mind.

Anger the false friend: yes, for the last few years Tad had found companionship in his anger. How often had he soothed himself to sleep by plotting the destruction of his enemies, from the president of the United States to the new artistic director at the Rep? Time and again he’d reached out gratefully to his anger as a buddy and a bedfellow; yet on Sunday night with Alida, he’d found himself to be his anger’s slave.

Now, he read, he must learn to feel “compassion” for his anger. But he could no more feel compassion for it than he could turn himself inside-out like a sock. That he was too angry with his anger was the problem: he wanted to get his hands around its neck and throttle it to death, which was, as they said in the Buddha books, incurably bad karma. By 4:30, Tad was getting angry at the Dalai Lama. At five, he turned on the radio to listen to the news: suicide bomber kills thirty-six, White House defends new measures to combat terrorism…

Fuckers! Tad thought. Those guys are the fucking terrorists.

RELUCTANT as Lucy was to go back to Useless Bay for the weekend, she had to accept Augie’s invitation because Tad had forced her hand. Not to go would give the appearance of caving in to his ridiculous outburst on Sunday night. He hated Augie because he’d refused to demonstrate with his students against the war in Vietnam — so far as Lucy could see, that was the long and short of it, and his paranoid tirade about Augie’s “sadism” was just an attempt to settle an ancient political score. Either that or he was being babyishly jealous of Alida’s fondness for Augie. Whatever — they now had to go to Useless Bay. To do otherwise would be bad for Tad’s character.

Yet she was concerned. Tad’s increasingly odd behavior over the last few weeks was truly frightening. She looked anxiously for signs of weight loss, but on his inhibitors and whatnots he was deceptively pink, portly, and Pickwickian. When he came back with his wrist bandaged after the TOPOFF exercise, Lucy’s first appalled thought was Kaposi’s sarcoma — he’s hiding a lesion. Tad had always been chattily informative about things like his T-cell count and the changes in his cocktail of medications, but lately he’d brushed off her inquiries with I’m fine and My doc threatens to predecease me. What was really going on?

She was terrified by the thought of him dying, and not just on Alida’s behalf. Tad could be maddening, but he was her best and closest friend, the only person besides Alida whom she loved. She’d often thought wistfully that if only he weren’t gay, the best place to settle their absurd political disagreements would be in bed, where she could take him in her arms and exorcize his black fantasies with kisses. These fantasies arose, she was certain, from the loneliness of his life without Michael: Tad was someone made to need a partner to cherish him, a role that Lucy, had things been differently constructed, would have volunteered for at the drop of a hat.

The sight of his bandaged wrist had panicked her, but when the bandage was off the following day, what it concealed was exactly what Tad had said, a nasty scratch inflicted by an amateur actor with a shovel. Though she hadn’t said a word about it, the relief that swept through her was immense.

She loved him dearly, but he could not be allowed to get away with the outrageous performance he’d put on last night. So she called the Vanagses’ number and got Minna.

Augie was out birdwatching. “He’ll be so pleased — he likes to talk to you,” Minna said, her faint Mittel-Europa accent sounding more pronounced over the phone.

“What can we bring?”

“Yourselves only. Everything on the island’s so much fresher than in the city.”

“Wine?”

“You see Augie’s cellar? We are drowning in wine.”

After Minna’s openheartedness, it was with a feeling of unpleasant disloyalty that Lucy sat down to her assigned task for the morning, which was to read a truly false memoir of World War II — Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. No ordinary fraud, Mr. Wilkomirski, having persuaded himself that his childhood lay in the Nazi extermination camps, had produced a work of fiction that, before it was exposed by a Swiss journalist, had won prizes and international attention as a work of harrowing documentary fact. Could you tell just by reading the book, Lucy wondered, by studying the way the words fell on the page, that it was untrue? If so, could Boy 381 stand up to the same test?

