T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain

I like my wife fine and we had a pretty smooth run of it over the years but there was a sort of — oh, what do I want to say here? — expectedness to the days that sometimes bore down on me till I felt like a piece of furniture that hasn’t been moved in a lifetime. An end table maybe, made of maple, with some fine beveling that serves no other purpose than to collect dust. Which is why — and I’m not making excuses, just stating the facts — I pulled on my black jeans and turtleneck that night, dug my ski mask out of the closet and climbed up the backside of Lily Baron’s cabin to the patch of roof where the deck projects on the second floor and peeped in the window with no other intention but to see what she was doing at eleven forty-five at night, and maybe, if that was what she wanted, to surprise her. Give her a little jolt. In the best possible sense, that is, by way of amiability and with the promise of mutual enjoyment.

You see, Lily has had it rough this past year. She’s only forty-three, but Frank, her husband who’s no longer with us, was in his sixties, and when he retired, she quit her job as a legal secretary and came up here to Big Timber to live out the rest of her days in tranquility amidst the giant sequoias. They built their dream house on the double lot Frank had bought back in the eighties and became full-timers (or dream cabin, I should say, since the twenty-eight of us who live here year-round as well as the fifty or so part-timers like to think of ourselves as roughing it, and while a couple of us do have actual log cabins built from kits out of actual peeled logs, most of us settle for houses with alpine touches, like cedar paneling, stone fireplaces and mounted animal heads over our hand-hewn mantelpieces. To a man, woman, child and dog, we call them cabins).

Frank volunteered for neighborhood watch and he helped out in winter with snow removal, and Lily, with her heartbreaking face and a figure unruined by childbearing because she’d borne no children, not to Frank or her previous husband, who, I understand, worked for the Forest Service over at Mineral King before he drank himself senseless and pitched headlong over the rail of the fire lookout, began organizing potlucks and bridge nights down at the lodge, that sort of thing. And she began drinking more than was probably good for her. As did Frank. This — and we’ve all joked about it — is just one of the hazards of living in a fishbowl community at seventy-two hundred feet and a good twisting brake-eating hour from the nearest town in a place of natural beauty so all-encompassing God might have thought to set it aside for His wife. If He even bothered to get married.

Anyway, Frank liked nature, liked the hills, and despite his age he was always out there hiking no matter the weather. You’d look up from the fire or the TV or your first double vodka and tonic on a snow-bleared winter morning and there he’d be, with his daypack and alpenstock, heading off into the woods without a thought as to trails, compasses or the weather, and if he had a cell phone it really wouldn’t have mattered since the reception here is what they invented the Call Failed indicator for. He went out one spring afternoon with his fly rod and a daypack containing a pint of Jim Beam and two cream cheese and olive sandwiches Lily had sealed in plastic wrap and he never came back. As they later reconstructed it, he was fishing Hellbore Creek for goldens when he must have taken a tumble because his leg was broken in two places, though with his eyes gouged out by the ravens and the way the bear had frolicked with the corpse no one could be sure. He’d been missing four days by the time Search and Rescue found him, the sandwiches gone along with the soft stuff of his eyes and the bourbon drawn down to less than a finger in its intact glass shell. Lily said she was sure he’d suffered and we all tried to reassure her, citing the solace of the bourbon, the soothing rhapsody of the stream and the sun that made way for the stars as if to give him a glimpse of eternity when the nights came on, but privately we knew she was right.

Of course he’d suffered. Alone with his pain. Hopeless. Fighting off the ravens till he could no longer lift his arms. He’d tried to crawl his way out of the canyon, according to Bill Secord, who was one of the first on the scene, but the pain in his leg was too bad apparently and he didn’t make it more than maybe two hundred yards despite all the scratching in the undergrowth and the way his fingernails were abraded down to the nub.

As if that wasn’t enough to lay on any woman, especially one as sweet and undeserving of it as Lily, there was the further complication of her accident. And this wasn’t much more than maybe three or four months after the funeral, when she was just starting to climb out of her own personal canyon and was entertaining a man whose name I don’t want to mention here because the sound of that name — hell, the look of him with his fat gloating face hanging out the open window of his pickup — makes me burn up with jealousy like a dry stick of pine laid on the coals. That’s funny too, I mean, that this particular image should pop into my head, because Lily’s accident involved just exactly that: burning. She had one of these old-fashioned popcorn makers, with the hot oil bubbling in the guts of it, and the way I see it she was a bit flustered when this particular individual showed up at the door with a bottle in one hand and a fistful of wilting wildflowers in the other, no way ready even to start thinking along those terms with Frank still intact in the ground, or mostly so, and maybe she was rushing a little, overcompensating in her role as hostess, and when she settled into the couch with her second drink her foot got tangled in the cord and the whole business, scalding oil, Orville Redenbacher’s crackling yellow kernels and the gleaming aluminum cylinder of the popcorn maker itself, came down on her.

The oil melted the skin across half her back down to the pantyline and wrapped a big annealed scar around her left shoulder and upper arm and burned what looks like two teardrops into the flesh under her left eye, which the plastic surgeon says he can remove and smooth over just like new once she saves up for the next round of operations, because, of course, Frank, who never even bothered to carry a compass with him out into the woods, didn’t have adequate health coverage from his insurer. Or life insurance, for that matter. I remember we all chipped in to defray the funeral expenses, but inevitably we fell well short of the actual cost. Which Lily had to absorb with no help from anybody, not Frank’s sister in Missoula or his one-armed son Lily’d had to put up with through the first ten years of her marriage.

So I was on her roof. With cause. And Jessica, my wife, who likes to turn in early — she’s yawning and gaping and stretching her arms out like she’s drowning come seven-thirty or eight — was at home, oblivious, snoring lightly in the frigid cavern of the bedroom we shared with its view in summer of the blistered duff at the ankles of the trees and in winter the piled-up drifts that look like waves rolling across a stormy white sea. If I’d expected Lily to be, oh, I don’t know, putting her hair up before the bathroom mirror so that her breasts rose and fell with the action of her arms in a baby-blue see-through negligee or something of the like, I was disappointed. At first I could see nothing but the upper hallway leading to her bedroom and the head of the mounted mule deer that graced the top of the stairway (the rock-hard nose of which I’d kissed for luck any number of times when Jessica and I were over for drinks and dinner and drinks when Frank was alive). There was a light on there, glowing faintly in the cheap smoked-glass sconce they’d got for twelve ninety-five at the Home Depot in Porterville, but there was no sign of movement. Or of her. They had a dog — she had a dog, I should say, a Chihuahua mix — but it was so old and withered and blind and deaf and pathetic it couldn’t have raised the alarm if an entire armored division rolled through the living room. So I waited. And watched.

Did I mention, by the way, that this was in winter?

The night was clear all the way up to where the stars slid across their tracks, which meant that it was cold, maybe ten or twelve above, and I was having a little trouble seeing through the eye-slits of my mask, plus my breath was condensing around the opening for my mouth and freezing there so that my lips had begun to sting even before I’d got to Lily’s (on foot, because I didn’t want to just pull up there out front in my truck, because that would have spoiled the surprise — that, and you never knew who was watching up here where everybody’s business is everybody’s business). At least the roof was clear. Frank had gone metal, with a steep pitch that overhung the upper deck, and the sun had taken the three feet of snow the last storm had dropped and deposited it down below. All to the good. I broke the crust of ice around my mouth and was just about to ease myself down on the deck to get a look in the window there, the bedroom window, when the slick thin all-but-invisible sheet of ice that had replaced the snow took my boots out from under me and I lost my balance.

We don’t have gutters here, for obvious reasons — the weight of the snow shearing over the side would rip them off in a heartbeat — so there was nothing between me and a two-story drop but corrugated sheet metal and the odd rivet. I was a little drunk. I admit it. We’d been over to the Ringsteads’ for drinks and cards earlier and after we got home I guess I kept on pouring even as I was thinking about how lonely Lily must have been because half the mountain was there but she never showed. Anyway, I did not plummet over the side and go down two stories to where the big granite boulders protruded like bad teeth from the drifts, or not yet anyway, but instead just managed to catch myself on one of the steel chimney supports Frank had been obliged to install after a Jeffrey pine came down and obliterated the chimney last winter. I was spared. But the noise I’d made in trying to save myself got the blind and deaf Chihuahua barking and that barking apparently roused Lily.

I was spread-eagled on the slick roof and just trying to inch my way across to the deck when the door there flew open and Lily appeared, dressed in the baby-blue nightie of my dreams which I guess I must have seen hanging on the hook in the bathroom when I went in to relieve myself on one of those happy drinks-dinner-drinks nights, only with a big off-white cable-knit sweater obscuring the parts of her anatomy I’d most come to see. She let out a low exclamation in her sweet girlish voice that was like the trickle of a pure mountain spring, the dog at her feet yapping and the weight of all those stars beginning to crash down on me, and then she said, “Don’t you move, you son of a bitch, because I’ve got a gun.” And she did have a gun. We all have guns up here, twenty guns per person, as if it were a rule of the community. Of course I didn’t have one, or not then anyway. My twenty guns were back home in my own cabin.

But here was my problem. I’d come to reconnoiter, albeit with the hope and maybe even expectation of a whole lot more, but I’d lost the element of surprise and wondered now whether I ought to say something to identify myself as me and not some crazed rapist paroled out of Lompoc Prison and dressed all in black with a black ski mask concealing his face and bad intentions in his heart. And it wasn’t getting shot that motivated me, believe me, because I would have welcomed it at that point — it was what my mother, my poor dead overworked and long-suffering mother, used to call mortification. If I revealed myself now, now that she’d got the drop on me, as they say, how could I hope to convince her that my purpose was essentially romantic — and beyond that consolatory even?

As it turned out, that decision was taken from my hands by the action of what some people would call fate but that I’m here to tell you was just bad luck, pure and simple. I lost my grip. The roof was like a skating rink if you could take a skating rink and cant it at a forty-five degree angle. Suddenly the night deserted me and I was gone. And it was my bad luck — my very bad, catastrophic luck — that I did not land among the drifts but on a big unforgiving incisor of rock that broke my leg just as thoroughly and nastily as Frank’s had been broken out there among the boulders of Hellbore Creek.

While I was lying there, concealed behind my mask like a second-string superhero and unable to move because the pain was like a comet trapped inside my body, I began thinking — and I don’t know why — of the stepson, of Frank Jr. He’d lost his arm in an incident at the San Diego Zoo when he was fourteen, which you may have read about because it made all the papers at the time. There was still a controversy surrounding the whole business, as to whether he really was high on angel dust and provoking the polar bear where it was only trying to cool off in its fetid little pond of greenish water or whether he honestly slipped and fell, but the result was he lost his right arm right to the shoulder and maybe a little beyond. You look at him now — he’s thirty-two years old, handsome as a TV anchorman, with Frank’s blond hair and squared-off features — and from the left side he could be doing Marine Corps recruiting posters, but on the right there’s just nothing there, and when he walks it really throws him off balance so he’s got a kind of funny hitch in his step. Lily, who’s just eleven years older than he is, more the age of a big sister than a mother, had to put up with him under her roof when she and Frank lived down in the flats all those years because with his disability Frank Jr. couldn’t support himself, and believe me, he’s about as pleasant to be around as a cage full of rats, angry at the world and always pissing and moaning about the indescribable pain he feels in his missing limb. Which he invariably goes on to describe in detail. Ad nauseam.

But let me get back to it, because this connects in to what I’m trying to say here, about pain, about my pain and Lily’s pain and everybody else’s too, the upshot being that about three minutes later I’m exposed for who I am. To Lily, who’s standing over me with a flashlight and her snubnose.38 Special that Frank gave her for her birthday year before last, because here’s the kid — Frank Jr., who’s supposed to be living down the hill in Porterville in some sort of halfway house — appearing out of nowhere to swoop down with the one hand he’s got left to him and tear the mask off my face.

—

I don’t think I ever talked and wheedled and apologized and extenuated as much as I did that night, stretched out on my back in the snow and freezing my ass off while Lily looked at me as if I were something she’d stepped on in the parking lot at Costco and Frank Jr. ran in to phone for the sheriff, the fire department and every last living soul on the mountain, including old Brick Sternreit, who’d won the title of Mountain Man three times running during the Memorial Day chili cookoff despite the fact that he was closing in on ninety, Bart Bliss, who ran the lodge and sported the longest beard on the mountain, three widows, two widowers and my own sharp-honed steel-eyed rapier of a wife, Jessica. There was an interval there, Frank Jr. in the house and phones ringing everywhere, when it was just me and Lily and the dead cold of the night. Lily had lowered the.38, thumbed the safety and dropped the thing in the pocket of the big cardigan sweater, which I now saw was decorated with a pair of prancing reindeer done up in red stitching, but the flashlight was still leveled on my face. “Lily,” I gasped, fighting for breath against the pain, “could you lower that light? Please? Because my leg’s broke”—I almost said, Just like Frank’s, but suppressed it—“and I can’t move and the light’s right in my eyes.”

The beam never wavered. “What in hell were you thinking?” This was framed in an accusatory tone, and her voice was anything but melodious and sweet.

“I love you,” I said. “I’ve loved you since the day Frank brought you up here and we all got drunk on pitchers of margaritas down at the lodge… remember?”

Her voice was flat. “You don’t love me.”

“I do.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. What did you think, you’d see me naked or something?”

There was the sound, in the distance, of snow tires crunching the crust of ice on the blacktop road that twisted below us past the Turners’ place, and already the headlights were dancing in the tops of the stripped aspens out front of Lily’s. “You must think I’m like a Peeping Tom or something, but really, I just, I mean—”

“No,” she said, cutting me off, “I don’t think you’re a Peeping Tom — I think you’re a slime. I mean, really, how could you? With Frank barely cold in the ground and what about Jessica, what about her, what about your wife?”

The pain — the comet that was shooting from my lower leg to my brain and back again, fighting to explode into the night — seized me up a minute and I had no reasonable answer to give her. I wanted to say, She won’t mind, or She doesn’t have to know, or I don’t love her, I love you, but I couldn’t.

“And the mask? What’s with the mask? I mean, that’s just sick.”

And so I wheedled and protested but it did no good because those tires and those headlights belonged to Bill Secord, first responder, and before I could blink twice the whole community was gathered there to contemplate me in my sprawled and broken disgrace (wildly, it came to me that I could say I was just checking the chimney braces as a favor to Frank, in memory of Frank, that is, and to help out a poor widow who didn’t know the first thing about winter maintenance). Voices drifted over me. Two dogs slunk up to sniff my boots. I noticed a bottle of vodka passing from hand to hand, but no one thought to offer me any, not even to wet my lips. People debated whether or not I should be moved and Bill was all official about back injuries and the like and the sheriff appeared out of the shadows to take his report while the ambulance was jerking its lights in and out of the trees and Jessica, my bedmate, my companion, my old rug and sweet married bride, lurched up and leaned over me with her face so disarranged with hurt and confusion and rage I barely recognized her as she let loose with a cold wad of spit that wound up freezing right there on my cheek as the paramedics lifted me onto the stretcher and the doors of the ambulance slammed shut on the night and the mountain, which until that very moment had been my home and my hideout and my refuge from the bad old world.

You want pain? Jessica filed for divorce before they even got the pin in my leg, and when I had to rely on the jerk whose name I won’t mention to drive me home from the hospital and help me up the steps to my own house and then make a second trip out to the car for the wheelchair, she was gone. As was about eighty-seven percent of the furniture and the plasma TV that had been my only solace the last couple of years, that and the squirrels, that is, and she’d cleaned out most of the microwave dinners and canned goods so that I had nothing to eat on top of nothing to watch. Oh, that was a cold house. And I tell you, for the rest of that winter, I never showed my face for the humiliation of what had gone down, and if I drank bourbon, I drank it alone.

If we’re anything, though, we’re a community that forgets if not forgives — hell, half of them up here have done things twice as bad as looking in on a woman out of concern and love in the dead of a winter’s night — and by spring I was feeling almost back to normal. So much so that I even took the wheelchair down to the lodge one night, up and down those looping murderous hills for a good mile till my palms were bleeding, and sat there over a medium-rare steak, a pitcher of Firestone and a shot glass that never stayed dry for long because everybody who came through the door stood me a round and slapped me on the back and said how good it was to see me out and about. And that was fine. Time heals all wounds and such. Except that my nerves were like guitar strings twisted too tight and my heart was undergoing cardiac arrest at the thought that Lily might walk through that door at any minute. Which she didn’t. I tried calling her when I got back home — Bill Secord gave me a ride, thank God, or I’d probably still be down there — but she had caller I.D. and wouldn’t pick up.

It must have been a few weeks later that I ran into that kid out on Tamarack Lane. Tamarack intersects my street, Aspen, and then swerves past our little man-made lake and continues on to the lodge and the main road beyond, so that if I want to go anywhere at all ninety percent of the time it’s going to be down Tamarack. We only have a couple of roads up here anyway, snaking wide frost-buckled blacktop thoroughfares to nowhere, hemmed in by the towering sequoias, ponderosa pines and the like that give the place its name, with maybe a cabin tucked back in the woods every couple of hundred yards, and these roads loop around back on themselves so the plan of the development is like a big hamster maze, one way in and one way out. Beyond that, there’s the state route winding its way down to Porterville to the north in case anybody would want to go down there and buy a plasma TV to replace the one lost to them, and to Kernville on the other side, where there’s nothing much but a couple run-down bars and trinket shops for the tourists. In winter, the Kernville road is closed due to the fact that nobody lives out there and the snow, which averages twenty-four feet per annum and goes to as much as forty and more in an El Niño year, isn’t worth the expense of plowing. Which puts us, for a good four or five months of the year, at the end of the road, for all that indicates or implies about the quality of people we sometimes unfortunately wind up with.

This kid was one of them, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was getting around pretty good by then with my cane, my leg still shrunken and white as a grub where the cast had constricted it, and I’d just turned onto Tamarack, thinking to hobble down to the lodge for a little exercise and maybe check the mail and see who was around, have a drink or two, get social, when there he was, striding along in this jaunty hey-look-at-me kind of way. Now, it was pretty rare to see strangers walking around the development — somebody goes by my house and nine out of ten I can tell you their first, middle and last name and all the regrets they’ve had since they got out of elementary school — but there are hikers and day-trippers and whatnot coming by occasionally, so it wasn’t unheard of. Anyway, the kid looks to be twenty or so and he’s tall and greyhound skinny, with a little soul patch just like mine, and so of course I’m neighborly and call out my standard greeting (“What up?”), which he returns with a big doggy smile that shows off the gap where three of his teeth are missing in front, one upstairs, two down. Next thing we’re standing there chatting, and if I was vaguely aware of one of the house alarms going off up the street (we’re always getting cabins broken into up here because you leave a place vacant long enough and somebody’s going to notice), I barely gave it a thought.

He was pretty winning, this kid, a real talker. Within sixty seconds he was asking me about the quality of the construction up on the mountain — he was a big aficionado of cabin architecture as well as being a master carpenter, or so he said, and why not believe him? — and three minutes later I found myself humping back up Aspen with him to show off what I’d done vis-à-vis layout, exposed beams, roof pitch and all the rest when I took early retirement and built the place for Jessica six years ago. We got talking. I made a pot of coffee. He leaned back in the one armchair my wife had left behind and observed that the place was pretty spare. I agreed that it was. And I said to myself, What the hell, what have I got to lose? So I told him my story. When I was done — and I have to admit I went to some length to wring the very bitterest dregs out of it — I offered to freshen up his coffee with a shot of Jim Beam and he took me up on it and then, because we were just being neighborly as all hell and maybe I hadn’t had as many people to talk to as I might have liked these past months, I encouraged him to sit right there and open up. What was his story? How’d he wind up on the mountain? Was he somebody’s kid? Grandkid?

Let me tell you, if you thought Lily had troubles, this kid went her one better. Or worse, I guess. He just looked at me a long moment over the rim of his cup, as if deciding whether to trust me or not, and he never flinched when the sheriff’s four-by went up and down the road two if not three times, siren screaming, and then he said, “You ever hear about that kid the parolee snatched in the back of Safeway when he was nine years old and then kept him traveling around the country till the kid didn’t know where he was or even who he was? Not to mention the dirty things he made that scared little kid do just to earn a candy bar — or, shit, a half-rotten scrap of meat? The handcuffs — you hear about the handcuffs?”

Well, that was a story. How he had to eat dog food out of the can with the only present the man ever gave him, which was a bent spoon. How the man made him split wood for the stove and clean the house like a slave all day and wouldn’t let him get within a mile of a newspaper and never let him out of the house and didn’t even have a TV. I still don’t know how much of it was the truth, but I watched the tears come up in his eyes and you know he had trouble whatever it was. We sat talking for the better part of an hour and then the sheriff, siren stifled now but his lights still flashing, pulled into the driveway, and who was with him but Bill Secord, stepping out carefully so as not to trample the irises Jessica planted along the drive last year, and right behind him, in her red cowgirl boots and skintight jeans, was Lily.

The kid gave me a look. “I need to tell you something—” he started, and I cut him off.

“You been breaking into cabins?”

“Not really.”

“What do you mean not really? Either you did or you didn’t.” There was the thump of the sheriff’s footfall on the weathered cedar planks of the front deck and then the accompanying thump of Bill’s boot and a lighter tread altogether, which was Lily’s, I knew. Can I tell you that I was torn in two directions in that instant, that I felt something for the kid despite myself and that the thought of seeing Lily’s pale white oval of a face and maybe catching a whiff of that hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar-an-ounce perfume she dabs so prettily under the twin points of her jawbone had me all but paralyzed?

The kid’s voice came at me like a tape on high speed. “Listen, I didn’t steal anything, I mean, look at me — where would I hide it? I was hungry, that was all. Because it wasn’t normal, what happened to me, you know? And I–I’m sorry, I just get these food cravings.” He was on his feet now and he was pleading. “I only escaped three years ago.”

I didn’t say anything. Lily was right outside the door.

“Listen, I’m begging you,” the kid said, drifting like a shadow across the room. “I just want to — could I just go in the bedroom a minute and close the door?”

So he did and I opened the front door to the sheriff (his name’s Randy Juniper, he’s thirty-six years old and he has a permanent hair up his ass, which is to say I don’t like him and never have liked him and never will), Bill Secord and Lily. Lily looked like she was drowning. Water up to her neck and the river in flood. She and Bill stepped in the room and Bill closed the door behind him and stared down at his shoes. Randy, I noticed, had his three-foot-long flashlight in one hand, though it was broad daylight, and he squinted at me in my own living room as if it was an interrogation cell in Guantánamo or someplace, and then, in his official sheriffese, he said, “You see anybody suspicious out there this morning?”

“They broke into my cabin,” Lily whispered, not looking at me.

“Who?” I said, playing for time.

Now she did glance up, her eyes, which are the exact color of Coca-Cola poured into a clear spotless glass, hardening with the contemplation of how much had been laid on her and laid on her again. “This kid,” she said, her voice gone soft, “like a teenager or maybe twenties, real gawky and skinny and stupid-looking — I pulled into the drive because I was down the lodge for breakfast and I saw him coming round the back of the cabin and when he saw me he just took off into the woods.”

Next question, and I didn’t like the way Sheriff Randy was looking at me, not at all: “Did they get anything?”

They hadn’t. But the screen over the kitchen sink had been slit open and that was enough for her. And the sheriff.

“You,” the sheriff said finally, “wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”

My answer was a long time coming — seconds, I guess, five, maybe ten even. I didn’t like the implication here because what they were hinting at was that I was a criminal, a thief, maybe a colluder with thieves, and all because I fell off Lily’s roof with the best of intentions, with love in my heart, and so I just looked Randy right in the face and shook my head no.

—

Time passes slowly up here, the hours squeezing out like toothpaste at the flattened end of the tube. I noticed that the days got a little longer and then they started to get a little shorter. The sun hung up in the trees. I fed the birds and the squirrels, stared at the faded place on the wall where the TV had been and thought about various projects I might embark on to fill the lonely hours, building a chicken coop maybe (though chickens wouldn’t last half an hour up here what with the coyotes and the bear and his cousins), buying a horse or a dirt bike so I could get out in the woods more, overhauling the engine on my snow machine. None of these came to fruition. And if I’d taken some satisfaction in how much my neighbors drank, half of them with corrupted livers and at least two I know of working on a single kidney each, now I was drinking so heavily I found myself waking up all day long and in places I didn’t even know I could get to, like on top of the refrigerator or underneath the pickup.

Lily was the problem, of course. And Jessica, who’d moved in with her mother in Sacramento and refused to return my calls. I did give Jessica some thought, remembering the good times like when I held her head down for a full hundred and ten seconds during an apple-bobbing contest at the county fair or how we’d make up a big pot of chili beans and sit out on the deck and listen to the sounds of nature, but it was Lily who occupied my thoughts. My leg was getting stronger and more and more I found myself drifting past her cabin on my daily walks or driving by after dark just to see if her lights were on.

One day, late afternoon, September touching the leaves of the aspens so they went from green to gold overnight and the breath of winter impatient on the air, I just couldn’t take it any longer and decided to dig out my bird-watching binoculars and maybe just stroll through the woods a bit — and if I wound up on the ridge across from Lily’s with an unobstructed view of the lower deck and the Weber grill giving off smoke in the corner there, so much the worse. No one was in sight, but the smoke told me Lily was barbecuing. The thought of that — not just the way she did tri-tip with her special sauce that managed to be both sweet and sour in equal proportions and how she leaned over you to refresh your drink so you could smell the bourbon on her breath and her perfume at the same time, but also the sad fact that I’d once shuffled across the boards of that very deck as an honored guest — got me feeling nostalgic. I sat there on a hard lump of rock, the binoculars trained on the windows, nostalgia clogging my veins like sludge, till the sun shifted and shadows tipped back from the trees and Lily finally appeared, a platter of meat in one hand and a spatula and tongs in the other. She was wearing a pair of red shorts that emphasized the creases front and rear and a low-cut white blouse. Her feet were bare. I wanted to kiss those feet, wanted to come down off my perch and worry over the splinters that were certainly a danger on that deck that hadn’t been treated since Frank died, wanted to warn her, make a joke, see her smile.

We all have binoculars up here, by the way, which are necessary to the enjoyment of nature, or so we tell ourselves, and we like to compete as to whose are the most powerful, just as we compete over our four-by-fours, snow machines and the like. Jessica got my good ones, the Bushnell Elites that allow you to count the whiskers on a marmot’s snout half a mile away, but the ones she left me — bargain basement Nikon 7x20s — were more than adequate to the purpose. I could see not only that Lily’d had her toenails done, in a shade of red that came as close to the hue of those clinging shorts as was humanly possible, but that both of her big toes sported a little white rose painted right in the middle. She was wearing her hoop earrings, the silver glinting in the long tube of sunlight as she bent to lift the top off the Weber and employ the tongs, and though I was maybe a football field away, it was close enough to hear the first startled sizzle of the meat hitting the grill. Or maybe I was imagining that. But I could see that she was all made-up, beautiful as a porcelain doll, with her eyebrows penciled in and her lashes thick as fur.

So I’m only human. And what I was thinking was that even if she wasn’t ready for my company, even if she wouldn’t glance up when I mounted the steps to the deck with a sad forgiving smile and invite me to sit down and break bread with her — or, in this case, slice tri-tip — she would at least have to acknowledge me and maybe even hear me out on the subject of the ski mask and the roof and all the rest. Because I loved her purely and I wanted her to know that. As if it had been decided all along, I pushed myself up from the rock just like that and kept to the cover of the trees while she fussed around the little picnic table on the deck, and as I got closer I could hear the strains of some eighties band leaching out through the screen door in front. At the foot of the driveway, I bent to secrete the binoculars under a bush so as not to give her the wrong impression, and then came silently up on her, looking to the surprise factor, though I wasn’t yet sure if I was going to chime out “Guess who?” or just “Hi” and add that I was in the neighborhood (a joke: we were all in the neighborhood twenty-four/seven) and just thought I’d say hello.

As it turned out, I didn’t have the opportunity, because at that moment Frank Jr. came backing his way out through the screen door, a big wooden bowl of salad clutched to his chest under the pressure of his arm and the rim of a sloshing cocktail glass clenched between his teeth. When he saw me — I was at the landing of the six steps that led up to the lower deck — he just about spit the glass into the bowl. As it was, he fumbled the bowl awkwardly for half a second before it hit the deck, spewing romaine and cherry tomatoes across the bleached boards, and I was worried he was going to bite through the glass, but he caught himself. Lily saw me then. Her look was blank at first, as if she didn’t recognize me, or more likely couldn’t place me in context, so far had she gone in wiping me off her personal slate.

Frank Jr. broke the silence. “Jesus, you got brass.”

I couldn’t be sure but Lily looked as if she was smiling at me — or maybe, considering what happened next, she was grimacing. Honestly, I don’t know.

Frank Jr. moved across the deck to put himself between me and her, as if I was some sort of threat, which I wasn’t and never have been, and I couldn’t help comparing him with the skinny kid who’d come up here to violate people’s space and steal what little they had for his own use. Frank Jr. was older, better-looking, but they were both kids to me and they shared the same general look, a kind of twitching around the mouth that only showed the kind of contempt they had for older people, and in that moment I half-wished I’d turned the kid in. I never did find out what happened to him. They found a stolen Mustang convertible abandoned on one of the logging roads not a mile and a half from the development, but whether he was responsible or not no one could say. For my part, I just pushed open the bedroom door after the sheriff left and found the room empty, as if the kid was nothing more than my own invention.

Frank Jr. was real enough though. And he let out a low curse and said, “Neither me or Lily want to see you on this property, not now or ever.” And he turned to her and squeezed her to him and I saw something there that made my heart jump. “Right, Lily?”

I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself all the way up the six steps and standing there on the deck as if I belonged, and I started to explain, but that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life because all the factors had been churning around in me through all those washed-out months, so I just said what I’d said to her that night. “Lily,” I said, “I’m sorry if I offended you or whatever”—I paused, and her eyes weren’t so much hateful as just stunned—“but you know why I did it.”

She said nothing.

Frank Jr. took a step forward. “No,” he said, low and nasty, “she doesn’t.”

“Because I love her,” I said, and maybe I took a step toward him too so that we were three feet apart and the next thing I knew I heard the sound of one fist clapping. Against my cheekbone. Frank Jr. — and he has a lot of power in that arm because when you think of it that arm has to do the work of two — lashed out and hit me and I tell you it was bad luck, pure and simple, that sent me into the rail that maybe wasn’t up to code with regard to height requirements and then pitched me right over it into the duff ten feet down. On my leg. My bad leg. Which broke all over again with a snap you could have heard in Sacramento.

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that Lily, instead of coming to my aid as even an anonymous stranger would have, instead took hold of Frank Jr. with both her strong shapely bare suntanned arms and pulled her to him for a long soul kiss that left not a single doubt in my mind. And I tell you, he was the stepson. The stepson, for Christ’s sake. I mean, morally speaking, isn’t that what they call incest?

—

I won’t go into detail about Bill Secord and the sheriff and the whole playing out of the same charade of the winter past, but I will say that when you talk about pain, it comes in varieties and dominions nobody can even begin to imagine. And when you talk about fate, which I reject as a useful proposition, you talk about some kind of wheel you can never get off of. Fate doesn’t leave you any margin for hope or redemption or even change. With fate, the fix is in, but I’m going to tell you that luck is different, bad luck anyway. Bad luck can change. I sit here in my rented wheelchair and look out into the trees present and see the ghosts of the trees past and tell myself it has to, because nobody — not Lily with her scarred back and two permanent tears or Frank Jr. with his missing arm or the snatched kid who had to degrade himself every minute of every day without hope even of the faintest flicker of love — could stand to be as lonely and miserable as this.

(2009)

The Silence

Dragonfly

What a dragonfly was doing out here in the desert, he couldn’t say. It was a creature of water, a sluggish slime-coated nymph that had metamorphosed into an electric needle of light, designed to hover and dart over pond and ditch in order to feed on the insects that rose from the surface in soft moist clouds. But here it was, as red as blood if blood could shine like metal, hovering in front of his face as if it had come to impart some message. And what would that message be? I am the karmic representative of the insect world, here to tell you that all is well among us. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba! For a long while, long after the creature had hurtled away in shearing splinters of radiance, he sat there, legs folded under him in the blaze of one-hundred-and-eighteen-degree heat, thinking alternately: This is working and I am losing my mind.

And this was only the first day.

Yurt

What he wanted, more than he wanted the air to sink into the alveoli of his lungs or the blood to rush through the chambers of his heart, was to tell his wife about it, about this miracle of the dragonfly in the desert. But of course he couldn’t, because the nature of this retreat, under the guidance of Geshe Stephen O’Dowd and Lama Katie Capolupo, was silence, silence rejuvenant, unbroken, utter. Three years, three months and three days of it, the very term undertaken by the Dalai Lamas themselves in their quest for enlightenment. He had signed on, drawn down his bank account, paid his first wife a lump sum to cover her maintenance and child support for the twins, married the love of his soul on a sere scorched afternoon three weeks ago and put the finishing touches to his yurt. In the Arizona desert. Amidst cholla and saguaro and sun-blistered projections of rock so bleak they might have confounded the Buddha himself. The heat was an anvil and he was the white-hot point of steel beaten under the hammer.

Though he felt light-headed from the morning and afternoon group meditation sessions and the trancing suck of the desert sun, he pushed himself up and tottered back to the yurt on legs that might as well have been deboned for all the stability they offered him, this perfect gift of the dragonfly inside him and no way to get it out. He found her — Karuna, his wife, the former Sally Barlow Townes of Chappaqua, New York — seated in the lotus position on the hemp mat just inside the door. She was a slim, very nearly emaciated girl of twenty-nine, with a strong sweep of jaw, a pouting smallish mouth and a rope of braided blond hair that drew in the light and held it. Despite the heat, she was wearing her pink prayer shawl over a blue pashmina meditation skirt. Her sweat was like body paint, every square millimeter of exposed flesh shining with it.

At first she didn’t lift her eyes, so deeply immersed in the inner self she didn’t seem to be aware of him standing there before her. He felt the smallest stab of jealousy over her ability to penetrate so deeply, to go so far — and on the first day, no less — but then he dismissed it as selfish and hurtful, as bad karma, as papa. They might have been enjoined from speaking, he was thinking, but there were ways around that. Very slowly he began to move his limbs as if he were dancing to an unheard melody, then he clicked his fingers, counting off the beat, and at last she raised her eyes.

Chickpeas

Dinner for their first evening of the retreat, after the meager portions of rice and lentils doled out for the communal morning and afternoon meals, had been decided on in a time when they could express themselves aloud — yesterday, that is. It was to consist of tahini, lemon juice and chickpeas blended into hummus, basmati rice and naan bread. He was at the stove watching the chickpeas roiling in a pan of water over the gas jet, which was hooked up to the propane tank half-buried in a pit behind the yurt. It must have been seven or so in the evening — he couldn’t be sure because Geshe Stephen had encouraged them all to remove their watches and ceremonially grind them between two stones. The heat had begun to lift and he imagined the temperature dipping into the nineties, though numbers had no value here and whether it was diabolically hot or, in winter, as he’d been forewarned, unforgivingly cold, really didn’t matter. What mattered were the chickpeas, golden in the pot. What mattered was the dragonfly.

He’d done his best to communicate the experience to Karuna, falling back on his admittedly rusty skills at charades. He led her to the entrance of the yurt and pointed to the place where he’d been sitting in the poor stippled shade of a palo verde tree and then used the distance between his forefinger and thumb to give her an idea of the creature and its relative size, jerking that space back and forth vigorously to replicate its movements and finally flinging his hand out to demonstrate the path it had taken. She’d gazed at him blankly. Three syllables, he indicated digitally, making his face go fierce for the representation of dragon — he breathed fire, or tried to — and then softening it for the notion of fly, and he’d been helped here by the appearance, against the front window, of an actual fly, a fat bluebottle that had no doubt sprung from the desiccating carcass of some fallen toad or lizard. She’d blinked rapidly. She’d smiled. And, as far as he could see, didn’t have the faintest idea of what he was attempting to convey, though she was trying her hardest to focus on the bliss in his face.

But now she was bending to the oven, where the flattened balls of dough were taking on the appearance of bread, her meditation skirt hitched up in back so that he was able to admire the shape of her ankles, a shape as miraculous as that of the dragonfly — or no, a thousand times more so. Because her ankles rose gracefully to her calves and her calves to her thighs and from there… he caught himself. This was not right-mindfulness, and he had to suppress it. There would be no touching, no kissing, no sex during the length of the retreat. And that length of time looped out suddenly before him like a rope descending into an infinite well: three years, three months, three days. Or no: two. One down, or nearly down. A quick calculation: 1,189 to go.

He reached for the handle of the pot and had actually taken hold of it, so entranced was he by the poured gold of the chickpeas, before he understood that the handle was hot. But not simply hot: superheated, all but molten. He managed to drop the pot back on the burner without upsetting it, the harsh clatter of metal on metal startling his wife, who shot him a glance out of enlarging eyes, and though he wanted to cry out, to curse and shout and dance through his pain, he just bit his finger at the knuckle and let the tears roll down both flanges of his nose.

Tarantula

The first night came in a blizzard of stars. The temperature dropped till it was almost bearable, not that it mattered, and he stared hard at the concentric rings of the yurt’s conical ceiling till they began to blur. Was he bored? No, not at all. He didn’t need the noise of the world, the cell phones and TVs and laptops and all the rest, transient things, distractions, things of the flesh — he needed inner focus, serenity, the Bodhisattva path. And he was on it, his two feet planted firmly, as he dropped his eyes to study the movements of Karuna while she prepared for bed. She was grace incarnate, swimming out of her clothes as if emerging from a cool clean mountain stream, naked before him as she bent for the stiff cotton nightshirt that lay folded beneath her pillow on the raised wooden pallet beside his own. He studied the flex of her buttocks, the cleft there, the way her breasts swung free as she dipped to the bed, and it was so right, so pure and wholly beautiful that he felt like singing — or chanting. Chanting in his own head, Om mani padme hum.

And then suddenly she was recoiling from the bed as if it had burst into flame, pinning the nightshirt to her chest and — it was her turn now — jamming a fist into her mouth to keep from screaming. He jumped to his feet and saw the tarantula then, a miracle of creation as stunning in its effect as the dragonfly, if more expected, because this was its environment, its home in the world of appearances. Big as a spread hand, it paused a moment on the pillow, as if to revel in its glory, and then, on the unhurried extension of its legs that were like walking fingers, it slowly ascended the adobe wall. Karuna turned to him, her eyes fractured with fear. She mouthed, Kill it, and he had to admire her in her extremity, because there was no speech, not even the faintest aspiration, just the drawn-back lips and the grimace of the unvoiced verb.

He shook his head no. She knew as well as he that all creatures were sacred and that the very worst papa attached to taking a life.

She flew to the drainboard where the washed and dried pot lay overturned, snatched it up and shoved it in his hand, making motions to indicate that he should capture the thing and take it out into the night. Far out. Over the next ridge, if possible.

And so he lifted the pot to the wall, but the tarantula, with its multiple eyes and the heat of its being, anticipated him, shooting down the adobe surface as if on a hurricane wind to disappear, finally, in the mysterious dark space beneath his wife’s bed.

Geshe

In the morning, at an hour he supposed might be something like 3:30 or 4:00, the first meditation session of the day began. Not that he’d slept much in any case, Karuna insisting, through gestures and the overtly physical act of pinching his upper arm between two fingers as fiercely tuned as any tarantula’s pedipalps, on switching beds, at least for the night. He didn’t mind. He welcomed all creatures, though lying there in the dark and listening to the rise and fall of his bride’s soft rasping snores he couldn’t help wondering just what exactly the tarantula’s message had been: I am the karmic representative of the arachnid world, here to tell you that all is well among us, which is why I’ve come to bite your wife. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!

Geshe Stephen, who’d awakened them both with a knuckle-rap at the door that exploded through the yurt like a shotgun blast, was long-nosed and tall, with a slight stoop, watery blue eyes and two permanent spots of moisture housed in his outsized nostrils. He was sixty-two years old and had ascended to the rank of Geshe — the rough equivalent of a doctor of divinity — through a lifetime of study and an unwavering devotion to the Noble Eightfold Path of the Gautama Buddha. He had twice before sought enlightenment in a regimen of silence and he was as serene and untouched by worldly worry as a breeze stirring the very highest leaves of the tallest tree on the tallest mountain. Before the retreat began, when the thirteen aspirants were building their domiciles and words were their currency, he’d delivered up any number of parables, the most telling of which — at least for this particular aspirant — was the story of the hermit and the monk.

They were gathered in the adobe temple, seated on the floor in a precise circle. Their robes lay about them like ripples on water. Sunlight graced the circular walls. “There was once a monk in the time of the Buddha who devoted his life to meditation on a single mantra,” the Geshe intoned, his wonderfully long and mobile upper lip rising and falling, his voice so inwardly directed it was like a sigh. “In his travels, he heard of an ancient holy man, a hermit, living on an island in a vast lake. He asked a boatman to row him out to the island so that he could commune with the hermit, though he felt in his heart that he had reached a level at which no one could instruct him further, so deeply was he immersed in his mantra and its million-million iterations. On meeting the hermit he was astonished to find that this man too had devoted himself to the very same mantra and for a number of years equal to his own, and yet when the hermit chanted it aloud the monk immediately saw that the hermit was deluded and that all his devotion had been in vain — he was mispronouncing the vowels. As a gesture of compassion, of karuna”—and here the Geshe paused to look round the circle, settling on Karuna with her shining braid and her beautiful bare feet—“he gently corrected the hermit’s pronunciation. After which they chanted together for some time before the monk took his leave. He was halfway across the lake when the oarsman dropped both oars and stared wildly behind him, for there was the hermit, saying, ‘I beg your pardon, but would you be so kind as to repeat the mantra once more for me so that I can be sure I have it right?’ How had the hermit got there? He had walked. On the water.” Again the pause, again the Geshe’s eyes roaming round the circle to settle not on Karuna, but on him. “I ask you, Ashoka: what is the sound of truth?”

Ashoka

His name, his former name, the name on his birth certificate and his New York State driver’s license, was Jeremy Clutter. He was forty-three years old, with a B.A. in fine arts (he’d been a potter) and an M.A. in Far Eastern studies, a house in Yorktown which now belonged to his first wife, Margery, and a middle-aged paunch of which he was — or had been — self-conscious. He’d met Sally at a week-long Buddhist seminar in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and she’d pointed out to him that the Buddha himself had sported a paunch, at the same time touching him intimately there. In his former life he’d made a decent income from a dot-com start-up, thepotterswheel.com, that not only survived the ’01 crash but had become robust in its wake. Money built his yurt. Money paid off Margery. Money embellished the Geshe’s grace. And the Geshe gave him his true name, Ashoka, which when translated from the Sanskrit, meant “Without Sadness.”

Ironwood

The second morning’s meditation session, like all the ensuing ones, was held out of doors on a slightly pitched knob of blasted dirt surrounded by cactus and scrub. There was a chill to the air that belied the season, but to an aspirant they ignored it. He chanted his mantra inside his head till it rang like a bell and resolved to bring a jacket with him tomorrow. Geshe Stephen kept them there till the sun came hurtling over the mountains like a spear of fire and then he rose and dismissed them. Bowing in his holy, long-nosed way, the Geshe took Ashoka gently by the arm and held him there until the others had left. With a steady finger, the finger of conviction, the Geshe pointed to a dun heap of dirt and rock in the intermediate distance and then pantomimed the act of bending to the ground and gathering something to him. Ashoka didn’t have a clue as to what the man was trying to impart. Geshe Stephen repeated the performance, putting a little more grit and a little less holiness into it. Still, he didn’t understand. Did he want him, as an exercise, a lesson, to measure the mountain between the space of his two arms extended so as to reduce it to its essence? To dirt, that is?