Most reviewers had been taken in by Fragments, comparing Wilkomirski to Primo Levi and Anne Frank, though one or two had raised cautious doubts as to its authenticity. Then the Swiss journalist, Daniel Ganzfried, had come along, with the shocking news that Wilkomirski “knows Auschwitz and Majdanek only as a tourist.” The last thing that Lucy wanted or expected was to be Augie’s Ganzfried. In fact, she hoped very much that reading Wilkomirski would put her mind finally at rest about Vanags.

No doubt about it: there was something thin, stagy, melodramatic, unreal in the opening chapter of Fragments, where Wilkomirski’s father was killed on the third page.

No sound comes out of his mouth, but a big stream of something black shoots out of his neck as the transport squashes him with a big crack against the house.

She didn’t buy it — but might she have, had Ganzfried not blown a hole in Wilkomirski’s story? Was the alloy ring in the words themselves, or was it just the wisdom of hindsight that made them sound so readily disbelievable? The childish voice felt contrived to her, as Augie’s never did. Surely no child, watching his father, would see him as so deliberately childish a stick figure? The falsity was right there in the words, she was sure of it.

She read on:

There’s a station in my memory. We have to go through a barrier, papers are shown and looked at — maybe false ones.

Sighs of relief and we’re standing on a platform and it’s sunny—

“Land lord!”

That imperious knock: him again. Letting Mr. Lee into the apartment, she did her best to make nice, lavishly thanking him for his work on the shelves.

“No problem, no problem. Got new lock for you today. Security!” He held out a chunky piece of machinery, somewhat scratched, that had obviously led a previous life in another building.

“Mr. Lee, was it you who brought the t-tulips?”

“Tertelips?”

She pointed at the vase.

“Oh, flowers, yeah. Old ones all dead and crackly.”

“Well, how kind.”

“No problem.” He trailed an orange cable across the carpet and laid out a filthy sheet beneath the door.

“Can I get you coffee? W-w-water? Tea?”

“You make coffee, Lucy. That be great. Cream, no sugar.” He waved his power drill at the kitchen area, as if to dispatch her there.

It was astonishing that the replacement of a lock could make such a racket, and the electric tools whizzed and screamed as if a complete remodeling of the apartment was under way. When she took the coffee to him, he waved at her from behind a churring saw. She tried to return to Fragments, but the din made it impossible to read a line. In a momentary pause he called, “Good coffee, Lucy. How I like it — strong.”

“I’d better remember that,” she said.

“Don’t drink tea,” he said over the whine of a bared screwdriver.

It took him the best part of an hour to finish the job; then he made her try the lock.

“Terrific,” she said. “Fantastic.” What could one say about locks? “Very solid.”

“Keep you safe.”

“Thank you.”

He made no move to clean up his stuff and go, but just sat down on one of the chairs around the dining table. “So you a rider, Lucy. What kind of riding you do?”

“Oh…articles, mostly, for newspapers and magazines. I’m working on one now. Against a tight d-d-deadline, so I’m afraid—”

“Whaddaya write about?”

“People, places.”

“What people?”

“Sometimes celebrities, sometimes p-people nobody’s ever heard of.”

“I like to read. How ’bout you give me something to read what you wrote?”

Desperate to get rid of him and back to Wilkomirski, she scanned the heaps of old magazines in the corner, where all her published stuff was filed, though nothing there could make much sense to a Chinese parking-lot tycoon. She said, “I wrote a piece about Bill Gates once, a long time ago.”

“Bill Gates, huh? Lemme see.”

She rummaged through a toppling stack and pulled out the old New Yorker from very near the bottom. She stuck a Post-It on the page where her piece began, and handed him the magazine. “There you are. Now—”

But he remained sitting and started to read, scowling at the mass of small print, his lips moving. The piece, even in its eviscerated state, ran to nearly seven thousand words; at this rate, he’d be sitting there forever.

“Wah!” he said, half shout, half whistle. “It say here, ‘Gates told me that…’ You meet Bill Gates?”

“Well, yes, twice. I always meet my subjects.”

“Bill Gates! You mean you talk to Bill Gates like you talk to me?”

“I spent an hour with him in his office. Then another time he showed me his house.”

“What tips he give you?”

“Tips?”

“Like business tips.”