Finally, exasperated, the Geshe pulled a notepad and pencil from his pocket and scrawled his redemptive message: Go up to the mountain and gather ironwood for the winter fires in the temple. Then report — report, that was the word he used—to the temple kitchen to peel potato and daikon for the communal stew.

Flypaper

The days stuck to him like flypaper. The moment was all there was. He went inward. Still, very gradually, the days became unglued, loosening and flapping in the wind that swept the desert in a turmoil of cast-off spines and seed pods. Nights came earlier, mornings later. One morning, after group meditation, the Geshe pressed a note into his hand. The note asked — or no, instructed — him to meet the water truck that came bimonthly from the nearest town, Indio Muerto, which lay some thirty-five miles across the motionless plain.

The truck, painted an illusory forest green, appeared as a moving speck in the distance, working haltingly over the ruts and craters of what was once and occasionally a dirt road. He sat cross-legged in the infertile soil and watched it coming for what might have been hours or even days, all sense of time and the transient rush of things foreign to him now. There would come a moment when the truck would be there before him, he knew that, and so he spun a prayer wheel and chanted inwardly until it was in fact there, planted before him and obscuring the horizon as if it had sprung up out of the ground.

He saw that there was a new driver to replace the expressionless old man who’d come in the past, a lean monkey-faced boy of nineteen or twenty with tattooed arms and a cap reversed on his head, and that the kid had brought his similarly tattooed and capped squeeze along for the desolate ride across the waste. No problem there. Ashoka didn’t begrudge him. In fact, as he watched them climb down from the cab of the truck he couldn’t help remembering a time when he and Margery had driven across country together in a car that had no radio and how Margery had said afterward that he’d never shut up for one instant the whole way, singing and laughing and spinning out one story after another, because for him, at least in those days, conversation wasn’t about truth or even communication — it was there for its entertainment value, pure and simple.

“So, uh,” the kid began, startling him out of his reverie — or no, shocking him with the impact of those two syllables spoken aloud and reverberating like thunderclaps—“where you want me to pump it?”

He pressed his hands to his ears. His face reddened. In that moment, rising, he caught a glimpse of himself in the big blazing slab of the truck’s side-view mirror and it was as if he’d been punched in the chest. What he saw reflected there was the exact likeness of one of the pretas, the restive spirits doomed to parch and starve because of their attachments to past lives, his hair white as death and flung out to every point of the compass, his limbs like sticks, face seared like a hot dog left too long on the grill.

“Whoa,” the kid said, even as the girl, her features drawn up in a knot of fear and disgust, moved into the protection of his arm, “you all right there?”

What could he say? How could he begin to explain?

He produced a gesture to wave him off. Another for reassurance. And then, turning so gradually he could have been a tree growing toward the light, he lifted a hand and pointed, shakily, to the water tank, where it floated on wooden struts behind the two whitewashed yurts that housed Geshe and Lama respectively and rose like twin ice-cream cones from the dead blasted earth.

Air-horn

Everyone in the community, all thirteen of them plus Geshe Stephen and Lama Katie and including their nearest neighbors, the former Forest and Fawn Greenstreet (now Dairo and Bodhi respectively), had an air-horn. For emergencies. If there was an accident, an illness, a fire, the air-horns were to be used to summon help. He spent a long while each day in contemplation of the one he and Karuna had been given, for what reason he couldn’t say. Perhaps because it represented a link to the renounced world, a way out. Or because it had a pleasing shape. Or because it was the only object of color, real color, in the yurt.

Karuna was at the cutting board, dicing cucumbers. She’d lost weight. But she was firm and lean and beautiful, not that it mattered, and he was enjoying the sight of her there, her elbows flashing beneath her robes that pulled back to reveal the pink thermal longjohns beneath. Outside it was dark. There was a fire in the woodstove. Karuna’s elbows flashed. Earlier, she’d been trying to tell him something of her day, of what she’d experienced on her walk out into the desert, but he couldn’t really catch much of it, despite the fact that she was leagues ahead of him when it came to charades. Something about a hillside and a moment and something she’d seen there, tracks, he thought, and a discarded water bottle. He’d smiled and nodded, feigning comprehension, because he liked the way her eyes flared and jumped and sank back again, liked the purse of her mouth and the ghost of her breasts bound up and held tight in the thermal weave that fit her like a new skin.

These thoughts were unhealthy, he knew that. And as he watched her now, he couldn’t help feeling even more unhealthy — aroused, even — and so he shifted his gaze to the air-horn, where it stood on an adobe shelf like a work of art. And it was a work of art. The milk-white canister topped with a red rooster’s comb of plastic which was to be depressed in an emergency, the matching red lettering (SPORTS/MARINE, and below it, BIG HORN) and the way the sound waves were depicted there as a flaring triangle of hard red slashes.

Big horn, he said to himself. Sports/Marine. Big horn. Sports/Marine. And for that moment, for that night, it became his mantra.

Bup-Bup-Bah

That was a problem, a growing problem, as the days wore on. The mantra, that is, because as the Buddha taught, life means suffering and the origin of suffering is attachment and the cessation of suffering is only attainable by taking the Bodhisattva path, and yet his mantra became mangled in its eternal repetition until other mantras, meaningless phrases and snatches of tunes, blotted it out altogether. Big horn lasted a week or more. And then one chill afternoon, sitting buttock to buttock with Fawn Greenstreet — Bodhi — on one side of him and Karuna on the other, staring through the long-nosed ascetic face of Geshe Stephen and digging inward, shovelful by shovelful, bup-bup-bah came to him. It was a musical phrase, from a tune of the great and towering giant of inwardness, John Coltrane, a tune called “Bakai.” The horns chanted it rhythmically, bup-bup-bah, bup-bup-bah, with a rising inflection on the first bah and a descending on the second. He tried to fight it off with Om mani padme hum, tried with all his concentration and practice, but it wouldn’t budge. It was there, bup-bup-bah, bup-bup-bah, like a record stuck in the groove, repeating over and over, repeating endlessly. And worse: his proximity to Bodhi on one side and his own wife on the other, given the day and the cold of the ground and the warm inviting odor arising from them both—bup-bup-bah—was giving him an erection.

Twins

Another note, this one handed to him by Lama Katie after the morning cleanup in the temple and the incantatory scraping of the baked-on oatmeal from the depths of the communal cook pot. Lama Katie, squat, big-breasted, her hair the color of midnight in a coal mine and her eyes even darker, gave him a smile of encouragement that radiated down the two deeply etched lines defining her chin and into the billowing plumpness beneath. She knew the contents of the note: she’d written it herself. According to the date marked on the calendar secreted in a chest in the back corner of her yurt, the twins — his twins, Kyle and Kaden — were due to appear this evening for the first of their biannual visits. He should wait for them half a mile out, Lama Katie suggested, so that the noise and presence of the rental vehicle their mother was driving wouldn’t impede his fellow aspirants on their journey down the Bodhisattva path.

It was mid-afternoon, the winter sun bleached white and hanging motionless overhead, when he turned away from Karuna, who was shucking a bushel of corn delivered to them via muleback by one of the Geshe’s more worldly followers, plucked up a prayer wheel and went on down the dirt track to wait for them. The desert ran before him. Birds visited. Lizards. He sat on a rock and stared off in the distance, chanting beneath his breath, his mantra beating as steadily in the confines of his skull as the heart beating in his chest, the Coltrane riff retired to another life in another universe and the Buddha, the very Buddha, speaking through him.

The car was unremarkable, but strange for all that, its steel shell, the glint of the sun on its windshield, the twin plumes of dust trailing away behind it till it was there and motionless and he could see his ex-wife’s face, a shadow clenched in distaste, as the two boys, nine years old now — or were they ten? — spun out of the doors in a flurry of leaping limbs. He caught them in his arms and rocked them round him in a mad whirl, their voices like the cries of birds descending to a feast. He showed them the prayer wheel, let them spin it. Sat with them and listened to their ten thousand questions (When was he coming back? Where was Karuna? Could they see his yurt? Did he have a pet lizard? Could they have a pet lizard?) He found that his mimetic skills had blossomed and he answered them with his hands, his eyes, the cast of his mouth and the movement of his shoulders. Finally, when the novelty had begun to wear off and they started to look round them for a means of escape — he could only imagine what their mother must have been telling them about their father’s mental state on the long flight and longer drive out here — he produced a pad and pencil and wrote them a note.

What he was doing, he reiterated, was seeking the truth, prajna, wisdom. Liberation from the cycle of rebirth in which all beings are trapped. If one soul achieves liberation, that soul can guide others toward achieving it too. They crouched beside him, staring at the pad in his lap, their faces numb, eyes fixed on the words as if the words had no meaning. I’m doing it for you, he wrote, underlining fiercely, for you, for both of you.

“Mom too?” Kaden asked.

He nodded.

They gave each other a look, smiles flowering, and in the next instant they sprang up in a sudden delirium of joy and ran to her where she sat in the car, carrying the note like a gift of infinite worth, the paper fluttering in the breeze their moving limbs stirred in the air. She took it, her face a simulacrum of itself behind the reflective windshield, then ordered them into the car. There was the abrupt thunderclap of the engine turning over, the screech of the front end as the car wheeled round, pale miniature hands fluttering their goodbyes out the open window, and then, finally, silence.

Rattlesnake

The rattlesnake was itself a shadow, pooled there on the trodden dirt floor of the yurt as if shadows ruled and light was abject. He didn’t see it until it was too late. Karuna, her hair released from the tight braid and exerting a life and movement of its own, was washing her face over a pan of water he’d heated for her on the woodstove and he’d been watching her idly, remembering their first night together after they’d realized to their delight — karma, it was karma — that they lived no more than half an hour’s drive from each other through the dense hilly woodlands of Westchester County. They were in Georgia then, the last night of the conference, and they’d lingered over beers, exchanging information, and she was so stunned by the coincidence that she’d slid away from the table in a slow sinuous dance, then taken him by the hand and led him back to her room.

When the snake bit her just above the ankle, where the swell of her calf rose from the grip of the heavy white sweatsock she wore as protection against the evening chill, it was just doing what it was designed to do. There was warmth in the yurt. It had come to the warmth. And she, inadvertently, had stepped on it. She didn’t cry out, not even then, not even when the snake snapped back into the shadows as if it were attached to a spring, but just looked down in bewilderment at her bare calf and the two neat spots of blood that had appeared there in commemoration of the puncture wounds. He didn’t think of what the snake’s message had been, not yet, not before Karuna stretched herself out on the bed and he twisted the tourniquet round her calf and her eyes fluttered and the fire hissed in the stove and the leg began to swell and darken and he took the air-horn to the door of the yurt and annihilated the silence in a single screaming stroke.

The snake’s message — and he knew it even as Dairo and Bodhi flew up out of the darkness with faces like white darting bats, Geshe Stephen and the others not far behind — was this: I am the karmic representative of the reptile world and all is not well among us. There is nothing inside and no cessation of pain. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!

Without Sadness

A tangle of hands moved like thought, juggling mute phrases and tracing the edges of panic. Everyone was gesturing at once, the yurt shrunk round them, the snake vanished, the fire dying in the stove. Karuna’s eyes had stopped blinking. She seemed to be in a deep trance, gone as deep as any soul can go, focused on the rising swirls of the ceiling and the circular hole that gave onto the night and the stars and the dead black face of the universe above.

His hands trembled as he gripped the pencil and scribbled a note for Geshe Stephen, who was standing stooped over the bed, looking lost. We need to get the doctor.

The Geshe shrugged. There was no doctor. There was no telephone. The nearest town was Indio Muerto. They all knew that — they’d all signed on with that knowledge and its implications implanted like splinters in their brains.

What about the car?

Another shrug. The community’s only automobile was a boxy white Prius belonging to Geshe Stephen, which was housed beneath a formfitting cloth out back of his yurt where its shape wouldn’t tempt anyone from the path or interfere with the business at hand. Its wheels were up on blocks and the Geshe, in a first-day ceremony, had drained the fuel tank and removed the distributor cap as a symbolic gesture while the gathered aspirants looked rapturously on.

We need to get her to the hospital! he screamed across the page in angry block letters.

The Geshe nodded. He was in agreement. He dipped his shoulders, produced a tight grin that tapered to a grimace at both corners of his mouth. His expression said: But how?

Into that silence that was fraught with the shuffling of feet, bare and slippered both, the faint hiss of the stove and the sub-aural racket of neurons firing in brains that were no longer in touch with souls, no longer calm and meditative, neurons nudged from the path and straining to find their way back, there came a deep harsh ratcheting cry from the figure on the bed, from Karuna. They turned to her as one. Her face was twisted. Her leg was swollen to twice its size. The skin was black around the wound. They all looked shocked, Bodhi especially, shocked and offended, wondering why she hadn’t stifled that human noise with a fist, with a knuckle stuffed between her teeth. The silence had been broken, and it was Karuna who had broken it, consciously or not.

What he wanted to say — to roar so that they could have heard him all the way to Indio Muerto and back — was Christ, what is wrong with you people? Can’t you see she’s dying? But he didn’t. Habit, conditioning, the reflex of the inner path kept him silent, though he was writhing inside. This was attachment and that sigh was the sound of truth.

Your Boat

Later, after they’d all filed uselessly out, he built up the fire and sat beside her while her breathing slowed and accelerated and finally caught in her throat for the last time. It might have taken an hour or mere minutes, he couldn’t say. Into his head had come a new mantra, a jingle from a commercial on TV when he was growing up as a child of baseball fields and macadam basketball courts with their bent and rusted hoops and the intense otherworldly green of a New York summer, a green so multivalent and assertive it was like a promise of life to come. The jingle was for a toothpaste and it made its own promises, and yes, you did wonder where the yellow went when you brushed your teeth with Pepsodent. The new mantra sang in his head and danced a tarantella, double speed, triple, and then it became a dirge. Just before dawn he found himself running back even further, reaching down to take hold of the earliest mantra he could recall as it marched implacably across the field of his consciousness, beating out its own tempo with two pounding knees on the underside of a metal desk in the back corner of a just-arisen classroom, Row, row, row your — Om mani padme hum — Gently down the stream. Row, row, row — Om.

At dawn he got up from the bed and without looking behind him pushed open the door and walked out into the desert.

Dragonfly

In the desert, he walked without purpose or destination. He walked past the hill where his wife had found the discarded water bottle, past the place where the green truck had appeared on the horizon, beyond the mountain where he’d gathered ironwood and down into the hot bleached plain it gave onto. He needed a mantra, but he had none. Into his head it came, the mantra the Geshe had given him, but he couldn’t sustain it, his mind swept clear of everything now. The sun was the eye of God, awake and staring. After a while his feet seemed to desert him and he sat heavily in the lee of a jagged boulder.

What he awakened to were voices, human voices, speaking aloud. He blinked open his eyes and looked up into three terrified faces, man, woman and child, their wide straw hats framing their skulls like halos. They were speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. They said, “Necesita usted socorro?” They said, “Tiene agua?” And then one of them, the woman, went down on her knees and held a plastic jug of water to his lips and he drank, but sparingly, and only because he knew they wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t stop talking, unless he did. He didn’t need water. He was beyond water, on a whole different path altogether. He reassured them with gestures, thanked them, blessed them, and then they were gone.

The sun moved till the projection of rock gave up its shade. His eyes closed but the lids burned till he opened them again and when he opened them the dragonfly was there. He studied it for a long while, the delicate interplay of its wings, the thin twisting calligraphy of its legs and the perfect jointed tube of its thorax. And what was its message? It had no message, he saw that now. It was merely a splinter of light, hovering for just a moment — just this moment — over the desert floor.

(2009)

A Death in Kitchawank

Saturday, just after two, the sun a hot compress on her shoulders and scalp, the shrieks and catcalls of the children as they splash in the shallows a kind of symphony of the usual. Behind her, the sharp thwock of the dense black rubber ball as it rockets from the paddle and slaps the wall, regular as a heartbeat till one of the men miscalculates and it freezes in cardiac arrest on the tail of a stifled curse. One beat, two, and here it comes again: thwock. She’s thinking she should have brought her straw hat to the beach with her because she wouldn’t want a thin red line of sunburn etched into the parting of her hair, but she’ll worry about that later — or maybe not at all. She hasn’t worn her hat in a week or more now — she hates hats, hats are a thing of her mother’s day — and her tan is deep, even at her hairline. She’s wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses new from the drugstore yesterday and last year’s black one-piece, which is maybe a little tight around the hips and waist, but so what? She’s not on display here. This is her beach, her community, her lake. These are her friends and neighbors gathered in their beach chairs and sprawled across their fluffed-up towels and beach blankets with their paperbacks and newspapers and Hebrew National wieners. This is the peace at the center of life. This, this Saturday in July when her mind runs free all the way up to the arch of the sun and back and her only worry is to shift the straps on her shoulders and gloss her lips to keep them from drying out.

In the house, which she could see if she craned her neck to look back over her shoulder past the concession stand and the paddleball courts and the big open grassy field where teenage couples are strolling hand in hand and boys playing pickup baseball, is the refrigerator, new three years ago and as cluttered as if it had been there a century. In its cool dark depths are the steaks in a covered dish of honey-ginger marinade, the potato salad and coleslaw she put up after breakfast and the Rose’s lime juice and vodka for the gimlets. All is well. And so what if the warm shifting sand beneath her feet has to be trucked in every other year at the expense of the Kitchawank Colony Association, its hundreds of billions of individual grains disappearing into the high grass, washing into the lake, adhering to toes and arches and tanned sinewy ankles only to wind up on bathroom tiles and beneath the kitchen sink? It’s as essential as air, as the water itself: how could you have a beach without it?

When she next opens her eyes it’s to the quick cold shock of Susan, her youngest, snuggling in beside her, everything wet suddenly as if a whole basket of fish has been upended in her lap. She feels the cold bunched knees poking at her, the shuddering ribcage and chattering teeth, hears her own voice jump up: “Get off, honey, you’re all wet!” And Susan, freckled, stick-limbed, ten years old, snuggling tighter. “I’m cold, Mommy.” She reaches behind her for the beach bag and the towel she’s brought for herself, never bothering to ask where her daughter’s own towel is because she knows it’ll turn up at the edge of the ball field or draped over the welded frame of the monkey bars, as soaked through as a dishrag. And then she’s wrapping her and holding her close till the shivering stops and her daughter springs loose to chase half a dozen other kids to the concession stand. For Coke, winter in a bottle, and the wiener snug in its bun. With chopped onion and sweet pickle relish and plenty of mustard. She lifts her sunglasses for a moment to watch after her and here are the Sollovays, the Greens, the Goldsteins, settling in around her in a wash of greeting and banter and sheer high spirits. Marsha Goldstein, her legs silken and her lips fluttering around her smile, offers a cigarette, but she prefers her own and they both light up and let the tobacco lift them, until in unison, as if they’ve rehearsed it, they throw back their heads and exhale in long twin plumes of blue. “What time did you want us tonight?” Marsha asks. “Fiveish?”

“Yes,” she says, “yes, that’ll be perfect,” and she glances over her shoulder, past the courts and the chain-link fence and the screen of trees to where her house sits tranquilly on its own little rise — the only house, of all the two hundred and more in the community, that looks directly onto the lake, a fact of which she tries not to be too sinfully proud. There’s the Buick, last year’s model, at rest in the drive like a picture out of a magazine, and the swing set they put up for Susan and her friends, though you could throw a stone and hit the big metal-framed one in the playground at the lake. The Japanese maple she planted when her daughter was born stands out in relief against the near wall of the house, throwing a delicate patterned shade over the flagstone path up to the kitchen door, its leaves the color of the claret Sid likes to sip after dinner. She lets her eyes linger there a moment before lifting them to the house itself. And it’s funny, because with the way the light comes off the lake and the big picture window stands in shadow, she can see into her own kitchen and the table there, already set for dinner, the clock on the yellow wall, time ticking by, and it’s almost as if she’s in two places at once.

[Forgive me for stepping in here but I do want to get this right — the fact is, I may have been there that day, the threads of the past so snarled now that thirty-five years on I’ve lost the ability to separate them with any clarity. But if I was there, I would have been on the paddleball court, playing in a fiercely competitive and very physical foursome with Miriam’s husband Sid and her two sons — Alan, who was twenty-six, and Lester, my best friend, who was then twenty-two, like me. And I would have entered the next scene too, the dinner scene, preceded by cocktails and the long unwinding of a muggy Saturday afternoon, fresh from the lake and the shower, the corded muscles of my legs gone limp in the afterglow of exercise and the long slow seep of alcohol.]

She’s got both fans going, the one at the kitchen window and the big lazy ceiling fan revolving in a slow slippage of optical illusion over the table, and yet still she’s dripping. Marsha’s with her, their drinks perspiring on the counter while they stand elbow to elbow at the cutting board, slicing long squared-off strips of carrot and wafer-thin slivers of Vidalia onion for the salad, dicing cucumbers and halving cherry tomatoes still warm from the garden, Marsha, who’d been maid of honor at her wedding to Sid just as she’d been Marsha’s maid of honor when she married David in a time when there were only the four of them. Now the boys are in their twenties, Susan’s ten and Marsha’s daughter Seldy is sixteen, or no, seventeen.

“I don’t know,” she’s saying, in reference to the two young couples, summer people, who’ve become fixtures at the beach, “if you’ve got it, flaunt it, though seeing the one girl in her two-piece suit makes me feel like I put on a hundred pounds — yesterday. And another hundred this morning.”

“No, no, I agree, but the shorter one, what’s her name—?”

“Barbara, isn’t it? Or is that the other one?”

“The other one’s Rachel, and she’s really very sweet, though you wouldn’t know it from the look on her face, which to me, I don’t know, is so forbidding—but what I was saying is to walk around in a two-piece when you’re eight months’ pregnant is just—”

“Too much.”

“Right,” she says, and then they’re both laughing. “Way too much.”

From the living room comes the sound of the men, their voices rich and pleased, as they call down the questions of the day, revile Nixon, trade quips with the boys. Les has begun to wear his hair long and dress in bell-bottoms and spangled shirts, in confraternity with his friend T., who looks so satisfied he could be flying across the room on his own magic carpet ride. And she’s had her moments of worry — or not worry, really, just concern — over whether the boys have been experimenting with tea or grass or whatever they call it these days, but she’s never said anything. And won’t. She doesn’t want to harp. Let them do what they’re going to do because no one, not even a mother, can legislate for them. Once they’re grown, that is, and her boys, with the shoulders and arms they inherited from Sid, are definitely grown.

They’re just sitting down to dinner — to the artichokes, one per plate, the grill out on the deck sending up smoke under the steaks — when Seldy, in a yellow sundress that shows off the figure she’s been growing into over the past year, drifts into the room, late as usual. Her mother says, “It’s about time,” and her father makes a quip about how she must’ve gotten lost on the long grueling four-minute drive from the house, but Sid and the three boys are dumbstruck for one thunderous instant. This is the face of beauty, and though they’re all family here, though Seldy’s like a daughter to Sid and a sister to the boys, Miriam’s boys anyway, none of that matters. Sid’s the first to break the spell, his voice rising to emphasize the joke: “Well, Jesus Christ, we thought we were going to wilt away and starve waiting for you.” And then the boys are falling all over themselves to wave and grin and ante up the wit (“Yeah, and think how starved the first caveman must’ve been to discover you could eat one of these things”), and Seldy, flushing, slides into the empty seat between Alan and Les, letting the steam from the artichoke rise gently about her face and the long trailing ends of her hair slip from her shoulders to sway gracefully over her plate.

It is then, just as Sid rises to check on the steaks (nobody here wants anything but rare and rarer and he’d be offended if they did), that the first eruption of thunder rolls across the lake to shake the house and rattle the ice cubes in the drinks Miriam has just freshened all the way around. The sky goes instantly dark and it’s just as if a shade has been drawn over the day. She’s wondering if she should go out to the kitchen and rummage through the drawer for the candles left over from Hanukkah when the storm chases a cool breeze through the screens and Marsha waves her napkin in front of her face, letting out a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” she says. “Oh, yes, bring it on.”

The first raindrops, big and slow and widely dispersed, begin to thump at the shingles and there’s Sid, with his muscled arms and bald head, out on the deck, hustling the lid off the grill and flipping the steaks, the worn boards spotted all around him. Another blast of thunder. “Better hurry, Sid!” David calls and then it’s really coming down, the original deluge, and this is funny, deeply, infectiously funny, Sid flipping steaks and wet through in an instant, because there’s no harm, no harm at all, and if there’s a drop or two on the platter of meat, which he’s covering even now, what does it matter? They’ll have candles, they’ll eat, and the evening, with its rising fertile smell of grass and the earth at the edge of the woods, will settle in around them, as cool and sweet as if the whole neighborhood were air-conditioned.

[I see I’ve written myself into the scene after all, a refugee from my own fractured family, at peace in the moment. Fair enough. But peace neither lasts nor suffices, and the fact was that Lester and I pursued the available pharmacopoeia far more assiduously than Miriam could ever have imagined. We were stoned at that very moment, I’m sure of it, and not merely on anything so innocuous as marijuana — stoned, and feeling blessed. Feeling, in the midst of all that radiant love and the deepest well of tranquillity, that we were getting away with something.]

Time jumps and jumps again, the maples struck with color, the lake giving up a thin sheet of wrinkled ice along the shore, then there’s the paucity of winter with its skeletal trees and the dead fringe of reeds stuck like an old man’s beard in the gray jaws of the ice. Twice the car gets away from her on the slick streets, the passenger’s side door taking the brunt of it so she has to go through all sorts of gyrations to lean over the back seat and swing open the door there for Susan when she picks her up from ballet or violin lessons. It seems like it’s always raining. Or sleeting. And if there’s a sun up there in the sky, somebody ought to get out a camera and show her the evidence. She lives for summer, that’s what she tells Marsha on the phone and anybody else who’ll listen, because she’s got thin blood, and dark at four-thirty in the afternoon is no way to live. Yes. Sure. But it seems like the summer’s gone before it even begins and then it’s winter again and the winter after that, months spinning out until the pointer stops on a day in March, gray as death, Susan working against the chill in the unheated basement with the girls from the Explorers’ Club at school, building a canoe from a kit shipped in all the way from Minnesota while Miriam tiptoes around upstairs, arranging warm-from-the-oven oatmeal cookies on a platter and pouring hot cocoa from the thermos into six porcelain teacups, each with its own marshmallow afloat in the center like a white spongy island.

When she opens the basement door there’s an overpowering smell of epoxy and the distilled vinegar Sid got for cleanup, and she worries about that, about the fumes, but the girls seem oblivious. They cluster around her in a greedy jostling pack, hands snatching at the cookies and the too-hot cups, all except for Janet Donorio, a poised delicate girl with fade-away eyes who lifts the last cup from the tray as if she’s dining with the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace, and why can’t Susan be more like that? But Susan has no sense of herself — she already has three cookies clenched in her hand, privilege of the house, as she stabs her tongue at the marshmallow in her cup, a mustache of chocolate sketching itself in above her upper lip.

“Shouldn’t you girls have some ventilation in here?” she says, just to hear herself, but they’re fine, they assure her, and it’s going great, it really is.

The canoe, lying overturned on a pair of sawhorses, has been a long winter’s project, Sid doing the lion’s share of the work on weekends, though the girls have been fairly diligent about the hand-sanding, the cutting and fitting of the fiberglass cloth and the slow smoothing of the epoxy over it. It’s just that they’re at an age when gathering for any purpose outside of school is a lark and they can’t help frittering away their time gossiping, spinning records, dancing to the latest beat or craze or whatever it is, their thin arms flailing, hair in motion, legs going like pogo sticks. They make fast work of the cookies and chocolate. And now, sated, they watch her warily, wondering why she’s lingering when it’s clear her motherly duties have been dispensed with, and so she collects the cups, sets them on the tray and starts back up the stairs.

Thanks to Sid, who’s a father like no other despite the fact that he has to drag himself home every night after a stifling commute and the kind of hard physical labor on one jobsite after another that would prostrate a man half his age, the canoe is ready for its maiden voyage by the time the ice shrinks back from the shore and the sun makes its first evanescent return. Miriam sits stiffly on the bench by the playground, Marsha beside her — freezing, actually, because with the way the wind’s blowing down the length of the lake from the north a windbreaker just isn’t enough — while the girls divide themselves democratically into two groups of three, roll up their jeans in the icy shallows and see the first group off in a mad frantic windmilling of forearms and paddles. “Be careful now!” she calls, and she’s pleased to see that her daughter has been gracious or at least patient enough to wait her turn in the second group. As Susan leans forward to push the canoe off, her ankles chapped with the cold, her face long and grave and bursting with expectation, it’s too much for Miriam and she has to look away to where the paddles flash in the pale depleted sunlight and the canoe cuts back and forth across the black surface like the blade of her pinking shears.

Marsha, who’s come to lend moral support, lights a second cigarette off the end of her first and flicks the still-smoldering butt into the dun grass at their feet, exhaling with a long complicated sigh. “Too cute by half,” she says.

Miriam’s on her feet — she can’t help herself — listening to her own voice skitter over the water and ricochet back again: “Don’t get too far out! Girls! Girls?”

“I heard from Seldy last night,” Marsha’s saying as Miriam eases back down on the bench. Seldy’s at Stony Brook. A junior. On scholarship and majoring in math, she’s that smart.

“And how is she?”

A pause. The canoe, far out now — halfway to the other shore and its dense dead accumulation of shoulder-high weed — makes a wobbly, long-stemmed turn and starts back, the girls paddling in unison, finally getting it. “Terrible. Awful. Worse than”—Marsha’s voice, wadded with grief and anger, chokes in her throat—“I don’t know, anything.”

“What? What is it? She isn’t—”

“She’s dropping out.”

Miriam is so surprised she can’t help repeating the phrase, twisting it with the inflection of disbelief—“She’s dropping out?” Caught up in the moment, with the girls on the lake, Susan and the others waiting their turn and the wind tugging a wedge of geese overhead, she doesn’t stop to consider that both her own sons dropped out in their time too.

“It’s that boy.”

“What boy?”

“You know, the one from high school that went to the community college for all of half a semester — Richie?”

For a moment Miriam’s confused, the name caught on her lips like an invocation—Richie, Richie? — and then suddenly she can picture him, tall and rangy in a swimsuit so tight you could see every crease and fold, the washboard stomach, hair that fell across his face like a raven’s wing, Richie, Richie Spano, the wiseguy, the joker, with his braying laugh and the look on his face when you caught him out that said, I am so far above this.

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish.”

And here’s the canoe, scraping at the sand that will have to be replaced again this spring or they’ll all be hip-deep in mud, and Susan’s there now, trading places with the girl in back, the power position, raising her paddle high as if it were the honed glistening spear of a warrior out for conquest.

A puff of smoke. A long mournful inhalation and Marsha won’t look her in the eye. “They’re going to get a place in the Village, she says. Live free. Do their thing.” The canoe, Miriam sees, is stuck there under the weight of the girls, stuck in the mud, and she has to restrain herself from interfering until finally Susan digs her paddle into the bottom to push them off and the canoe rides free in a shimmer of light. “Or some such crap,” Marsha says.

[I was already gone by then, trying to redeem myself in grad school, and Les was in San Francisco, managing the first Cajun-style restaurant to appear there, but I knew Richie Spano from the time Les and I rented a house in the Colony three years earlier. There was a lot of traffic in that house — friends, musicians, druggies, friends of friends, friends of druggies — and Richie drifted in from time to time. He was quick on his feet, cocky, borderline obnoxious, with a mean streak that was something sick. One night, apropos of nothing, he plucked the darts out of the board on the kitchen wall and nailed my girlfriend’s cat with one of them — which stuck there in the stripe of fur along its spine, quivering like a bandillera, until the cat vanished and bled all over the carpet in the back room and cost thirty-five dollars at the vet’s to repair, money I paid out of my own pocket because Richie Spano wasn’t about to pay anybody anything.]

Miriam is there at the window one soft mist-hung morning in the spring of a year when the canoe has been all but forgotten, chained to a rail on a grassy strand off to the far side of the beach in a mismatched tumble of upended boats, the girls on to other pursuits now, most of them boy-related. Susan is seventeen, too nervous by half over her college applications, her AP courses, the way Mr. Honer presses her to practice though she’s only third violin and Mr. Davies rides roughshod over the Thespian Club, but her room is decorated with posters of shirtless, long-haired boys posing with guitars in their hands. And there was junior prom last year when Miriam had to pull strings behind the scenes till the boy her daughter liked finally asked her, though thank god nothing more came of it beyond the gown, the flowers and home by one.

She’s sipping a cup of tea while her cigarette levitates smoke at her elbow, caught in a recollection of her own seventeen-year-old self when she first came up from Stelton for the summer to stay with her cousins in a bungalow not three city blocks from where she’s sitting now. No one would have described her as shy back then, and when she went to the beach with her cousin Molly that first afternoon and saw a group of boys sweating over a little black ball on the paddleball court, she went right up to them, not five feet away, and watched as they leapt and grimaced and slammed at the ball with all the raw frustrated adolescent power boiling up out of them until they began to falter, to hit out, to lose the rhythm of the game — and it was no secret why. It was because she was there, with her pretty dark features that everyone said were just like Rita Hayworth’s, with her nails freshly done and a white towel slung insouciantly over one shoulder, dressed in the swimsuit she’d spent the better part of an hour admiring in the full-length mirror at Genung’s before she said yes and counted out the money at the cash register. There were four boys playing and half a dozen others sprawled on the grass at the edge of the court, but the one who caught her eye — the tall one, with his slicked-back dirty blond hair, his shrinking T-shirt and the black high-top basketball shoes he wore without socks — was Sid.

She shifts in her seat, lifts the cigarette to her lips to consolidate the recollection, but the cigarette is dead. And the tea — the tea’s gone cold. She’s about to push herself up and light the gas under the kettle when a movement on the ball field catches her eye. There’s someone out there — two people, a boy and a girl — and that strikes her as odd because it’s a school day and though it’s officially spring the leaves of the trees are wound tight in the grip of their buds and it’s cold still, especially with the way the mist is pushing in off the lake. Hardly beach weather.

She’s already put up dinner — a pot roast simmering in the crock pot Les gave her for her birthday last year — and she’s been through the newspaper twice and blackened the crossword puzzle till she can’t make a thing of it. Is she bored? Lonely? In need of stimulation? She supposes so. She’s been spending an awful lot of time sitting at the window lately, talking on the telephone or just dreaming, and she’s been putting on weight too. But what are they doing out there?

In the next moment she’s in the front hall, shrugging into her faded blue parka with the mismatched mittens stuffed deep in the pockets amidst various wads of Kleenex and expired notes to herself, and then she’s out in the air, the day brisk and smelling faintly of something left too long in the refrigerator, heading down the path to where her property ends and the single-lane gravel road loops through the high chain-link gates and peters out in the beach area. She veers left, onto the grass of the outfield, and feels it wet on the worn suede moccasins she slipped on at the door. When she gets closer — when she’s halfway to the two figures bent over what looks to be a big gray-green stone protruding from the grass — she recognizes Seldy. Seldy, in bell-bottom jeans and a serape and some sort of leather cowboy hat pulled down so far it masks her eyes. And who’s that with her? Richie. Richie, looking as if he’s dressed for Halloween with his long hair, his tie-dyed shirt and the ragged cloth overcoat he might have dug out of the pile at the Salvation Army.

She’s not thinking, really — and the way she’s dressed and with her hair uncombed and no makeup on she’s not especially in the mood to see anybody at the moment — but she’s here now and that thing on the ground, she realizes, is no rock. It’s moving. And the boy—Richie—is stabbing at it with a fallen branch. In the very instant she opens her mouth to say “Hi,” startling them both, she sees what it is: a turtle. One of the big ridge-backed things that come up out of the lake to lay their eggs on the apron of sand at the edge of the ball field.

Seldy tries for a smile and only partly succeeds. Richie ignores her. “Hi,” Seldy murmurs.

“Are you up visiting?” she hears herself say, even as Richie forces the stick into the animal’s mouth and the jaws clamp down with an audible crack.

“See that?” he says. “One of these things can take your hand off if you’re not careful.”

Very softly, as if she’s afraid to raise her voice, Seldy says, “Yes,” but that’s puzzling, because Marsha didn’t breathe a word and it takes a moment for her to realize they must be staying with Richie’s parents on the other side of the lake — or not even on the lake, really, but in a development off Amazon Road. And then a scenario from a year ago presents itself, a dinner party she was giving for a new couple, the Abramsons — he’s a doctor in the city — and how Seldy, up for the weekend, had sat rigidly between her parents and barely said a word all night. Except to be negative. At one point, early on, before the Abramsons and the others arrived, Miriam had been rearranging the flowers in the big cut-glass vase she’d inherited from her mother, soliciting Marsha’s opinion, just chattering, that was all, when Seldy, her face sour and her lips drawn down, snapped at her out of nowhere. “Jesus, Miriam, it’s only the Colony, only the sticks,” she said, and her voice was like a saw cutting the house in two. “You’d think you were Mrs. Dalloway or something.”

It’s cold — raw — and she tightens the parka around her. She’s about to say something inane like “That’s nice,” when Richie jerks the branch from the turtle’s mouth and brings it down hard on the slick gleaming carapace, not once but twice. He’s lifting it again, lifting it high, when she steps forward and takes hold of the end of it so quickly she surprises herself. “What are you doing?” she demands, her voice gone harsh in her throat.

To his credit, he doesn’t resist, and the stick is hers now, to drop in the grass at her feet while the turtle, hissing, thrashes its head back and forth as if it can’t pinpoint the source of the threat. “Thing doesn’t deserve to live,” he says, and his eyes are unfocused, fully dilated, as if he’s dreaming on his feet. “They’re just trash anyway. They kill fish, ducks even. They—”

“No,” she says, cutting him off, “no. They belong here. They have a right to live just like everything else.” She wants to go on, wound up all of a sudden, angry out of all proportion, but he’s already turned his back on her, stalking across the grass in his high-heeled boots — purple, purple boots — and she’s left there with Seldy. Who has nothing to say. Her best friend’s daughter, a girl she’s known since she was in the cradle, and she has nothing to say. Miriam wants to invite her up to the house for tea, a bagel, a good long chat about dropping out, about fashion and respect for nature and life in the Village—freaks, they call themselves freaks—but she finds, in that moment, that she has nothing to say either.

[I remember stopping by one year on spring break and finding Miriam in a lawn chair out on the fringe of the ball field, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, keeping watch over a pair of nesting turtles while a pickup game went on behind her. I must have spent an hour crouched there beside her, catching up on things as the turtles patiently extruded their eggs as if time had gone back a millennium and there were no lawnmowers or automobiles or boys with sticks and rocks and baseball bats poised to annihilate them. And where was Sid? Working. Always working. He’d had his reverses on the stock market and elsewhere, a tough year, but he was still a member of the tin knockers’ union and always had work. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even know turtles existed.]

And it’s another day, a year further on, Susan at Rutgers and loving it, or at least liking it, or so she says on the odd nights when she bothers to call, and Miriam has just got off the phone with her cousin Molly, who lives in Connecticut now and whose youngest — Mark, just twenty-four — has had some sort of nervous breakdown. Or worse. He’s been in treatment since he was a teenager and nobody wants to call it schizophrenia because you don’t come back from that. They say it runs in families, and when Miriam comes to think of it, Molly’s father was no mental paragon, scared of his own face in the mirror, hearing voices, talking nonsense half the time. She just thanks her lucky stars her own children turned out normal, though sometimes she wonders about Les, out there on the West Coast, unmarried at thirty and running with a fast crowd, restaurant people, bar people, people who use drugs and don’t go to bed till the sun rises.

She pushes herself up from the table, aching in her joints — and there’s a sharp pain in the calf of her left leg, a kind of thrilling or buzzing that goes away almost as soon as she puts a name to it. She actually pads to the stove and lights the burner under the kettle before she realizes it’s not tea she wants. Or a cigarette either. The house is a mess — she’s never been much of a housekeeper, except on special occasions, holidays, dinner parties, when she can get herself motivated — but she’s in no mood to start sifting through the papers and magazines and books, the pots and pans and dead and dried-up flowers that seem to accumulate like drift, that will one day bury the house like the sands of Arabia and no one here to care one way or the other. From the window she can see the wall of the paddleball courts, which are empty at this hour on a weekday, and beyond them Rose Shapiro — eighty and stooped — pacing the beach as if she were making her way across the steppes of Russia like poor Dr. Zhivago, and the sight only depresses her the more. You marry, have children, cook, clean, get sick, get old, pace the beach till you can’t even remember who you are anymore. That’s life. That’s what it is.

It is then that she thinks of the canoe. Susan had it out last summer once or twice, but aside from that it’s just sat there inert for as long as she can remember. She’s suddenly seized with the idea of it, its smooth white skin pressed to the belly of the water, clouds scudding by overhead, the release of it, gliding, just gliding. She makes herself a sandwich at the kitchen counter, pours juice into the thermos, selects a paperback from the shelf in the den and goes out into the day and the sunlight, which flares with sudden brilliance, feeling as if she’s going off on an adventure. The lake gives back the sun in a fine glaze of light. There’s a ripple of wind across the water, an infinity of scalloped black wavelets riding out as far as she can see. Birds spangle the grass.

She has some trouble with the combination lock — it’s just rusty, that’s all — and then, once she’s got the chain free and tries to flip the boat over, she finds it’s unaccountably heavy. There’s no one to see her, really, aside from Mrs. Shapiro, who barely glances up from her own shoelaces, but still she feels embarrassed to think that she can’t even flip over a canoe, a thing she must have done a hundred times when she was a girl. Is she really that old and weak? She sucks in her breath and gives it another try, like one of those puffed-up Russian weight lifters in the Olympics on TV, and there it is, like a miracle, right side up and thumping reverberantly to the ground. The sound echoes out over the water and comes back again, thrilling with the chatter of birds and the soughing of the breeze in the branches overhead. It’s April. She’s fifty-eight years old. And her feet, her bare feet, are in the water now, the canoe hovering before her and threatening to tip first one way and then the other until all at once she’s firmly planted in the seat and the paddle is working in her sure tight grip and the shore retreats behind her.

It’s a joy. A lark. And almost immediately she finds her rhythm, the motion — dip and rise and dip again — coming back to her as if it were ingrained in her muscle memory, and maybe it is, though it’s been more years than she can count. She feels the sun on her face and when she shifts position it wraps itself across her shoulders like an electric blanket, warming and gentle. By the time she thinks to look back to where her house sits reduced on the horizon, she’s nearly to the far side of the lake. What she’s thinking is that she should do this more often — get out, enjoy life, breathe the air — and she makes a promise to herself that starting tomorrow, she will. It’s not even noon yet when she lays the paddle athwart the gunwales and unwraps her sandwich, pastrami on rye, just letting the boat drift, and isn’t this the best pastrami on rye she’s ever had? The canoe rocks. She lies back, for just a moment, and closes her eyes.

When she wakes, she can’t imagine where she is, despite the evidence all around her. It takes her a minute, so inured is she to her own home, to her kitchen and den and the walls and doors and ceilings that contain her, to come fully to herself. The sun is gone, the clouds bleeding across the sky. And the wind is stronger now, damper, sweeping out of the south with a scent of rain. She’s not wearing her watch — she left it home for fear of getting it wet — and that further disorients her, as if to know the time would put everything back in its place. Nothing for it but to paddle, but which way? She can’t see the shore from here, not through the low-bellied clouds — as best she can figure the canoe must have been carried all the way down the lake while she dozed. All right. She’ll just orient herself, that’s all. She swivels round, scanning both shores till she finds a fixed point, the pale white tower of the seminary all the way up on Stony Street emerging suddenly from the clouds and the canopy of the distant trees, which means she has to go in… that direction, there, behind her now. She feels the relief wash over her — at least she knows where she is — until she reaches for the paddle, or the place where the paddle was, and finds it gone.

[This became a family legend, trotted out at dinner parties over the years, the story of how Miriam used her hands to paddle the boat to the nearest point, which unfortunately lay on the far side of the lake, and how she’d walked a good mile and a half barefoot and with her windbreaker and the blouse beneath it soaked through before she got to Kitchawank Village and the pay phone in front of the liquor store there and realized she didn’t have a cent to her name, let alone a dime. How she’d turned around and walked another three blocks on the cold hard unforgiving pavement till she got to Lowenstein’s Deli and Sy Lowenstein let her use the store phone to call Sid, who was installing heating ducts in a four-plex in Mount Kisco where thank God they had a phone already hooked up on the ground floor, to please come get her before she froze to death. And how Sid had let out one of his arpeggiated Jesus Christs! and went twenty miles over the limit all the way back and then had to take her out to Fiorvanti’s because there was no dinner on the table that night.]

She’s never much liked the autumn, even when Susan was in Brownies and she took the girls out into the woods to collect leaves and hickory nuts and they made campfires and cooked wieners over the open coals, because autumn prefigures winter and winter lasts forever. But it’s an autumn day in an advancing year, the trees brilliant around the lake, each leaf painted a distinctive shade and the whole blended as in a Monet, when the phone rings and she picks up to hear from Molly, all the way out in Connecticut, that Marsha’s daughter Seldy is getting married. To Richie Spano. Who, at thirty-four, is assistant manager of some sort of appliance store in Yorktown Heights and apparently making a decent living, though no one would have thought it from the way he was raised.

What goes through her mind first is a quick envious accounting — neither Alan nor Les is married yet, nor do they look to be soon, and Susan’s been so busy studying for the Bar she hasn’t had a date in months, or not that Miriam knows of anyway — and then, as she forms the words She hasn’t told me anything about it, the hurt sets in. This is Marsha, her best friend all these years, maid of honor at her own wedding, and she can’t call her with the news? Yes, well maybe they have been like strangers lately, because things are different now, everybody getting older and more stay-at-home, the Colony breaking down as people die off or move away to Florida and the new people don’t want to pay their dues and drop out — plus in most cases they’re not even Jewish — but that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a telephone.

As soon as she hangs up — before it occurs to her that maybe Marsha’s ashamed to have such a son-in-law, not to mention a daughter throwing her life away — she’s dialing. What she wants to say is Hello, how are you? so that she can ease into the situation as gracefully as possible, but her lips betray her. “Marsha?” she says. “How come you didn’t tell me the good news?”

“Hello, Miriam, is that really you?” Marsha returns, her rasping voice as familiar as Miriam’s own. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it, what with one thing and another? But news? What news are you talking about?”

“Seldy. Getting married. Are you planning a spring wedding then — June? Like you and David? And Sid and me?”

There’s a pause. The sound of a match striking and Marsha drawing smoke into her lungs. “No,” she breathes finally, “no, that’s not the way it is anymore.”

And then there’s the exegesis, a story stewed in its details and leaning heavily toward Richie and Richie’s feelings. Richie — he grew up Catholic, did she know that? — hates religion, just hates it, and so does Seldy, or that’s what she claims. They don’t want a fuss. Don’t want anybody there — and it was like pulling teeth just to get them to say that she and David could stand as witnesses when they go before the justice of the peace. And they want to do it as soon as possible.

There’s a pause. Silence on both ends of the line. “Well, could we at least host the reception?” Miriam puts in, feeling nothing but shame and disappointment for Marsha — and for herself, herself too.

Very softly: “No, I don’t think so. I think the Spanos — Rich Senior and Carlotta, the parents? — I think they have something planned.”

She wants to shout back at her You think? but she goes numb all over, the phone pressed to her ear like a weight, like one of the dumbbells Alan had left in the far corner of the basement from when he was in junior high. She gazes out across the lake and hears herself peep and chirp back at Marsha as the conversation runs to the sorrows and sicknesses of people they know, to the sad state of the Colony, how hardly anybody goes to the Association meetings anymore and how they could barely raise a crew to take the raft out of the water this fall, and then finally stalls. “Call soon,” she hears herself say.

“Yes, I will.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

There are half a dozen people she wants to call, she’s so wrought up, but for a long while, as the sun softens and the colors fade from the trees on the far side of the lake, she just sits there, feeling as if someone has died. What will Sid think? Sid’s always had a soft spot for Seldy, as if she were his own daughter, and he’s never liked Richie Spano, never liked what he stood for or where he came from or how he’d managed to get his hooks into her. And then she’s remembering the time, years ago now, down at the lake, when she snapped awake from a sun-soaked dream to a clamor of voices raised in anger. Sid’s voice she recognized right away, a low buzz of outrage that meant he was right on the verge, but the other voice — a high querulous whine that seemed to choke on itself — she didn’t know.

It was Richie Spano’s. She turned to look over her shoulder and there he was, incandescent in the light, flailing his arms and screaming in Sid’s face. He didn’t want to wait for a court and he’d been waiting too long already, shouting it out as if he’d been gored, shouting that the whole idea of holding the court when you never lose was just bullshit, that was all. She pushed herself up from the beach chair in the moment that the two of them came at each other — and Sid, though he was slow to anger, could have torn him apart and would have but for the intervention of David, who forced himself between them before the shoves could turn to blows. But that wasn’t enough for Richie. He danced out of reach, spewing his obscenities till Sid broke loose and came for him, but there was no way Sid could catch him in the open and that just made it worse. The next week, at the very next meeting of the Association, she raised her hand and made a motion to ban people from the beach who weren’t even members of the Colony — and she named Richie Spano specifically, because whose guest was he anyway?

[My memories of Sid are of a man secure in himself, a big man — huge for his generation, six-three and two-twenty and none of it gone to fat — who gave the impression of power held in reserve, even when he was flipping steaks in a rainstorm or revolving a gimlet so that the pale green viscid liquid swirled like smoke in a crystal ball. He was quick-witted and light on his feet, as verbally wicked as we ourselves were, and if you were admitted to his inner circle — and I was, I was — he would defend you against all comers. He’d fought the Germans, done a stint as a beat cop in Harlem and then come home to the house on the lake to raise his family. I remember walking into a bar with him once, an unfamiliar place, down and dirty — and he must have been in his mid-sixties then — and feeling untouchable, as secure as if I were sitting in my own living room.]

The tragic days of our lives, the days of accounting, begin like any other, with routine, with the bagel in the toaster and the coffee on the stove. So this is a morning. Sunlight streams through the big picture window though it’s cold, down to zero overnight, and the lake is sealed beneath a hard uneven tegument of ice so thick you could drive a truck across it. Miriam is feeling good, the pain in her hip subsiding under the ministrations of the prescription the doctor gave her while Sid, home from work because things are slow, is sitting across the table from her, his head bowed to the paper, jaws working at the bagel she’s smeared with cream cheese and decorated with a transparent wafer of lox and a sprinkle of capers. They’re silent, she absorbed in her thoughts, he in the paper. The only sounds are the little ones, the tap of a spoon on the rim of a cup, the sigh of the knife as it divides another bagel. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee is as rich and intoxicating as if they were sitting on a carpet in some bazaar in the Orient.

“You want juice?” she says. “Fresh-squeezed, I can make fresh-squeezed, with the oranges Molly sent us from Florida?”

He glances up from the paper, his eyes a roving watery blue above the little wire reading glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose. His fringe of hair, so thin now it’s barely there, sticks up awkwardly in back. He’s dressed in blue jeans, moccasins, a thin gray sweatshirt she’s washed so many times it’s almost white. “Yeah,” he breathes, “I guess. But don’t go to any trouble.”

She’s already pushing herself up, about to say, They’re going to go bad soon anyway, when she glances reflexively out the window, just as she does a hundred times a day. There’s a scattering of snow over the beach, the lake, the long low building that houses the concession stand, snow like dust. Everything is still, not even a bird moving among the stripped black branches of the trees. Susan says that she needs a hobby, needs to get out more, and maybe she does spend too much time at the window, more interested in what’s outside of her than what’s here inside the house — if this is what old women do, biddies, yentas, then she guesses she’s one of them. Yet when Les flew in from San Francisco for her sixty-fifth two weeks back she felt the resistance rising in her — was she really that old? And the cake — the cake was like the flank of some animal set ablaze in a conflagration, only it wasn’t running away. It was right there on the table in front of her.

But here’s the juicer, here the crate of oranges. She dips forward to dig into the crate, her gaze running across the table, past Sid and out to the familiar scene as if it were a picture in a frame. But it’s not a picture and something’s wrong, something’s out of place. She spots it then, a moving shadow in the deeper gloom cast by the overhanging roof of the concession stand, a man there, furtive, jerking back the door and ducking inside. “Sid,” she says, her blood quickening, “there’s somebody out there. I just — I think somebody just broke into the concession stand.”

“Who? What are you talking about?” He’s set down the paper now and he’s leaning forward to peer out the window, his lips pursed in concentration. “I don’t see anything.”

“He just went inside. I’m telling you. There’s somebody in there.”

This is an old story. There’ve always been problems with the place, the lake an irresistible draw for teenagers looking for trouble, and over the years the outbuildings have periodically been broken into, though there’s not much to steal, not in the off-season. They don’t seem to care. They just want to smash things, carve epithets into the counters, spray-paint their dirty slogans in the corners where children can’t miss them come summer. It’s been that way since the first truckload of sand was laid down, though it’s worse now, always and progressively worse, because the community isn’t what it was. And never will be.

Sid doesn’t want to be bothered, she can see that. He thinks she’s crazy, calling him at work every time a strange car pulls into the lot, sitting out there over her turtles and chasing dogs away from the Canada geese, ringing up the Yorktown cops so many times they don’t even bother to send a patrol car anymore. He’s already turned back to the paper—“It’s nothing, Miriam, nothing, don’t worry yourself”—when she drops the oranges right back in the crate and snatches up the binoculars. At first she can’t make out a thing, but then she focuses on the door, and sure enough, it’s standing open and there’s movement there, a man’s face showing like an image in a slide projector, presented and withdrawn all in the space of an instant. “Sid. Sid!”

The look he gives her is not a loving look. He sighs in that way he has when he’s feeling put-upon, a sigh that could contain a novel’s worth of martyrdom and resentment. But then she’s handing him the binoculars and he’s standing there erect at the window, focusing in. After a moment, he emits a low curse. “Son of a bitch,” he mutters, and he strides across the room to the door even as she calls out, “Take a coat!” and tries to fumble into her parka and slip on her boots all at the same time.

By the time she reaches the gates — and the big brass padlock there is hanging open, no question about it — he’s already at the paddleball courts, moving swiftly, his shadow jogging on ahead of him. It’s cold and she’s forgotten her glasses. She digs into her pockets, but can only come up with one mitten. The pain in her hip is back, as sharp as a scalpel. She’s forcing herself on, breathing hard, breathing as if she’s about to have a heart attack, when she hears the shouts ring out, and she makes the open door just in time to see Richie Spano, in a black peacoat and with the dark slash of a mustache slicing his face in two, standing over Sid, who’s stretched out supine on the gray concrete floor. What she doesn’t know, not yet, because she hardly ever talks to Marsha anymore, is that Vic Janove, who’s run the concession stand for the past twenty years and who’s become as close to the Goldsteins as she and Sid used to be when they were young together, has asked Richie, as a favor, to look after the place while he’s in Florida.

Sid is down on the concrete. He’s sixty-eight years old and he’s just been in a fistfight. And Richie, the breath issuing from his mouth like one of those dialogue balloons in the funny papers, squares his shoulders, swings round and walks right past her and out the door, and all he says, his voice so fierce and choked he can barely get it out, is, “You bitch. You stupid interfering bitch.”

[This too is family legend, though it’s etched in pain. Sid, who had suffered what the neurologists quaintly call an insult to the brain when his head struck the concrete, was too stubborn to go to the doctor. He’d been knocked down before. It was nothing. He took a fistful of aspirin to quell his headache, asked Miriam to make him a cup of tea and maybe some soup, borscht or chicken noodle, it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t really hungry anyway. Three days later, when finally he relented, and she, unsteady on her feet herself, tried to help him down to the car, he collapsed in the driveway. He was dead before she could get the car door open.]

It’s a Saturday in July, another Saturday, the voices of children careening about her and the steady thwock of the dense black rubber ball punctuating her thoughts. These are new children, of course, the children and grandchildren of her friends and of the new people too. She barely glances at the men on the paddleball court — they’re interchangeable, their bare legs furred in dark swirls, T-shirts glued to their torsos, sweatbands at their wrists. Their voices rise and fall, immemorial. Someone laughs. A radio buzzes, seeking the signal. Thwock. Thwock. She knows it will all be lost, everything we make, everything we love, everything we are.

Her eyes close, the sun pressing at her lids like a palpable weight. She can feel everything, every molecule of the hot aluminum slats of the chair and the fading grains of sand, she can taste the air and smell the cold depths of the lake, where no one ever drowns and every child comes home safely. There’s a splashing in the shallows, a dog raising its voice in ecstasy, the sharp tocsin of the lifeguard’s whistle. And then peace, carving out a space where the big green turtles rise lazily from the depths and the geese float free and a little girl, somebody’s daughter, comes wet and shivering to her mother’s sun-struck embrace.

(2009)

What Separates Us from the Animals

When the new doctor first moved in — it was a year ago now, in January — my husband Wyatt and I had him over to dinner. We were being neighborly, of course, that goes without saying, but we were also curious to see what he was like when his guard was down. After he’d had two Cutty Sarks and water, that is, and maybe half a bottle of chablis, and he was sitting by the fire with his legs stretched out before him and the remains of a platter of my cranberry tarts balanced on the swell of his belly. That was when you found out what a man was really like, in the afterglow of dinner, when he was digesting, and believe me the doctor had been no slouch at the table, putting away two steaming helpings of lobster bisque, a grilled haddock fillet with rosemary potatoes and my own tartar sauce, three buttered slices of homemade sourdough and a wilted spinach salad with bacon bits and roasted pine nuts. Of course, we weren’t the only ones to invite him over — probably half the families on the island had the same idea — but we were the first. I’d been chair of the committee that brought him here, so I had an advantage. Plus, that was me standing out there in the cold to greet him when he drove off the ferry in an old Volvo wagon the color of jack cheese.

He’d begged off that first night — too much to do, he’d said, what with unpacking and all, and that was understandable, though I really did fail to appreciate why he wouldn’t accept my offer of help, especially in the absence of a wife or children or any sort of family, if you discount the two slope-shouldered Siamese cats staring out the front window of the car — but he agreed to come the following night. “Just name the time,” he said with a little click of his fingers, “and I’ll be there.”

“We tend to eat early this time of year,” I said, trying not to make my voice sound too apologetic. We were standing on the porch of the house he was seeing for the first time and I’d just pushed open the door for him and handed him the key. There was a breeze out of the northeast, bitter as the salt smell it carried. The cats mewed in unison from the confines of the car, which sat in the driveway, sagging under its load. I was thinking of the city, how they ate at all hours there, and trying to balance Wyatt’s needs — he was a bear if he didn’t get fed — with what my mother, when she was alive, used to call etiquette.

“How early?” He lifted a pair of eyebrows thick as spruce cuttings.

“Oh, I don’t know — would four-thirty be all right?” He frowned then and I added quickly, “For cocktails, that is. Dinner can always wait.”

Whether he was put out or not, I’ll say this for him: he was prompt. There he was rapping at the door the next evening just as the light was fading from the sky and Venus brightening out over the water. He’d come at four-thirty on the dot and that showed consideration on his part, but both Wyatt and I were surprised to say the least when we got a look at what he was wearing. I don’t know what we expected, not a tux and tails certainly, but he was a doctor after all, an educated man, and from the city too, and you’d think he’d have some notion of what it meant to accept an invitation. I don’t know how to put this politely so I’ll just say I was dumbfounded to see him standing there on the front porch dressed in the very same paint-spattered blue jeans, shapeless gray sweatshirt and pinched little baseball cap he’d been wearing the previous day (which I’d excused at the time because he was in the process of moving and nobody wears their Sunday finest for lugging boxes and hauling furniture, not that he had much — medical equipment, mainly — but then the Trumbull House was furnished. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?).

Of course, I’m nothing if not adaptable, and I did manage to recover myself quickly enough to give him as gracious a smile as I could muster under the circumstances and usher him in out of the cold. I didn’t have time to worry over the peculiar odor he was bringing in with him or where I could possibly seat him without having to think about the furniture, because there he was, stamping around in the anteroom and clapping his arms to his shoulders as if he’d walked twenty miles in an arctic blast instead of just kitty-corner across the street, and the moment had come for me to act the role of hostess — and Wyatt too. Or, in his case, host.

Wyatt was looking chicken-necked in the white shirt and tie I’d made him put on, and his eyes dodged away from the doctor’s even as he took the man’s meaty big-knuckled hand in his own. “Pleased to meet you,” the doctor whispered so you could barely hear him and ran a hand through his beard. Did I mention he had a beard? A doctor with a beard? That set me back, I’ll tell you, but at least I’d seen him the previous day and this was Wyatt’s first exposure to him. (Not that there’s anything wrong with beards — half the lobstermen wear them. So does Wyatt, for that matter.)

As planned, we got sociable over the scotch whiskey, the doctor sitting in the wooden rocker by the fire and Wyatt and I settling into the couch with its linen slipcovers and ecru pillows that are nothing but dirt magnets and why I didn’t go for a darker shade — or gray even, a nice charcoal gray — I’ll never know. Of course, I didn’t want to dominate the conversation but I’m afraid there were long stretches when I was pretty much resigned to listening to my own voice as I filled him in as best I could on our institutions, our likes and dislikes, and some of our more colorful types like Heddy Hastings, who at eighty-seven years old ignored everybody’s advice and named a whole litter of Pekinese puppies after her deceased siblings and then went around talking to them as if they were living, breathing people. The doctor didn’t seem surprised, or not particularly — I guess he’d seen just about everything in the city. He was more a listener than a talker, in any case, and Wyatt wasn’t much of a conversationalist unless he was sitting down at the fishermen’s shack with the Tucker brothers and some of the other old boys he’d grown up with, and that was a problem right from the start. But I’d given Wyatt a couple of prompts, and as he got up to refresh our drinks, he cut me off in the middle of a description of the sins and venalities of the summer people and blurted, “So you’re divorced then, is that it?”

The doctor — he’d said right off Call me Austin, but the way my mother raised me I just couldn’t bring myself to address him as anything other than Doctor — held out his glass and gave us two words on the subject: “Never married.”

“Really?” I said, trying to cover my surprise. I looked at him closely, looked at him in a whole new light. I thought of the two cats in the car — Siamese, no less — and made a leap. Was he gay, was that it? Because if he was he hadn’t mentioned a thing about it when he applied for the position, and though we didn’t have a whole lot of choice (there was one other applicant, a black woman from Burkina Faso who was still working toward her certification), I don’t know if we would have wanted a gay doctor. I tried to read Wyatt’s face, to see how he was taking it, but he turned his back to me as he measured out the scotch whiskey.

“Wyatt and I’ve been married twenty-eight years now,” I said into the silence that had descended over the room, “and to answer your unasked question, no, we were never blessed with children.” Something came over me then, a kind of sadness that catches me unawares at the oddest times. My face felt like putty all of a sudden, as if it had just been molded from big wet globs of the stuff, and I thought for a minute I was going to start to cry. “It was me,” I told him, fighting to master my voice. “My tubes. They — but you’ll learn all that soon enough.” I drew in a deep breath to compose myself before turning the focus back on him. “What about you? Never found a… a person—you hit it off with?”

He laughed and waved his hand as if he were swatting flies. “No, I don’t swing that way, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He dropped his eyes, a big overgrown man in dirty clothes who was probably just shy, that was all, and if I thought of Mary Ellen Burkhardt’s daughter Tanya, who’d recently come back to us after her divorce on the mainland, so much the worse. “I like women as much as the next man,” he said, but he never raised his eyes to look at me, just studied the pattern of the carpet as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. And then — I did think this was a bit excessive — he laughed again, and I couldn’t help feeling it was at our expense. I mean, we may be provincial — how could we help but be, living out here a good twelve and a half miles from the coast with just five hundred year-round residents and one bar, one café, one church and a single supermarket that’s anything but super? — but we were still part of the modern world. Eileen McClatchey’s son, Gerald, was queer, as he insisted on calling himself, and we did have the summer people, after all.

But then we were at the table, eating, and he never paused for grace or removed his cap, though I told myself not to be judgmental. He praised my cooking in the usual way — I’m known from one end of this island to the other for my lobster bisque, not to mention my pork roast with onion and peanut sauce — and then, as I’ve said, we wound up by the fire. I was trying to pinpoint the odor he gave off, something between perspiration, naphtha and a heap of old sweat socks left out in the rain, and I was just about to offer to do a load of wash for him as a way of getting him to open up, but he wasn’t the sort of man to open up, even when he was digesting. In fact, right then, with the crumbs on his lips and the platter of cranberry tarts still balanced on his stomach, he began, ever so softly, to snore.

—

It was a while before I saw him again, other than to wave at him when he passed by in his Volvo going God knows where, and in that time just about everybody we knew invited him to dinner (the better class, that is, the ones who gave two hoots whether a township functioned smoothly or even at all). I know the Caldwells had him over, Betsy Fike, John and Junie Jordan, all sorts of people. And if he wasn’t dining out, he could be found down at the Kettle at seven o’clock on the stroke, forking up a plate of fish and chips or deep-fried scallops, which are delicious, I admit it, but maybe not so beneficial for your heart health, as any doctor ought to know. At any rate, I doubted if he cooked for himself at all, not even to the extent of heating up a can of soup over the range or popping a frozen dinner in the microwave.

Then there was the question of his office hours. Our agreement — the township was paying him $75,000 a year, plus the use of the Trumbull House, gratis — stipulated that he hold office hours, morning and afternoon, five days a week, and be available for house calls as needed. But Betsy Fike, whose wrist never really healed properly after her boating accident, went in to see him at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning — in pain, real pain — and the door was locked and he never answered her knock. Even worse, when you could get in — and I had this from Fredericka Granger — he just sat there behind his desk, which even back then, right in the beginning, was a mess, heaped high with forms and papers and grease-stained sandwich wrappers, empty potato chip bags and the like, and you practically had to move heaven and earth to convince him to take you into the back room for an examination. And that was a mess too.

I guess he’d been here six weeks or so by the time I decided to go in and see for myself. There was nothing wrong with me — Wyatt says I’m as healthy as a horse — but I invented something (female troubles, and though I’d turned forty-six and long since given in to the inevitable, I still wanted to see what he had to say about it, if that makes any sense). At any rate, I went in after lunch on one of those crusted-over March days when you think winter will never end, and took a seat in the deserted waiting room. The doctor didn’t have a nurse, so you just rang a bell and waited. I rang, took a seat and began leafing through the finger-worn magazines Dr. Braun had left behind when he lost his license in a prescription pill sting on the mainland and had to leave us.

Dr. Murdbritter (yes, that’s right, it does sound Jewish and we batted that around like a shuttlecock before we made him the offer) wasn’t prompt at all, not this time. I sat there a good ten or fifteen minutes, listening for sounds from within, until I got up and rang again, twice, before resuming my seat. When he finally appeared, in a faintly grayish-looking white shirt with an open collar, no jacket, he looked as if he’d been asleep. His hair — have I mentioned his hair? — was as kinky as a poodle’s and it tended to jut up on one side and lie flat on the other, and so it was now, as if he’d just raised his head from the pillow. He looked old, or older than his documentation claimed (which was my age exactly — we were even born in the same month, six days apart) and I had to wonder about that. Had he fudged a bit there? And if so, what of his qualifications, not to mention previous experience?

“Hello, Doctor,” I said, trying not to chirp, which I unfortunately find myself doing in such circumstances — running into people, that is, at the market or the gas station or the library or wherever. You’re chirping, Wyatt’ll say, and I’m forever trying to rein myself in.

The doctor’s face was unreadable. He was squinting at me. He gave a little tug at his beard. “Mrs. McKenzie,” he said, his voice as flat as if he were reading from a phone book.

“Call me Margaret,” I said, appending a little laugh. “After all, we have broken bread together—”

He didn’t appear to have heard this — or if he did he chose to ignore it. This wouldn’t be a sociable visit, I could see that. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked, stepping back to hold the door open so that I could see through to his heaped-up desk, and beyond it, the examining room, which looked little better.

“Oh, nothing, really,” I said, settling into the chair stationed in front of the desk while he eased himself into the swivel chair behind it with an audible sigh, “and I don’t want to trouble you—” Was that really a boot, a mud-encrusted boot, peeping out from beneath the examining table in the back room? And where were the oil paintings of dories and seabirds and the sun setting over Penobscot Bay Alva Trumbull had left behind when she bequeathed the place to the township?

“Yes?” He was waiting, his fingers knitted, his eyes roving over me.

“I’m having pains.”

“What sort of pains?”

I glanced away, then turned back to him, indicating, as best I could, the region of my lap. “Women’s pains. A kind of, I don’t know, just pain.”

“Bloating?”

I shook my head.

“Blood? Any discharge at all?”

I shook my head again, even more emphatically. There had been something, a faint discoloration I sometimes found in the crotch of my panties when I did the wash, but it was ordinary, the sort of thing women my age can be prone to once menopause comes, and I’d thought nothing of it till he put a name to it: discharge. I felt strange all of a sudden, as if I’d gone too far, too deep, and my little fib had come back to bite me.

He asked the usual questions then, looked at the charts Dr. Braun had left, probing gently about my previous history, and when we got to a point where we could go no further, he rose and said, “If you’ll step inside,” indicating the examining room.

“But I, I don’t really—” I began, pushing myself up from the chair in confusion, all the while silently cursing Fredericka Granger. Here he was leading me into the examining room without a hint of hesitation, but as far as I was concerned there was nothing to be examined, or no point to it, at any rate, because I was here to check up on him, not vice versa.

“It’s all right,” he said, and for a moment I saw beyond the beard and the dingy shirt and the tumult of the place, and saw him for what he was — a good doctor, a friend, a man who’d come to fulfill our collective need. I bowed my head and complied.

Still, as soon as I was inside, in his inner sanctum, I have to tell you I was shocked all over again. Everything I’d heard was true. The paper on the examining table looked as if it hadn’t been changed since Dr. Braun’s time. The linoleum was in serious need of wax, let alone a good mopping, the wastebaskets were overflowing — I saw fluffs of cotton stained with blood, syringes, throwaway thermometers, yet more fast-food wrappers and paper cups — and there must have been half an inch of dust scattered over everything. Worse, there was that muddy boot peeping out at me from beneath the table, and his jacket, his white coat, thrown across the back of a chair like an afterthought.

“Sit here, please,” he said, indicating the table, and he went through the usual routine, taking my temperature, peering into my eyes, listening to my heart and lungs. “Now, if you’ll just lie back,” he said finally, puffing for breath as if he’d just climbed a steep hill. I lifted my legs to the table and lay back, wondering about that, and then it came to me: he was out of condition, that was what it was, as disordered on the inside as he was on the outside, overweight, sloppy, with an appetite for deep-fried food and no wife or mother to anchor him. I felt sorry for him suddenly, felt as if I wanted to reach out and console him, help him, but then he was there leaning over me, his fingers pressing at my abdomen, roving from one spot to another, liver, kidneys and lower. Was this painful? This?

I was unconsciously holding my breath, his odor — it was B.O., plain and simple, and I saw myself gift-wrapping one of the spare bottles of Old Spice Wyatt’s sister sends every Christmas and leaving it on his porch in an anonymous gesture — settling over me like a miasma. Listerine. Maybe I’d leave some Listerine too.

“You understand you’ll have to go to the mainland, to a gynecologist, for a complete exam,” he offered at the conclusion of our little visit. “I can’t really do an exam without a nurse present — for my own protection, you understand — and since we don’t seem to have funding for a nurse…”

“Yes,” I said, feeling nothing but relief.

He was writing a prescription for some sort of pain medication — or a placebo, more likely — and saying, “Just take one of these every four hours for pain, and if it gets worse, or if there’s any bleeding or unusual discharge, you let me know right away.”

I smiled as best I could, and then, ignoring everything — the mess of the room, his beard, the fact that his lower teeth were as yellow as a dog’s — I made a leap, envisioning a little dinner party, my shrimp scampi or maybe linguine, Tanya Burkhardt and her mother Mary Ellen sitting across the table from the doctor and Wyatt mixing the drinks. “I was wondering,” I said, as he handed me the prescription, which I was determined to tear up the minute I was out the door, “if maybe you wouldn’t want to come over to dinner again sometime soon? Thursday, maybe? How does Thursday sound?”

—

Tanya and Mary Ellen arrived first, and I saw right away that Tanya hadn’t managed to gain back any of the weight she’d lost from the strain of the divorce and trying to manage the twins all by herself (though I couldn’t understand why, since she’d been back nearly three months now and living at home, where she didn’t have to lift a finger and Mary Ellen heaped up enough food three times a day to choke a lumberjack). And her hair. Tanya had always had the most beautiful hair, her best feature really, since it hid her ears and contoured her face, but here she was shorn like a nun. Which only emphasized those unfortunate ears she’d inherited from her father, Michael, now deceased but living on in his daughter’s flesh. Or cartilage, I suppose, in this case.

Anyway, we were all settled in around the fire, presenting the cozy sort of scene I hoped would awaken some long-forgotten notion of hearth and family in Dr. Murdbritter, when he called to say he’d be late — something about a last-minute patient suffering from an asthma attack, which could only have been Tom Harper, who went around wheezing like a sump pump and should have given up smoking the day he was born — and that put me off my mood. When the doctor did finally arrive, we were just finishing our second cocktail — Wyatt had made up a batch of his famous cranberry margaritas — and I’m afraid Tanya was looking a bit flushed.

I don’t know if I was overcompensating by getting everybody to the table as expeditiously as possible (yes, the doctor had his drink, white wine, and precisely three of my Swedish meatballs and two slices of cheese folded onto half a cracker amidst a smattering of small talk orchestrated by Mary Ellen and me), but I did really feel that we had to get something on our stomachs. I seated the doctor between Tanya and her mother, across from Wyatt and myself, and served the bread hot from the oven with pats of fresh creamery butter and little individual dipping plates of my own garlic-infused olive oil, which I figured would keep them busy long enough for me to excuse myself and dress the salad. I was in the kitchen, trying to listen to the conversation wafting in from the dining room while I tossed the salad and grated Romano, when Tanya sashayed through the open door and helped herself to a glass of the Italian red I’d set aside for the pasta course, filling it right to the very rim. “It’s a nice wine,” I said absently, but she just put her lips to the glass, shrugged, and drank half of it in a gulp before topping off the glass and drifting back into the dining room to take her seat at the table. Was this a recipe for trouble? I couldn’t say, not at the time, but my thinking was charitable and if I was foolish enough to try to play matchmaker, well, maybe I got what I deserved.

It seemed that Tanya took a dislike to the doctor right off, asking him all sorts of pointed (rude, that is) questions about his past and why he’d ever want to maroon himself in a craphole (her exact phrase) like this. I tried to intercede, to have a general conversation, but the doctor, chuffing slightly and making short work of the bread, butter and olive oil, didn’t seem fazed, or not particularly. “Oh, I don’t know,” he breathed, snatching a look at her before dropping his eyes to his plate, “I guess I’d just had enough of the rat race in the city. Know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t,” Tanya returned, with real vehemence. “People look at me like I’m some sort of wounded bird or something just because I’ve crawled back here to my mother, but I can’t wait to get away again. Just give me the opportunity — give me a ticket anywhere and five hundred bucks and I’m gone.”

“Tanya,” Mary Ellen said, coming down sharply on the first syllable.

“But you can’t mean that, Tanya,” I said. Wyatt stared at the paneled wall behind her. The doctor studied her as if seeing her for the first time.

“Damn straight I do.” Tanya lifted her glass and drained it, and this wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill red but an imported Chianti that cost twenty-two dollars a bottle on the mainland and was meant to be sipped and sniffed and appreciated. She glared round the room, then pushed herself up from the table. “And if you”—she pointed a finger at me—“and my mother think you can shove me off on some man I’ve never laid eyes on in my life just because you’ve got nothing better to do than play matchmaker, then you don’t need his kind of doctor, you need a head doctor.”

We tried, both Mary Ellen and I, but Tanya wouldn’t sit back down and eat. She wandered away from the table and into the living room, where she sank into the easy chair by the fire, and I was so involved in that moment with getting dinner on the table — the green beans were within ten seconds of being overcooked to the point of losing their texture — that I didn’t notice her slip out the door. What could I do? I put on a brave face and served the pasta and the green beans and we all seemed to find common ground in the vacancy Tanya left behind. The doctor perked up, Wyatt regaled us with a story about the young kayaker killed by a shark that apparently mistook the silhouette of his boat for a basking seal (a story so fresh I’d only heard it twice before), and Mary Ellen used her people skills to bring the doctor out — at least as far as he was willing to come.

We learned what had become of the oil paintings, which were now stored in the closet on the ground floor (“Too nautical for a landlubber like me,” he said with a chuckle) and discovered that his family name was of Franco-German origin. He had a brandy after dinner, his eyes at half mast and his big hands folded over his abdomen, and he never mentioned Tanya or the scene she’d created. And when his eyes fell shut and his breathing began to slow, Mary Ellen gently shook him awake and he looked at us all as if trying to recollect who we were and where he was, before rising massively and murmuring that he’d a lovely evening and hoped he could repay us someday with an invitation of his own.

—

Spring came in a long succession of downpours that flooded the streets and got the peepers peeping and the birds winging in from the south, a spell of nice weather took us by surprise in mid-May, and then it was June and the summer people began their annual migration. I saw Tanya around town with her two boys (three-year-olds, and a real handful), but we didn’t stop to chat because no matter what she’d been through with her ex or how sympathetic and forgiving a person I might be, her behavior in my dining room had been inexcusable, just inexcusable. As for the doctor, I did slip out one evening and leave a few anonymous gifts on his front porch — the shaving lotion and mouthwash, along with a plastic bucket of cleaning supplies and a mustache trimmer I found at the drugstore — but I was busy with a thousand things and hadn’t got round to inviting him over again and, of course, we were still waiting for him to live up to his parting promise and have us over one night in return. Not that I blamed him for putting us off. He had enough on his hands with the influx of summer people and the rash of contusions and snapped bones they suffered pitching headlong over the handlebars of their mopeds or careening down the rocks at Pilcher’s Head without having to worry about entertaining (though certainly it wouldn’t have killed him to host a cocktail party in that magnificent front room of the Trumbull House — if it still was magnificent, that is). In fact, all I knew of the doctor during the ensuing months came to me on the wings of rumor and complaint. Everybody had something to say on the subject, it seemed, and at the next town meeting, sure enough, Betsy Fike, who could hone the knife blade of a grudge for months if not years, stood up and declared that something had to be done about the state of the doctor’s office, not to mention the house, which was common property of the township and needed to be kept up out of consideration for the next generation and beyond.

Mervis Leroy, who was chair of the meeting, asked if she’d actually been in the house since the doctor’s occupation thereof and could testify to any lack of upkeep or deterioration, and Betsy (she’s five foot one, whip-smart, with two grown daughters and a husband about as expressive as a wall) admitted that she hadn’t. “But I’ve been to his office twice, after that first time when he wouldn’t even answer the door, and I can tell you the place is a pigsty. Worse. Even a pig wouldn’t put up with it.”

Voices piped up all around her and Mervis pounded his gavel and recognized one speaker after another, everybody supplying anecdotal evidence but pretty much saying the same thing: that Dr. Murdbritter seemed all right as a doctor, neither conspicuously bad nor conspicuously good, but that the way he maintained his office and his person was a disgrace. Someone, I forget who, pointed out that his Volvo had been sitting at the curb with a flat tire for two months now and that when he did make house calls he did it on foot, which was no way to operate if a crisis ever arose. Especially if you were overweight. And then there was the garbage situation and the way the dogs would get into his cans and scatter trash (and worse: medical waste) all over his back lawn and how he never bothered to do a thing about it. Junie Jordan said that while she was in the waiting room Wednesday last she’d peeked in the door at the main room of the house and saw that it hadn’t been touched since the day he moved in, except that the chairs were all covered in cat hair and there were dust bunnies sprouting up everywhere and cobwebs in the corners like in a horror movie, big ropes of them. People looked angry.

Then came the question: what to do about it? Send him a letter of official condemnation? Tell him to clean up or ship out? Start all over again searching for a replacement, one who was a model of personal hygiene? Do nothing and hope for the best? Finally — and this was my inspiration, because I had so much invested in making this work and could always see my way to a compromise, unlike some of my neighbors, who will go unmentioned here — it was moved that the township should allocate two hundred dollars a month out of the general fund for the purpose of hiring a maid to go into the Trumbull House once a week and straighten up. Betsy Fike seconded the motion. The chorus of ayes was resounding.

We found a young immigrant woman from Lincolnville and she took the ferry out and marched up the street with her own mop and broom slung like weapons of war over one shoulder. I watched her mount the steps, try the door handle — the door was left unlocked during office hours — and vanish inside. Five minutes later, she was back on the porch, the doctor hovering in the doorway like some dark presence while the young woman — a girl really — seemed to be giving him what for. I only wished I could have heard what they were saying, and I did go to the front door and ease it open, but at that moment a pack of tourists went buzzing by on their mopeds and all sense was lost to the racketing of their engines.

I waited ten minutes, watching the erstwhile maid head off down the street, the mop and broom dragging behind her in the dirt in the very picture of defeat, before I rang the doctor’s number. He answered on the second ring. “Dr. Murdbritter,” he announced in his official voice.

“I just wanted to know why you turned that girl away,” I started in without preliminary, and I guess that was a mistake. “We allocated the funds. For you. To help you with, well, to give you a hand keeping the place up—”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, Margaret. Margaret McKenzie.”

“I suppose you were watching all along.”

“Well, I just happened to be in the front yard and I couldn’t help but… She’s a good girl, with the best references. And she came all the way out here on the ferry just to—”

“I’m sorry,” he said, cutting me off, and I was startled by the tone of his voice, “but I just can’t have any interference in my personal life. You people brought me here to establish a practice and that’s what I’m doing. If you find funding for a nurse, you let me know — otherwise, stay clear, do you hear me?”

Of course, I had no choice but to report this turn of events, not to mention the doctor’s rudeness, to just about everyone I could think of, my phone tied up for the rest of the day and well into the evening so that Wyatt had to wait on his supper, which wound up being leftovers spruced up with a garden salad. We hashed it over at the next meeting, but no one had a good solution beyond giving the doctor his notice and that would have left us in a vulnerable position until we could find a replacement. I took it on myself to try to contact the woman from Burkina Faso in the hope that she’d completed her requirements and received her license in the interim, but a recording told me her telephone was no longer in service and my follow-up letter came back stamped Addressee Unknown.

We were at a stalemate. The tourists and summer people thronged the doctor’s porch with their blood-stained T-shirts and improvised bandages even as we islanders took our place in line and shuffled into his ever-filthier offices to announce our ailments because we had no choice in the matter. Would you let him put a needle in you? Betsy Fike demanded over the phone one day. Even in an emergency? Or blood — would you want him drawing blood? I felt very tired that day, crushed really, and I could barely rise to his defense and point out that his syringes were disposable and the blood things too. I know, I said finally, my voice ragged and weary, I know.

Autumn came early, blowing off shore with a cold wind just after Labor Day. The summer people departed, leaves flamed and died, the geese flapped overhead and showed up in roasting pans and crockpots. The first snow fell at the end of October and I felt so low and depressed it might as well have been the frozen white lid of my coffin, and when Thanksgiving rolled round I just didn’t feel up to it. Normally, Wyatt and I opened the house to a dozen or more guests and really made it festive — I baked for a week, served cod chowder, broiled oysters and turkey with all the trimmings, and it was one of the highlights of the year, and not just for Wyatt and me, but for our neighbors too. Yet this year was different, and it wasn’t just because I would have had to invite the doctor — that was a given. Truthfully, I didn’t even realize what it was till Wyatt brought it up.

“You know, you’re running yourself into the ground, worrying over every little detail all the time,” Wyatt said one night when he came in the door from work. “Have you had a look at yourself in the mirror? You’re as white as”—I watched him mentally juggling clichés before he gave up—“I don’t know, just white. Pale, you know.”

What I hadn’t told him, what I hadn’t told anybody, was that I’d begun spotting again. And this wasn’t just a faint discoloration, but blood, actual blood, crusted and dried till it was brown as dirt. I’d spent a long afternoon at our little one-room library (open Tuesday and Thursday, ten to four), masking the computer screen while I searched the Internet for information and that only scared and depressed me the more. I read about endometrial polyps, cancer of the uterus and fallopian tubes, anemia, hysterectomy, sonar and radiation treatments, the sickness that lingers and kills. I didn’t want to go to the mainland, didn’t want to pick doctors out of the phone book, didn’t want them probing and cutting and laying me up in some hospital in the city while strangers haunted the corridors and shot by obliviously in their shiny little Japanese cars. I went to the drugstore and stocked up on iron pills, multipurpose vitamins, a calcium supplement, and I hid my underthings at the bottom of the hamper as if that would solve anything.

One afternoon — it was just after Christmas, which I’d tried to make as cheerful for Wyatt as I could, though I didn’t feel up to caroling, not this time around — I was sitting at the front window, sipping tea and looking out into the fog that had begun to drift in. It was a typical winter fog, dense and shifting, so that the far side of the street just seemed to evaporate one minute only to reappear the next. At some point a stray shaft of sunlight cut through it all and lit up the front of the Trumbull House like a movie set and I could see something hanging on the door there, a sheet of white cardboard, it looked like. I plucked my binoculars from the table and focused in. It was a note of some sort, big and boxy, outsized like everything about Dr. Murdbritter, even his mess, but I couldn’t make out what it said. I knew in my heart that I needed to see him, confide in him, have him examine me even if I had to drag Wyatt into the room along with me, but I was afraid — not only of the tests he’d insist on and what they might show, but of letting him touch me there, and of the dirt, the dirt above all else.

I put on my coat, looked both ways on the porch to be sure no one was watching, and crossed the street to the doctor’s house. His car — he’d had Joe Gilvey replace the tire for him after Mervis drafted an official letter of complaint — was gone, and that was strange. After those first few weeks when he’d traced each of our six blacktop roads to where they petered out in a salt marsh or bay, he’d given up exploring, and then he’d had the flat and the car had just sat there like a natural feature of the environment for I don’t know how long. When I got to his porch, the mystery cleared itself up: the note said that he was taking the ferry to the mainland on personal business and would be back the following afternoon, directing all emergencies that might arise in his absence to the sheriff’s office. I don’t know what I felt at that moment. One part of me had been ready to ring the bell, slink into his office and confess what was happening to me and how scared I was, while the other part held back.