“We weren’t really talking business. It was more like personal.”

The landlord shook his head slowly in reproach. She’d evidently missed her great opportunity. “How much they pay you to write this?”

“Not enough,” Lucy said in what she hoped was a briskly deterrent tone.

“Like they pay by the hour?”

“No. By the p-p-piece.”

“No benefits?”

“I wish.”

“You ought to read some books.” Now he sounded severe.

“I do.” She gestured at the shelves he’d fastened to the wall.

“Nah. Not storybooks. Good books. You ever read Who Moved My Cheese? That’s a good book. Kind of like a storybook, but different. Lot of tips. Maybe I give you it sometime.”

“That would be nice. Now, please, Mr. Lee…”

At last she succeeded in budging him from his perch. He folded his dirty sheet, gathered his tools into their canvas bag, picked up the New Yorker, and at the door tapped the new lock. “You’re safe now, Lucy.”

“Thank you for taking all this trouble, Mr. Lee.”

“No trouble. Enjoy.” Smiling weirdly, tools in one hand, magazine in the other, he made a stiff little bow, and left.

Fast running out of time, Lucy lunched on a yogurt that was past its sell-by date and returned to the seemingly unconscious fraudster Binjamin Wilkomirski, finding the book increasingly irksome as she plowed through his disordered ragbag of false memories. She was at the point of giving up on it altogether when, in Chapter 12, an odd passage caught her eye. The boy Wilkomirski, now supposedly in a concentration camp, saw a “mountain” of naked women’s corpses. One appeared to have a bit of life in it: a sudden twitchy movement of the stomach.

Now I can see the whole belly. There’s a big wound on one side, with something moving in it. I get to my feet, so that I can see better. I poke my head forward, and at this very moment the wound springs open, the wall of the stomach lifts back, and a huge, blood-smeared, shining rat darts down the mound of corpses. Other rats run startled out of the confusion of bodies, heading for open ground.

I saw it, I saw it! The dead women are giving birth to rats!

The author, who’d spent years in psychotherapy, was clearly on overly familiar terms with Freud, and Lucy saw his disgusting rat story, or rat dream, as evidence only of his distinct talent for morbid fantasy. Yet the passage immediately recalled a bit in Augie’s book. Of course, everything was different: no mountain of bodies, just one male body, naked except for a woolly hat and one sock, sprawled face-down in a German street after a night raid by RAF bombers. Augie wrote that he’d seen a small, wet rat wriggling out of the cleft in the man’s buttocks like an agile four-legged turd.

Where there was war, there were bodies; where there were bodies, there were rats. It was no more than that. Lucy was just new to its ghastly everyday vernacular.

IN MATH CLASS, all Alida could think of was how wrong her algebra was — her human algebra. She’d had little sleep, whiling away the long dark hours first with Agatha Christie, then with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, unable to lose herself in either. The equation involving her, Tad, and her mom had suddenly, terrifyingly, come apart. Isolate the variable: the variable, the big x, was obviously Augie, though Alida couldn’t begin to figure why. Get every term containing the variable on one side of the equation; then get any term that doesn’t contain the variable on the other side of the equation. Which was a lot easier said than done, because somehow Tad was tied to x, and so were she and her mom. The obvious solution was to eliminate x, but she couldn’t do that because her mom was writing an article about him, and it looked like x would be in their lives for weeks and weeks. She eventually maddened herself to sleep with fruitless variations on this theme, and woke up with a, b, c, and x still jostling furiously in her mind.

Looking across the room she saw her own perplexity reflected in the face of Finn, who was scowling, frowning, scribbling, then wildly staring into space. Finn could be a math genius when he bothered, so he surely wasn’t fazed by the problems set by Mr. Tennyson, which were easy: Alida had worked out all three in less than five minutes. She knew “poor Finn” had his own difficulties with human algebra, so maybe he was working on a baffling equation parallel to her own. Whatever it was, he seemed to be in a state of mental torture, and for the first time ever she found herself actually sympathizing with Finn. Then he caught her eye and pulled his Tasmanian-devil face at her. Boys!