I can’t explain what I did next, not in any rational way, but I somehow had the duplicate key in my hand, the one that had hung on its little hook above the calendar on the bulletin board in my kitchen, and why I’d thought to put it in my pocket I’ll never know. In the next moment, I was inside, the house cold and dank and smelling of things I wouldn’t want to name, let alone the cat box, which must have been changed sporadically, if at all. I found the coffeepot in the kitchen set atop a stove so stained and blackened you couldn’t tell what color it was — he had been cooking after all, I thought, but it was a small consolation. I brewed the strongest coffee I could stand and began looking through the closets for the cleaning supplies, the mop and broom and vacuum cleaner Dr. Braun had left behind in his haste to vacate the place.

Can I tell you that all the lethargy that had come over me in the past months vanished the moment I went to work? I keep the tidiest house on the island, take my word for it, though some of the other wives and homemakers might make the same claim for themselves. Cleanliness, the desire for order where there is none, the struggle to fight down the decay all around us, is what separates us from the animals, at least in my opinion. I’m alert to everything, every tarnish and scuff and speck of mold, and I can’t sit still till it’s gone. It’s just me, it’s just the way I am. My father told me that when the Nazis were retreating across France ahead of the Allies, they’d vacate a farmhouse one morning and the Allies would occupy it that evening, and the most common booby trap the Nazis left behind was this: they’d leave a picture just slightly askew on the wall and when a soldier went to straighten it, goodbye. They’d have got you, Missy, the very first day, my father used to say, and he’d say it with pride.

Anyway, I went at that mess as if I were possessed, working past dinnertime so that Wyatt and I had to go out to the Kettle to eat and I ordered the fried scallops and polished them off with a vengeance, not caring a hoot if they hardened my arteries or not. I couldn’t sleep that night thinking of the shambles of the doctor’s bedroom and his filthy sheets — how could anybody sleep like that? — and of all that remained to be done not only in the house itself but in the office, especially the office. The ferry would be back at two, I knew that, but I wouldn’t rest till I had that desk cleared, the floors gleaming, the examining room and all the stainless-steel cabinets and instruments shining as if they gave off a light of their own. This place was a shrine, didn’t he realize that? A place of shriving and forgiveness and healing as sacred as any church. By God, I thought, by God.

I got lost in the rhythm of the work and when two o’clock rolled round I was still at it, which is why I really couldn’t say when he came in. I was down on my knees scrubbing the floor under the examining table till I thought I was going to take the finish right off it, my hand moving automatically from brush to pail and back again, and for a moment I didn’t realize he was there in the room with me. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the washer going and the dryer tossing his clothes with a rattle and clack. He might have cleared his throat, I don’t know, but I looked up then and saw him whole, from his clunky shoes and ill-fitting pants right on up to the look of shock and astonishment on his big whiskered face. He didn’t say a word. I got slowly to my feet, wiping my hands on the apron I’d run through the washer before dawn, the dial set to hot and a quarter cup of bleach poured in on top of it. “Doctor,” I said, and then I used his given name for the first time in my life, “Austin. I’m sorry, but I just had to — talk to you. About me. About my problem, that is.”

He might have said something then, a faint murmur of reassurance escaping his lips, but his face was so comical, so caught between what he’d been yesterday and what he was now, I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway. Was he angry? A little, I suppose. Or maybe he was just relieved, because finally the ice had been broken, finally we were getting down to the bottom of things. For the longest moment we simply stood there, ten feet apart, and let me tell you, everything in that room and the room beyond it shone as if we were seeing it for the first time, both of us, and when the sun broke free and poured through those spotless windows to pool on the shining floor, the glare was almost too much for us.

(2010)

Good Home

He always took Joey with him to answer the ads because Joey was likable, the kind of kid anybody could relate to, with his open face and wide eager eyes and the white-blond hair of whoever his father might have been. Or mother. Or both. Royce knew something about breeding and to get hair like that there must have been blonds on both sides, but then there were a lot of blonds in Russia, weren’t there? He’d never been there, but from what his sister Shana had told him about the orphanage they must have been as common as brunettes were here, or Asians and Mexicans anyway, with their shining black hair that always looked freshly greased, and what would you call them, blackettes? His own hair was a sort of dirty blond, nowhere near as extreme as Joey’s, but in the same ballpark, so that people often mistook Joey for his son, which was just fine with him. Better than fine: perfect.

The first place they went to, in Canoga Park, was giving away rabbits, and there was a kid there of Joey’s age — ten or so — who managed to look both guilty and relieved at the same time. A FOR SALE sign stood out front, the place probably on the verge of foreclosure (his realtor’s brain made a quick calculation: double lot, maybe 3,500 square feet, two-car garage, air, the usual faux-granite countertops and built-ins, probably sold for close to five before the bust, now worth maybe three and a half, three and a quarter), and here was the kid’s father sauntering out the kitchen door with his beer gut swaying in the grip of his wife-beater, Lakers cap reversed on his head, goatee, mirror shades, a real primo loser. “Hey,” the man said. He was wearing huaraches, his toes as blackened as a corpse’s.

Royce nodded. “What’s happening?”

So there were rabbits. The kid’s hobby. First there’d been two, now there were thirty. They kept them in one of those pre-fab sheds you get at Home Depot and when the kid pulled back the door the stink hit you in the face like a sucker punch. Joey was saying, “Oh, wow, wow, look at them all!” but all Royce was thinking was Get me out of here, because this was the kind of rank, urine-soaked stench you found in some of the street fighters’ kennels, if they even bothered with kennels. “Can we take two?” Joey said, and everybody — the father, the kid and Joey — looked to him.

He gave an elaborate shrug, and how many times had they been through this charade before? “Sure,” he said, “why not?” A glance for the father. “They’re free, right? To a good home?”

The father — he wasn’t much older than Royce, maybe thirty-four, thirty-five — just nodded, but on the way out Royce bent to the kid and pressed a five into his palm, feeling magnanimous. The next stop yielded a black Lab, skinny, with a bad eye, but still it would have to have its jaws duct-taped to keep it from slashing one of the dogs, and that was fine except that they had to sit there for half an hour with a cadaverous old couple who made them drink lukewarm iced tea and nibble stale anise cookies while they went on about Slipper and how she was a good dog, except that she peed on the rug — you had to watch out for that — and how sad they were to have to part with her, but she was just too much for them to handle anymore. They struck out at the next two places, both houses shuttered and locked, but all in all it wasn’t a bad haul, considering these were just bait animals anyway and there was no need to get greedy.

Back at home, the minute they pulled up under the oaks in front, Joey was out the door and dashing for the house and his stash of Hansen’s soda and barbecue chips, never giving a thought to the rabbits or the black Lab confined in their cages in the back of the Suburban. That was all right. There was no hurry. It wasn’t that hot — eighty-five maybe — and the shade was dense under the trees. Plus, he felt like a beer himself. Just driving around the Valley in all that traffic was work, what with the fumes radiating up off the road and Joey chattering away about anything and everything that entered his head till you couldn’t concentrate on the music easing out of the radio or the way the girls waved their butts as they sauntered down the boulevard in their shorts and blue jeans and invisible little skirts.

He left the windows down and kicked his way across the dirt expanse of the lot, the hand-tooled boots he wore on weekends picking up a fine film of dust, thinking he’d crack a beer, see what Steve was up to — and the dogs, the dogs, of course — and then maybe grill up some burgers for an early dinner before he went out. He’d have to lift the Lab down himself, but Joey could handle the rabbits, and no, they weren’t going to bait the dogs tonight no matter how much Joey pleaded, because tonight was Saturday and he and Steve were going out, remember? But what Joey could do, before he settled down with his video games, was maybe give the bait animals a dish of water, or would that be asking too much?

—

The house was in Calabasas, pushed up against a hillside where the oaks gave way to chaparral as soon as you climbed up out of the yard on the path cut through the scrub there, the last place on a dirt road that threw up dust all summer and turned into a mudfest when the rains came in December. It was quiet, private, nights pulled down like a shade, and it had belonged to Steve’s parents before they were killed in a head-on collision with a drunk three years back. Now it was Steve’s. And his. Steve paid the property taxes and they split the mortgage each month, which for Royce was a whole lot cheaper than what he’d be paying elsewhere — plus, there was the barn, formerly for horses, now for the dogs. They had parties every couple of weeks, various women circulating in and out of their lives, but neither of them had ever been married, and as far as Royce was concerned, he liked it that way. Tonight, though, they were going out — cruising, as Steve liked to call it, as if they were in some seventies disco movie — and Joey would be on his own. Fine. No problem. Joey knew the score: stay out of the barn, don’t let anybody in, bed at ten, call him on the cell if there were any problems.

Steve drove. He’d never had a DUI, but Royce had, and Royce needed his license up and running in order to ferry people around to his various listings, as if that would make a difference since nobody in his office had sold anything in recent memory. Or at least he hadn’t anyway. They took the 101 into town, wound their way down Laurel Canyon and valeted the car in a lot off Sunset. It was just getting dark. A continuous line of cars, fading to invisibility behind their headlights, pulsed up and down the boulevard. This was the moment he liked best, slamming the car door and stepping out into the muted light, the street humming with the vibe of the clubs, the air so compacted and sweet with exhaust it was like breathing through your skin, the night young, anything possible.

Their first stop was a Middle Eastern restaurant that hardly served any food, or not that he could see anyway. People came here to sit at the tables out front and smoke Starbuzz or herbal shisha through the hookahs the management provided for a fee. Every once in a while you’d see a couple inside the restaurant picking over a lamb kebab or pita platter, but the real action was outside, where just about everybody surreptitiously spiked the tobacco with something a little stronger. The waitress was slim and young, dark half-moons of makeup worked into the flesh under her eyes and a tiny red stone glittering in one nostril, and maybe she recognized them from the week before, maybe she didn’t. They ordered two iced teas and a hookah setup and let the smoke, cool and sweet, massage their lungs, their feet propped up on the wrought-iron rail that separated them from the sidewalk, eyes roaming the street. After a moment, just to hear his own voice over the shush of tires and the rattling tribal music that made you feel as if you were running on a treadmill, Royce said, “So what nationality you think these people are — the owners, I mean? Iranian? Armenian?”

Steve — he was a rock, absolutely, six-two, one-eighty, with a razor-to-the-bone military haircut though he’d never been in the military — glanced up lazily, exhaling. “What, the waitress, you mean?”

“I guess.”

“Why, you want a date with her?”

“No, I just—”

“I can get you a date with her. You want a date with her?”

He shrugged. “Just curious, that’s all. No biggie. I just figured, you’re the expert, right?” This was a reference to the fact that Steve had dated an Iranian girl all last winter — or Persian, as she liked to classify herself, and who could blame her? She was fleshy in all the right places, with big bounteous eyes and a wide-lipped smile that really lit her face up, but she’d wanted things, too many things, things Steve couldn’t give her.

“Yeah, that’s me, a real expert, all right. I don’t know why you didn’t just hit me in the face with a two-by-four the minute Nasreen walked through the door”—he held it a beat, grinning his tight grin—“Bro.” He was about to bring the hose to his lips, but stopped himself, his eyes fixed on a point over Royce’s shoulder. “Shit,” he breathed, “isn’t that your brother-in-law?”

Feeling caught out all of a sudden, feeling exposed, Royce swung round in his seat to shoot a glance up the boulevard. Joe — Big Joe, as Shana insisted on calling him after she came back from Russia with Joey, who was just a baby in diapers then — was nobody he wanted to see. He’d left Shana with a fractured elbow and a car with a bad transmission and payments overdue and she’d been working double shifts on weekends ever since to catch up. Which was why Royce took Joey Friday through Sunday — Joey needed a man’s influence, that’s what Shana claimed, and besides, she couldn’t afford a babysitter. “Ex-brother-in-law,” he said.

But there he was, Big Joe, easing his way in and out of the clusters of people making for the clubs and restaurants, his arm flung over the shoulder of some woman and a big self-satisfied grin on his face, just as if he was a regular human being. Even worse, the woman — girl — was so pretty the sight of her made Royce’s heart clench with envy. If he was about to ask himself how a jerk like Joe had managed to wind up with a girl like that, he never got the chance because Steve was on his feet now, up out of his seat and leaning over the rail, calling out, “Joe, hey, Joe, what’s happening?” in a voice deep-fried in sarcasm.

Joe was no more than twenty feet away and Royce could see him exchange a glance with the girl, as if he was going to pat down his pockets and pretend he’d left his credit card on the bar at the last place, but he kept on coming because he had no choice at this point. He wasn’t that big — just big in relation to Joey and Shana — but he carried himself with a swagger and he had one of those faces that managed to look hard even when he was smiling at you. Which he definitely wasn’t doing now. He just froze his features, tightened his grip on the girl, and made as if to ignore them. But Steve wouldn’t have it. Steve was over the railing in a bound, waving his arms like a game-show host. “Hey, man, good to see you,” he was crowing in his put-on voice. “What a coincidence, huh? And look, look who’s here”—and now the voice of wonder—“your brother-in-law!”

That moment? Nobody really liked it. Not the couple with the pita platter or the waitress or the other smokers, who only wanted to suck a little peace through a tube and dissolve the hassles of the day, and certainly not Joe. Or the girl he was with. She was involved now, giving him a look: brother-in-law?

“Ex,” Joe said, looking from her to Royce and shooting him a look of hate. He was stalled there, against his will, the girl about to say something like Aren’t you going to introduce me? and people beginning to turn their heads. Steve — he was amped up, clowning — kept saying, “Hey, come on, man, come on in and have a toke with us, like a peace pipe, you know?”

Joe ignored him. He just kept staring at Royce. Very slowly, in disgust, he began to shake his head, as if Royce were the one who’d walked out on his wife and kid and refused to pay child support or even leave a forwarding address, then he tightened his grip on the girl’s arm, sidestepped Steve, and made a show of strutting off down the street as if nothing had happened. And nothing had happened. What was he going to do, have Steve fight his battles for him? It wasn’t worth it. Though if he was Steve’s size, or even close, he would have gone over that rail himself, and he would have had a thing or two to say, and maybe more — maybe he would have gone for him right there on the sidewalk so people made way and the pretty girl let out a soft strangled cry.

By the time they settled in at the first bar up the street, he’d put it out of his head. Or mostly. He and Steve talked sports and spun out a couple of jokes and routines and he found himself drifting, but then Joe’s face loomed up in his consciousness and he was telling himself he should have followed him to see what he was driving, get a license plate number so Shana could clue the police or child services or whoever. Something. Anything. But he hadn’t, and the moment was gone. “Forget it,” Steve told him. “Don’t let that fucker spoil the night for you.”

They went to the next place and the next place after that, the music pounding and the lights flashing, and for a while there he felt loose enough to go up to women at random and introduce himself and when they asked him what he did for a living, he said, “I’m a dog man.” That got them interested, no doubt about it, but it was the rare woman who didn’t turn away or excuse herself to go to the ladies’ when he began to explain just what that meant. Still, he was out on the town and the alcohol began to sing in his blood and he didn’t feel tired or discouraged in the least. It was around eleven when Steve suggested they try this hotel he’d heard about, where they had a big outdoor pool area and a bar scene and you could sit out under the stars and watch girls jump in and out of the pool in their bikinis. “Sure,” he heard himself say, “why not?” And if he thought of Joey, he thought of him in bed, asleep, the video remote still clenched in his hand and the screen gone blank.

He was feeling no pain as he followed Steve up the steps of the hotel and into the darkened lobby. Two doormen — studiously hip, mid-thirties, with phone plugs in their ears and cords trailing away beneath their collars — swung back the doors on a big spreading space with low ceilings, concrete pillars and a cluster of aluminum and leather couches arranged in a grid against the wall on the right. People — various scenesters, mostly dressed in black — lounged on the couches, trying their best to look as if they belonged. Beyond them, the pool area opened up to the yellow night sky and the infinite lights of the city below. A minute later he and Steve were crowding in at the pool bar — glasses that weren’t glass but plastic, a rattle of ice cubes, scotch and soda — while the music infected them and the pool sucked and fell in an explosion of dancing blue light. Girls, as promised. And swimming like otters. “Pretty cool, huh?” Steve was saying.

He nodded, just taking in the scene, thinking nothing at this point, his mind sailing free the way it did when somebody else’s dogs were fighting and he had no betting interest in the outcome. Suddenly he felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over him — or was it boredom? After a moment he excused himself to find his way to the men’s, and that was when the whole world shifted on him.

Right in the lobby, set right there in the wall above the long curving sweep of the check-in desk, was a lit-up glass cubicle, maybe eight feet long, four high, with a mattress and pillow and a pale pink duvet turned back on itself — how could he have missed it on the way in? It was like the window of a furniture store, or no, a stage set, because there was a girl inside, propped up against the back wall as if she were in her own bedroom. She was wearing pajamas — nothing overt like a teddy or anything like that — just pajamas, button-up top and draw-string bottoms rolled up at the ankles. She had a cell phone stuck to one ear and a book open in her lap. Her hair was dark and long, brushed out as if for bed — a brunette, definitely a brunette — and her feet were bare and pressed to the glass so you could see the pale flesh of her soles. That was what got him, that was what had him standing there in the middle of the lobby as if he’d been nailed to the floor: the soles of her feet, so clean and white and intimate in that darkened arena with its scenesters and hustlers and everybody else doing their best to ignore her.

“Can I help you?” The man behind the desk — big-frame glasses, skinny tie — was addressing him.

“I was”—but this was genius, wasn’t it, the hotel advertising what you could do there, in private, in a room, if you had a girl like that? — “just looking for the men’s…”

“Down the hall to your right.”

He should have moved on, but he didn’t, he couldn’t. The guy behind the desk was studying him still — he could feel his eyes on him — probably a heartbeat away from informing him that he couldn’t stand there blocking traffic all night and another heartbeat away from calling security. “Does she have a name?” Royce murmured, his voice caught low in his throat.

“Chelsea.”

“Does she—?”

The man shook his head. “No.”

When Steve finally came looking for him, he was squeezed in at the end of one of the couches in the dark, just watching her. At first, she’d seemed static, almost like a mannequin, but that wasn’t the case at all — she blinked her eyes, flipped the hair out of her face, turned the pages of her book with a flick of enameled nails, each gesture magnified out of all proportion. And then, thrillingly, she shifted position, stretching like a cat, one muscle at a time, before flexing her arms and abdomen and pushing herself up into the lotus position, her feet tucked under her, the book in her lap and the cell cupped to one ear. He wondered if she was really talking to anybody — a boyfriend, a husband — or if it was just part of the act. Did she eat in there? Take bathroom breaks? Brush her teeth? Floss?

“Hey, man, I’ve been looking all over for you,” Steve said, emerging from the shadows with the dregs of a drink in one hand and all trace of his grin gone. “What are you doing? You know what time it is?”

He didn’t. He just shook his head in a slow absent way as if he were waking from a deep sleep, and then they were down the steps and out on the street, the cars crawling past in a continuous illuminated loop and a sliver moon caught like a hook in the jaws of the yellow sky. The cell in his left front pocket began to vibrate. It was Joey. “What’s up, big guy?” he said without breaking stride. “Shouldn’t you be asleep? Like long asleep?”

The voice was soft, remote. “It’s the Lab.”

“What about her?”

“She’s crying. I can hear her all the way from my bedroom.”

“Yeah, okay, thanks for telling me — really — but don’t you worry about it. You just get to sleep, hear me?”

Even softer: “Okay.”

He wanted to add that they’d work the dogs in the morning, that they’d devote the whole morning to them because there was a match next weekend and if Joey was good he was going to bring him along, first time ever, because he was old enough now to see what it was all about and why they had to put so much time into training Zoltan and Zeus the way they did, baiting them and watching their diet and their weight and all the rest of it, but Joey had broken the connection.

—

Most of them were creeps, pure and simple — either that or old men who stood there gaping at her when they checked in with their shrink-wrapped wives — and she never had anything to do with any of them, no matter if they sent her ten-page letters and roses and fancy candy assortments, the latter of which she just gave to the maids in any case because sweets went straight to her hips and thighs. In fact, it was against the rules to make eye contact — Leonard, the manager, would jump down your throat if you even glanced up at somebody because that was like violating the fourth wall of the stage. This is theater, he kept telling her, and you’re an actress. Just keep that in mind. Right. The only thing was, she didn’t want to be an actress, unlike ninety-nine percent of the other girls clawing their way through the shops and bars and clubs seven days a week — she was two years out of college, waitressing mornings in a coffee shop and doing four nights a week here, representing some sort of adolescent wet dream while saving her money and studying for her LSATs.

Was it demeaning? Was it stupid? Yes, of course it was, but her mother had danced topless in a cage during hippie times — and that was in a bar where people could hoot and throw things and shout out every sleazy proposition known to humankind. She wasn’t an actress. Anybody could be an actress. She was going to go into immigration law, help give voice to people who didn’t have a say for themselves, do something with her life — and if using her looks to get her there, to get paid to study, was part of the deal, then that was fine with her.

So she was in her cubicle, embracing the concept of the fourth wall and trying to make sense of the logical reasoning questions TestMasters threw at her, good to go sometimes for an hour or more without even looking up, but she wasn’t blind. The scene drifted past her as if she were underwater, in a submarine, watching all the strange sea creatures interact, snatch at each other, pair up, stumble, glide, fade into the depths, and her expression never changed. She recognized people from time to time, of course she did, but she never let on. Matt Damon had been in one night, with a girl and another guy, and once, just after she clocked in, she thought she’d seen George Clooney — or the back of his head anyway — and then there were people she’d gone to college with, an older couple who were friends of her parents, even a guy she’d dated in high school. Basically, and it wasn’t that hard, she just ignored them all.

On this particular night though, a Saturday, when the throngs were out and the words began to blur on the page and nobody, not even her mother, would answer the phone, she stole a glance at the lobby and the guy who’d just stood there watching her for the last five minutes till Eduardo, the desk man, said something to him. In that instant, when he was distracted by whatever Eduardo was saying, she got a good look at him and realized, with a jolt, that she knew him from somewhere. Her eyes were back on the page but his image stayed with her: a lean short tensed-up guy with his hands in his pockets, blond hair piled up high on the crown of his head and a smooth detached expression, beautiful and dangerous at the same time, and where did she know him from?

It took her a while. She lost him when he drifted across the room in the direction of the lounge and she tried to refocus on her book but she couldn’t. It was driving her crazy: where had she met him? Was it at school? Or here? Had she served him at the coffee shop, was that it? Time passed. She was bored. And then she snatched a look again and there he was, with another guy, moving tentatively across the lobby as if it were ankle-deep in mud — drunk, both of them, or at least under the influence — and it came to her: he was the guy who’d adopted the kittens, the one with the little kid, the nephew. It must have been six weeks ago now. Missy had had her second — and last — litter, because it was irresponsible to bring more cats into the world when they were putting them down by the thousands in the shelters every day and she’d decided to have her spayed once the kittens were weaned, all nine of them, and he’d showed up in answer to her ad. And what was his name? Roy or something. Or no: Royce. She remembered because of the boy, how unusual it was to see that kind of relationship, uncle and nephew, and how close they seemed, and because Royce had been so obviously attracted to her — couldn’t keep his eyes off her, actually.

She’d just washed her hair and was combing out the snarls when the bell rang and there they were on the concrete landing of her apartment, smiling up at her. “Hi,” he said, “are you the one with the kittens?”

She looked from him to the boy and back again. She’d given one of the kittens away to a guy who worked in the hotel kitchen and another to one of her girlfriends, but there were seven left and nobody else had called. “Yeah,” she said, pushing the door open wide. “Come on in.”

The boy had made a real fuss over the kittens, telling her how cute they all were and how he couldn’t make up his mind. She was just about to ask him if she couldn’t get him something to drink, a glass of lemonade, a Coke, when he’d looked up at his uncle and said, “Could we take two?”

They were in a hurry — he apologized for that — and it was just a chance encounter, but it had stayed with her. (As had three of the kittens, which she hadn’t been able to find homes for.) Royce told her he was in real estate and they’d lingered a moment at the door while the boy cradled his kittens and she told him she was looking to buy a duplex, with her parents’ help, so the rent on the one apartment could cover her mortgage — like living for free — but she hadn’t pushed it and he hadn’t either.

Now, as she watched him square up his shoulders at the door, she wondered if he’d recognized her. For an instant her heart stood still — he was going, gone — and then, on an impulse, she broke her pose, set down the book and flicked off the light. In the next moment she was out of the cubicle, a page torn from her book in one hand and her pen in the other, rushing across the cold stone floor of the lobby in her bare feet. She scribbled out a note on the back of the page—How are the kittens? Call me. Chelsea—and handed it to Jason, the doorman.

“That guy,” she said, pointing down the street. “The one on his cell? Could you run and give this to him for me?” In her rush, she almost forgot to include her number, but at the last second she remembered, and by the time Jason put his fingers to his lips and whistled down the length of the block, she was hurrying back across the lobby to the sanctuary of her cubicle.

—

It took three cups of coffee to clear his head in the morning, but he was up early all the same and took time to make an omelet for Joey—“No onions, no tomatoes,” Joey told him, “just cheese”—before they went out to see to the dogs. The Lab was in her cage outside the door to the barn, still whining, and he didn’t even glance at her. He’d have Joey feed her some of the cheap kibble later, but first he had to work Zoltan and Zeus on the treadmills and make sure Zazzie, who’d thrown six pups out of Zeus’ sire, the original Zeus, got the feed and attention she needed while she was still nursing. Zeus the first had been a grand champion, ROM, Register of Merit, with five wins, and the money he’d brought in in bets alone had been enough to establish Z-Dogz Kennels — and a dozen or more of his pups were out there on the circuit, winning big in their own right. Royce had never had a better pit dog, and it just about killed him when Zeus couldn’t scratch after going at it with Marvin Harlock’s Champion Kato for two and a quarter hours and had to be put down because of his injuries. Still, he’d been bred to some sixteen bitches and the stud fees alone had made up a pretty substantial part of Royce’s income — especially with the realty market dead in the water the last two years — and Zeus the second, not to mention his brother Zoltan, had won their first matches, and that boded well for stud fees down the road.

The dogs set up their usual racket when he and Joey came in — happy to see them, always happy — and Joey ran ahead to let them out of their cages. Aside from the new litter and Zoltan, Zeus and Zazzie, he and Steve had only three other dogs at the time, two bitches out of Zeus the first, for breeding purposes with the next champion that caught their eye, and a male — Zeno — that had lost the better part of his muzzle in his first match and would probably have to be let go, though he’d really showed heart. For now, though, they were one big happy family, and they all surged round Royce’s legs, even the puppies, their tongues going and their high excited yips rising up into the rafters where the pigeons settled and fluttered and settled again. “Feed them all except Zeus and Zoltan,” he shouted to Joey over the noise, “because we’re going to work them on the mills first, okay?”

And Joey, dressed in yesterday’s blue jeans with smears of something on both knees and a T-shirt that could have been cleaner, swung round from where he was bending to the latch on Zeno’s cage, his eyes shining. “And then can we bait them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Then we’ll bait them.”

The first time he’d let Joey watch while they set the dogs on the bait animals, he’d been careful to explain the whole thing to him so he wouldn’t take it the wrong way. Most trainers — and he was one of them — felt that a fighting dog had to be blooded regularly to keep him keyed up between matches and if some of the excess and unwanted animals of the world happened to be lost in the process, well that was life. They were just going to be sent to the pound anyway, where some stoner working for minimum wage would stick a needle in them or shove them in a box and gas them, and this way was a lot more natural, wasn’t it? He no longer remembered whether it was rabbits or cats or a stray that first time, but Joey’s face had drained and he’d had to take him outside and tell him he couldn’t afford to be squeamish, couldn’t be a baby, if he wanted to be a dog man, and Joey — he was all of nine at the time — had just nodded his head, his mouth drawn tight, but there were no tears, and that was a good sign.

He didn’t want to wear the dogs out so close to their next match, so he clocked half an hour on the treadmill, then put Zeus in the pit he’d erected in the back corner of the barn and had Joey bait him with one of the rabbits, after which it was Zoltan’s turn. Finally, he took the Lab out of her cage, taped her jaws shut and let both dogs have a go at her, nothing too severe, just enough for them to draw some blood and get the feel of another body and will, and whether it fought back or stood its ground or rolled over to show its belly didn’t matter. Baiting was just part of the regimen, that was all. After five minutes, he had to wade in and break Zeus’ hold on the animal. “That’s enough for today, Joey — we want to save the Lab for maybe two days before the match, okay?”

Joey was leaning against the plywood sides of the pit, his expression unreadable. There was something in his hair — a twig or a bit of straw the dogs had kicked up. He didn’t say anything in response.

The Lab was trembling — she had the shakes, the way dogs did when they’d had enough and wouldn’t come out of their corner — and one of her ears was pretty well gone, but she’d do for one more go around on Thursday, and then they’d have to answer another ad or two. He bent to the dog, which tried to look up at him out of its good eye but was trembling so hard it couldn’t quite manage to raise its head, clipped a leash to its collar, and led it out of the pit. “Put her back in her cage,” he told Joey, handing him the leash. “And you can feed and water her now. I’ll take care of Zeusy and Zoltan. And if you’re good, maybe later we’ll do a little Chicken McNuggets for lunch, how’s that sound? With that barbecue sauce you like?”

He turned away and started for the house. He hadn’t forgotten the note in his pocket — he was just waiting till a reasonable hour (ten, he was thinking) before he called her, figuring she’d been up even later than he and Steve. Call me, she’d written, and the words had lit him up right there on the street as if he’d been plugged into a socket — it was all he could do to keep himself from lurching back into the hotel to press his face to the glass and mouth his assent. But that would have been uncool, terminally uncool, and he’d just floated on down the street, Steve ribbing him, all the way to the car. The mystery was the reference to the cats and he’d been trying to put that together all morning — obviously he and Joey must have answered an ad from her at some point, but he couldn’t remember when or where, though maybe she did look familiar to him, maybe that was part of it.

He crossed the yard and went in the kitchen door, but Steve was sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, rubbing the bristle of his scalp with one hand and spooning up cornflakes with the other, so Royce stepped out back to make the call on his cell. And then, the way these things do, it all came back to him as he punched in the number: the kittens, a potted bird of paradise on the landing, the condo — or no, duplex — she was looking to buy.

She answered on the first ring. Her voice was cautious, tentative — even if she had caller I.D. and his name came up it wouldn’t have meant anything to her because she didn’t know him yet, did she?

“Hi,” he said, “it’s me, Royce, from last night? You said to call?”

—

She liked his voice on the phone — it was soft and musical, sure of itself but not cocky, not at all. And she liked the fact that he’d been wearing a nice-fitting sport coat the night before and not just a T-shirt or athletic jersey like all the rest of them. They made small talk, Missy brushing up against her leg, a hummingbird at the feeder outside the window like a finger of light. “So,” he said after a moment, “are you still interested in looking at property? No obligation, I mean, and even if you’re not ready to buy yet, it would be a pleasure, a privilege and a pleasure, to just show you what’s out there…” He paused. “And maybe buy you lunch. You up for lunch?”

He worked out of an office on a side street off Ventura, not ten minutes from her apartment. When she pulled up in the parking lot, he was there waiting for her at the door of a long dark bottom-heavy Suburban with tires almost as tall as her Mini. “I know, I know,” he said, “it’s a real gas hog and about as environmentally stupid as you can get, but you’d be surprised at the size of some of the family groups I have to show around… plus, I’m a dog man.”

They were already wheeling out of the lot, a book of listings spread open on the console between them. She saw that he’d circled a number of them in her price range and the neighborhood she was hoping for. “A dog man?”

“A breeder, I mean. And I keep this vehicle spotless, as you can see, right? But I do need the space in back for the dogs sometimes.”

“For shows?”

A wave of the hand. They were out in traffic now and she was seeing him in profile, the sun flaring in his hair. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I’m just a breeder, that’s all.”

“What kind of dogs?”

“The best breed there is,” he said, “the only breed, pit bull terriers,” and if she thought to ask him about that, which she should have, she didn’t get the chance because he was already talking up the first property he’d circled for her and before she knew it they were there and all she could see was possibility.

Over lunch — he took her to an upscale place with a flagstone courtyard where you could sit outside beneath a huge twisting sycamore that must have been a hundred years old and listen to the trickling of the fountain in the corner — they discussed the properties he’d showed her. He was polite and solicitous and he knew everything there was to know about real estate. They shared a bottle of wine, took their time over their food. She kept feeling a mounting excitement — she couldn’t wait to call her mother, though the whole thing was premature, of course, until she knew where she was going to law school, though if it was Pepperdine, the last place, the one in Woodland Hills, would have been perfect. And with the sun sifting through the leaves of the trees and the fountain murmuring and Royce sketching in the details of financing and what he’d bid and how much the attached apartment was bringing in — and more, how he knew a guy who could do maintenance, cheap, and a great painter too, and didn’t she think the living room would look a thousand percent better in maybe a deeper shade of yellow, gold, really, to contrast with the oak beams? — she knew she would get in, she knew it in that moment as certainly as she’d ever known anything in her life.

And when he asked if she wanted to stop by and see his place, she never hesitated. “It’s nothing like what you’re looking for,” he said, as they walked side by side out to the car, “but I just thought you’d like to see it out of curiosity, because it’s a real sweet deal. Detached house, an acre of property, right up in the hills. My roommate and I, we’re co-owners, and we’d be crazy to sell, especially in this market, but if we ever do, both of us could retire, it’s that sweet.”

The thing was — and he was the one to ask — did she want to stop back at the office for her car and follow him? Was she all right to drive? Or did she just want to come with him?

The little decisions, the little moments that can open up forever: she trusted him, liked him, and if she’d had any hesitation three hours ago he’d more than won her over. Still, when he put the question to her, she saw herself in her own car — and she wouldn’t have another glass of wine, though she was sure he was going to offer it when they got there — because in her own car she could say goodbye when she had to and make certain she got to work on time. Which on a Sunday was eight p.m. And it was what, three-thirty now?

“I’ll follow you,” she said.

—

The streets were unfamiliar, narrow twisting blacktop lanes that dug deeper and deeper into the hills, and she’d begun to wonder if she’d ever be able to find her way back again when he flicked on his signal light and led her onto a dirt road that fell away beneath an irregular canopy of oaks. She rolled up her window, though it was hot in the car, and followed at a distance, easing her way over the washboard striations that made the doors rattle in their frames. There was dust everywhere, a whole universe of it fanning out from the shoulders of the road and lifting into the scrub oak and mesquite till all the lower leaves were dulled. Mailboxes sprang up every hundred yards or so, but the houses were set back so you couldn’t see them. A family of quail, all skittering feet and bobbing heads, shot out in front of her and she had to brake to avoid them. Scenery, a whole lot of scenery. Just as she was getting impatient, wondering what she’d got herself in for, they were there, rolling in under the shade of the trees in front of a low rambling ranch-style house from the forties or fifties, painted a deep chocolate brown with white trim, a barn set just behind and to the right of it and painted in the same color combination.

The dust cleared. He was standing there beside the truck, grinning, and here came the boy — Joey — bouncing across the yard as if he were on springs. She stepped out of her car, smelled sage and something else too, something sweet and indefinable, wildflowers she supposed. From the barn came the sound of dogs, barking.

Royce had an arm looped over Joey’s shoulder as they ambled toward her. “Great spot, huh? You want end of the road, this is it. And you should see the stars — nothing like the city where you get all that light pollution. And noise. It’s quiet as a tomb out here at night.” Then he ducked his head and introduced Joey — or reintroduced him.

The boy was taller than she’d remembered, his hair so blond it was almost white and cut in a neat fringe across his eyebrows. He gave her a quick smile, his eyes flashing blue in the mottled sun beneath the trees. “Hi,” she said, “bending to take his hand, “I’m Chelsea. How are you doing?”

He just stared. “Good.” And then, to Royce, “Mr. Harlock’s been ringing the phone all day looking for you. Where have you been?”

Royce was watching her, still grinning. “Don’t you worry,” he said, glancing down at the boy, “I’ll call him first chance I get. And now”—coming back to her—“maybe Chelsea’d like to sit out on the porch and have a nice cold soda — or maybe, if we can twist her arm, just one more glass of that Santa Maria Chard we had over lunch?”

She smiled back at him. “You really have it? The same one?”

“What you think, I’m just some amateur or something? Of course, we have it. A whole case straight from the vineyard — and at least one, maybe two bottles in the refrigerator even as we speak…”

It was then, just as she felt her resolve weakening — what would one more hurt? — that the screen door in front sliced open and the other guy, the taller one from last night, stuck his head out. “It’s Marvin on the phone,” he called, “about next week. Says it can’t wait.”

“My roommate, Steve,” Royce said, nodding to him. “Steve,” he said, “Chelsea.” He separated himself from her then, spun around on one heel and gestured toward the porch. “Here, come on, why don’t you have a seat out here and enjoy the scenery a minute while I take this call — it’ll just be a minute, I promise — and then I’ll bring you your wine. Which, I can see from your face, you already decided to take me up on, right?”

“Okay, you convinced me,” she said, feeling pleased with herself, feeling serene, everything so tranquil, the dogs fallen silent now, not a man-made sound to be heard anywhere, no leaf blowers, no backfiring cars or motorcycles or nattering TVs, and it really was blissful. For one fraction of a moment, as she went up the steps to the porch and saw the outdoor furniture arrayed there, the glass-topped table and the armchairs canted toward a view of the trees and the hillside beyond, she pictured herself moving in with Royce, going to bed with him and waking up here in the midst of all this natural beauty, and forget the duplex — she’d be even closer to school from here, wouldn’t she? She settled into the chair and put her feet up.

And then the door slammed and Joey, having bounced in and back out again, was standing there staring at her, a can of soda in his hand. “You want some?” he asked, holding it out to her. “It’s good. Kiwi-strawberry, my favorite.”

“No, thanks. It’s a tempting offer, but I think I’ll wait for your uncle.” She bent to scratch a spot on the inside of her calf, a raised red welt there, thinking a mosquito must have bitten her, and when she looked up again her eyes fell on the cage standing just outside the barn door in a flood of sunlight. There was a dark figure hunched there, a dog, and as if it sensed she was looking, it began to whine.

“Is that one of your dogs?” she asked.

Joey gave her an odd look, almost as if she’d insulted him. “That? No, that’s just one of the bait animals. We’ve got real dogs. Pit bulls.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, the distinction he was making — a dog was a dog as far as she was concerned, and this one was obviously in distress. “Maybe it needs water,” she said.

“I already watered her. And fed her too.”

“You really like animals, don’t you?” she said, and when he nodded in response, she added, “And how are the kittens doing? Did you litter-train them? And what are their names — you name them yourself?”

She was leaning forward in the chair, their faces on a level. He didn’t answer. He shuffled his feet, his eyes dodging away from hers, and she could see the lie forming there—bait animals—even before he shrugged and murmured, “They’re fine.”

Royce was just coming through the door with two glasses of white wine held high in one hand and a platter of cheese and crackers in the other. His smile died when he saw the look she was giving him.

“Tell me one thing,” she said, shoving herself up out of the chair, all the cords of her throat strung so tight she could barely breathe, “just one thing — what’s a bait animal?”

—

The darkness came down hard that night. It was as if one minute it was broad day, bugs hanging like specks in the air, the side of the barn bronzed with the sun, and then the next it was black dark. He was out on the porch, smoking, and he never smoked unless he was drunk, and he was drunk now, because what was he going to do with an open bottle of wine — toss it? He hadn’t made Joey any supper and he felt bad about that — and bad about laying into him the way he did — but Shana would be here soon to pick him up and she could deal with it. Steve was out somewhere. Everything was still, but for the hiss and crackle of Joey’s video game leaching down from the open bedroom window. He was about to push himself up and go in and put something on his stomach, when the Lab bitch began to whine from across the yard.

The sound was an irritant, that was what it was, and he let out a soft curse. In the next moment, and he didn’t even think twice about it, he had the leash in his hand. Maybe it didn’t make sense, maybe it was too late, but Zeus could always use the exercise. And when he was done, so could Zoltan.

(2010)

In the Zone

People told her she’d get cancer in her bones, that the mice were growing into monsters the size of dogs, that if she planted a tomato or a cucumber in her own garden she wouldn’t be able to eat it because of the poison in the ground. And the mushrooms she loved so? The ones that sprouted in the shady places after a rain, the big brown-capped porcini that were like meat in your mouth? They were the worst. They concentrated the poison and put it in your body where it gathered and glowed and killed you dead. Was that really what she wanted? Was she touched in the head?

Well, no, she wasn’t. And when the opportunity came to move back to the deserted ruins of her village after living for nearly three years in an inhuman space in a crumbling apartment block for evacuees in Kiev, she took it. Leonid Kovalenko, sixty-seven years old and with a pair of ears as big as a donkey’s, who’d been a friend of her late husband, Oleski, and whose wife wouldn’t budge from the apartments because she was afraid, knew of a man with a car who knew of a border guard who, for a bribe, would let you in. Back in. Where you belonged. Where the forest was cool and moist and striped with shade and the smoke unfurled from your chimney like a flag all twenty-four hours of the day so that when you went out to the well on a moonlit night you could see it there, a presence, hovering above the roof on the suspired breath of your ancestors.

“How much do you want?” she asked Leonid as they browsed among the inferior cabbages and pulpy potatoes at the market, rutabagas like wet cardboard, overpriced honey in a jar without the comb. “Because I have little.”

He shrugged, weighing a cabbage in one hand while rich people, the educated rich and the corrupt rich alike, went by on the street in their automobiles that roared and belched and gave back the sun in glistening sheets of light. “For you?” he mused, gazing at her appraisingly from beneath the overgrown hedges of his eyebrows. He was a hairy man, hair creeping out from beneath his collar and sleeves, curling out of his nostrils and the pits of his great flapping ears, nothing at all like Oleski, who was smooth as a baby till the day he died, but for his private hair and his beard that came in so sketchily it was barely there at all. “For you,” he repeated, as if the deal had already been struck, “a little is more than enough.”

*

The man with the car was young, in his thirties, she guessed, and he wore a leather jacket like a hoodlum. He smoked the whole time, lighting one cigarette off the other. In place of conversation he had the radio that thrummed and buzzed with a low-level static and snatches of what someone in Prague or Moscow might have called music but to her was just noise. She sat in back with her two bags of possessions while Leonid, his great wide shoulders sagging against the torn vinyl of the seat, sat up front with the driver. It was night. The road was rutted. From the ditches came the sounds of the spring peepers, awakening from the frost to glory in life and love and the spewing of their eggs that were like pale miniature grapes all bound up in transparent tissue. When they came to the checkpoint and the fence that enclosed the Zone of Alienation for thirty kilometers around, the young man got out and conferred with the guard while Leonid lit his first cigarette of the night and shifted in the seat to study her face in the dim light cast by the guard’s kiosk. “A small bribe,” he said. “Nothing to worry over.”

She wasn’t worried, or not particularly. Word had it that the Ministry of Emergencies was looking the other way and allowing a small number of people — old people, over fifty only — to return to their villages because they knew no other way of life and because they were expendable. The sooner they died, either from natural or unnatural causes, the sooner their pensions would be released to the state. There were rumors of criminals roaming the Zone, of looters dismantling machinery and mining the deserted apartment blocks of Pripyat, the city closest to the reactor, for television sets and stereos and the like, then smuggling them, radiant with poison, out into the larger world. She didn’t care. She peered past Leonid to where the driver was having a laugh with the guard and sharing something out of a bottle. Beyond them was night absolute, the black night of the primordial forest where there were no apartments or automobiles or shops. “I don’t like him,” she whispered. “I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.”

In the half-light of the car, Leonid’s hand, blocky and work-hardened, snaked its way between the front seats to rest ever so lightly on her knee, and that was a revelation to her, that was when she began to understand things in the way the peepers in their ditches understood. Leonid’s own bags lay at his feet, two dark humps that were his life compacted. “Everything,” he murmured, his voice gone thick in his throat, “is going to be all right.”

And then the hoodlum was back in the car and the gate swung aside as if by magic and they were on a road that was no longer a road, jostling and scraping, shrieking through the brush of the dried and dead plants from the years past, dodging fallen trees no one had bothered to cut because there was no one to bother. They hadn’t gone more than a mile when the hoodlum tugged violently at the wheel and the car spun round in an exaggerated loop and came to a stop, the motor still ratcheting beneath them. “This is as far as I go,” he said.

“But it’s still seven miles to the village,” Leonid protested. And then, a wheedling tone came into his voice, “Maryska Shyshylayeva is an old woman — don’t make her walk all that way. Not in the dark and the cold of night.”

Before she knew she was going to speak, the words were out: “I’m sixty-two years old and while I may be stout — I don’t deny it — I can out-walk you, Leonid Kovalenko, with your creaky knees and big fumbling feet.” She could picture the cabin she and Oleski had built of peeled logs cut from the forest and the thatch they’d laid across the roof that bloomed with wildflowers in the spring — and the stove, her pride, that had never gone cold a day in her life, until the order came to evacuate, that is. “And you too,” she said, turning to the black-jacketed driver and honing her voice, “whatever your name is.”

*

She hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight but Leonid had and that was a good thing because the night was moonless and the road she’d reconstructed in her dreams a hundred nights running all but invisible beneath her feet. It wasn’t cold for April, or not particularly, but her breath hung before her like a veil and she was glad of the sweater and cloth coat she was wearing. Out here, the peepers were louder, shrieking as if their lives were going out of them. There were other noises too — the irregular hooting of owls from their hidden perches, a furtive dash and rustle in the brush, and then, startlingly, a sudden rising open-throated cry she’d hadn’t heard even the faintest trace of since she was a girl. “Do you hear that?” she said, her feet driving on, the straps of the bags digging into her shoulders.

“Wolves,” he said, between breaths. She’d been walking long distances lately to build up her stamina and she didn’t feel winded or tired in the least, but after the first mile or so she had to adjust her pace so that he could keep up. He breathed hollowly through his smoker’s lungs and in that moment she found herself worrying for him: what if he couldn’t make it? What would she do then?

“So the rumors are true,” she said. “About the animals returning.”

His feet shuffled through the mat of dead grasses that had colonized the cracks of the road. “I’m told there are moose now,” he said, pausing to catch his breath. “Roe deer like flocks of sheep, boar, rabbits, squirrels. Like in the time of Adam. Or our grandparents anyway.”

She held that picture a moment, even as something scurried across the road ahead of them. She saw her cabin restored to what it was, the deer clustered round, the fields standing high and green, rabbits jumping out of their skins and right into the pot even as she set it on the stove to boil, but then the image dissolved. “What of the poison? They say you can’t eat a tomato from your own garden, let alone a rabbit that’s grazed here all along—”

“Ridiculous. Rumors, nonsense. They just want to have an excuse to keep us out. What do you think, the meat’s going to glow? Nobody can tell, nobody, and if you don’t think poachers are feasting on venison and rabbit and goose even now, then you’re crazy. We’ll eat it, you can bet we will. Just think of it, all that game, all the fish in the lakes and rivers no one’s touched in three years now.”

She wanted to agree with him, wanted to say that she didn’t care about radiation or anything else because we all have to die and the sooner the better, that all she cared about was the peace of the forest and her home where she’d buried her husband fourteen years ago, but she was afraid despite herself. She pictured rats with five legs, birds without wings, her own self sprouting a long furred tail beneath her skirts while the meat shone in the pan as if it were lit from within. The night deepened. Leonid huffed for air. She hurried on.

*

When the order came to evacuate, after the explosion that jolted people from their beds and combusted the sky in the dead hours of the night, after the preternaturally darkened days — nearly a week of them — in which rumors flew and everybody who wasn’t in the fields or milking or out in the orchards hovered over their radios, the government sent in troops to force compliance. The core of the reactor was heating up again — there could be a second explosion. It wasn’t safe. Everyone must board the buses that rolled through the villages, no exceptions made. Two bags only, that was what the radio said and it was reiterated by the loudspeakers blaring from the jeeps and army trucks that stopped outside each house. What of our things? people wanted to know. What of the livestock, our pets? The government reassured them, one and all, that they would be able to return in three days’ time, and that the livestock would be evacuated too. The dogs — and the government didn’t reveal this — were to be shot on sight, nearly ten thousand of them across Polissia, for fear of rabies. And the livestock, including her own milk cow, Rusalka, were ultimately to be slaughtered en masse and mixed with the flesh of uncontaminated animals for feeding to luckier dogs and cats living in places were there were no evacuations and life went on as usual.

She believed the voice of the radio. Believed the reports of the invisible poison. Believed what she was told. There was no alternative. She had electricity in the cabin, a loop of wire strung from a pole that connected to another pole and on and on ad infinitum, but no telephone, and so she went in that suspended week when no one knew anything to the cottage of the Melnychenkos to pay for the use of theirs. What had they heard? They’d heard that to the north of them the city of Pripyat stood deserted, all forty-nine thousand inhabitants shunted onto buses and whisked away; beyond that, they knew no more than she. She stood by the stove in the Melnychenkos’ front room, the log walls of which were decorated with ikons and pages torn from color magazines, just like her own, and placed a call to her son, Nikolai, the professor of language studies in Kharkov. He would know what to do. He would know the truth. Unfortunately, however, the receiver only gave back a buzz in her ear and when the bus came she carried her two bags up the steps and found a seat among her neighbors.

And so now, in the black hours of night in a haunted place that was the only place she’d ever wanted to be, she trudged up the overgrown road with Leonid Kovalenko, waiting for the light of dawn so that she could see what had become of her life. Had the looters been here? Or the animals? What of her sheets and comforter — her bed? Would there be a place to sleep even? Four walls? A roof? Her father used to say that if you ever wanted to get rid of a barn or a shed or even a house all you had to do was poke a hole in the roof and nature would bring it down for you. Her left shoe began to rub against the place where her toes fought the grip of the worn leather. Her ankles felt swollen and her shoulders burned under the weight of her bags.

Leonid had long since fallen silent, the shaft of his flashlight growing dimmer as they walked on, moving ever more slowly, to his pace. She wanted to leave him behind, maddened by his wheezing and shuffling — he was an old man, that was what he was — and it was all she could do to keep from snatching the flashlight away from him and rushing off into the night. She heard the wolves again, a sound like interference on the radio, starting low and tailing off in a high broken whine. There was a smell of bog and muck and fallow land. She was focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, all the while mentally sorting through her cupboards, the tinned goods there, the rice, flour and sugar she stored in jars on the highest shelf to frustrate the rodents, her spices, her crockery, her cookware, when the sky to the east began to grow pale and she saw the world as it once had been. Five minutes later, hurrying on, no thought for Leonid or his flashlight now, she was there, in her own yard with the spring flowers gone to riot and the apple tree she’d planted herself already in bloom and the dark horizontal lines of the cabin materializing from the grip of the shadows as if she’d never been away at all.

*

That first day was among the happiest of her life. She felt like a songbird caged all these years and suddenly set free, felt giddy, a girl all over again. And the house, the house was a miracle, everything as she’d left it, the smells awakening a thousand recollections, of Oleski, of the good times, the summer nights when the light seemed as if it would never fade, the snowbound winters when the two of them sat playing chess and checkers in front of the stove while the cat purred in her lap and the samovar steamed and the silence was so absolute you could wrap yourself in it. Her bed was still made, though the comforter was damp with mold and the pillowcase slick to the touch, but they could be washed, everything could be washed and no harm done. Of course, there was damage, she could see that at a glance. A pane of glass in the back window lay shattered on the carpet and a birch tree thick around as her waist had fallen against the roof. What had been her garden was now a forest of weeds and saplings, there were mice in the stove and birds nesting atop the cupboard, but the looters hadn’t come — they’d stuck to the cities, to Chernobyl and Pripyat — and if you could ignore the dust that lay over everything and the dirt of the spiders and mice and birds, there was nothing a broom and a mop and a good strong back couldn’t put to rights.

She was at the stove, arranging sticks of three-year-old kindling in the depths of the firebox, thinking the mice could look out for themselves, thinking she’d warm the place, dry it out, then tape newspaper over the broken pane, boil water to wash the sheets and scrub the tabletop and sink — and here, right at hand, was her sturdiest pot hanging on its hook where she’d left it, ready to receive the soup she would prepare from the pork, cabbage and potatoes she’d brought along and maybe something off the shelves of her larder too because unless the cans had burst they were good, weren’t they? — when she heard a noise behind her and turned to see Leonid there, his face drained of everything but exhaustion. He came forward heavily and sank into her armchair. “I just need to rest a moment,” he said, his breath leaving him in a thin wheeze that made her think of a child releasing a balloon.

“Rest,” she said, her smile blooming so that her cheeks felt flushed with it, “I’ll make us tea.” And then, because she couldn’t contain herself, she swept across the room to plant a kiss on his cheek. “Nobody’s been here,” she crowed, “nobody at all!”

It was at that precise moment that the hinges of the cupboard below the sink gave a short sharp groan and the slick head and labile shoulders of a weasel emerged, one paw arrested. The animal shot them an indignant look, its body a dun writhe of snakelike muscle flowing from the cabinet to the floor, before it vanished through a hole in the wall no wider around than a wind-drift apple. Leonid caught her eye, grinning himself now, and said, “Nobody?” before they both dissolved in laughter.

*

She fetched water from the well while he fell into a heavy sleep in the armchair, then filled all her pots and stoked the stove till the water came to a furious boil and the room began ever so gradually to take on warmth. Next, she washed her cutting board and knives and all the dishes she could lay hands on, just to remove any hint of grime from them — and the poison, the poison too — then stripped the sheets from the bed and washed them, along with the comforter, in her big tub. In the yard — it was so overgrown with weeds it was as if no one had lived here in a century — she discovered that her clothesline had been snapped in two by a fallen branch, the ends of the frayed rope lying sodden on the ground, but she was able to knot them and hang out the sheets and her comforter in the hope they’d dry by nightfall. When she came back through the door, she found Leonid awake and alert.

“Where’s that cup of tea I was promised?” he asked, his voice rising in merriment as if he’d just delivered the punchline of a joke. He was feeling exactly the same way she was, feeling liberated, relieved, as joyful and rejuvenated as if he’d just won the lottery.

She poured them each a cup, but she wouldn’t sit down, taking hers to the cutting board, where she began to cube the pork and dice the vegetables and feed them into the pot. There were so many things to do, infinite things, and the funny part of it was that she didn’t feel tired at all, though she’d been up all night and walked those seven miles in the dark.

From the armchair, Leonid lifted his voice in supposition: “That’s the meat you brought along, isn’t it? And the vegetables?”

“What do you think — I shot a boar while you were snoring there in the chair? And sprouted a whole garden outside the window like in some fairy tale?” She turned to face him, hands on her hips, and here was where the doubt crept in, here was where she was glad to have him there with her if only to get a second opinion on the parameters of this tentative new world they were inhabiting. “But the rice in this jar? I’m going to use it, because we are going to have to eke out every bite till we can grow a garden and snare rabbits and catch fish from the river. The poison can’t invade glass, can it? Or tins?”

He was on his feet now, setting down the empty tea cup and taking up the broom, which he began to whisk across the floor in a running storm of dust and leaves. Had she really said “we”? As if it were already decided that he wouldn’t go home to his own cottage but stay on here with her?

“No,” he said, over his shoulder, “I don’t think so, not after three years. But anything you’ve canned, tomatoes, snap beans, we have to be careful if the seal’s broken, because then we’ll get the real poison, ptomaine or what have you—”

“Yes,” she said, cutting him off, “and die fast, right here tonight, instead of waiting for the radiation to do the job.”

She’d meant to be funny, or irreverent at any rate, but he didn’t laugh. He just went on sweeping till he threw open the door and swept all the litter out into the yard. Then he set the broom carefully aside and said, “I’d better get the saw from my place and cut that birch tree away from the eaves. We,” he said, emphasizing the pronoun, “wouldn’t want a leaky roof, now would we?”

*

That first night they slept together in her marriage bed, but not as lovers — more in the way of brother and sister, in the way of practicality, because where else would he sleep except between his own slimy sheets in his cottage three quarters of a mile away? In the morning they each had a bowl of soup fortified with rice and then he went out the door and vanished up the road while she busied herself with all manner of things, not the least of which was scrubbing the mold from the walls with the remains of an old jug of bleach. It was past noon, the sun high, birdsong like a symphony, deer nosing through the yard and the evicted weasel sunning itself atop the woodpile, when he returned, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with foodstuffs from his own larder, another set of bedsheets, a fur comforter, his rifle and fishing pole and a coil of rope for snares. And more: there was a dog trotting along behind him. It was no dog she’d ever seen before, not among the pets of her neighbors, or not that she could remember anyway. She regarded it dubiously, its ribs showing like stripes and the scrap of its tail wagging feebly over the scent of the soup drifting out the open door. It was of medium size, not big enough to be a proper watchdog, its coat the color of suet shading to a dark patch over one eye. “We can’t keep it,” she said flatly. “It’ll be a struggle just to feed ourselves.”

“Too late,” he said, grinning wide. “I’ve already named him.”

“As if that means anything.”

“Sobaka,” he called, appending a low whistle, and the dog came to him even as he set the wheelbarrow down in the high weeds.

“‘Dog’? You’ve named him ‘dog’? What kind of a name is that?”

He was on the doorstep now, proffering the fur, which smelled of ancient history. His ears shone. He was grinning through the gap in his beard, which seemed to have grown even thicker and grayer overnight. Then he took her in his arms, hard arms, lean and muscular, not an old man’s arms at all, and squeezed her to him. “What kind of name? The perfect name. Maybe, just maybe, if you behave yourself, Maryska Shyshylayeva, I’ll call you ‘woman.’ What do you think of that?”

And when night came and the lantern burned low, they slept together again, only this time there was no euphemism interposed between them.

*

Time went on. The days broadened. Her garden, planted from the seed packets she’d brought with her from Kiev, grew straight and true, as if it had arisen from virgin soil. Leonid put up wire fencing borrowed from a derelict field to discourage the rabbits and used his rifle on the hogs that stole in to dig up her potatoes, so that the smell of smoking meat hung thick over the yard and attracted a whole menagerie of fox, lynx, raccoon dog, bear and wolf. When the wolves came, and they came as much for the deer crowding the meadows as for the scent of Leonid’s meat, Sobaka kept close to the house, and in time he began to thicken around the ribs and haunches and his bark rang out in defiance of the interlopers. He was a superior mouser, better even than the big striped cat — Grusha, that was her name — she’d had to leave behind. Three years was an eon in a cat’s life. As soft and old as she’d become, the cat would have been an easy target for a fox or hawk or one of the big white-tailed eagles that had reappeared to soar over the Zone on motionless wings — or the poison, the poison would have gotten her by now, sure it would. Still, if this dog had survived, she couldn’t help thinking, maybe Grusha had too. Maybe one day she’d be there meowing at the door as if the calendar had stood still. And wouldn’t that be a miracle, among so many others?

The thing was — and she couldn’t put this out of her mind — the fact of the poison increasingly seemed less a liability than a benefit. The government that had collectivized all the big farms to the north and east of them and suppressed any notion of individual effort and freedom was gone, withdrawn to the safety of its eternal offices in all the sanitized regions of the country. And the people who for centuries had tamed and beaten and leached the land were gone too, while in their absence the animals had come back to thrive in all their abundance. Neither she nor Leonid had been sick a day — he was leaner now, his shoulders thrust back, his face tanned, and the work of the place had hardened her too so that she’d lost the excess flesh she’d put on in the apartments — and the dire warnings, the predictions of cancers and mutations and all the rest seemed nothing more than wives’ tales now. What more would she want? A cow, so they could have dairy. And Grusha returned to her. But she was content, and when she served Leonid a plate of dumplings or holubtsi, she saw nothing but love in his face. About his wife, he never spoke a word.

And then one morning as they were lingering over breakfast — porridge, a fresh loaf she’d baked the night before, strawberry preserves she’d put up all those years ago and a pot of the good rich China tea Leonid had discovered in an abandoned house on one of his jaunts through the woods — a strange terrible mechanical sound suddenly erupted out of nowhere and drove down the chatter of the birds and the symphony of the bees. At first she thought the reactor had blown again, thought they were doomed, but then the noise began to settle into a pattern she recognized from long ago: somebody was driving a vehicle down the forgotten street out front of the house.

In the next moment they were both on their feet. They moved as if entranced to the door that stood open to admit the breeze and saw a car there, a jeep with battered fenders and no top and a single man behind the wheel, turning that wheel now and pulling right on up to the door. They couldn’t have been more astonished if the premier himself had showed up — or a man from space. Her heart sank. They were going to be evicted, that was it, she was sure of it. But then she got a good look at the man behind the wheel and understood in a flash: it was Nikolai, his face flushed, his blond hair in a tangle, his eyes obscured behind a pair of dark glasses.

“Mama,” he said, stepping down from the jeep and coming to her embrace, holding her tight to him in a mad whirling hug. Then there was the awkward introduction to Leonid, whom he knew, of course, from his days here as a boy before he went off to the state school and never returned, and then he was handing her packages, gifts of food from the city and a book by William Faulkner, the American agrarian writer he was forever translating, though she’d told him years ago that the Bible and Chekhov were enough for her.

Oh, but he was fat! Ushering him to the table and fussing over the loaf and his tea, she couldn’t help noticing the girth of him that wouldn’t allow him to button his shirt around the midsection and the way his cheeks sagged with the weight of easy living. He was thirty-six years old. He was her son, the professor. And in all those days, weeks and months of the three years she was entombed in those apartments, he had visited her exactly once.

At first, they talked of the little things — the weather, the strikes and movements and tragedies of the outside world, the health of his fragile and childless wife — but then, within minutes of his stepping through the door, he started in on the subject he’d come expressly to address, or not simply to address, but to harangue her with: the poison. Did she know the danger she was exposing herself to? Did she understand? Could she imagine? His hands were like balls of butter, his eyes sunk to glittering blue slits in the reddened globe of his face. He pushed the bread aside. He wouldn’t touch the tea.

After a moment he snatched up the jar of honey — wild honey, honey they’d collected themselves, with the comb intact — and waved it in her face. “Do you have any idea how radioactive this is? You couldn’t poison yourself more thoroughly if you stirred arsenic into your tea. Bees collect pollen, don’t you know that? Every grain of it shot through with radionuclides — they concentrate it, Mama, don’t you understand?”

There was something attached to his belt, a little machine with a white plastic cover, and he took it up now, depressed the button on top and held it to the jar. Immediately, it began to release a quick breathless high-pitched chirp, as if a field of crickets were trapped inside. “Do you hear that?” he demanded, and he got up from the table to run the little machine across the walls, the plates, the food in the cupboard, and all the while it chirped and chirped again. “That,” he said, “is the sound of cancer, Mama, of disease. You’re getting it from the environment, from everything you touch, but more than that from the food, the meat, the vegetables in your garden. It’s suicide to be here, Mama, suicide, slow and sure.”

It was then that Leonid pushed himself up from the table with a sigh and ambled out the door, his bulky frame shimmering in the wash of golden summer light. She was left with her son, the professor, and his little white machine. He ran it over the antlers of the deer Leonid had hung on the wall above the sofa and it screeched out its insectoid warning—“Strontium-90, concentrated in the bones, Mama, in your bones too”—and then over the ashes in the bucket by the stove. “The worst,” he said, “the very worst, because the radionuclides are bound up in the wood and when you burn it they’re released all over again into the atmosphere. To breathe. For you to breathe. And Leonid. And your dog.”

She looked at him bitterly. What was he trying to do — terrify her? Ruin her life? Give her bad dreams so she couldn’t sleep at night?

“Mama,” he said, and he had his hand on her arm now, “I’ve come to take you back.”

And now she spoke for the first time since he’d brandished his little chirping machine: “I won’t go.”

“You will.”

Suddenly Leonid was back in the room, the dog at his side. He seemed to have something in his hand, an axe handle, as it turned out. Sobaka, who’d slunk away when the jeep approached, stood his ground now and showed his teeth. Leonid said: “You heard your mother.”

*

She couldn’t sleep that night, imagining the poison in her bones, illuminating her from the inside out like in the X-rays they took of her lungs when she was in the apartments. The rot was working in her and she’d been fooling herself all along. Any day now she’d fall sick — or Leonid would, sinking into himself till the flesh dropped away and she would have to haul him out by his attenuated ankles and bury him beside Oleski. She saw that, saw him dead, even as he lay next to her, oblivious, stretched out like a fallen tree, snoring mightily. She listened to him in the dark and heard the creatures of the night rustling outside the window, and finally, near dawn, fell asleep to the ancient sound of the wolves on their hunt.

Next morning she was up as usual, working in the garden, and when she was done, she cooked, washed and cleaned, no different from any other day, but the heaviness stayed with her. Leonid was tentative around her, as if sensing her thoughts. He brought her a pair of rabbits he’d caught in his snares and then went about doing what he did best: repairing things. She tried to drive down her uneasiness, but it wasn’t till late in the day, the rabbits roasting on a bed of onions, carrots and potatoes and the breeze as sweet as a hand on your cheek, that she began to relax. She took a chair out into the yard and sat there in the sun with Leonid, sipping a glass of the zubrovka he’d very patiently distilled from bison grass, drop by drop, and thought about one of the stories he’d told her from his time when he’d slipped across the border into Turkey and gone to sea as a merchantman.

He’d had a shipmate from a place called Tobago, an island in a tropical sea, and this man — his skin as weathered and black as an old bicycle horn — had a disease called ciguatera. It came from eating certain reef fishes from his native waters, fishes that accumulated poison in them, and it attacked his nervous system so that he was always twitching and jerking about. All his teeth but one had fallen out and his eyes were affected too, so that he wore the thickest lenses just to see. One day, when they were all on shore leave in a tropical port, Leonid and another shipmate were strolling by a café and saw this man there, a beer in hand, a plate of barracuda set before him. “What are you doing, my friend?” Leonid said. “Don’t you realize that barra is the very fish that gives you the disease?” And the man just smiled at him, his mouth full now, and said, “Yes, this I know, but it’s de sweetest fish in de sea.”

That was it, exactly. And she glanced at Leonid, at his big ears and drooping stolid features, and raised her glass to him. His own glass rose to click the rim of hers and he gave her his broad toothy grin. “To your health,” she said.

*

The first frost arrived late that year and when it came to swab the trees with color and shrivel the leaves of her tomato plants, it was immediately succeeded by a brief return to summer, one of those autumn idylls that comes round every once in a lucky year. She was out in her garden under the full force of the sun, harvesting her squash and cucumbers and beans while the pots boiled away on the stove and Leonid gave up all his time to her and the canning that consumed their every waking moment, when she heard the sound of hooves on the road out front. She glanced up, expecting one of the moose or big strutting red deer that thronged the woods and gave her pleasure every time she saw one, but she was surprised. There was a man on the road, a young man in his twenties with the same look as the hoodlum who’d driven the car for them last spring, and for a moment she caught her breath, expecting trouble. But then she saw he was dressed in simple clothes — no boots and leather jacket — and that his face was shaded by the broad-brimmed felt hat of a farmer. Even more surprising — startling, amazing — he was leading two milk cows on a tether, both of them laden with his possessions wrapped up in burlap.

He started when he saw her there, rising from her knees and wiping her hands on her skirts, but then he called out a greeting and in the next moment he was in the yard, coming up the path to her. She didn’t know what to do. They’d seen no one since Nikolai, all sense of grace and propriety lost to her, and even as she called out a hello in response, her voice seemed out of practice.

He was no more than twenty feet from her, the cows lurching this way and that on their tether and finally dipping their heads to the grass, when she saw that he wasn’t alone. Coming round the bend in the road was a young woman hunched under the weight of a backpack, her blond hair wrapped high on her head and shining in the sun, and behind her were two children, lean and long-legged and striding right along, though they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. “Hello,” the man called out again, and now Sobaka was there, barking and showing his teeth, and the figure of Leonid shadowed the doorway, his rifle in hand. “I didn’t know anyone was living out here now,” the man said, and if the dog intimidated him — or the sight of Leonid in the doorway — he didn’t let it show. In fact, he seemed so relaxed he might have been standing in his own yard, with his own dog, and she and Leonid the outsiders.

One of the children let out a cry and then both of them were running across the yard in a bright flash of bare knees and working arms as Sobaka danced round their heels and the young woman strode into the yard behind them to shrug out from under her backpack and set it down in the high grass. “Do you know if the Ilyenok place is still standing?” the woman asked, coming forward till she stood shoulder to shoulder with her husband.

“Ilyenok?” Maryska echoed stupidly, but she could feel something opening up inside her — the notion of what was going on here, what this promised, settling into her brain like a little bird winged down from the trees.

“Aren’t you Maryska Shyshylayeva?” the man said, but he was hardly a man — he was an overgrown boy, that was what he was. “I’m Sava, Sava Ilyenok — don’t you recognize me?”

In the next moment, Leonid was out of the house, the rifle forgotten, embracing this boy, son of deceased parents, son of the earth, son of the village, come home again. “Yes,” Leonid boomed, rocking back from the boy to take in the sight of the pretty young wife and the two children, who were frolicking with the dog now, “we know you, of course we know you, and welcome, welcome!”

And Maryska, coming back to herself, held out her hands in delight. “You must be exhausted,” she said. “Come, come in. I’ve got soup on the stove, hot tea, bread and jam for the children.” She paused to gaze longingly on the cows. “But no cheese, I’m afraid.”

Husband and wife exchanged a glance, then turned their faces to her. He was the one who spoke. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “I think we can fix that.”

*

When the snow came, the first snow, it was light and wet, limning the bare branches of the poplars and bowing the evergreens. The stove ticked and hissed throughout the day. Everything was still. In the oven was the pheasant Leonid had shot that morning, which she planned to serve with potato dumplings and sour cream. She was reading, for the tenth time, the tenth time at least, the Chekhov story about the peasants and their miserable lives and how one misery propagates another, when she set the book aside and went out into the yard to smell the air and watch the heavy snowflakes whirl down out of the sky.

The trees stood sentinel, black lines etched against the accumulation of snow. A pair of squirrels were busy at the base of the apple tree, darkening the whiteness with their miniature digging. She wasn’t worried about herself any longer or about Leonid either, but she did worry for the children, for Ilya and Nadia Ilyenok, and what the days might bring them. What of their bones? What of the strontium-90 in the grass the cows chewed all day long? What would Nikolai say about it? He would say that they were crazy, suicidal, that to live in nature under the open sky and walk the earth that gave up everything, even its poisons, was somehow unnatural — as if the apartments, with their crush and stink of humanity, were some sort of heaven.

She was about to turn and go back into the house, to her roasting bird and Leonid and the zubrovka they would sip over the chessboard before dinner, when a movement beside the woodshed caught her eye. There was something there, small, compact, lithe, and at first she thought it was the weasel come back to them, but then she saw her mistake: it was a cat. Gray, striped, with a long fluff of hair and a tail tipped in white.

“Grusha,” she called softly, “can it really be you?” The cat — Grusha had been darker, hadn’t she? — gave her a long steady gaze before melting away behind the shed. She didn’t want to spook it, and so she moved forward very slowly, step by step, but by the time she got there, it was gone, nothing left but fading tracks in a wet snow.

(2010)

Los Gigantes

At first they kept us in cages like zoo animals, but that was too depressing. After a while we began to lose interest in what we’d been brought there to do. We didn’t think about it, or not much anyway. We were just depressed, that was all, and when they brought the women to us it was inevitable that we went about the business in a halfhearted way. In any case, it was soon over and then it was time for a meal, another meal. They fed us well, I’ll say that for them. No expense was spared. And the food was good, the best I’d ever tasted, prepared for us by a man who was rumored to have been first assistant to the pastry chef at the presidential palace before he was replaced by a Frenchman who didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

Originally we were ten, but one of our number was suspect and soon rooted out. It happened that a woman refused to go with him and when Corporal Carrera, who held the keys, wanted to know why, she said, Just look at him. And he did. We all did. (This was during the first week when we really hadn’t had a chance to get to know one another yet and no one had given the man much thought. Why would we? We were being fed. We had women. Life was good.) Anyway, once this woman had spoken up we all began to scrutinize him and saw what she meant: he was damaged goods. He was tall enough, three or four inches taller than me, in fact, and thick in the limbs, but his face was like an anvil and his eyes couldn’t seem to focus. And when he talked it was in disconnected monosyllables that seemed to dredge themselves up out of some deep fissure in his digestive tract. The man in the cage beside mine whispered, “Pituitary freak,” and in that instant I saw what I’d missed. Yes: damaged goods. No sense in wasting the stipend, the ex-assistant pastry chef’s culinary concoctions and all those prescribed women on him. I felt a sense of outrage that was as much about my own humiliation as anything else: whoever had chosen him had chosen me too, and what did that say about me?

Even worse, for the first time in my life I had to contend with the fact that I wasn’t the biggest man around. At six feet ten inches and four hundred and twenty-odd pounds I wasn’t far off, but there were two men heavier, in addition to the pituitary case (freak or not, he’d still looked down at me). All my life I’d been the one looking down on the world, the biggest boy and then the biggest man not only in my own bustling port city but in the entire province. I was strong too. At the Fiesta de Primavera I once lifted two sheep above my head, one in each hand, and for a prank when I was in my teens I hauled the Mayor’s shining black Duesenberg coupe up the steps of the Ministry of Justice and left it there at the feet of the gilded statue of the President. By the time I turned twenty I was earning a good wage cranking the capstan that lifted the wooden drawbridge in the center of town so that the high-masted fishing vessels could pass beneath it — and if that seems unremarkable, just consider that formerly three mules had been required to do the job, mules that were now free to pull plows through the fields of maize that ring the city, while the muleskinner himself was able to retire on a small pension and move into the house his mother had left him at the place where the river runs brown into the moss-green sea. People would come out to watch me work — families with picnic baskets, nubile women, strongmen, grandmothers, sailors. My legend grew. Of course, to be a legend, to attain that status, is to court attention. That was how they found me. And truly? I wish they never had.

—

Within the month the first rumors of discontent began to circulate among us. If in the beginning it had seemed as if we’d arrived in paradise, our days given over to leisure and nothing expected of us but the essentials, the routine began to wear on us. We were free to roam the compound by day and we had books and a communal radio and we played games of cards and dice, the usual sort of thing, but we were locked in at night, and the cages — though they were roomy enough and each equipped with a toilet, desk, couch and reading lamp in addition to a gargantuan steel-frame bed — were an oppression of the spirit. The man I was to become closest to — Fruto Lacayo, a former circus fat man who stood seven inches shorter but outweighed me by some forty pounds — was the first to voice his complaints.

We were in the courtyard one afternoon, smoking, chatting, getting our bearings in this place that was not, despite appearances, a former zoo, but in fact a camp where the regime had kept dissidents in a time before dissidence had been so radically discouraged as to eliminate it altogether. Fruto had been pacing along the path that traced the outer walls under the beneficent gaze of the guard in the tower (who wasn’t a guard at all, we were told, but rather a facilitator) when he came directly across the courtyard to where I was sitting in the shade with the latest issue of Hombre, examining the photographs of the slim-ankled women who stared out from its pages with looks of air-brushed longing. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, gasping for breath, “I feel like my joint’s about to fall off.”

I gave him a wary smile. He was a fat man. I was a giant. And if you don’t see the distinction, then you have no access to my soul and no appreciation either. I shrugged. “Better than working, isn’t it?”

There was a sheen of sweat on his jowls. It was winter then, thank the Lord and the Blessed Virgin, but still the humidity was high and the afternoon temperatures were in the eighties and even nineties so that we were always uncomfortable, especially where our parts chafed. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “It’s these cages. We’re not animals.”

“No,” I said, “we’re not.”

“Do you know what the President did before he joined the army — professionally, I mean?”

I didn’t. He’d been president before I was born and I expected he’d be president still when I moved on to the next world.

Fruto winked, as if he were letting me in on a great secret. “You don’t? You really don’t?”

I shook my head.

“Well, let me tell you, let me awaken you: he was a cattle breeder.”

—

The initial breakout wasn’t a serious attempt — it was perfunctory, at best — but at least it made a statement, at least it was a beginning. Early one night, after we’d lain with the evening’s women and were gathered around the radio in the courtyard half-listening to the tail end of one of the President’s speeches (rumba music, that was what we wanted, and “Rumba Ciudad” was due to come on at eight), Fruto heaved himself up from his chair, and addressing us all, growled, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it. I’m going home. Tonight. Soon as it’s dark.”

There was a flutter of astonished voices: You can’t be serious! Have you gone mad? Leave here? Melchior Arce, a former stevedore who was nearly as wide across the shoulders as me though his head was disproportionately small and his left hand had been mangled in an accident so that it looked like a crushed tarantula dangling from his shirtsleeve, gave a whistle of surprise. “The only way they’ll get me out of here,” he said, “is in a coffin.” He paused to bite off the end of his cigar and spit it in the dirt. “What’s wrong with you, fat man — you a maricón?”

“You want to know the truth?” Fruto went on, ignoring the insult. “I don’t like big women. Never have. I like them petite, the way women should be — if I want to see fat I can just look in the mirror.”

If I’d been feeling the stirrings of my own discontent, now I went rigid with longing: all I could see was the face of Rosa, my Rosita, the girl I’d left behind when I’d signed the agreement and come all the way across the country to be cooped up here in this stifling compound with its jungle reek and chicken-wire cages that showed us for what we really were. Rosita was petite by any measure, a hundred pounds, if that, and an inch short of five feet. I too had always been attracted to the sleek and unencumbered, to the girls who looked more like children than women, and why was that? Because opposites attract, of course they do — otherwise we’d all be pygmies or giants instead of something proportional, something in between. I’d asked her to wait for me. I’ll be gone six months, I told her, a year at most. And we’ll save the stipend — every penny of it — so we can be married when I come back. She asked what the government wanted of me — pressed me, over and over — but I couldn’t tell her. Secret work, I’d said. And she’d looked up at me out of her saucer eyes, beseeching, wanting more, the truth. Top secret, I said. For the military.

But now, as soon as Fruto spoke the words, I knew I was going with him. We gathered a few things — sliced meat, bread, chocolate bars left over from dinner — and waited till lights out at ten, when the nocturnal clamor of the jungle rose to a crescendo and our fellow gigantes, exhausted from their venereal labors, turned over in their massive beds and began to snore. Then we made our way across the courtyard to the main gate, which was secured by a padlocked chain doubled over on itself. The guard was asleep. Nothing moved but for a solitary rat silhouetted against the faint glow of the village that lay three miles to the west of us. I took hold of the chain in the grip of my two hands and snapped it without even trying (it was nothing, a child’s toy, a poor weak thing designed to forestall ordinary men), and then I rolled back the gate on its lubricated rail and in the next moment we were outside in the darkness.

The problem was Fruto. We hadn’t gone five hundred yards down the dirt lane that would take us to the village where there were taxis, buses, even a rail line that would give us access to the whole of the country, to freedom, to the slim and beautiful, to Rosita, when he sat ponderously on a wet stump overgrown with black twisted vines and, wheezing heavily, croaked, “I can’t go on.”

“Can’t go on? What are you talking about? We just left the place!” I crushed mosquitoes against the back of my neck. Something flapped across the darkened road.

“Give me a minute. Let me catch my breath.” I could barely make out the shape of him there in the dense clot of shadows. I heard him slapping at his own host of mosquitoes. “You don’t have one of those sandwiches handy, do you?” he asked.

“Look,” I said, “if we expect to get out of this, to go home — you do want to go home, don’t you? — we’ll need to get to the village and purchase a bus ticket or hire a taxi and be gone before they bring in the morning’s women.”

“Go on without me,” he said. The air seemed to tear through his lungs. “I’ll follow you after I’ve had a bit of rest. And a sandwich. Let’s split up the provisions now. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case we don’t meet up again.”

So I left him there. It was no less than he deserved. The worst that would happen was that they would take him back to his cage, to food and leisure and the manipulation of the flesh. For my part I made it as far as the village, where I found myself distracted by the lights of a cantina. I had to duck to get through the door. Everyone stared. I should say in my own defense that I’m not one of these men who drink themselves senseless, but they didn’t allow us liquor in the compound — for fear it would affect our performance, I suppose — and the taste of it after more than a month without made me want another taste and another after that. I slept somewhere, I don’t remember where. And in the morning, when they came for me, I went along with them as docilely as one of the sheep I’d lifted above my head as if they were no more than woolly clouds trailing across a serene blue sky.

—

The following afternoon, after we’d eaten our lunch and ministered to the women who joined us each day at siesta time, Fruto and I were summoned to the military barracks on the far side of the village. A truck painted in camouflage colors took us through town (ordinary men, ordinary women, bicyclists, street vendors, dogs that were so ordinary even the bitches that whelped them wouldn’t have given them a second glance) and into another compound, this one made of whitewashed brick, with a three-story building at the center of it. Corporal Carrera led us up the stairs and into a big office on the second floor that was presided over by a monumental oil portrait of the President and a dozen limp flags representing each of the country’s provinces. There was a bank of windows, spilling light. Beneath them stood a mahogany desk, very grand in size, though to us it was like the sort of thing children make use of in elementary school, and seated at the desk, in full military uniform replete with epaulettes and layered decorations, was a man we recognized as Colonel Lázaro Apunto, Director of Educational and Agricultural Resources for the Western Region. There were no seats for us, or no seats large enough, and so we were made to stand.

A long moment elapsed, Corporal Carrera stationed at the door, the Colonel gazing up at us with a look caught halfway between irascibility and awe. Finally, he spoke. “So, I’m given to understand that you two have been abrogating your patriotic duties, is that correct?”

I said, “Yes, that is correct.”

“You have complaints — legitimate complaints?”

This started Fruto going in the way that a molded steel crank, in the hands of the President’s chauffeur, might fire up a balky engine. “We are not animals,” he said, “and we want our privacy. We can’t be expected to be, be intimate, in a chicken-wire cage where anyone can see for himself how we go about our business, and the heat is intolerable. And the insects. And—”

“And the food?” the Colonel asked, cutting him off. “Is that not of the highest order, rich in protein, flavorful? And your stipends, the money we send on each week to your families — your loved ones, whose home addresses we scrupulously maintain — aren’t they sufficient? And what of work? It’s not as if we’re asking you to work.”

“The food is excellent,” I said, stifling the impulse to append Your Excellency to the assessment.

“Good,” the Colonel sighed, leaning back in his chair, “very good.” He was a little man, with mustaches. But then they were all little men, everyone in the military, everyone on the street, even the President himself. “For a moment there I’d thought you were going to renege on your contract with the government, but here I see the whole matter is nothing really, just a question of adjustments. You want stucco walls built over the chicken wire? Fine. It will not be a problem. In fact”—he scrawled something on a pad—“we’ll see to it immediately.”

“Tile floors,” Fruto put in. “For the sake of the coolness on our feet. A fan. Two fans. And a radio in each—room—and, and a day off. Once a week. Sundays. Sundays off.” He bowed his head, mopped sweat. His grin was like a grimace. “The day of rest, eh? Our Lord’s day.”

The Colonel tented his fingers, smiled benignly at us. He waved a hand. “All this can be arranged. Your needs are our needs. If you haven’t already divined the importance of the project in which you’re participating, let me enlighten you. The President — the country — has many enemies, I don’t have to tell you that. They are building up their armed forces, constantly building and accelerating, and who can guess what their purposes are — but we must counter them. Do you know your Greeks?”

“Greeks?” I echoed, mystified.

“Homer. Aeschylus. Euripides. They had their heroes, their champions, their Achilleses and Ajaxes, and that is what the President envisions for our country’s forces — and not simply individual heroes but an entire regiment of them, do you see?”

“Like Samson?” Fruto put in.

The Colonel shot him a look. “Not the Hebrews, the Greeks. They knew how to win a war.”

“The President must be a very patient man,” I offered. “It’ll take generations.”

A shrug. “‘Prescient’ is the word. That is why he is the father of our country. And don’t concern yourself: we will breed the issue of your labors — the females, that is — once they reach puberty. And when that issue reaches puberty, we will breed them as well.” He fumbled for something on his desk, sifting through the papers there until he held up a single sheet, transparent in the light glazing the windows. “Do you see this? This is a sample requisition form to be sent out to the boot makers of the future, calling for boots in exactly your size, señor, eighteen, triple E. Just think of it.” He settled back in his chair. “Helmets the size of birdbaths, jerseys like tents. No, my friends, the President is a man of foresight, a futurist you might say, and his vision is all-encompassing. Are you not proud of your country? Do you not want, with all your heart, to protect and nourish her?”

Fruto stood there dazed. I nodded in assent, but it was only for show. Was I seething inside? Not just then, perhaps — we’d already had a pretty fair idea of what was wanted from us and we had, after all, signed on the dotted line, as venal as any other men — but I could see the months to come, years even, stretching out before me like a sentence in the penitentiary.

Corporal Carrera pulled open the door behind us, our signal to vacate the room: our business here was concluded. But just as we reached the door, my legs working autonomously and Fruto heaving for breath and wiping at his massive face with the great sopping field of his handkerchief, the Colonel called out to us. “Now go and do your duty, for the love of your country and of the President. Go to your female volunteers — whose stipends are but half of yours, incidentally, and so it should be — and, in your throes, think of him.”

—

The Colonel was as good as his word. Improvements came rapidly, laborers from the village appearing the very next day to reinforce the frames of the cages with four-by-four posts, enclose them in walls of lath and stucco and lay tile in a handsome herringbone pattern you could stare at for hours. There were tin roofs. Each of us got a radio. At night, electric fans stirred the breezes and mosquito netting held the insects at bay. I’d volunteered to help with the work — let’s face it, I was bored to the point of vacuity with all that sitting around — but the Colonel wouldn’t hear of it. “No,” he said, on one of his inspections of the compound. “You must conserve your energy”—and here the hint of a smile appeared beneath the dark cantilever of his mustaches—“for your President and your country.”

In the interim, we were bused to the women’s compound, which, as it turned out, lay some three miles to the north of the men’s facility, on the banks of a nameless oozing watercourse that bred mosquitoes and stinging flies in the pestilent millions so that we were all of us, men and women alike, scratching furiously the entire time we were there. What distinguished their compound from ours, aside from the increase of insects? Not much. They too lived in cages, but they were crammed in, four or five of them to a cage, and their camp stretched as far as the eye could see. If we were nine, the women numbered in the hundreds, and this of course reflected a simple calculus any cattle breeder could have worked out on a single sheet of paper.

The women I was put in with the first night were among the biggest in the camp, selected especially for me. And by big I don’t necessarily mean the heaviest — such women were reserved for Fruto and his ilk — but the tallest and broadest, with the longest limbs and thickest bones. These women could have felled forests, collapsed mines, held back the sea just by linking arms. Where the President had found them, I couldn’t imagine — not till one of them called me by name.

I’d just set down my overnight bag and taken possession of the bed, as uninterested in these women as I’d been in the phalanxes that had trooped in and out of my cage at the men’s compound, when one of them broke ranks and came across the dirt floor to me, my name on her lips. She was Magdalena Duarte, she’d been raised in the city I called home and — in a shy voice — told me she’d often come to the drawbridge to watch me at work when she was just a girl. “Before my growth spurt,” she said, covering her mouth with one hand as she laughed at her own joke.

Later, after we’d coupled by rote while the insects whined and the other women, utterly indifferent, unfurled straw mats and lay down to sleep, she asked me how I was adjusting to my new role in life. Did I like it?

“Anything for the President,” I said.

Her voice was soft, with a scratch in it. “All work and no play, eh?”

“Something like that. But what of you — do you like serving your country?”

I could just make out her features in the light of the guard tower where it fell across the wire mesh of the cage. She glowed a moment, her face like a moon rising over a dim horizon. “They move us to a nicer place once we’re pregnant,” she said. “And the stipend is all my parents have to live on in these times. You see, I come from a large family”—she caught herself, giggled softly—“of many children, that is, thirteen of us, and so when the recruiter came to us, I did my duty. To the President, yes, and to my family as well.”

I was quiet a moment, thinking about that — duty — when she dropped her voice even lower and whispered: “You know, there’s another compound. Two other compounds.”

“No,” I said, “I had no idea.” Beside us, in the dark, the giantesses heaved and blew and let their stertorous snores crash through their dreams.

“For little people.”

“Little? What do you mean little?” Forgive me if in that moment I thought of Rosa, my Rosa, my Rosita, and her perfect diminutive feet that were the size of a child’s, of her mouth, her lips, the way she would tease me good-naturedly every time I had to bend double and squeeze sideways through a doorway or avoid the chairs in her parents’ parlor for fear of splintering them.

“Not dwarves, not midgets — the President wants normal stock only — but people who, by the grace or whim of God, are very fine and very small.” She left the thought hanging there, the darkness seizing me, the mosquitoes raging till the furious cacophony of their wings drove down every sound in that place.

“But why? Why would he want—little people?”

I couldn’t see anything but her face in the mosaic shadow of the wire, but I could feel her shrug animate the mattress. “They say he wants to create a race no more than two feet high and normal in every other way, intelligent, active, people like cats who can come and go in the night without detection.”

“Spies?”

Another shift of the mattress. She was nodding now. “Our fatherland has many enemies,” she said, whispering still, as if fearful of being overheard. “We must be ready for them.”

—

I couldn’t sleep that night, not a wink, not after what Magdalena had told me. I kept picturing Rosa in a camp like this one, stepping into a cage where a wiry little man like a human Chihuahua lay waiting for her, though I knew it was absurd. Rosa was an innocent. She would never volunteer, never allow herself to be conscripted no matter what pressures were brought to bear. Or would she? Would she feel moved in her heart (in her loins!) to serve her country like all these patriotic women laid out snoring in the darkness around me? The thought seared me, burned in my brain like the perpetual flame illuminating the grave of our President’s lamented mother. It was dawn by the time I finally dozed off, my dreams poisoned and my heart constricted as if a noose had been drawn tight around it.

After that, I bided my time, and when they moved us back to our new apartments in the men’s compound — the very night — I broke out again. This time I went straight for the bus terminal and soon experienced the giddy release of the wheels revolving beneath me as a dark curtain of vegetation lurched past the windows and the striped margins of the road home came clear in the first light of dawn. What I didn’t yet appreciate was that after our first abortive attempt at escape the Colonel had issued an alert to all carriers to be on the lookout for any big man seeking passage out of the province. They were waiting for me at the end of the line.

Did I go quietly? No, I didn’t. When I saw them there in their Black Maria with its chopping blue light, I came down off the bus like a hurricane and laid that vehicle over on its roof till the men it contained came crawling out the windows and I snatched them up two at a time and flung them behind me like so many paper dolls. Sadly, they’d anticipated me here too, and their chloroform canisters brought me down as swiftly and surely as if I were that king ape in the cinema show we’d all marveled at in simpler times, when the images played across the screen like waking dreams and Rosa breathed quietly at my side.

—

I awoke in a damp subterranean place that smelled of the raw dirt of the floor and the whitewash slathered over the rough stone of the walls. Here was a huge vault of a room, lit dimly by a pair of gray bulbs in wall sconces, a silent place where no one would hear my cries of outrage or pleas for freedom. I was laid out on my back on one of the big industrial-strength beds, and my hands and ankles were bound up in chains — and not merely run-of-the-mill chains, but the heavy steel links they use to moor boats in the harbor of my ancestral home by the sea. It took me no more than sixty seconds to intuit where I was — that is, in the basement of the three-story brick building where the Colonel had his offices overlooking the poor huts and open sewers of the village beyond. If I listened carefully I could hear the sound of footsteps on the floor above and of a chair rolling back and forth on its casters. I tugged at my chains, of course, but they held me fast, secured not to the posts of the bed but to the great ceiba pillars that rose out of the shadows at the four corners of the room to disappear in the ceiling above.

Almost as soon as I opened my eyes a door swung to at the far end of the room and a woman entered bearing a tray of food. She was of average height and weight, this woman — no Amazon — and as I soon discovered, it was her task to spoon-feed me as I lay there under the burden of my chains. “Release me,” I whispered, but she shook her head. “Just one hand — so I can eat. I feel like an infant lying here. Please. I beg you.” She shook her head again and pressed a spoonful of the rich seafood stew we know as zarzuela to my lips. If I’d had any notion of refusing it, of going on a hunger strike in protest of the way I was being treated—mistreated—the scent and taste of that zarzuela drove it away. You can’t begin to imagine what it takes to fuel the cells of this body that entraps me. I ate. Ate hungrily and gladly.

And then the women started coming to me, three a day, morning, afternoon and evening, the big women, the giantesses, lowering themselves over me as I lay chained and helpless beneath them. Did I want to perform the act? No. But I was devoured by lust, perpetually aroused, no matter that I was rebelling inside or that I found the women gross and the task odious. They must have been putting something in my food — one of the coarse brown powders easily attainable at any Chinese herbalist’s shop, the ground horn of the rhinoceros or the friable bones of the tiger infused in alcohol. The women came. I stared at the ceiling. My rage grew.

It must have been the third or fourth day when the Colonel appeared. He was seated in a wicker chair drawn up to my bed as I awakened one afternoon from a bludgeoning dream and he began lecturing me without preliminary. “You may be interested to know,” he said, “that you’ve obtained excellent results, superior, the best of your cadre.”

“Release me,” I said, my voice tense and caught deep in my throat.

He was studying a notepad. He took a minute to smooth the top sheet with his fingers. “Some seventy-six percent of the women you’ve”—he broke off, searching for the right phrase—“been with have become impregnated. Congratulations.”

“If you release me, I promise, I swear on my mother’s soul, that I will do my duty without complaint, without—”

He held up a hand. “Speaking of your mother, she’s doing very well for herself, better than she’s ever done in all her life, thanks to the stipend you’re providing. She appreciates your service, as does the President.” Here he leaned in close to me and I saw that a small glittering object was dangling by a ribbon from his right hand — a medal, such as the military doles out to its heroes. In the next moment I felt the pressure of his fingers as he pinned it to the breast of my shirt. “You’ll be released in good time,” he said, “so that you can go back to the compound where you’ll be more comfortable, but we all feel that for the present, given your, what shall we say, recalcitrance, not to mention dereliction of duty, you’ll be better off here. Really, it’s for your own good. And the President’s too, that goes without saying.”

Later, in my boredom and the solitude that ground me down till my consciousness floated free—Rosa, Rosa, where are you? — I shifted my neck and forced my head as far back against the pillow as it would go so that I was able to squint down the vast slope of my chest and get a look at the medal the President had devised as a token of his gratitude. Dangling from the ribbon was a figure cast in metal — either gold or brass, I never did discover which. It took me a moment — squinting, as I say — to see what it represented: a bull, rampant, with a thin golden puff of steam spewing from his nostrils.

That was it. That was the end. I didn’t care what became of me after that, but I knew then that I hadn’t been born on this earth to serve anybody, let alone the President, that I didn’t love him, didn’t even know him, and that the rage building in me, beat by beat, was a force no man could contain, not even a giant. I waited till the mute who served me had left with the remains of the evening meal and the last giantess had done with me and waddled her way out the door, and then I went deep inside myself, working like a Hindu fakir through every cell of my body, from my smallest toes to the truncheons of my legs and my torso that was like a bucket of iron and on up to my shoulders, my biceps and forearms and down into the reservoirs of my fingers, one digit at a time.

Then I began worrying the chain that bound my right arm, thrusting and jerking back again, over and over, through a thousand repetitions, till finally it gave way and the arm was free. After that, it was easy. I came up off the bed, chains rattling loose around me, telling tales, and if the guard who must have been watching through a hidden peephole came hurtling into the room, I barely noticed. I could have gone through the door and taken the guard with me, but I didn’t. No, I just leaned into the nearest pillar and shoved till the whole edifice began to quake and quake again.

—

That was six months ago. I wasn’t blinded, no one cut my hair, and when the building came down around me — inferior construction; the termites would have got to it if I hadn’t — I found a pocket of air trapped beneath a beam and was spared. I dug my own way out and if the authorities presumed I was buried beneath the rubble, along with the Colonel and his functionaries and the great glistening oil portrait of the President, I wasn’t about to disabuse them. This time I avoided public transport, making my way home in the depths of a freight car designed to carry livestock from one place to another.

Rosa and I escaped to the high fractured plains caught fast in the mountains that separate our country from that of our enemies to the south, where we are living now as man and wife in a village populated by Indians whose teeth are eroded by the leaves they chew to give them energy in the high altitudes where they must scrape a poor living from the earth. I earn my own keep here through main strength, as I always have, hauling loads up and down the stony trails that vanish around each bend and drop off thousands of feet to the distant featureless land below. Am I a beast of burden? Yes. But I’m nobody’s beast but my own. And Rosa’s. Rosa is pregnant now, incidentally, and if we’re lucky she’ll bear our first son come spring, and if we’re even luckier he’ll be neither giant nor dwarf, but something in between. As for me, I try to keep my head down and avoid attracting notice, but inevitably they’ll find me, I know that. How could anybody, let alone a man like me, expect to blend in in a land where the people are so very, very small?

(2011)

The Way You Look Tonight

He was in the teachers’ lounge, seven-fifteen a.m., sipping the latte he’d picked up on his way to work and checking his e-mail before classes started, when he clicked on a message from his brother Rob and a porno filled the screen. His first reaction was annoyance, shading rapidly through puzzlement to fear — in the instant he recognized what it was (a blur of color, harsh light, movement) he hit escape and shot a look round the room to see if anyone had noticed. No one had. The lounge was sparsely populated at this hour, and those who were there were sunk deep inside themselves, staring into their own laptops and looking as if they’d been drained of blood overnight. It was Monday. The windows were dark with the drizzle that had started in just before dawn. The only sound was the faint clicking of keys.

All of a sudden he was angry. What had Rob been thinking? He could be fired. Would be. In a heartbeat. The campus was drug-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free, and each teacher, each year, was required to take a two-hour online sexual harassment course, just to square up the parameters. Downloading porn? At your workplace? That was so far beyond the pale the course didn’t even mention it. His fingers trembled over the keys, his heart thumped. He clicked on the next message — some asinine joke his college roommate had sent out to everybody he’d ever known, all thirty or so of them with their e-mail addresses bunched at the top of the screen — and deleted it before getting to the punchline. Then there was a reminder from the dentist about his appointment at three-thirty, after school let out, and a whole long string of the usual sort of crap — orphans in Haiti, Viagra, An Opportunity Too Unique To Miss Out On — which he hammered with the delete key, one after another, with a mounting irascibility that made Eugenie McCaffrey, the math teacher, look up vaguely and then shift her eyes back to her own screen. Rob had left no message, just the video. And the subject heading: I Thought You’d Want To Know.

By lunch he’d forgotten all about it, but when he checked his phone messages there was a text from Rob, which read only: ?????? Sandwich in hand, the noontime buzz of the lounge reverberating round him — food, caffeine, two periods to go — he called Rob’s number, but there was no answer and the message box was full. Of course. He summoned his brother’s face, the hipster haircut, the goofball grin, eyes surfing the crest of some private joke — when was he going to grow up? — then dialed Laurie at work because it came to him suddenly that they were supposed to go out to dinner tonight with one of her co-workers and her husband, whom he’d never met, and he was wondering how that might or might not interfere with the football game on TV, but she didn’t answer either.

Then the day was over and he was in his car, heading to the dentist’s. The drizzle had given way to a drifting haze that admitted the odd column of sunlight so that the last he saw of the school, for today at least, was a brightly lit shot of glowing white stucco and orange-tile roof rapidly dwindling in the rearview mirror. Traffic was light and he was fifteen minutes early for the dentist, whose office was on the second floor of a vaguely Tudorish building that anchored an open-air mall — bank below, Italian restaurant with outdoor seating bottom floor left, then a realtor and a sandwich shop and on and on all the way round the U-shaped perimeter. A patch of lawn divided the parking lot. There were the usual shrubs and a pair of long-necked palms rising out of the grass to let you know you weren’t in Kansas, appearances to the contrary.

He debated whether to drift over to the sandwich shop for a bite of something, but thought better of it, remembering the time the dentist had chastised him in a high singsong voice because he hadn’t brushed after lunch, the point of which had escaped him, since he’d been coming in to get his teeth cleaned in any case. The thought made him shift the rearview and pull back his lips in a grimace to study his gums and then work a fingernail between his front teeth, after which he took a swig of bottled water and swished it around in his mouth before rolling down the window and spitting it out. That was just the way he was, he supposed — the kind of person who did what was expected of him, who wanted to smooth things out and take the path of least resistance. Unlike Rob.

It was then that he thought of the video. He looked round him, his blood quickening, but no one was paying any attention to him. The cars on either side were empty and the only movement was at the door of the bank, where every few minutes someone would come in or out and the guard stationed there (slab-faced, heavy in the haunches, older — forty, forty-five, it was hard to say) would casually nod his head in recognition. Shielding the laptop with the back of the seat and the baffle of his own torso, he brought up the video — porn, he was watching porn right there in the dentist’s parking lot where anybody could see, and he wasn’t thinking about students or students’ parents or the rent-a-cop at the bank or the real thing either, because all at once the world had been reduced to the dimensions of the screen on the seat beside him.

He saw an anonymous room, a bed, the incandescence of too-white flesh and the sudden thrust of bodies cohering as the scene came into focus. In the center of the bed was the woman, on all fours, the man standing behind her and working at her, his eyes closed and his face drawn tight with concentration. The woman had her head down so that her own face was hidden by the spill of her hair, red-gold hair parted in the middle and swaying rhythmically as she rocked back into him. He saw her shoulders flex and release, her fingers spread and wrists stiffen against the white field of the sheets, and then she lifted her head and he saw her face and the shock of it made something surge up and beat inside of him with a fierce sudden clangor that was like the pounding of a mallet on a steel rail. He watched as she stared into the camera, her eyes receding beneath the weight of the moment — Laurie’s eyes, his wife’s — and then he slapped the screen shut. I Thought You’d Want To Know.

For a long moment he sat there frozen, unable to move, unable to think, the laptop like a defused bomb on the seat beside him. He wanted to look again, wanted to be sure, wanted to feel the surge of shock and fear and hate pulse through him all over again, but not now, not here. He had to get home, that was all he could think. But what of the dentist? Here he was in the parking lot, staring up at the bank of windows where Dr. Sedgwick would be bent over his current patient, finishing up with the pads and the amalgam and all the rest in anticipation of his three-thirty appointment. But he couldn’t face the dentist now, couldn’t face anybody. He was punching in the dentist’s number, the excuse already forming on his lips (food poisoning, he was right out there in the lot, but he was so sick all of a sudden he didn’t think he could, or should… and maybe he’d better make another appointment?), when he became aware that there was someone standing there beside the car window. A girl. In her twenties. All made up and in a pair of tight blue pants of some shiny material that caught the light and held it as she bent to the door of the car next to his while another girl clicked the remote on the far side and the locks chirped in response. She didn’t look at him, not even a glance, but she was bending over to slip something off the seat, on full display, every swell and cleft and crease — inches from him, right in his face — and all at once he was so infuriated that when the dentist’s secretary answered in her bland professional tone he all but shouted into the phone, “I can’t make it. I’m sick.”

There was a pause. Then the secretary: “Who is this? Who’s speaking, please?”

He pictured her, a squat woman with enormous breasts who doubled as hygienist and sometimes took over the simpler procedures when Dr. Sedgwick was busy with an emergency. “Todd,” he said. “Todd Jameson?”

Another pause. “But you’re the three-thirty—”

“Yeah, I know, but something’s come up. I’m sick. All of a sudden, and I—” The car beside him started up, the long gleaming tube of the chassis sliding back and away from him, and there was the lawn, there were the palm trees, but all he could see was Laurie, the way her fingers stiffened on the sheets and her eyes went on gazing into the camera but didn’t register a thing.

“Our policy is for a twenty-four hour cancellation or else we have no choice but to charge you.”

“I’m sick. I told you.”

“I’m sorry.”

The moment burst on him like one of those rogue waves at the beach and he came within a hair of shouting an obscenity into the receiver but he caught himself. “I’m sorry too,” he said.

At home, he found he was shaking so hard he could barely get the key in the door, and though he didn’t want to, though it wasn’t even four yet, he went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a shot of the tequila they kept on hand for margaritas when people came over. He didn’t bother with salt or lime but just threw it back neat and if this was the cliché—your wife has sex with another man and you go straight for the sauce — then so be it. The tequila tasted like soap. No matter. He poured another, downed it, and still he was trembling. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, opened the laptop, clicked on Rob’s e-mail and watched the video all the way through.

This time the blow was even harsher, a quick hot jolt that seared his eyes and shot through him from his fingertips to his groin. The whole thing lasted less than sixty seconds, in medias res, and what had preceded it — disrobing, a kiss, foreplay — remained hidden. The act itself was straightforward as far as it went, no acrobatics, no oral sex, just him behind her and the rhythmic swaying that was as earnest and inevitable as when any two mammals went at it. Dogs. Apes. Husbands and wives. At the moment of release, she looked back at the guy doing it to her and as if at a signal rolled over and here were his knees in the frame now and his torso looming as he covered her with his own body and they kissed, their two heads bobbing briefly in the foreground before the screen went dark. The second time through, details began to emerge. The setting, for one thing. Clearly, it was a dorm room — there was the generic desk to the left of the bed, a stack of books, the swivel chair with the ghosts of their uninhabited clothes thrown over it, Levi’s, a belt buckle, the silken sheen of her panties. And Laurie. This was Laurie before she’d cut her hair, before her implants, before he’d even met her. Laurie in college. Fucking.

The tequila burned in his stomach. There was no sound but for the hum of the refrigerator as it started up and clicked off again. Very gradually, the light began to swell round him as the sun searched through the haze to fill the kitchen and infuse the walls with color — a cheery daffodil yellow, the shade she’d picked out when they bought the condo two years ago on her twenty-ninth birthday. “This is the best birthday present I ever had,” she’d said, her voice soft and steady, and she’d leaned in to kiss him in the lifeless office where the escrow woman sat behind her block-like desk and took their signatures on one form after another as if she’d been made of steel and they’d run out of movable parts.

They’d celebrated that night with a bottle of champagne and dinner out and sex in their old apartment on their old bed that had come from Goodwill in a time when neither of them had a steady job. He looked round the room now — the most familiar room in the world, the place where they had breakfast together and dinner most nights, sharing the cooking and the TV news and a bottle of wine — and it seemed alien to him, as if he’d been snatched out of his life and set down here in this over-bright echoing space with its view of blacktop and wires and the inescapable palm with its ascending pineapple ridges and ragged wind-blown fronds.

The next thing he knew it was five o’clock and he heard her key turn in the lock and the faint sigh of the door as she pushed it shut behind her and then the drumbeat of her heels on the glazed Saltillo tile in the front hall. “Todd?” she called. “Todd, you home?” He felt his jaws clench. He didn’t answer. Her footsteps came down the hall, beating, beating. “Todd?”

He liked her in heels. Had liked her in heels, that is. She was a surgical nurse, working for a pair of plastic surgeons who’d partnered to open the San Roque Aesthetics Institute five years back, and she changed to flats while assisting at surgery but otherwise wore heels to show off her legs beneath the short skirts and calibrated tops she wore when consulting with prospective patients. “Advertising,” she called it. The breast implants — about which he’d been very vocal and very pleased — had come at a discount.

He was still at the table when she walked into the kitchen, the bottle on the counter, the shot glass beside him, the laptop just barely cracked. “What’s this?” she said, lifting the bottle from the counter and giving it a shake. “You’re drinking?” She came across the room to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and ran it up the back of his neck, then bent forward to lift the empty glass to her nose and take a theatrical sniff.

“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t lift his eyes.

“That’s not like you. Tough day?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Well, if you’re partying”—and here her voice fluted above him, light and facetious, as if the world were still on its track and nothing had changed—“then I hope you won’t mind if I pour myself a glass of wine. Do we have any wine left?” Her hand dropped away and he felt a chill on the back of his neck where her palm had been. He heard her heels tapping like typewriter keys, then the wheeze of the vacuum seal on the refrigerator door, the cabinet working on its hinges, the sharp clink as the base of the wine glass came into contact with the granite counter, and finally the raucous celebratory splash of the wine. Still he didn’t look up. Her attitude — this sunniness, this self-possession, this blindness and blandness and business-as-usual crap — savaged him. Didn’t she know what was coming? Couldn’t she feel it the way animals do just before an earthquake strikes?

“That guy you used to date in college,” he said, his voice choked in his throat, “what was his name?”

He looked up now and she was poised there at the counter, leaning back into it, the glass of wine — sauvignon blanc, filled to the top — glowing with reflected light. She let out a little laugh. “What brought that up?”

“What color hair did he have? Was it short, long, what?”

“Jared,” she said, her eyes gone distant a moment. “Jared Reed. From New Joisey.” She lifted the glass to her lips, took a sip, the gold chain she wore at her throat picking up the light now too. She was wearing a blue silk blouse open to the third button down. She put a hand there, to her collarbone. Sipped again. “I don’t know,” she said. “Brown. Black maybe? He wore it short, like Justin Timberlake. But why? Don’t tell me you’re jealous”—the facetious note again when all he could think of was leaping up from the table and slapping every shred of facetiousness out of her—“after all these years? Is that it? I mean, what do you care?”

“Rob sent me a video today.”

“Rob?”

“My brother. Remember my brother? Rob?” His voice got away from him. He hadn’t meant to shout, hadn’t meant to be accusatory or confrontational — he just wanted answers, that was all.

She said nothing. Her face was cold, her eyes colder still.

“Maybe”—and here he flipped open the laptop—“maybe you ought to have a look at it and then you tell me what it is.” He was up out of the chair now, the tequila pitching him forward, and he didn’t care about the look on her face or the way she cradled the wine and held out her hands to him and he didn’t touch her — wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t touch her ever again. The kitchen door was a slab of nothing, but it slammed behind him and the whole house shook under the weight of it.

—

Later, as faces wheeled round him and the flat-screen TV behind the bar blinked and shifted over the game that was utterly meaningless to him now, he had the leisure to let his mind go free. School didn’t exist — lesson plans, papers to grade, none of it. Laurie didn’t exist either. And Jared Reed was just a ghost. And whether he had brown hair or black or muscles on top of muscles or a dick two feet long, it didn’t matter because he was just a ghost on a screen. Nothing. He was nothing. Less than nothing.

But here was the bartender (thirties, with a haircut like Rob’s and dressed in a cowboy shirt with embroidery round the pockets like icing on a cake) looming over him with the Jameson bottle held aloft. “Yeah,” he said, and he would have clarified by adding, Hit me again, but that would have been too much like being in a movie, a bad movie, bad and sad and pathetic. He wasn’t a drinker, not really, and he hadn’t wanted the tequila except that it was there because they didn’t keep anything in the house beyond that and a couple bottles of wine they got when it was on sale, but when they went out, he always ordered Jameson. Jameson was all he ever drank, aside from maybe a beer chaser, which he wasn’t having tonight, definitely wasn’t having. Rob drank it too. And their father, when he was alive. It was a family tradition, and how many times had they sat at dinner when they were kids and their father would say, Just wait till old man Jameson kicks off, then we’ll be rich, and they would chime, Who’s Jameson? and he’d say, Who’s Jameson? The Whiskey King, of course. And their mother: Don’t hold your breath.

And then the drink was there and he was sipping it, thinking of the last thing Rob had sent him as an attachment, and when was it? A week ago? Two? It was an article he’d downloaded from some obscure Web site and he’d forwarded it under the heading Look What Our Glorious Ancestor Was Up To. The ancestor in question — if he was an ancestor, of course, and there was the joke — was James Jameson, heir to the whiskey fortune. In 1888 Jameson was thirty-one years old, same age as Todd was now, and he was a wastrel and an adventurer, and because he was limp with boredom and had done all the damage he could in the clubs and parlors of Ireland, England and the Continent, he signed on for an African expedition under Henry Morton Stanley, of Livingston fame. They were in the Congo, in the heart of the heart of darkness, stuck on some river Todd had forgotten the name of though he’d read through the article over and over with a kind of sick fascination — stuck there and going nowhere. One morning when Stanley was away from camp, Jameson got the idea that he might like to visit one of the cannibal tribes to see how they went about their business and make a record of it in his sketchbook. From the beginning of the expedition, he’d made detailed drawings of tribesmen, game animals, the erratic vegetation and crude villages scattered along the banks of the rivers, and now he was going to draw cannibals. At work. For six handkerchiefs — not a dozen or two dozen, just six — he bought a ten-year-old slave girl and gave her as a gift to the cannibals, then sat there on a stump or maybe a camp chair, one leg crossed over the other, and focused his concentration. He drew the figure of the girl as she was stripped and bound to a tree, drew her as the knife went in under the breastbone and sliced downward. She never struggled or pleaded or cried out but just stood there bearing it all till her legs gave way and he drew that too, his hand flashing and the pencil growing duller while the mosquitoes hummed and the smoke of the cookfire rose greasily through the overhanging leaves.

Was there a theme here? Was he missing something? Laurie had run out the door shouting, You don’t own me! as he’d backed the car out of the drive, the window up and the motor racing. And Rob had sent him the video. And the article too. Just then, a groan went up from a booth in the corner behind him and he glanced vaguely at the TV before digging out his phone and hitting Rob’s number. The referee on the screen waved his arms, music pounded, the bottles behind the bar glittered in all their facets. He got a recording. The message box was full.

The strangest thing, the worst thing, had been those first few minutes when he had to struggle with himself to keep from bulling his way back into the kitchen to see the look on her face, to see her shame, to see tears. He’d slammed the door so hard the cheap windows vibrated in their cheap frames and one of Laurie’s pictures — the silhouette of a couple on a moonlit beach he’d always hated — crashed to the floor, glass shattering on the tiles. He didn’t stoop to clean it up. Didn’t move, not even to shift his feet. He just stood there rigid on the other side of the door, picturing her bent over the screen, her face stricken, the wine gone sour in her throat. But then the thought came to him that maybe she liked it, maybe it turned her on, maybe she was proud of it, and that froze him inside.

When she did come through the door — and she’d had enough time to watch the thing three or four times over — she didn’t look contrite or aroused or whatever else he’d expected, only angry. “Jared is such an asshole,” she hissed, glaring at him. “And so’s your brother, so’s Rob. What was he thinking?”

“What was he thinking? What were you thinking? You’re the one on the sex tape.”

“So? So what? Did you think I was a virgin when we got married?”

“You tell me — how many men did you have? Fifty? A hundred?”

“How many women did you have?”

“I’m not the one putting out sex tapes.”

She stood her ground, tall on her heels, her face flushed and her arms folded defensively across her chest. “You want to know something — you’re an asshole too.”

If ever he was going to hit her, here was the moment. He took a step toward her. She never even flinched.

“Listen, Todd, I swear I didn’t know that creep was making a video — he must have had a hidden camera going or something, I don’t know. I was in college. He was my boyfriend.”

“What about the lights?”

She shrugged. An abortive smile flickered across her lips. “He always liked to do it with the lights on. He said it was sexier that way. He was an artist, I told you that, really visual—”

Everybody had past lovers, of course they did, but they were conveniently reduced to shadows, memories, a photo or two, not this, not this hurtful flashing resurrection in the flesh, the past come home in living color. An artist. All he knew was that he hated her in that moment.

“How was I to know? Really, I’m sorry, I am. To put that online — where’s it posted, even? — I mean, it’s really disgusting and stupid. He’s a shit, a real shit.”

“You’re the shit,” he said. “You’re disgusting.”

“I can’t believe you. I mean, really — what does it have to do with you?”

“You’re my wife.”

“It’s my body.”

“Yeah? Well you can have it. I’m out of here.”

And that was when she chased him down the drive and put on a show for the neighbors, her voice honed to a shriek like something out of the bell of an instrument, a clarinet, an oboe, abuse of the reed, the pads: You don’t own me!

—

It was getting late. The game was over, long over, and he was sitting there in a kind of delirium, waiting for his phone to ring, waiting for Rob — or maybe her, maybe she’d call and pour her soul out to him and they could go back to the way they were before — when he noticed the couple sitting at the end of the bar. They were kissing, long and slow, clinging fast to each other as if they were out in a windstorm, as if all the contravening forces of the universe were trying to tear them apart, two untouched drinks standing sentinel on the bar before them and the bartender in his cowboy shirt steering round them as he poured and wiped and polished. The girl’s arms were bare, her jacket — blue suede, with a fake-fur collar — draped over the chair behind her. He couldn’t see her face, only the back of her head, her shoulders, her arms, beautiful arms, stunning actually, every muscle and tendon gently flexed to hold her lover to her, and he looked till he had to look away.

He became aware of the music then, some syrupy love song seeping out of the speakers, and what was it? Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart at his worst, hyper-inflated love delivered in a whisper, as manufactured as a pair of shoes or a box of doughnuts, and here was this couple sucking the breath out of each other, and what was he doing here, what was he thinking? He was drunk, that was what it was. And he hadn’t had anything to eat, had he? Eating was important. Vital. He had to eat, had to put something on his stomach to absorb the alcohol — how else could he get behind the wheel? Drunk driving on top of everything else. He pictured it: the cuffs, the cell, his corner in the teachers’ lounge deserted and Ed Jacobsen, the principal, wondering where he was — not a phone call? Couldn’t he even have called?

The thought propelled him up off the stool, down the length of the bar past the stupefied sports fans and the clinging couple and the bartender with the haircut like Rob’s, You have a good night now, and out onto the street. He stood there a moment outside the door, patting down his pockets, wallet, keys, cell phone, taking stock. The air was dense and moist, fog working its way up the streets as if the streets were rivers and the fog a thing you could float on. He could smell the ocean, the rankness of it. He thought he’d go to the next place, get a burger and coffee, black coffee — wasn’t that how it was done? Wasn’t that taking the cliché full circle? That was how it had been in college after he’d gone out cruising the bars with his dormmates, lonely, aching, repressed, gaping at the girls as they took command of the dance floor and never knowing what to do about it. A burger. Black coffee.

He started down the street, everything vague before him, trying to think of where to go, of who would be open at this hour. Things glittered in the half-light, the pavement wet, trash strewn at the curbs. A single car eased down the street, headlights muted, taillights bleeding out into the night. Neon thickened and blurred. He made a left on the main street, heading toward a place he thought might be open still, a place he and Laurie sometimes went to after a late movie, focused now, or as focused as he could be considering the whiskey and the hammer beating inside him, reverberating still, when a woman’s voice cut through the night. She was cursing, her delivery harsh, guttural, as if the words were being torn from her, and then there was the wet clap of flesh on flesh and a man’s voice, cursing back at her — figures there, contending in the shadows.

He wanted to call out, wanted to defy them, bark at them, split them apart, get angry, get furious — there they were, just ahead of him, the woman lurching into the man, the man’s arms in dark rapid motion, their curses propulsive, shoes shuffling on the concrete in a metastasized dance — but he didn’t. There was a suspended moment when they felt him there and they switched it off, in league against him, and then he was past them, his footsteps echoing and the curses starting up behind him in a low seething growl of antipathy.

How he made it home he couldn’t say, but he remembered standing at the door of the car fumbling with his keys on a street so dark it might as well have been underground and feeling the cell buzz in his pocket. Or thinking he felt it. He kept it on vibrate because of teaching, because of class — the embarrassment factor — but half the time he never felt it there against his skin and wound up missing his calls. Which was why he had to check messages all the time… but it was buzzing and he had it in his hand and flipped it open, the only light on the street and a dim light at that. Rob. Rob calling.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Todd, hey, bro — you okay? I mean, I been calling for like three hours now and I’m worried about you, because I mean, it’s tough, I know, but it’s not like the end of the world or anything—”

“Rob,” he said, his voice ground down so that he barely recognized it himself. “Rob, can you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.”

“Good. Because screw you. That’s my message: screw you.” And then he’d turned the phone off and thrust it deep in his pocket.

—

When he came in the door the house was silent. There was a lamp on in the hallway and the nightlight in the kitchen was on too, but Laurie, in her meticulous way, had turned off all the rest and gone to bed. Or so it seemed. He moved slowly, heavily, his breath coming hard and his feet working as if independent of him, far away, down there in the shadows where the baseboard ran the length of the hall and conjoined with the frame of the bedroom door. If she had a light on in there — if she was up, waiting for him, waiting for what came next — he would have seen it in the crack at the bottom of the door, the tile uneven there, treacherous even, shoddy workmanship like everything else in the place. Very slowly, he turned the handle and eased the door open, wincing at the metallic protest of the hinges that needed a shot of WD-40, definitely needed WD-40, and then he was in the room and looking down at the shadow of her where she lay in bed, on her side, her back to him. It took him a moment to see her there, his eyes adjusting to the dark and the stripes of pale trembling light the streetlamp outside the window forced through the shades, but very gradually she began to take on shape and presence. Laurie. His wife.

He saw the way she’d tucked her shoulder beneath her, saw the rise there, the declivity of her waist and the sharp definition of her upthrust hip. He’d always loved her hips. And her legs. The indentation of her knees. The way she walked as if carrying a very special prize for someone she hadn’t quite discovered yet. He was remembering the first time he’d ever seen her, a hot summer day with the sun arching overhead and her walking toward him with a guy from school he liked to hang out with on weekends, and he didn’t know a thing about her, didn’t know her name or where she came from or that they liked the same books and bands and movies or that her whole being would open up to his and his to hers as if they had the same key and the key fit just exactly right. What he saw was the sun behind her and the shape of her revealed in silhouette, all form and grace and the light like poured gold. What he saw was the sway of her hips against the fierce brightness of the sun and the shadow of her legs caught in the grip of a long diaphanous dress, her legs, sweet and firm and purposeful, coming toward him.

He remembered that. Held that vision. And then, as quietly as he could, he pulled back the covers and got into bed beside her.

(2011)

The Night of the Satellite

What we were arguing about that night — and it was late, very late, 3:10 a.m. by my watch — was something that had happened nearly twelve hours earlier. A small thing, really, but by this time it had grown out of all proportion and poisoned everything we said, as if we didn’t have enough problems as it was. Mallory was relentless. And I was feeling defensive and maybe more than a little paranoid. We were both drunk. Or if not drunk, at least loosened up by what we’d consumed at Chris Wright’s place in the wake of the incident and then at dinner after and the bar after that. I could smell the nighttime stink of the river. I looked up and watched the sky expand overhead and then shrink down to fit me like a safety helmet. A truck went blatting by on the interstate and then it was silent but for the mosquitoes singing their blood song while the rest of the insect world screeched either in protest or accord, I couldn’t tell which, thrumming and thrumming till the night felt as if it was going to burst open and leave us shattered in the grass.

“You asshole,” she snarled.

“You’re the asshole,” I said.

“I hate you.”

“Ditto,” I said. “Ditto and square it.”

—

The day had begun peaceably enough, a Saturday, the two of us curled up and sleeping late, the shades drawn and the air conditioner doing its job. If it weren’t for the dog we might have slept right on into the afternoon because we’d been up late the night before at a club called Gabe’s, where we’d danced, with the assistance of well rum and two little white pills Mallory’s friend Mona had given her, till our clothes were sweated through and the muscles of our calves — my calves anyway — felt as if they’d been surgically removed, hammered flat and sewed back in place. But the dog (Nome, a husky, one blue eye, one brown) kept laying the wedge of his head on my side of the bed and emitting a series of truncated violin noises because his bladder was bursting and it was high time for his morning run.

My eyes flashed open, and despite the dog’s needs and the first stirrings of a headache, I got up with a feeling that the world was a hospitable place. After using the toilet and splashing some water on my face, I found my shorts on the floor where I’d left them, unfurled the dog’s leash and took him out the door. The sun was high. The dog sniffed and evacuated. I led him down to the corner store, picked up a copy of the newspaper and two coffees to go, retraced my steps along the quiet sun-dappled street, mounted the stairs to the apartment and settled back into bed. Mallory was sitting up waiting for me, still in her nightgown but with her glasses on — boxy little black-framed things that might have been an example of the generic reading glasses you find in the drugstore but for the fact that they were ground to the optometrist’s specifications and she wore them as a kind of combative fashion statement. She stretched and smiled when I came through the door and murmured something that might have been “good morning,” though, as I say, the morning was all but gone. I handed her a coffee and the Life section of the newspaper. Time slowed. For the next hour there were no sounds but for the rustle of newsprint and the gentle soughing suck of hot liquid through a small plastic aperture. We might have dozed. It didn’t matter. It was summer. And we were on break.

The plan was to drive out to the farmhouse our friends Chris and Anneliese Wright were renting from the farmer himself and laze away the hours sipping wine and maybe playing croquet or taking a hike along the creek that cut a crimped line through the cornfields which rose in an otherwise unbroken mass as far as you could see. After that, we’d play it by ear. It was too much trouble to bother with making dinner — and too hot, up in the nineties and so humid the air was like a flak jacket — and if Chris and Anneliese didn’t have anything else in mind, I was thinking of persuading them to join us at the vegetarian place in town for the falafel plate, with shredded carrots, hummus, tabouleh and the like, and then maybe hit a movie or head back over to Gabe’s till the night melted away. Fine. Perfect. Exactly what you wanted from a midsummer’s day in the Midwest the week after the summer session had ended and you’d put away your books for the three-week respite before the fall semester started up.

We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense — jobs were a myth, a rumor — and we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.

At any rate, we made some sandwiches, put the dog in the car and drove through the leafy streets of town until the trees gave way and the countryside opened up around us, two bottles of marked-down shoppers’ special Australian zinfandel in a bag on the floor in back. The radio was playing (bluegrass, a taste we’d acquired since moving out here in the heart of the country) and we had the windows rolled down to enjoy the breeze we were generating as the car humped through the cornfields and over a series of gently rolling hills that made us feel as if we were floating. Nome was in the back seat, hanging his head out the window and striping the fender with airborne slaver. All was well. But then we turned onto the unmarked blacktop road that led out to Chris and Anneliese’s and saw the car there, a silver Toyota, engine running, stopped in our lane and facing in the wrong direction.

As we got closer we saw a woman — girl — coming toward us down the center of the road, her face flushed and her eyes wet with what might have been the effects of overwrought emotion or maybe hay fever, which was endemic here, and we saw a man — boy — then too, perched on the hood of the car, shouting abuse at her retreating back. The term “lovers’ quarrel” came into my head at the very moment the girl lifted her face and Mallory yelled, “Stop!”

“It’s a lovers’ quarrel,” I said, ever so slightly depressing the accelerator.

“Stop!” Mallory repeated, more insistently this time. The guy was watching us, something like an angry smirk on his face. The girl — she was no more than a hundred feet away now — raised her hand as if to flag us down and I eased up on the gas, thinking that maybe they were in trouble after all, something wrong with the car, the engine overheating, the fuel gauge on empty. It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.

The car slowed to a halt and the girl bent to my window, letting her face hover there a moment against the green tide of corn. “You need help?” I asked, and those were tears in her eyes, absolutely, tears that swelled against her lids and dried in translucent streaks radiating out from her cheekbones.

“He’s such a jerk,” she said, sucking in her breath. “He’s, he’s”—another breath—“I hate him.”

Mallory leaned over me so the girl could see her face. “Is he your—?”

“He’s a jerk,” the girl repeated. She was younger than us, late teens, early twenties. She wore her blond hair in braids and she was dressed in a black tank top, cut-off jeans and pink Crocs. She threw a look at the guy, who was still perched on the hood of the car, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began to cry again.

“That’s right,” he shouted. “Cry. Go ahead. And then you can run back to your mommy and daddy like the little retard you are!” He was blond too, more of a rusty blond, and he had the makings of a reddish beard creeping up into his sideburns. He was wearing a Banksy T-shirt, the one with the rat in sunglasses on it, and it clung to him as if it had been painted on. You could see that he spent time at the gym. A lot of time.

“Get in the car,” Mallory said. “You can come with us — it’ll be all right.”

I turned to Mallory, blocking her view of the girl. “It’s between them,” I said, and at the same time, I don’t know why, I hit the child lock so the door wouldn’t open. “It’s none of our business.”

“None of our business?” she shot back at me. “She could be abused, or I don’t know, abducted, you ever think of that?” She strained to look around me to where the girl was still standing there on the blacktop as if she’d been fixed in place. “Did he hit you, is that it?”

Another sob, sucked back as quickly as it was released. “No. He’s just a jerk, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” he crowed, sliding down off the hood now, “you tell them all about it, because you’re little Miss Perfect, aren’t you? You want to see something? You, I’m talking to you, you in the car.” He raised one arm to show the long red striations there, evidence of what had passed between them. “You want her? You can have her.”

“Get in,” Mallory said.

Nome began to whine. The house was no more than half a mile up the road and probably he could smell Chris and Anneliese’s dog, a malamute named Boxer, and maybe the sheep the farmer kept behind the fence that enclosed the barn. The girl shook her head.

“Go ahead, bitch,” the guy called. He leaned back into the hood of the car and folded his arms across his chest as if he’d been at this awhile and was prepared to go on indefinitely.

“You don’t have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn’t got around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”

“No,” the girl said, stepping back from the car now so that we got a full view of her. Her arms shone with sweat. There were beads of moisture dotting her upper lip. She was pretty, very pretty.

I eased off the brake pedal and the car inched forward even as Mallory said, “Stop, Paul, what are you doing?” and I said, “She doesn’t want to,” and then, lamely, “It’s a lovers’ quarrel, can’t you see that?” Then we were moving up the channel the road cut through the greenest fields in the world, past the pissed-off guy with the scratched forearms and a hard harsh gloating look in his eyes, down into a dip and up the next undulating hill, Mallory furious, thumping at the locked door as if it were a set of drums and straining her neck to look back as the whole scene receded in the rearview mirror.

—

By the time we got to Chris and Anneliese’s, Mallory was in full crisis mode. The minute we pulled into the driveway I flicked off the child lock, but she just gave me a withering look, slammed out of the car and stalked up the steps of the front porch, shouting, “Anneliese, Chris, where are you?” I was out of the car by then, Nome shooting over the front seat to rocket past me even as Boxer came tearing around the corner of the house, a yellow Lab pup I’d never seen before at his heels. The dogs barked rhapsodically, then the screen door swung open and there were Chris and Anneliese, spritzers clutched in their hands. Chris was barefoot and shirtless, Anneliese dressed almost identically to the girl on the road, except that her top was blue, to match her eyes, and she was wearing open-toed flats to show off her feet. Before grad school she’d been a hosiery model for Lord & Taylor in Chicago and she never missed an opportunity to let you know it. As for the rest of her, she was attractive enough, I suppose, with streamlined limbs, kinky copper-colored hair and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen or imagined. My own teeth tended toward the yellowish, but then neither of my parents was a dentist and both of hers were.

Mallory didn’t say hello or how are you or thanks for inviting us, but just wheeled around in exasperation and pointed down the road. “I need a bicycle,” she said. “Can I borrow somebody’s bicycle?”

Anneliese showed her teeth in an uncertain smile. “What are you talking about? You just got here.”

The explanation was brief and vivid and unsparing with regard to my lack of concern or feeling. All three of them looked at me a minute, then Anneliese said, “What if he’s dangerous?”

“He’s not dangerous,” I said reflexively.

“I’m going with you,” Anneliese said, and in the next moment she was pushing a matching pair of ten-speed bicycles out the door, hers and Chris’.

Chris waved his glass. “You think maybe Paul and I should go instead? I mean, just in case?”

Mallory was already straddling the bike. “Forget it,” she said, with a level of bitterness that went far beyond what was called for, if it was called for at all. I’d done what anyone would have done. Believe me, you just do not get between a couple when they’re in the middle of a fight. Especially strangers. And especially not on a sweltering afternoon on a deserted country road. You want to get involved? Call the cops. That was my feeling anyway, but then the whole thing had happened so quickly I really hadn’t had time to work out the ramifications. I’d acted instinctively, that was all. The problem was, so had she.

Mallory shot me a look. “You’d probably just wind up patting him on the back.” She gave it a beat, lasered in on Chris. “Both of you.”

That was when things got confused, because before I could respond — before I could think — the women were cranking down the drive with the sun lighting them up as if we were all in the second act of a stage play, and the dogs, spurred on by the Lab pup, chose that moment to bolt under the lowest slat of the bleached wooden fence and go after the sheep. The sheep were right there, right in the yard, milling around and letting off a sweaty ovine stink, and the two older dogs — mine and Chris’—knew they were off limits, strictly and absolutely, and that heavy consequences would come down on them if they should ever lapse and let their instincts take over. But that was exactly what happened. The pup, which, as it turned out, was a birthday present from Chris to Anneliese, didn’t yet comprehend the rules — these were sheep and he was a dog — and so he went for them and the sheep reacted and that reaction, predator and prey, drove the older dogs into a frenzy.

In that instant we forgot the women, forgot the couple on the road, forgot spritzers and croquet and the notion of chilling on a scalding afternoon, because the dogs were harrying the sheep and the sheep had nowhere to go and it was up to us — grad students, not farmers, not shepherds — to get in there and separate them. “Oh, shit,” Chris said and then we both hurdled the fence and were right in the thick of it. I went after Nome, shouting his name in a fury, but he’d gone atavistic, tearing wool and hide from one bleating animal after another. I had him twice, flinging myself at him like a linebacker, but he wriggled away and I was down in the dirt, in the dust, a cyclone of dust, the sheep poking at my bare arms and outthrust hands with their stony black hooves. There was shit aplenty. There was blood. And by the time we’d wrestled the dogs down and got them out of there, half a dozen of the sheep had visible gashes on their faces and legs, a situation that was sure to disconcert the farmer — Chris’ landlord — if he were to find out about it, and we ourselves were in serious need of decontamination. I was bleeding. Chris was bleeding. The sheep were bleeding. And the dogs, the dogs we scolded and pinched and whacked, were in the process of being dragged across the front yard to a place where we could chain them up so they could lie panting through the afternoon and contemplate their sins. That was the moment, that was what we were caught up in, and if the women were on their bicycles someplace wearing a scrim of insects or stepping into somebody else’s quarrel, we didn’t know it.

A car went by then, a silver Toyota, but I only caught a glimpse of it and couldn’t have said if there were two people in it or just one.

—

We never did get around to playing croquet — Mallory was too worked up, and besides, just moving had us dripping with sweat — but we sat on the porch and drank zinfandel and soda with shaved ice while the dogs whined and dug in the dirt and finally settled down in a twitching fly-happy oblivion. Mallory was mum on the subject of the couple in the Toyota except to say that by the time she and Anneliese got there, the girl was already in the car, which pulled a U-turn and shot past them up the road, and I thought — foolishly, as it turned out — that that was the end of it. When six o’clock rolled around we wound up going to a pizza place because I was outvoted, three to one, and after that we sat through a movie Anneliese had heard good things about but which turned out to be a dud. It was a French film about three non-specifically unhappy couples who had serial affairs with one another and a troupe of third and fourth parties against a rainy Parisian backdrop that looked as if it had been shot through a translucent beach ball. At the end there was a close-up of each of the principals striding separately and glumly through the rain to separate destinations. The three actresses, heavily made-up, suffered from smeared mascara. The music swelled.

Then it was Gabe’s and the pounding air-conditioned exhilaration of an actual real-life band and limitless cocktails. Chris and Anneliese were great dancers, the kind everybody, participants and wallflowers alike, watches with envy, and they didn’t waste any time, not even bothering to find a table before they were out there in the middle of the floor, their arms flashing white and Anneliese’s coppery flag of hair draining all the color out of the room. We danced well too, Mallory and I, attuned to each other’s moves by way of long acquaintance, and while we weren’t maybe as showy as Chris and Anneliese, we could hold our own. I tried to take Mallory’s hand, but she withheld it and settled into one of the tables with a shrug of irritation. I stood there a moment in mute appeal, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye, and it was then that I began to realize it was going to be a long night. What did I want? I wanted to dance, wanted joy and release — summer break! — but I went to the bar instead and ordered a spritzer for Mallory and a rum and Coke for myself.

The bar was crowded, more crowded than usual, it seemed, even though most of the undergrads had gone home or off to Europe or Costa Rica or wherever they went when somebody else was paying for it. There were two bartenders, both female and both showing off their assets, and it must have taken me five minutes just to get to the bar and another five to catch the attention of the nearest one. I shouted my order over the furious assault of the band. The drinks came. I paid, took one in each hand and began to work my way back through the crowd. It was then that someone jostled me from behind — hard — and half the spritzer went down the front of my shirt and half the rum and Coke down the back of a girl in front of me. The girl swung round on me with an angry look and I swung round on whoever had jostled — pushed — me and found myself staring into the face of the guy from the blacktop road, the guy with the distraught girlfriend and the silver Toyota. It took a beat before I recognized him, a beat measured by the whining nasal complaint of the girl with the Coke-stained blouse—“Jesus, aren’t you even going to apologize?”—and then, without a word, he flashed both palms as if he were performing a magic trick and gave me a deliberate shove that tumbled me back into the girl and took the drinks to the floor in a silent shatter of glass and skittering ice cubes. The girl invoked Jesus again, louder this time, while the guy turned and slipped off into the crowd.

A circle opened around me. The bartender gave me a disgusted look. “Sorry,” I said to the girl, “but you saw that, didn’t you? He shoved me.” And then, though it no longer mattered and he was already passing by the bouncer and swinging open the door to the deepening night beyond, I added, my own voice pinched in complaint, “I don’t even know him.”

When I got back to the table, sans drinks, Mallory gave me a long squint through her glasses and said — or rather, screamed over the noise of the band—“What took you so long?” And then: “Where’re the drinks?”

That was the defining moment. My shirt was wet. I’d been humiliated, adrenaline was rocketing through my veins and my heart was doing paradiddles, and what I was thinking was, Who’s to blame here? Who stuck her nose in where it wasn’t wanted? So we got into it. Right there. And I didn’t care who was watching. And when the band took a break and Chris and Anneliese joined us and we finally got a round of drinks, the conversation was strained to say the least. As soon as the band started up again I asked Anneliese to dance and then, out of sympathy or etiquette or simple boredom, Chris asked Mallory and for a long while we were all out on the dance floor, Chris eventually going back to Anneliese, but Mallory dancing with a succession of random guys just to stick it to me, which she succeeded in doing, with flying colors and interest compounded by the minute.

And that was how we found ourselves out in that dark field on the night of the satellite, letting things spill out of us, angry things, hurtful things, things that made me want to leave her to the mosquitoes and go off and rent a room on the other side of town and never talk to her again. She’d just told me she hated me for maybe the hundredth time — we were drunk, both of us, as I’ve said, the encounter on the road the tipping point and no going back — and I was going to retort, going to say something incisive like, “Yeah, me too,” when I felt something hit my shoulder. It was a blow, a palpable hit, and my first thought was that the Toyota guy had followed us in order to exact some sort of twisted vengeance for an incident that never happened, that was less than nothing — the girl hadn’t got in our car, had she? — but then I felt whatever it was skew off me and drop into the wet high grass with an audible thump. “What was that?” Mallory said.

I wasn’t making the connection with the streak of light that had shot overhead as we’d climbed out of the car — or not yet, anyway. “I don’t know.”

“Here,” she said, pulling out her phone to shine the light on the ground.

The object was right there, right at our feet, cradled in a gray-green bowl of broken stalks. It was metallic, definitely metallic, some sort of steel or titanium mesh six inches long and maybe three wide, like a sock, the size of a sock. And it wasn’t hot, as you’d expect, not at all. In fact — and this was when it came to me — the heating had taken place twenty-three miles up and by the time it had got here, to earth, to me, it was as lukewarm as a carton of milk left out on the counter.

—

It was a sign, but of what I wasn’t sure. I went online the next day and found an article confirming that the streak in the sky had been produced by the reentry of a decommissioned twenty-year-old NASA climate satellite scientists had been tracking as it fell out of orbit. The satellite had been the size of a school bus and weighed six and a half tons and that fact alone had caused considerable anxiety as it became increasingly clear that its trajectory would take it over populated areas in Canada and the U.S. A picture of it, in grainy black and white, showed the least aerodynamic structure you could imagine, all sharp edges and functional planes, the whole overshadowed by a solar panel the size of the screen at a drive-in movie. The article went on to claim that all debris of any consequence had most likely been incinerated in the upper atmosphere and that the chances of any fragment of it hitting a given person anywhere within its range had been calculated at 1 in 3,200. All right. But it had hit me, and either they needed to recalculate or Mallory and I should get in the car and go straight to Vegas. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table in the alcove, working a serrated knife through the sections of her grapefruit.

“What did I tell you?” I said.

She took a moment to scan the article, then glanced up at me. “It says it was incinerated in the upper atmosphere.”

“Most likely, it says. And it’s wrong, obviously. You were there. You saw it.” I pointed through the doorway to the living room, where the piece of mesh — stiff, twisted, blackened from the heat of reentry — occupied a place on the bookcase where formerly a vase had stood between Salinger and Salter in the American Lit section. “Tell me that’s not real.”

The night before, out in the field, she’d warned me not to touch it—“It’s dirty, it’s nothing, just some piece of junk”—but I knew better, I knew right away. I took it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger, expecting heat, expecting the razor bite of steel on unprotected flesh and thinking of The War of the Worlds in its most recent cinematic iteration, but after we’d had a moment to examine it under the pale gaze of the cell phone and see how utterly innocuous it was, I handed it to her as reverently as if it were a religious relic. She held it in one hand, running her thumb over the braid of the mesh, then passed it back to me. “It feels warm,” she said. “You don’t really think it came from that meteor or whatever it was?” She turned her face to the sky.

“Satellite,” I told her. “Last I heard they said it was going to come down in Canada someplace.”

“But they were wrong, is that what you’re saying?”

I couldn’t see her features, but I could hear the dismissiveness in her voice. We’d been fighting all day, fighting to the point of exhaustion, and it infuriated me to think she wouldn’t even give me this. “They’ve been wrong before,” I said, and then I cradled the thing under one arm and started back across the field without bothering to see if she was coming or not.

Now she said, “Don’t be crazy. It’s just some piece of a car or a tractor or something, or a lawnmower — it fell off a lawnmower, I’ll bet anything.”

“A lawnmower in the sky? It hit me. Right here, on the shoulder.” I jerked at the neck of my T-shirt and pulled it down over my left shoulder in evidence.

“I don’t see anything.”

“There’s a red mark there, I’m telling you — I saw it in the mirror this morning.”

She just stared at me.

—

A week slid by. The heat never broke, not even after a series of thunderstorms rumbled in under a sky the color of bruised flesh — all the rain managed to do was drive up the humidity. We were supposed to be enjoying ourselves, we were supposed to be on vacation, but we didn’t do much of anything. We sat around and sweated and tried to avoid contact as much as possible. Dinner was salad or takeout and we ate at the kitchen table, where the fan was, books propped in our hands. It was hard on the dog, what with the complication of his fur that was made for another climate altogether, and I took him for increasingly longer walks, just to get out of the house. Twice I brought him to the park where the satellite had sloughed its skin, and if I combed the grass there looking for evidence — metal, more metal, a screw, a bolt — I never said a word about it to anybody, least of all Mallory. What did I find? A whole world of human refuse — bottle caps, cigarette lighters, a frayed length of shoelace, plastic in its infinite varieties — and the bugs that lived in and among it, oblivious. I came back from the second of these excursions and found Mallory on the couch where I’d left her, her bare feet and legs shining with sweat, magazine in one hand, Diet Coke in the other. She never even glanced up at me, but I could see right away there was something different about her, about the way she was holding herself, as if she knew something I didn’t.

“I took the dog to the park,” I said, looping his leash over the hook in the entryway. “Hotter down there than here, I think.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You want to go down to Gabe’s for a drink? How does a G and T sound?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking up at me for the first time. “I guess so. I don’t care.”

It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of Nine Stories had fallen flat. “Where’s the thing?” I said.

“What thing?”

“The mesh. My mesh.”

She shrugged. “I tossed it.”

“Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?”

In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid to the trashcan, only to find it empty. “You mean outside?” I shouted. “In the Dumpster?”

When I came thundering back into the room she still hadn’t moved. “Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it.”

Her lips barely moved. “It was dirty.”

—

I must have spent half an hour out there poking through the side-by-side Dumpsters that served our building and the one across the alley from it. I was embarrassed, I’ll tell you, people strolling by and looking at me like I was one of the homeless, a can man, a bottle redeemer, and I was angry too, and getting angrier. She had no right, that was what I kept telling myself — she’d done it just to spite me, I knew it, and the worst thing, the saddest thing, was that now I’d never know if that piece of mesh was the real deal or not. I could have sent it to NASA, to the JPL, to somebody who could say yea or nay. But not now. Not anymore.

When I came back up the stairs, sweating and with the reek of rotting vegetables and gnawed bones and all the rest hanging round me like a miasma, I went right for her. I took hold of her arm, slapped the magazine away and jerked her to her feet. She looked scared and that just set me off all the more. I might have pushed her. She might have pushed back. Next thing I was out the door, out on the street, fuming, the sun still glaring overhead, everything before me looking as ordinary as dishwater. There was a bar down the street — air-conditioning, music, noise, people, a change of mood that was as easy to achieve as switching channels on the TV — and I was actually on my way there, my shoulders tense as wire, when I stopped myself. I patted down my pockets: wallet, keys, cell phone, a dribble of dimes and quarters. I didn’t have a comb or a toothbrush or a change of underwear, I didn’t have books or my iPod or the dog, but none of that seemed to matter, not anymore. A couple in shorts and running shoes flashed by me, breathing noisily. A motor scooter backfired across the street.

We kept the car in the lot out back of the apartment. I went the long way around the building, keeping close to the wall in case Mallory was at the front window looking to see where I’d gone off to. The tank showed less than a quarter full and my wallet held three fives and three singles — along with the change, that gave me a grand total of nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents. No matter. I’d stop at the ATM on the way out of town and if things got desperate I did have a credit card, which we reserved for emergencies only, because we really struggled just to make the minimum payment every month. Was this an emergency? Mallory wouldn’t think so. The geniuses from NASA might not think so either — or the farmer whose sheep bore crusted-over scabs on their legs and throats and sad white faces. But as I wheeled the car out of the lot I couldn’t help thinking it was the biggest emergency of my life.

I didn’t know where I was going, I had no idea beyond the vague notion of putting some miles behind me, heading north maybe till the corn gave way to forest, to pines as fragrant as the air that went cold at night and seeped in through the open window so you had to pull a blanket over you when you went to sleep. The car — the rusted-out Volvo wagon Mallory’s mother used to drive to work back in Connecticut — shuddered and let out a grinding mechanical whine as I pulled up in front of the bank. I got out, mounted the three steps to the concrete walkway where the ATM was and waited the requisite six feet, six inches away from the middle-aged woman in the inflated khaki shorts who was just then feeding in her card. The heat was staggering. My shirt was wet as a dishrag, my hair hanging limp. I wasn’t thinking, just doing.

It was then that I glanced up and noticed the silver Toyota parked in the lot of the ice-cream parlor next door. A woman and two kids emerged from the building, licking cones, and went off down the street, and then the door swung open again and there was the blond girl, her own cone — the pale green of pistachio — held high and her face twisted in a grimace as she said something over her shoulder to the man behind her. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d worn that day on the road and he didn’t have an ice cream of his own, but as he came through the door he twisted his face too and jerked hold of the girl’s arm. She let out a cry, and then the ice cream, double scoop, which had already begun to melt in green streaks across the back of her hand, slipped from the cone to plop wetly at her feet, just like anything else subject to the law of gravity.

“You creep,” she said. “Look what you did.” And he said something back. And then she said something. And then I was no longer watching them because as far as I was concerned they could go careering around the world on any orbit they wanted, just so long as it never intersected mine again. Space debris collides in two wide bands of low earth orbit, at 620 and 930 miles up, fragmenting and fragmenting again, things as big as satellites and rocket boosters and as small as the glove the astronaut Ed White lost on the first U.S. spacewalk. Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it’ll burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess.

The woman at the ATM seemed to be having trouble with her card — no bills had yet appeared and she kept punching at the keys and reinserting the card as if sheer repetition would wear the machine down. I had time. I was very calm. I pulled out my cell and called Mallory. She answered on the first ring. “Yeah?” she snapped, angry still. “What do you want?”

I didn’t say anything, not a word. I just pressed my thumb to the off switch and broke the connection. But what I’d wanted to say was that I’d taken the car and that I’d be back, I was pretty sure I’d be back, and that she should feed the dog and pay the rent, which was due the first of the month, and if she went out at night — if she went out at all — she should remember to look up, look up high, way up there where the stars burn and the space junk roams, because you never can tell what’s going to come down next.

(2012)

Slate Mountain

The sun was a little gift from the gods, pale as a nectarine and hanging just above the treetops on a morning the weatherman on the local NPR affiliate had assured him would begin with a cold misting drizzle and progress to rain. Well, the weatherman — or actually, she was a woman, a weatherwoman, with a soft whispery voice that made you think of a whole range of activities that had nothing whatever to do with the weather — had been wrong before. More times than he could count. Satellites, ocean sensors, hygrometers, anemometers, barometers — they were all right in their way, relaying messages to people stuck in cities who might want to know when to break out their galoshes and umbrellas, but more often than not he could just step out the back door, take a sniff of the air and tell you with ninety-five percent accuracy what the day was going to bring. Of course he could. And he did it now, riding a rush of endorphins as he shifted the coffee cup from his right hand to his left to swing open the back door, stroll out onto the deck with its unimpaired views of the humped yellow fields and freestanding oaks and the blue-black mountains hanging above them, and take in the air. It was damp, no doubt about that, but the sky was clear, or mostly clear, and even if it did spit a little rain — even if it snowed up there at the higher elevations — there was no way in the world he was going to cancel the hike.

It was a Saturday at the end of October, the leaves bronzing on the lower slopes, deer season safely in the can and the mosquitoes gone to mosquito hell till spring at least, and seventeen people had signed up, including Mal Warner, who’d been a member of the group executive committee of the Los Padres Chapter for as long as Brice could remember. “So we’ll have two executives along for this little stroll,” Syl had pointed out at dinner last night. It hadn’t really occurred to him to think of it in those terms — he and Mal went back forty-five years, to the time of Brower and the fight over the Grand Canyon, though they’d grown apart in recent years — but he’d looked up from his vegetarian lasagna and salad of nopal and field greens to give her a little nod of recognition. “Yes,” he’d said, acknowledging the point — he was on the executive committee of the Kern-Kaweah Chapter, after all, not to mention leader of a dozen or more group hikes a year—“I guess so.”

He’d set down his fork and gazed across the room, beyond Syl and the calendar on the wall and out the window to where the evening sun burnished the top rail of the fence till it shone as if it had been waxed, wondering all over again why Mal had decided to drive all this way to join them — and not for dinner or a drink or a night of reminiscence out on the deck but for a routine day hike up a mountain that held no challenges for either of them. Plus, Mal had chosen to e-mail rather than telephone, as if he couldn’t bother to waste his breath, though the message itself was amiable enough: See you’re leading one of your 60-plus hikes up Slate Mt. next week and thought I’d come join you. You’ve got to admit I qualify. And some. Looking forward. Yours, Mal. P.S. Say hi to Syl.

Now, as the breeze shifted and a high vanguard of cirrostratus crept into place around the sun like dirty wash, he sipped his coffee and thought of the pleasures of the trail. It had been over a month since he’d been up in the mountains because of what he liked to call the special use tax of the hunting season, Fish and Game making their pile out of it and everybody else left to duck for cover. You’d have to be suicidal to leave the paved roads when the hunters were on the loose, whether you were dressed in Day-Glo orange and carrying an air-raid siren strapped to your back or not — Christ, if it was up to him he’d impose a ban on all hunting, even of rodents, and make it permanent. Over a month. He was looking forward to stretching his legs.

Just as he was about to go in and urge Syl to get a move on — it took nearly an hour to drive the switchbacks up to the seven-thousand-foot elevation of the trailhead where the group would assemble, and he, as leader, had to be there first to reassure them as they emerged from their vehicles in a confusion of coolers, daypacks and binoculars and the like, no dogs allowed, thank you, and alcoholic beverages discouraged — a glint of light caught his eye and he looked up to see a boxy silver car swing off the main road and start up the drive toward him. It took him a moment — the flash of wire-frame spectacles, the outsized head, the gleam of a perfect set of old man’s choppers working over a wad of gum — to realize that this was Mal behind the wheel, and it took him a further moment to recollect and replay the unhappy occasion of their last meeting, which had nearly brought them to blows over the very pettiest of things, so petty it embarrassed him to recall it: a dinner check.

How long ago was it? Five or six years anyway. They’d been entertaining a party of Angels — donors in excess of the $100,000 range — after a horseback trip into the Golden Trout Wilderness, regaling them with a feast at the local lodge, no expense spared and everybody aglow with the camaraderie of the trail, when the check came. It was pretty hefty, but that was only to be expected, the overheated faces up and down the table glutted with filet mignon and lobster tail and the cocktails and wine and desserts and after-dinner drinks that preceded and rounded out the meal, but he and Mal had agreed beforehand to split the cost between their chapters. The waitress had brought the check to him, and while he was fumbling with his reading glasses and frowning over the figures that seemed to swell and recede in the candlelight, Mal had pushed himself up to come jauntily round the table, lean in and whisper in his good ear, “You’re going to have to cover this — I must have left my wallet in my other pants.” Which was exactly what he’d said, word for word, the last time. And the time before that. The upshot was a discussion out in the parking lot that managed to exhume some buried resentments, not the least of which involved Syl, who’d been Mal’s lean leggy golden-braided hiking companion before Brice had ever met her, on a hike, with Mal, some forty years ago. He’d said some harsh things. So had Mal.

And now here he was, easing out of the car and slinging a daypack over his shoulder in one fluid motion, looking not a minute older than he had in the parking lot that day, though he must have been, what? Sixty-eight? Or no: sixty-nine. Sixty-nine and loping up the walk without the slightest hesitation, no hitch in his stride, no tics or palsies or spastic readjustment of the lower back muscles after the long drive, just forward momentum. When he reached the bottom step, Brice came down to him and they shared a solemn handshake. “Brice,” Mal said.

“Mal.”

“Hope you don’t mind my stopping off here instead of meeting you up top. Thought it’d be nice to drive up with you. Plus”—and here he grinned, as if in acknowledgment of what had come between them—“it sure saves fuel.”

Before he could respond, Syl came tearing out the door. “Mal!” she cried, scooting across the porch in her hiking boots, no-nonsense jeans and down vest to fall into his arms for a sisterly embrace that might have lasted just a beat too long. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Yeah,” Mal said, his jaws working and his eyes shining, “you too.”

—

Hiking wasn’t a competitive activity, or that was the party line anyway, but of course it was. It was about endurance, about knowledge, wisdom, woodcraft, and it was as testosterone-fueled as any other sport, which was why he liked leading the sixty-and-up groups — it eliminated the young studs with their calf-length shorts and condescending attitudes, the kind who were always pressing to pass you on the trail. He could really get worked up about that if he let himself, because the first rule of the group hike, to which they’d all sworn allegiance beforehand, was never to pass the leader (or, for their opposite number, the bloated ex-athletes and desk jockeys and their top-heavy wives, never to lag behind the rear leader). Now, as they stood assembled at the trailhead, he went over the printed rules for the twelve hikers who’d showed up: four couples in their early to late sixties, a single man wearing lace-up knee boots who looked to be seventy-five or so and three stocky women in matching pastel hoodies he took to be widows or divorcées. “And remember,” he said, “always keep in sight of the person ahead of you in case there’re forks in the trail and you’re not sure which way to go. Any questions?”

“What about bears?” one of the stocky women asked.

He shrugged, gave her a slow smile. “Oh, I don’t know — what did you bring for lunch?”

“Tuna. On rye.”

“Uh-huh, well that just happens to be their favorite. They’re probably all lifting their muzzles in the air right now, taking a sniff.” He waited for laughter, but there was none. “But seriously, it shouldn’t be a problem. I rarely see bears up here, especially this time of year after the hunters have got through with them. But if a bear should come for you, you know the drill: stand up tall, wave your arms and shout. And if that doesn’t do it, abandon your pack. And lunch. Better to go hungry than have a four-hundred-pound black bear pinning you down and licking your face, don’t you think?”

That got a chuckle out of them, at least a couple of them anyway. He gave the group a quick once-over, looking for weakness or instability, thinking of the woman who’d had some sort of nervous breakdown on the Freeman Creek trail last spring, repeating a single word—“dirigible”—over and over in an array of voices till she was screaming it at the treetops. Or the bone-thin guy dressed in motorcycle regalia who’d gone into convulsions and had to have a stick thrust between his teeth while the ravens buzzed overhead and an untimely snow sifted down to whiten his face and sculpt miniature pyramids on both ends of the stick before help could arrive. That had been a nightmare. And if it hadn’t been for one of the group, a dental hygienist who knew her way around emergencies, the guy probably would have died there on the trail. But that was an anomaly, the chance you take, whether you’re out on a mountaintop in the Sierras or pushing a cart at Walmart.

There wouldn’t be any problems today, he could see that at a glance. A cluster of mild-looking faces hung round him like pale fruit, old faces—older faces — that had seen their senses of humor erode along with everything else. They looked obedient, respectful, eager. And all of them, the seventy-five-year-old and the stocky women included, looked fit enough for what had been advertised as a moderate-to-strenuous hike of six hours’ duration and a two-thousand-foot elevation gain, lunch at the summit, back before dark. No problem. No problem at all.

He collected the liability waivers, checked his watch to give the two no-shows the requisite fifteen minutes to pull into the lot, then announced, “We’re all set then. Just follow me and I’ll try to point out anything interesting we might encounter along the way.” And he’d actually started out, the group falling into line behind him, before he swung round and added, pointing to Mal, “The rear leader today is Mal Warner, in the plaid shirt there?”

Until he pronounced it aloud, he hadn’t realized he was going to select Mal, but after being stuck in the car with him for the better part of an hour, listening to him jaw on about everything from his stock-market losses to the line of hiking gear he was trying to get off the ground with the help of a major investor and his devotion to Pilates, weight training and the modified butterfly stroke he’d devised to take pressure off his hips, Brice couldn’t help thinking it might be best all the way round if he put some distance between himself and Mal. Mal would have been the logical choice in any case, since Brice didn’t know the first thing about any of the others and Syl could get herself lost walking to the grocery store. They’d have plenty of time to catch up on things later on — at least that’s what he told himself. He even foresaw a conciliatory dinner, at which he would insist on picking up the check.

“Please be sure to stay ahead of him,” he went on, in official mode. “And if you have trouble, whether it’s a stone in your shoe or a blister or you need to catch your breath, just give a holler. We want everybody to have a super experience today, okay?” Heads nodded. People shuffled in place. “So let’s just go and enjoy the heck out of it, are you with me?”

—

The first sour note was struck before they’d gone half a mile. Someone — hunters, was his best guess — had scattered trash all over the trail, fire-blackened cans, plastic bags, a slurry of corn cobs, ground meat and chili beans in a sauce like congealed blood, the de rigueur half-crumpled beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Today it was bourbon and vodka, generic brands, the mainstay of the middle-aged sportsman. If they were younger, it would have been Jägermeister, and what the appeal of that sugary medicinal crap was, he could never figure. Of course, in his day it was sloe gin, which you gulped down without pausing for breath, telling yourself you loved it, till it came up in the back of your throat. No matter — he made a point of carrying a biodegradable trash bag with him anywhere he went, even along the back roads down below, and now he bent patiently to the trash and began stuffing it into the mouth of the bag.

“People have no respect,” somebody said.

“You can say that again,” the woman who’d been worried about the bears put in, and in the next moment she was kneeling beside him, scooping up trash with hands like risen dough and nails done in two colors, magenta and pink. “They’re like animals.” And then, lowering her voice to address him so he had to turn his face to hers and see that she was wearing mascara and blusher — on a hike — she said, “I’m Beverly, by the way. Beverly Slezak? I thought you might have known my husband Hal, from down in Visalia? He was a great one for hiking — before the cancer got to him. Lung,” she added, her shoulder brushing against his as she leaned forward to dump a handful of cans into the bag.

“No,” he said, scuttling forward with the bag as some of the others brought him offerings, “I don’t think I know him. Or knew him, that is.”

Mal’s voice, from somewhere behind him: “People are animals. Apes. The third chimpanzee, along with the bonobo and the common chimp.”

“Right,” Syl put in. “And that’s why we’re out here in the woods, cleaning up trash. It’s what apes do.”

Somebody laughed. And then the old guy (old: he was ten years older than Brice, if that) opined in a flat voice that it was probably Mexicans because the whole world’s just a dump to them and one of the other men — tall, with swept-back features and a long white braid trailing down his back — objected. “Hey, I resent that. I’m Mexican and you don’t see me throwing shit all over the place—”

“All right,” Brice heard himself say, and he was straightening up now and twisting a knot in the neck of the bag, “it’s nothing to get worked up over, sad as it is — it’s just the kind of thing we want to educate people about. But what we’ll do? We’ll leave the bag here beside the trail and collect it when we come back down, because no litterer’s going to spoil my day, are you with me?”

After that, they went on up along a series of meadows and he pointed out the frost-withered remains of the various plants that flowered here in July — corn lilies, sneezeweed, columbine, rein orchids, geraniums — and promised he’d lead a summer hike if anybody was interested in seeing the meadows in bloom. “Right,” said Beverly, who seemed to have taken up post position just behind him, “and get eaten alive by the mosquitoes. And gnats. And those biting things, what are they? They look like houseflies but they sure make you dance.”

He turned his head to look at her without breaking stride — and where was Syl? There, back toward the rear, in animated discussion with Mal. She was matching him stride for stride, her hands juggling ideas, the brim of her baseball cap pulled down so he couldn’t make out the upper half of her face, only her outthrust chin and the gleam of her moving lips. “Deerflies,” he said.

“Not the yellow ones, the black ones.”

A breeze stirred the tops of the pines. He could taste the moisture on the air. The sun was gone. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some sort of horsefly maybe. But you don’t have to worry today, do you?”

“No,” she said, taking the grade with short powerful thrusts of her legs, and he saw that she wasn’t so much overweight as muscular, her calves swelling against the woolen knee socks and her thighs caught in the grip of a pair of tight blue nylon shorts. “No, I guess not.”

“That’s the beauty of a fall hike,” he said, swinging round to fling out his arms as if he’d created it all, the meadows, the views, the soaring pines and big granite boulders ranged like giants’ skulls along the trail. Soon it would all be covered in snow and you’d need skis to get up here.

The old man — he was second behind Beverly — took the opportunity to ask an involved question about the geology of the mountain, throwing around terms like “pre-cretaceous” and “metamorphic,” and the best Brice could do was to say he honestly didn’t know but that up top, up at nine thousand feet, there were all sorts of rare plants, like purple mountain parsley, which hadn’t even been discovered — or identified, that is — till 1976.

“Dead now, I suppose,” the old man said.

Brice acknowledged the point, taking a quick glance behind him to be sure everybody was still there, the group in single file now as the trail steepened and the switchbacks dug into the slope in the thinning air. “Just like the bugs.”

—

Two miles up was a saddle with a scatter of downed trees, where he liked to call a rest stop so people could catch up, refer to their water bottles and power bars and take in the view of the granite spires known as the Needles where they rose up like outstretched fingers from the grip of the mountain opposite. The group settled in, some of them spreading groundcloths, others easing down in the pine needles to sort through their packs. Everyone seemed companionable enough at this point, all the hang-ups and anxieties of their daily lives washed clean on the flow of blood pumping through their hearts and lungs and down into the loose working muscles of their legs. As advertised. And what had John Muir said? I never saw a discontented tree. Exactly.

He was unwrapping the avocado and bean-sprout sandwich he’d prepared in the kitchen before first light when Syl, the bill of her cap set at a rakish angle, eased down beside him and began sorting through her own pack. She was on a diet — a perpetual diet, though to his eyes her figure had scarcely changed over the years, her legs firm, her stomach flat and her small, perfectly proportioned breasts still right where they should be, whether she was wearing a bra or not, and never mind the striations above her upper lip or the way her throat sagged to give away her age — and so she’d passed on his offer to make her a sandwich, relying on her cache of low-cal fiber bars instead. She unwrapped one now and gave him a grin.

He grinned back. He was feeling good, better than good — he could have climbed up over Slate and kept on going down the far side and into the foothills, along the river course and all the way home. Car? What car? Who needed a car? “What were you two talking about back there?” he asked. “From what I could see it looked like you barely had time to catch your breath.”

“What? Mal and me? He’s a talker, that’s for sure. He’s still upset about his last wife — Gloria, the one we never met? They lasted two years, I gather, if that. Plus, he keeps repeating himself, starts on one story and then suddenly he’s off on another one and then another till he doesn’t even know what the subject is and you have to guide him back to it.”

“If you’ve got the patience.” He took a bite of the sandwich, gazed across the massed treetops below them to where the Kern River cut its canyon and then to the mountains beyond, mountains that rolled into other ranges altogether, on and on till they dropped off into the deserts to the east.

“I don’t know what it is between you two — I mean, after all these years. He’s Mal, what can I say? He’s got his charms. Still.”

The notion irritated him. “I thought he was a real bore.”

“That’s just because he was nervous.”

“Nervous? About what?”

“You. The situation. Seeing us both after all this time. You know what he said? He said I was as beautiful as the day we first met.”

He didn’t have anything to say to this. He studied her a moment, her legs sprawled in front of her, her lips pursed, her gaze eclipsed by some private memory. She took a bite of the fiber bar, a smear of chocolate caught in the corner of her mouth, then unscrewed the cap of her water bottle and took a long swallow.

“But what about you?” she said finally. “You seemed pretty friendly with your groupie there, what was her name — the one with the nails and face job and the hair dyed the color of a brick wall? What is she, a cosmetologist or something?”

He just smiled. “Beats me.”

“But she’s hot for something, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, smiling wider. “Aren’t they all?”

It had begun to rain, a light pattering in the dust that had people rising to their feet and briskly stuffing things back into their packs. Mal had already shrugged into his poncho and was making his way toward them, so he pushed himself up and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. “All right, everybody,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the scrape and shuffle of activity, “gather round a minute. I don’t think the rain’s going to amount to much—”

“Scattered showers,” the old man put in, cutting him off. “That’s what the TV said.”

“Right, well, we can head down now or go on up to the summit — what do you think, show of hands?”

The majority, Mal and Syl included, raised their hands, while the remainder just stood there watching him. “Good,” he said finally. “I’d hate for a little weather to spoil the fun, so let’s go on as planned and see what it’s like up top — anybody has a problem, don’t be shy. Just let me know and we’ll head back down anytime you say. But really, I agree with”—gesturing to the old man—“what was your name?”

“Louis.”

“With Louis here. The forecast, I mean. A little rain never hurt anybody, right?”

—

They were up at eight thousand feet, moving along easily, the rain sucked back up into the clouds, the trail barely slick and the black sheared-off face of Slate Mountain looming over the treetops as if it had just dropped down out of the sky, when the cries of what must have been a whole flock of ravens broke the silence. The trees held fast. There was the scrape of hiking boots. Then a pair of the birds appeared from below, beating upslope, their wings creaking to gain purchase on the air, and everybody stopped to watch them go. “What’s that all about, you think?” Beverly asked, and there she was, right behind him, her hair clamped beneath a floppy pink hat now as a concession to the damp. “Something dead up there?”

“Probably a deer,” he said, “or the offal anyway. The stuff the hunters leave behind.”

“For a raven party.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, moving on, talking over his shoulder while keeping one eye on the snaking line behind him. He was thinking of the way a carcass disappears up here, beetles coming up out of the ground, flies laying their eggs, vultures and ravens at it, rot, bacteria, coyotes, even the mice sneaking out under cover of darkness to gnaw calcium from the bones. He wanted to say, Everything dies to give life to something else, but he didn’t want to come off sounding pompous — or morbid, especially with a group like this, when they were all out here to deny the proposition or at least forget about it for the time it took them to get to the summit of a mountain and back down again — and so he left it at that.

He turned his head and kept moving on up the trail, Beverly doing her best to keep pace, to show him she was fit, a fit widow, if that was what she was, as if he were in the market and this was some kind of test. Which, he supposed, it was. Why should there be limits? If you felt good, what did age matter? It was only a number. He didn’t feel any different than he had at fifty — or forty, even. His blood pressure was in the acceptable range, he and Syl had sex once a week and he slept through the night and woke each morning with the sense that there was something new out there in the world, something reserved for him and him alone if only he had the strength to go out and find it. His feet dug at the trail. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

When they got close, he could see that the ravens were squabbling over something just off the trail. They hung in the trees like ornaments, fought along the ground in a black flap of wings, their voices harsh and constricted. He sliced away from the trail then, dodging through waist-high brush until he was there and the ravens lifted off silently and he saw what it was they’d been disputing: a bear. The carcass of a bear, its paws removed and its gut slit open, but otherwise intact. Before he had time to think (Rule #2: Never leave the trail), Beverly was there at his elbow and he could hear the others following behind, their voices muted, legs scissoring through the brush. He hadn’t wanted this: these people were old, they could misstep, break a leg, break everything.

“What is it,” Beverly said, breathless, “—a bear? Is that a bear?”

There was an anger churning in him — poachers, and they’d got the gallbladder and the paws to sell on the black market and left the rest to rot. What was wrong with the world? Christ, you couldn’t even take a hike anymore, not without this, this obscenity, this shit. Suddenly he was shouting. “Get back, all of you! Back on the trail!” But it was too late. Half of them were already gathered round, gaping at the swollen dead thing before them, its eyes gone, tongue discolored, the stumps of the legs rigid as poles, and the rest picking their way toward him. Beverly had her cell phone out, taking pictures. And here came Syl and Mal and then the old man, high-stepping his way through the bushes as if they were about to come to life and take him down.

“We ought to report this,” Beverly said. “What number do we call? You know what number?”

He would have told her it was useless, useless because there was nothing anybody could do about it, nothing that would put the animal together again and breathe the life back into it or eliminate the superstition and ignorance that drove the market for animal parts, for degradation, for destruction, but instead he just said, “There’s no signal up here.”

It was then that the trees began to stir, a breeze there, a sound like distant freight. When the rain came, it came in earnest, a heavy pounding that slicked everything even as they struggled back to the trail and fumbled with their rain gear, and then it was sleet, and then it was snow.

—

This time there was no debate, no show of hands, no further pretense: if they wanted to make the summit it would have to be another day because he was in charge here — he was the captain of this ship — and they were turning back. “We’re calling it a day,” he said, and he wanted to tail it with a joke, a quip about the weather or maybe the weatherwoman on the radio and how she’d been right after all, but all the lightness had gone out of him. It was always rougher on the way down than the way up — people never seemed to realize that — and with the wet snow the footing would be worse than usual. He’d have to keep an eye on the old guy — Louis — and on Beverly, who’d already slipped twice, the rear of her shorts sporting a long dark vertical smear that ran down the back of her right leg as if she’d just stepped out of the mineral bath at the spa. They hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he almost lost it himself, looking back over his shoulder to keep everyone in sight when he should have been watching his own two feet, but he managed to catch himself at the last minute. That would have been something, the group leader taking a muddy pratfall, and whether he’d have wound up hurting himself or not, he could imagine the sort of multi-faceted joke Mal would have made of it — and you didn’t see him slipping. Not Mal. He had the agility of a surfer, all out-flung arms and flapping lips.

No one had much to say, not even Beverly, who was right behind him (and Louis behind her, as if they’d drawn lots). Every once in a while, negotiating the sharp corner of a switchback, he’d hear a snatch of Mal’s voice in mid-discourse, but the rest were quiet, focusing on their own thoughts and maybe their disappointment too, because if you didn’t reach the summit, no matter how illuminating the scenery or soothing the exercise, the hike was a failure. For his part, he was disappointed too — the bear had cast a pall over everything and then the weather had come down on top of that, and if he had to think about it, there was Mal too, Mal as pure irritant, and why he’d ever agreed to get back together with him he’d never know. Some misguided notion of being cool or democratic or nostalgic or whatever it was. His neck ached from looking back over his shoulder and his left knee was sore where he’d strained it to keep from falling. He was thinking he’d beg off on dinner plans, thinking maybe Mal could get a ride back with somebody else—Next time, he’d tell him, we’ll do it next time—and then they were down at the seventy-five-hundred-foot level and the snow tapered off to sleet and then a light rain and by the time they reached the parking area it had stopped altogether.

He stood there patiently at the trailhead, making a checkmark by each name on his reservation list as people filed by him. Most just nodded or gave him a muted thanks, eager to get to their cars and back to their recliners and sofas and wide-screen TVs, but the old man stopped to jaw awhile—Hell, I could have made it to the top, no problem, but I respect your decision, what with the women, but maybe next time we’ll do an all-male hike and really put some miles under our boots, huh, what do you say? — and Beverly stopped too, standing there beside him as if she were ready to hand out certificates of achievement.

Five minutes passed. Ten. He kept looking up the long flat final stretch of the trail, expecting to see Syl and Mal come striding round the corner at any minute, but they never showed. The old man climbed into his car. The lot cleared. Beverly snapped open her compact and touched up her lipstick, making a kissing noise that seemed unnaturally loud in the silence that had descended after the last of the cars rattled up the rutted road to the highway. “Where could they be?” she murmured, as if thinking for him. “They were right behind us, weren’t they?”

He looked back across the dirt lot to where his car stood beside a bulky black SUV that must have been Beverly’s, straining his eyes to see into the darkened interior, as if somehow Syl and Mal had slipped by him and were waiting there for him, talking quietly, making jokes, wondering why he was lingering here with this boxy widow while the sky darkened and everybody just grew colder and hungrier.

At fifteen minutes he cupped his hands and began to shout. “Syl!” he called, “Syl!” until he was bleating it. At twenty, he started back up the trail, Beverly tagging along like a dog, though he tried to dissuade her. “You don’t have to feel responsible,” he told her. “It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I want to help. I can’t just leave you out here by yourself.”

He had nothing to say to this. He could feel the incline in the long muscles of his legs. His breath steamed before him. “I can’t imagine what happened,” he said, moving quickly now, but not panicking, not yet. “They’re both experienced in the woods and they’re both — Syl especially — in good shape.”

“Maybe she turned an ankle. Maybe—” Beverly let the thought trail off. She was eager, keeping pace, her arms swinging at her sides.

He didn’t want to think about heart attack or stroke or even broken bones. He called out till his voice went hoarse and the shadows deepened and the trail was gone and they had to turn back. It was full dark by the time they got back to his car. He sat there, the heater going, Beverly shivering beside him, and tapped the horn at intervals, signaling into the night. An hour crept by. The battery light kept going on and he had to keep starting the car up to run the heater and then shutting it off again. What they talked about, he and Beverly — this stranger who was sitting beside him in the dark while his thoughts raced and collided — he had no recollection of afterward. But at seven, when there was still no sign of Syl, he backed the car around and drove the three miles to the lodge, where there would be a telephone available to him, a ground line that could get him through to anybody, to the county sheriff, the paramedics, Search and Rescue, and what was he going to say? Just this: I’ve got two people missing.

—

He was in a brightly lit place, voices swelling round him, an undercurrent of jaunty guitar and country baritone washing through the speakers at either end of the room. The man from the local SAR team — mid-forties, squat, carrying a big breadbasket of flesh round his waist like a badge of authority — had told him they’d be on the case as soon as they could, volunteers and sheriff’s department people driving up the mountain even as they spoke, but that they really couldn’t expect to do much till first light in the morning. The temperature was likely to go down into the teens overnight — that was what he’d heard on the radio anyway — but the snow was expected to hold off, so there was that. Were they dressed for the elements, these two? Did they have a space blanket? A tent? The means to make a fire?

Brice had just shaken his head. He had everything he needed for an emergency in his pack, but who knew what Syl was carrying? Or Mal. Mal should have known better, should have been prepared, but then he’d always been a free spirit — give him a minute and he’d tell you all about it — and whether he’d thought beyond a couple sandwiches and a bottle of water for a routine day hike, who could say? And then he was picturing them up there on the mountain in the fastness of the night, lost and cold and hungry, huddling together for warmth, maybe injured — maybe that was it, maybe Mal had broken a leg or knocked himself unconscious doing the butterfly face-first into a tree — and then he was staring down at the plate set on the bar before him, a sandwich there, untouched, and the drink beside that, bourbon and water, no ice. “I don’t blame you,” Beverly was saying, “because if I was in your place the last thing I’d be thinking about is food, but you’ve got to keep yourself up.”

She was perched on the stool beside him, the remains of a steak and salad scattered about the plate at her elbow, a drink in one hand. She’d gone to the ladies’ and cleaned herself up, the smear of mud gone now, her makeup freshened, her legs crossed at the knee. He saw Syl again, up there in the dark. Huddling. With Mal. And then he saw himself in bed with this woman, with Beverly, who’d confessed to him in a breathless voice that she’d signed up for the hike under false pretenses: “I’m really only fifty-three, and that’s the truth. But then you didn’t exactly I.D. me, did you?”

He kept telling himself that everything was going to turn out all right, that Mal and Syl must have missed the turnoff and taken the trail that led in the other direction altogether, eight miles down to Coy Flat, and that once it got dark they would have seen it was too late to retrace their steps — and he’d told the Search and Rescue man the same thing. They must have missed the fork, that’s all, but the man had just said, How old did you say they were?

What if she died? What if Syl died up there?

He tried to put the thought out of his head, tried to focus: here was the emergency he’d always thought he was prepared for, but when it came to it, he wasn’t prepared for anything. How could he be? How could anybody? The whole world was just chance and misstep, that was all. A bear wandered too far afield and wound up gutted and dead, you took the wrong turn and died of exposure on the flank of a mountain under a thin black sky that was no covering at all. The truth was, he hadn’t taken Syl away from Mal. Mal hadn’t wanted her. He’d gone to South America, to the Andes and Tierra del Fuego, to climb mountains and tramp the wide world, but he couldn’t wait for Syl to finish college and so he left her behind. And Brice had been there for her. Every Friday, no matter the weather or how beaten down he was from the shit job he’d taken out of college just to pay the bills, he drove the two hundred miles up the cleft of the San Joaquin Valley to take her to dinner or a movie or to cruise the student bars and then sit in the lounge of the dorm sucking at her tongue and feeling for her breasts till the lights flickered for curfew. Then they were together. Then they were married. And then, childless by design because children were an extravagance in a world already stressed to the limits, they devoted themselves to right living and ecology, to education and preservation. They grew old together. Older.

Beverly leaned into him, the toe of her hiking boot grazing his leg. He saw that she’d removed the knee socks so that her legs were bare, solid legs, smooth, descending to the sculpted hollows of her ankles. “So what do you want to do?” she asked, and they might have been on a date in some anonymous place, not a care in the world that wasn’t immediate and erotic. “You can’t sit up in your car all night long, you’re not going to do that, are you?”

He was. That was the least he could do. There was a sleeping bag in the trunk. He’d wrap himself in that.

“Because, well, you’re going to have to drive me back to get my car, and I’m perfectly willing to sit there with you for as long as you want and we can honk the horn every once in a while, to signal, but you should know I took a room here for the night, very reasonable actually, and you’re welcome — I mean, no strings attached — if you want to get some sleep, that is…”

In some way it was Syl’s own fault, trusting Mal like that, keeping up the chatter — the flirtation — till neither of them was paying the slightest bit of attention to the trail or where it went or what had happened to the rest of the group, which must have been around the next turn, sure it was, and why worry? It wouldn’t have fazed Mal. Or Syl. He would have liked a bed — and whatever else Beverly was offering — but he could already foresee exactly what was going to happen.

He was going to drive her to her car where it sat beneath the trees in the impenetrable dark and he was going to say no to her, but gently, and there’d be a kiss and maybe a bit more — he wasn’t dead yet — but then she’d get in her car and the brake lights would flash and she’d be gone, back to the lodge and the lights and the music. And he’d sit there wrapped up in the sleeping bag, stiff and miserable, till dawn broke and the Search and Rescue team hurried up the path he was too drained to negotiate and within the hour they’d be back, bearing Mal on a stretcher because Mal was too far gone with cold and disorientation to stand upright on his own. A few minutes — five, ten? — would elapse, each one thunderous, dropping down on him like a series of explosions. He’d be out of the car, moving toward the trailhead, and there she’d be, dehydrated maybe, suffering from exposure, but tall still, and erect, her head held high and her step firm, Syl, the old lady he was married to.

(2011)

Sic Transit

There was a foul odor coming from the house — the odor, as it turned out, of rotting flesh — but nobody did anything about it, at least not at first. I was away at the time, my business taking me to the East Coast for a series of fruitless meetings with a consortium of inadequate and unserious people whose names I forgot the minute I settled into the first-class cabin for the trip back home, and so I had the story from my wife’s walking partner, Mary Ellen Stovall, who makes her living in real estate. We’d always wondered about that house, which was something of an eyesore in the neighborhood — or would have been an eyesore, that is, if it was visible from the street. We went by the place nearly every day, my wife Chrissie and I, running errands or strolling down to the beach club or one of the shops and restaurants on the main road. The houses around it — tasteful, well-kept and very, very pricey — were what you’d expect from a California coastal community, in styles ranging from craftsman to Spanish mission to contemporary, most of them older homes that had been extensively remodeled, in some cases taken right down to the frame or even the original slab. But what this one looked like was anybody’s guess because the trees and shrubbery had long since gone wild so that all you saw was a curtain of green enclosing a gravel drive, in the center of which stood — or rather, listed — an ancient, rust-spattered Buick the size of our two Priuses combined.

As it happened, the man who lived there—had lived there — was a recluse in his early sixties whom no one, not even the next-door neighbors, could recall ever having seen. The properties on either side of him featured eight-foot walls topped with bougainvillea that twisted toward the sun in great puffed-up balls of leaf and thorn and flame-red flower, and as I say, his property had reverted to nature so that his flat acre on a bluff with ocean views might as well have been sectioned out of the Amazonian jungle for all anybody could see into — or out of — it. Isolation, that was what he had. Isolation so absolute it took that odor and a span of eight full days after he’d expired for the police and firemen, who’d arrived simultaneously in response to the neighbors’ complaints, to force open the door and find him sunk into his bed, his mouth thrown open and the mattress so stained with his fluids it had to be burned once the coroner and the forensics people had got done with him.

Why am I telling you all this? Because of what came next, of what I discovered both on my own and with Mary Ellen Stovall’s help, and because I’m in a period of my life — I just turned fifty — when I’ve begun to think less about the daily struggle and more of what awaits us all in the end. Here was an anonymous death, unattended, unmourned, and the thought of it, of this man, whoever he was, drawing his last breath in a run-down house on a very valuable piece of property not two blocks from where Chrissie and I had bought in at top dollar during the very crest of the boom, spoke to me in some deep way I couldn’t define. Had he suffered? Had he lain there for days, weeks, a month, too ill or derelict in his soul to call for help? Had he slowly starved? Mary Ellen — who was to get the listing once the surviving relative, a brother, equally bereft, in some godforsaken place like Nebraska or Oklahoma, had given her the go-ahead — claimed that the body had been practically engulfed in a litter of soda cans, half-filled containers of microwave noodles, and (this really got to me) blackened avocado skins from the tree out back.

According to the ten-line story that appeared in the local paper the day after I got back, the dead man had been identified as Carey Fortunoff, and he’d once been a member of an obscure rock band called Metalavox, after which he disappeared from public view, though he continued to write the occasional song for other bands and singers, a few of whom were named in the article, but they must have been equally obscure since neither Chrissie nor I had ever heard of them. Out of curiosity I googled the band and came up with a single paragraph that was virtually a duplicate of what the paper had run. There was a photo, in black and white, of the five band members in a typical pose of the era, which looked to be late seventies, early eighties, judging from their haircuts and regalia. They were in a cemetery, variously slouching against one tombstone or another, wearing mirror sunglasses and wasp-waisted jackets, their hair judiciously mussed. As to which one was Carey Fortunoff — the dead man — I couldn’t say, though for the two or three minutes I invested in staring at the photo I imagined he was the one standing — slouching — just slightly to the left of the four others and staring out away from the camera as if he had better things on his mind than posing for a cheesy promotional shot. And that was it. I clicked on something else, which led me to another thing altogether and before I knew it half an hour had vanished from my life. Then I went down to see what Chrissie wanted to do about dinner.

—

The next day was Sunday and I was up early, still running on East Coast time. I awakened in the dark and for a long while just lay there on my side watching the numbers mutate on the face of the ancient digital clock Chrissie’s mother had left behind when she’d died the previous year. I hadn’t wanted that clock — I always tried to sleep through the night and didn’t like knowing what time it was if I woke to use the bathroom, which was increasingly common now that I’d reached the age when the prostate seems programmed to enlarge — but, of course, out of sensitivity to Chrissie and her loss, I’d given in. “It reminds me of her,” Chrissie had claimed the day she’d cleared space on the bureau and knelt to plug the thing in. “I know it’s crazy,” she added, turning to give me a plaintive look, “but it’s like she’s right here watching over me.” Again, out of sensitivity, I didn’t point out to my wife that she couldn’t see the thing anyway since she wore a sleep mask to bed (along with a medieval-looking dental appliance designed to prevent her from snoring, which, occasionally, it did). At any rate, I watched the numbers reorganize themselves until the window took on a grayish glow that reminded me of the test pattern on the TV we’d had when I was a boy, then I pushed myself up, pulled on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals, and slipped out the door, thinking to walk down to the village for croissants and coffee.

It was utterly still, the new-made light just touching the tops of the trees in a glad, dependable way. There was no sound but for the distant hiss of the freeway, a kind of white noise we all get so used to we barely know it’s there. A crow started up somewhere and then the other birds chimed in, variously clucking and whistling, but hidden from view. I wasn’t thinking about Carey Fortunoff or anything else for that matter beyond maybe the way the smell of fresh coffee and croissants hot from the oven hit you when you stepped in the door of the bakery, but then I found myself passing by his house — or jungle, that is — and I couldn’t help stopping right there in the street to wonder all over again about the kind of person who could let his property deteriorate like that.

The car was still there, still listing, still enclosed in a shadowy pocket of vegetation. The bushes were woven as tight as thatch, the trees — eucalyptus, black acacia, oak and Catalina cherry — struggling above them. Looking closer, I could see the bright globes of oranges and — what was it, Meyer lemon? — choked in the gloom, and there, to the side of the car, a splash of pink begonias run wild. I glanced over my shoulder. Did I feel guilty? Ghoulish, even? Yes. But a moment later I was trespassing on a dead man’s property.

It was nothing to duck down the tunnel of the drive to where a crude path twisted through the undergrowth in the direction of what must have been the house itself. The shadows congealed. I felt a chill. People always describe the odor of dead things as being vaguely sweetish, but the smell here was more of the earth, the smell of compost or what’s left at the bottom of the trash can on a summer morning. I’d gone maybe a hundred feet before I spotted a window up ahead, the light puddled there, dense and gray, and then the front of the house emerged from the tangle like a stage prop, single story, flat roof, stucco in a shade of brown so dark it was almost black. Coffee grounds, that was what I thought of, a house the color of coffee grounds, and what was wrong with beige or white or even lime green for that matter? But now the path widened, branches broken off, bushes trampled, and it came to me that this was where the police had gone in to bundle up the corpse in some sort of plastic sheet or body bag, something impervious to leakage.

I could have stopped there. I suppose I should have. But I was curious — and I’d come this far, Chrissie asleep still, the croissants on the warming tray in the display case at the bakery and the coffee brewing, and, as I say, I felt some deeper compulsion, no man an island and all that — and without even thinking I went right up the front steps and tried the door. It was locked, as I’d expected it to be, though in this neighborhood we have an exceptionally low incidence of crime and people have grown pretty casual about security. Half the time — and I’m at fault here, I know it, because you’ve got to be prepared for the unexpected — Chrissie and I forget to set the house alarm when we turn in at night. Still, there I was on the front porch of Carey Fortunoff’s house and the door was locked — and whether he’d locked it himself before climbing into bed for the final time or the firemen had secured it after breaking in was something I didn’t want to think about. Next thing I knew, I was fighting my way through jasmine and oleander gone mad, clinging to the skin of the house and trying the windows successively till I reached the back and found the door there, a windowless slab of pine painted the same color as the house, only two shades lighter. I tried the knob. It turned in my hand till it clicked and the door eased open.

Inside, the smell was more intense, as you might expect, but it wasn’t overpowering — there was a chemical component to it, an astringency, and I realized that the firemen must have used some sort of dispersal agent to contain the odor. Everything was dim, the windows overgrown, the shades pulled, the shadows intact. Very gradually — and it was absolutely still in that room, which turned out to be the kitchen — my eyes began to adjust and I was surprised to see that things were orderly enough, no cascading bags of garbage, no blackened pans piled up in a grease-smeared sink, no avocado skins strewn across the floor. Orderly — and ordinary too. He had the same sort of things in his kitchen we did, dishwasher, Viking range, coffee maker, refrigerator.

For a long while I just stood there, ignoring the voice in my head that advised me to get out, screamed at me to get out while I could, because if anybody should catch me here the humiliation factor would be off the scale, Neighbor Caught Looting Dead Rocker’s House, but then, almost as if I were working from a script, I crossed the room and pulled open the refrigerator door. The light blinked on and I saw the usual stuff arrayed there — catsup, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, horseradish, chunky peanut butter, pickles, a six-pack of Hires root beer. Half a dozen eggs resided in the sculpted plastic container built into the door. There was butter in the butter compartment and in the rack on the door a carton of one percent milk, expired. Did I actually unscrew the lid of the pickle jar, pluck one out with thumb and forefinger and savor the cold crunch of it between my teeth? I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe I did.

Again, there was something operating in me here that I’m not proud of — that I wasn’t even in control of — and I’m telling you about it simply to get it down, get it straight, but really, what was the harm? I was curious, all right? Is curiosity a crime? And sympathetic too, don’t forget that. A thought flashed through my head — if those East Coast people could see me now they’d be the ones vetoing the arrangement and not me — but the thought crumpled like foil and in the next moment I was moving down the hall to the living room, or great room, as the realtors like to call it. Great or not, it was an expansive space with a raised ceiling that must have taken up a third of the square footage of the place and had once featured a view out to sea, where water and sky met in a shimmering translucent band that shrank and enlarged and changed color through all the phases of the day, the same view Chrissie and I enjoy, albeit more distantly, from our upstairs bedroom window. The shades hadn’t been drawn here, but there was nothing to see beyond the cascading leaves and the bare branchless knuckles of the shrubs pressed up against the glass.

There was a grand piano in one corner (Steinway, white) and across from it an electric version hooked up via a nest of wires to a pair of speakers that stood on either side of it. I had an impulse to lift the lid on the Steinway and try a key or two — and who in this world has ever entered a room with a piano and failed to go to it and tinkle out something, be it “Chopsticks” or the opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave”?—but I fought it down. The neighbors might have been behind an eight-foot wall but how could they fail to remark on the sound of a dead man playing the piano at six-thirty of a Sunday morning? No. No piano playing. Chrissie would be waking soon, the paper was still in the driveway and the croissants waiting. I had to go. Had to leave right this minute… but what was this on the walls, these rectangular forms giving back the soupy light? Photos. Framed photos.

A glance showed me I’d been wrong in identifying Carey Fortunoff as the brooder in the group photograph. Here was his face replicated in half a dozen discrete scenarios, with and without his bandmates; with a pair of rockers even I recognized, famous men; with a sweet-faced woman sporting teased blond hair and holding an infant daughter, her hair teased too — and I realized, by process of elimination, that he was the one in the original photo partially obscured by a tombstone and staring straight into the camera. Not as dynamic maybe as the one I’d mistaken him for or as good-looking either, but solid in his own way. I imagined him as the composer, the arranger, the mad genius behind the band, because didn’t every band, if it was to succeed at any level, require a mad genius?

I didn’t know. But suddenly I felt something, a presence, an aura, and I came back to myself. I needed to stop prying. I needed to leave. I needed croissants, coffee, my wife. And no, I had no interest in entering that bedroom down the hall or wherever it was. I turned to go, was actually on my way across the room and out the door, when my eye fell on the bookshelf, and if there’s an impulse every bit as compelling as to lift the lid on a piano and finger a few keys, it’s to inspect a bookcase, whether a friend’s or a stranger’s, just to get a sense of the titles some other person, someone other than you or your wife, would select and read. Without trying to sound overly dramatic, this was the moment where the fates intervened, because what drew my attention was a uniform set of leather-bound books, hand-numbered and dated. Journals. The journals of a third-tier musician who’d died alone in what sort of extremis I could only imagine — Carey Fortunoff’s journals. The one I picked at random was dated 1982, and I didn’t flip back the cover and leaf through it, because another impulse was at work in me, even stronger than the ones I’d already given way to.

I never hesitated. Ignoring the warning voices rattling round my head, I tucked the volume under my arm and slipped out the way I’d come.

—

I tried to be inconspicuous on the street, just another man — citizen, neighbor, innocent — heading down to the bakery in the early morning with a favorite book, but in any case there was no one around to doubt or question me. The walls stood tall and mute. A soft breeze swayed in the treetops. On the main road, the one that arcs gracefully through the lower village, a pair of cars, pinked by the early sun, rolled silently to a halt at the four-way stop sign, then rolled on. I bought the newspaper from one of the machines ranged like staring eyes outside the bakery, folded the book inside it, and went on up the steps and into the shop, where the smells were sweet and comforting.

Coffeed and croissanted, I took a table in back and made a show of studying the headlines before sliding the book out from between the Real Estate and Style sections. I won’t say my heart was hammering — it wasn’t — but I did feel the quickening pulse of an illicit thrill. I looked up. There were three other people in the place, aside from the girl behind the counter: two women and a man, each sitting separately, and each absorbed in laptop or phone. I didn’t recognize them — and if I didn’t recognize them, then they wouldn’t have recognized me. I opened the journal and spread it flat on the table.

The first page simply stated the date in bold black numerals three inches high. Beneath it was the leering cartoon figure of what I at first took to be a devil — horns, goatee, cloven hooves — and I was put off. Here was the same old pubescent trope: devils and grinning skulls, phallic snakes, witch women and graves, a kind of wet dream of death you saw in one form or another on every band poster of the era. But then I saw my mistake — the figure was actually meant to be that of a satyr, as indicated by the definition of satyriasis written out in block letters at the bottom of the page: Excessive or abnormal sexual craving in the male. Which was at least more interesting. I turned the page.

What followed, beginning with the first entry for January 1, the day after the band had performed for a New Year’s Eve party at a place called the Whisky, alternated between descriptions of random sexual encounters (groupies), drug use (cocaine, Percodan) and recording sessions for the group’s first album, which apparently was being released that May by Warner Brothers, one of the big companies of the time. It was the usual sort of thing, the rock and roll cliché interlarded with detailed descriptions of various sex acts and demeaning depictions of the females involved, forays into new pharmaceutical experiences, visits to the doctor for burns, contusions and sexually transmitted diseases, set lists, the names of cities, restaurants, venues. I have to admit I began to skip ahead. What was I looking for? Introspection. Connection. Some sort of insight into a life, this life, a life lived coevally with my own. And pain, of course — the sort of pain and hurt and trauma that defines and delimits any life on this earth.

I wasn’t disappointed. In May, once the band went on tour, the entries began to shrink away to virtually nothing, a single line, the name of a city (Cincinnati, encore “Hammerhead” & “Corti-Zone,” vomit on shoes, whose?), and then in June the pages went blank altogether. What happened — and this was revealed in the first long entry for July, the longest entry in the journal thus far — was that Carey Fortunoff, mad genius of Metalavox or no, had quit the band in mid-tour, kicking out the windshield of the van they were traveling in after a dispute with the drummer over credit for a song he (the drummer) claimed he’d co-written.

Carey was uncompromising. He had a temper. And no matter how his bandmates pleaded with him, or the drummer (Topper Hogg, another name to look up) prostrated himself, Carey walked away from the whole thing. Just crossed the road, stuck out his thumb and spent two deprived and miserable weeks flagging rides west, sleeping rough, haunting Dumpsters outside fast-food restaurants and listening to every sort of country western and pop atrocity his thumbed rides inflicted on him, till he finally made it back to L.A. And his wife. His wife, Pamela, mentioned now for the first time, as if she’d been supplied by a casting company, as if she’d carried no more weight in his life than one of the Cindys and Susies and Chantals he picked up after every gig, as he called it. (Lost 22 pounds by the time I got back to Pamela, my head splitting open like a big ripe cantaloupe. Why didn’t you call me? she said. And what’d I do? I just shrugged, because how you could you even begin to put it into words?)

Imagine my surprise. But then, of course, I didn’t have access to the earlier volumes, which for all I knew might have portrayed an awkward first meeting, a tender courtship and a marriage as deep and committed and sweetly strong as the one Chrissie and I have been able to make together. So give him credit. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me, for having entered his story at random, for hovering over it like some sort of vulture, for being a thief, an expropriator — and yet as I look back on it now, everything I did, even if it was questionable, even if it was ultimately futile, was for a reason. For the better, that is. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

The next surprise was his daughter. Two lines after he mentioned the wife, in trotted the daughter. A three-year-old. Terri. And whether she was a prodigy or autistic, tall or short or fat or thin, dark or blond (and here something clicked: the pouf-haired toddler in the photo?), I couldn’t have said, not yet, not without reading on. I looked up. My coffee cup was empty and the plate before me held nothing but crumbs, so I closed the book, slipped it back into the newspaper and went home to my wife.

—

That night I took Chrissie out to La Maison, the new restaurant in the village that was so popular you couldn’t get in the door unless you had connections, but, of course, I always had connections. I walked her the long way around, avoiding Carey Fortunoff’s street, making up some excuse about wanting to stop off at the ATM for cash, when, in fact, I had more than enough with me, not to mention half a dozen credit cards, all fully paid up. The maitre d’, who was fooling nobody with his simulated French accent, practically went down on his knees when we came through the door, and we were soon sitting at our favorite table on the patio, where we liked to watch the evening light mellow over the village and cling to the mountains beyond till everything was in shadow but for the highest peak. Our daughter, Patricia, was away for the summer on a fellowship in Florence, studying art restoration, and though we both missed her, it was nice to be free to come and go as we pleased, almost as if we were dating again. When the waiter poured out our first glass of wine, I took Chrissie’s hand and raised my glass to her.

We were on our second glass, Chrissie as ebullient as ever, her voice rising and falling like birdsong as she gossiped about this neighbor or that and filled me in on the details of Mary Ellen Stovall’s marital tribulations, when she suddenly glanced up and said, “Oh, you remember that house? The one on Runyon?”

“What house?” I said, though I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.

“The one where the guy died? The musician?”

This was my chance to come clean, to tell her about the leather-bound volume I’d secreted in the garage behind a shelf of old National Geographics, but I held back, and I still don’t know why. I shifted my eyes. Broke off a crust of bread and chased a dollop of tapenade across my plate.

“Mary Ellen says there’s no way they can ever get the smell out of the house — it’s like that boat in the harbor, remember, where the seal climbed up and then fell through the skylight into the galley and couldn’t get out?” She gestured with her glass. “And rotted there, for what, weeks, wasn’t it? Or months. Maybe it was months.”

“So what are they going to do?”

She shrugged, her bracelets faintly chiming as she worked her fork delicately in the flaking white flesh of the halibut Provençal, which was her favorite thing on the menu. Mine too, actually, as neither of us eats much meat anymore. “I don’t know — but it’s got to be a teardown, don’t you think?”

—

There had been problems with Carey Fortunoff’s marriage almost from the start. Pamela was one of the hangers-on, one of the original groupies, when the band had first formed and was still rehearsing in somebody’s mother’s garage. She was nineteen years old, shining like a rocket blazing across the sky (Carey’s words, not mine), and she had musical ambitions of her own. She played guitar. Wrote her own songs. She’d been performing in a local coffeehouse since she was fourteen (this was in Torrance, from what I could gather, the town where Carey had been raised by a single mother with a drinking problem), and for a while she’d sat in with the band during rehearsals and they’d even covered one or two of her songs. But then she got pregnant. And Topper Hogg joined the band and felt they should go in a different direction. So she stayed home. And Carey, a self-confessed sex addict, went on the road.

All this came out in the July entries, this and more — how she’d refused to have an abortion, how she swore she’d stick to him till the seas boiled and the flesh melted from her bones no matter what he threw at her, whether he gave her a dose of the clap (twice) or chlamydia (once) or whether he loved her or not. It came out because he was back with her now, living in a two-room apartment in Redondo Beach and trying both to shake off the uneasiness — fright — of having burned his bridges with Metalavox and forge on with new music for a solo album. He was feeling introspective. Or confused. Or both. At any rate, this was where the journal became something more than a compilation of trivia and deepened into something more — a life, that is. I was hooked. That night, after Chrissie had gone to bed, I went out to the garage and read it through to the end.

For the first few weeks, they went to the beach nearly every day — to “kick back,” as he put it. There was the sun, the sand, there were the surfboards he and Pamela paddled out on the ocean while whoever they could grab hold of watched the little girl so she didn’t drown herself, the days lazy and long and memorialized by the potent aroma of suntan oil and the hiss of cold beer in the can. But Carey wasn’t much of a surfer and the waves were all taken in any case (prioritized, that is, by a clique of locals who resented outsiders and one another too), and by August he and his family were headed north, for the Russian River, where they were going to stay for the remainder of the summer with another couple — friends from high school, from what I could gather. Jim and Francie. Jim was a writer, Francie taught school. And they’d rented a “funky” cabin in the redwoods just three blocks from the river and a place called Ginger’s Rancho, where local bands played six nights a week and on Mondays there were poetry readings.

It was an ongoing party, shared meals, a surfeit of beer and wine and drugs, swimming in the river, dancing in the club at night, yet what Pamela didn’t know — or Jim either — was that Carey was having sex with Francie every chance he could get. They’d make excuses, going out to the market while Jim was writing and Pamela babysitting, taking long walks, swimming, canoeing, berry picking, their eyes complicit and yet no one the wiser. Then came a sultry afternoon in mid-August when they all went down to Ginger’s in their shorts and swimsuits to sit in the bar there, at a table in the corner where the window was thrust open and they could gaze out on the river as it made its swift dense progress to the sea. Francie was wearing her two-piece — a leopard-skin pattern, gold and black like the sun spotting the floor of the jungle — and Carey, in a pair of cut-off jeans, leaned into the table to admire the pattern of moles in the cleft between her breasts. (Orion’s Belt, he liked to call it — privately, of course — and he was writing a song named after one of the three stars of the constellation, Alnilam, though how he expected to find a rhyme for it I couldn’t imagine.) Pamela was in a one-piece and a baggy T-shirt and was trying her best to keep the little girl — Terri — entertained. Jim was Jim, with hair that hung in his eyes, a chain-drinker and chain-smoker who seemed content to let the world roll on by.

An hour passed. They took turns buying rounds for the table. There was music on the jukebox and time slowed in the way it does when simply drawing breath is all that matters. Even Terri seemed content, sprawled on the floor and playing with her Barbies. Then, at a signal, Carey got up to go to the men’s room and a moment later Francie went to the ladies’, making sure the coast was clear before pulling him in with her and locking the door. It was risky, it was mad, but that made it all the more intensely erotic, a hurried bottomless grinding up against the sink while the jukebox thumped through the wall and the shouts of children at play in the shallows ricocheted eerily round them in that echoing space. Francie came back to the table first, after having hastily dabbed at herself with a wad of paper towels, and if her smooth tanned abdomen showed a trace of Carey’s fluids shining there, no one noticed. A moment later Carey sauntered across the room, four fresh gin and tonics cradled against his chest. “What took you so long?” Pamela wanted to know. He set down the drinks, one at a time, shrugged. “There was a line like you wouldn’t believe.”

And where was Terri? She was at the next table over, being entertained by an old woman in a bleached straw hat who must have been a retired elementary school teacher or a grandmother or something of the like because she took right to Terri as if she’d been waiting for her all her life. The two of them were playing word games, playing patty-cake, the woman had her on her lap. Pamela said it was cute. The drinks went down. The conversation jumped and sparked, longtime friends spinning out jokes and routines and gossiping about every soul they knew in common who didn’t happen to be sitting at the table in that moment. And then, at some point, Pamela glanced up and saw that the old woman in the straw hat was gone. Along with Terri. The little girl. Her daughter.

It took a minute for Carey to grasp the situation — and when he did, when he got up dazedly from his chair, the first stirrings of alarm beating in him, he went methodically through the place, jerking out chairs to look under the tables, going down on his hands and knees, startling people, Pamela right behind him and Jim and Francie right behind her. Then it was the restrooms, the kitchen, then out the door to where the river, cold and muscular, framed the shore. He saw a maze of bare limbs, people spread out on mats and blankets, huddled beneath beach umbrellas in bruised puddles of shade, radios going, kids shouting, dogs shaking themselves dry. But he didn’t see Terri. And now it began to build in him, the shock and fear and hate — hate of the old woman, of all these people, these oblivious people, and of Pamela too, for doing this to him, for giving him this daughter he loved in that moment more than anything in the world. He began shouting his daughter’s name, his voice high and tight, as if he were onstage howling into the microphone at the climax of one his concerts, and here were Pamela and Jim and Francie, their faces shrinking away from his like stones dropped down a well. “Terri!” he called. “Terri!”

But wasn’t that the old woman? Wasn’t that her, laid out on her back like a corpse, her flabby legs spread in a V and the straw hat pulled down over her face? He was on her in the next instant, snatching the hat away. “Where is she?” he demanded. “My daughter. What did you do with her?”

The old lady blinked under the harshness of the sun. It was hot. Mid-afternoon. She was glazed in sweat. “Who?”

“My daughter. Terri. The little girl you had in your lap. Terri!”

Something like recognition slid across the woman’s face, the faintest spark, and he realized she was drunk, no grandmother, no schoolteacher, just a drunken fat old slut he could have choked to death right there on the beach and nobody would have blamed him. And what did he get out of her? Blinking, holding up a hand to shield her eyes, her voice cracked and the fat of her arms shining like grease, she came up on one elbow and gave him a grimace. “I thought she was with you.”

He was making promises to himself as he ran up and down the beach, wading now, calling out his daughter’s name over and over — he’d been wrong, he’d sinned, he’d been selfish, stupid, stupid, stupid, and if they found her, if she was all right, saved, fine, whole, he would change his ways, he swore it. If only—

That was when Pamela let out a cry from the far end of the beach where the trail wound through a scrub of bushes and low trees and he ran toward the sound of it, people jerking their heads around, Jim just behind him and Francie too, the sand burning under his feet and the sun knifing at him. In the next moment, Pamela was stepping out of the shadows as if out of an old photograph, and he saw the smaller figure there beside her, Terri, in her pink playsuit and with her face clownishly smeared with the juice of the huckleberries she’d been picking all by herself.

—

What happened next? I didn’t know. Curiously, there were no entries after that, the year drawn down in a succession of blank white pages. It happened that I had to go back east again on business in any case (not with the first group — I had no patience with them — but for another investment opportunity, which ultimately turned a nice little profit for Chrissie and me), and when I got back I treated her to a week at a resort in Cabo we like to use as a getaway. Time passed. I forgot about the journal, forgot about Carey Fortunoff and his unplumbed life. And then one day Mary Ellen stopped by to pick up Chrissie for their afternoon walk just as I was coming in the door, and it all came back to me.

“So what’s new?” I asked. “Anything interesting out there?”

“Well, duh,” she said. “Haven’t you been reading the paper? Things are going through the roof — my last two listings sold the day they came on the market. For above asking.” She was wearing a yellow sun visor and a white cotton tennis dress. Her eyes jumped out at me as if they held more than they could contain. She wasn’t aggressive, or not exactly, but she never seemed far off message.

“What about that place on Runyon?” I asked. “That ever sell?”

“Why? You interested?” She was giving me a coy look, dropping one hand to tug at the hem of her skirt as if to draw my attention there. She had great legs, her best asset, tanned and honed by countless hours of tennis and power-walking. I realized I’d never seen her in a pair of pants, but then why would I? Her standard outfit was a skirt and heels and a blouse cut just low enough to keep the husbands interested while the wives paced off the living room to determine where the hutch was going to go.

She held the look just a beat too long. “Because Chrissie never said a word. But that’s a prime piece of property, two blocks closer to the beach than your place, and with better views — or potential views. I’ll tell you, that’s where I’d build my dream house if I had the wherewithal. Or the peace of mind.” This was a reference to the fact that her life was unsettled now that she’d separated from her husband and moved into a condo with views of nothing.

I shrugged. “Just curious.”

“I’ll show it to you if you want.” A door eased shut upstairs and here was Chrissie coming down the staircase in her walking shorts, her own legs long and bare and shining like tapered candles in the light from the open doorway. Mary Ellen shot me a look. “Tomorrow? Say, four?”

—

I went in the front door this time, Mary Ellen Stovall leading the way. The first room we entered, just off the hallway, was a den, wood-paneled, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled not with books but CDs, thousands of them, and on the bottom two shelves, running along all four walls, records — old-fashioned vinyl records in their original jackets. Mary Ellen flicked on an overhead light and the spines leapt out at me, dazzling slashes of color in every shade conceivable. There were speakers, an amp, turntable and CD player, and a single ergonomic chair covered in black velvet. This was his sanctum, I realized, the place where he came to listen.

“He had quite a collection,” Mary Ellen said, clicking across the parquet floor in her heels to pull out a CD at random. “‘Throbbing Gristle,’” she read, turning it over in her hand so that the cover flashed like a beacon. “Ever hear of them?”

“No,” I said.

“Not your kind of music, is it?”

“Not so much, no.”

“But listen, if you see anything you want, go ahead and take it, because aside from the piano, which I’ve got somebody coming in to pick up — and the appliances for the recycler — the rest is going to the dump. I mean, the brother doesn’t want it and since there’s no other heirs…” She gestured with the CD to complete the thought, then slid it back in its place on the shelf.

“I thought he had a daughter?”

“Not that I know of. But don’t you want to see the rest of the place? Just out of curiosity?” She paused, took a moment to cross one ankle in front of the other and tap her heel so that the sound, faint as it was, seemed to etch its way into the silence. “Of course, the house has got to go — that goes without saying. But it’s a steal, a real steal at the price. And you can’t beat the location.”

“Yes, definitely,” I said. “But give me a minute — you go on ahead.”

What I was thinking was that the 1982 volume of Carey Fortunoff’s journals didn’t have to go back at all and that if I wanted to I could just waltz out the door with any one I liked. Or better yet, now that I had a legitimate purpose in being here, I could come in at my leisure and read through them all. But then why would I want to? He was nothing to me. In fact — and here I bent to leaf through the records — I’d never even heard his music, not a note. The records, incidentally, were alphabetized, and I went through the M’s pretty thoroughly (Metallica, Montrose, Motörhead and the like), thinking to put the Metalavox album on the turntable, just for my own interest, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find, up above on a separate shelf, was a complete set of CDs labeled by year in magic marker, each one featuring multiple discs with the names of the compositions neatly written out, Carey Fortunoff’s music ordered in the way he’d ordered the events of his life in the journals. I even found one that was called Alnilam.

Mary Ellen tapped down the hall, stuck her head in the door. “Come on, I want to show you the grand room, because that’s where the views are going to be once we get rid of all the undergrowth — or overgrowth or whatever you want to call it — and isn’t that just the worst shame about this place, that he let it go like that?” She sighed, ran a hand through her hair. “But to each his own, huh?”

I followed her up the hallway, her hips swaying over the high heels, until she paused at a closed doorway. “You might want to hold your nose,” she whispered, as if Carey Fortunoff were still in there, still doing whatever he’d been doing before the breath went out of him. “The master bedroom,” she mouthed. “I’ve never even opened the door. Really, I think I’m afraid to.”

And then we were in the grand room, the light muted and leafy. Mary Ellen went to the window as if she could see out across the channel to the islands, the million-dollar view (or in this case, more likely three- or four-million-dollar view) she would earn her commission on. I stood in the doorway, gazing at the bookcase, where the gap for the 1982 volume stood out like a missing tooth. I tried to be casual, moving toward it as if I’d never seen it before, as if I were a potential buyer contemplating a move to a better location, as if I weren’t some sort of hyena sniffing out the death of a neighbor I never knew, but then time seemed to compress and two things happened that continue to trouble me to this day.

The first was my discovery, in the gap on the shelf where it must have slipped out of the volume I’d removed, of a newspaper clipping, yellowed with age and dated August 16, 1982. The headline read, “Toddler Drowns in Russian River,” and below it: “The body of Teresa Fortunoff, age 3, was found by sheriff’s deputies late yesterday afternoon. The current had apparently swept the girl nearly a mile downriver from where she was first reported missing. The cause of death was given as drowning. She is survived by her parents, Carey Fortunoff, former member of the rock group Metalavox, and Pamela Perry Fortunoff, both of Los Angeles.”

Before I could absorb the shock of it — Carey had lied to me, to himself, to posterity — the purposive clack of Mary Ellen’s heels made me turn my head and I had a second shock (or surprise, I suppose, would be a better word). She’d stripped off her blouse and dropped her skirt right there on the floor. I saw that she was wearing an elaborate set of undergarments, in black lace, with matching garters, an arrangement that had taken some forethought. “I’m so lonely since Todd left,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me. I felt the heat of her, smelled her perfume that rose and wafted and overwhelmed every other odor there was or ever had been. “Hold me,” she said, whispering still. And then, because I hadn’t reciprocated — or not yet — she added, “I won’t breathe a word.”

—

Carey Fortunoff’s last year wasn’t at all like what I’d imagined. He was in good health (but for a knee injury he’d sustained in a motorcycle accident twenty years back that left him with a slight limp), he was composing the score for a film being shot in Bulgaria and a record label was interested in bringing out an album that would collect the best of his songs, both the ones he’d written for himself and for other artists, including “Alnilam,” which had apparently been a top twenty hit for a band called Mucilage. He was sixty-two. Pamela was long gone. Francie too. But he had a new girlfriend he’d met online and he wrote passionately about her, in love — genuine love that went beyond the quick fix of sex, or at least that’s how I read it — for the first time in years. (Just to be with her is all the heaven I need, put on a record, an old movie, just sit there holding hands. All gravy.) If he had a problem it was with people, with society, with all the hurry and the wash of images, strange faces, the jabber of day-to-day life. Increasingly, he’d withdrawn into himself and his music, sleeping through the day and emerging only at night and only then to take care of the necessities, groceries and the like. Pickles. One percent milk. Root beer. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses to hide his face. He let the trees and shrubs go mad.

I really can’t say if it was the death of his daughter that broke him, but he marked the anniversary of the day in subsequent volumes and wrote what from its description seemed to be a symphony called “The Terri Variations,” though, as far as I know, no one ever heard it. Thirty years passed before he admitted the truth of what had happened that day on the Russian River — in the 2012 volume, which he had no idea of knowing would be his last. Or maybe he did. Maybe he had some intuition of what was coming, of the common cold his new girlfriend would give him on one of her conjugal visits, the cold he ignored till it turned to pneumonia and cost him his life in a dark neglected house.

There was no lifeguard on that beach. It wasn’t much of a beach even, just an irregular strip of sand spat up by the river during the winter rains, its configuration changing year to year so that one summer it would be a hundred yards across and the next fifty. Daytime temperatures reached into the nineties and sometimes higher, but the river remained cold, flowing swiftly, dark with its freight of sediment. Carey found the old woman and the old woman was drunk. She didn’t know what he was talking about. Little girl? She hadn’t seen any little girl. She cursed him and he cursed her back. Then he and Jim — the cuckold — chased up and down the shore, calling out till they had no breath left in them, while the women, Pamela and Francie, searched the parking lot and the street out front where the speed limit was posted at thirty-five but people tended to do fifty or more. Twenty minutes after Pamela first looked up and saw that their daughter was missing, they called the police.

What were they hoping? That Terri had been found wandering and been picked up by a good Samaritan, a real schoolteacher, an actual grandmother, someone with a stake in things, someone who cared, someone who would deliver her to the authorities — who was driving her to the police station even then. They didn’t want to think about abduction, didn’t want to think about the river. But they had to. And so Carey was up to his waist in the water, beating along the shore, ducking under obstructions, feeling with bare feet in the mud that blossomed in dark plumes to the surface and just as quickly dissolved in the current. He was wet through. Chilled. Exhausted. Even when the police and firemen arrived and they sent boats out onto the river with nets to drag and hooks to poke under obstructions, he kept at it, kept going through all the plummeting hours and all the horror and futility of it. And when they found her, still in her pink playsuit and with her limbs so white and bloodless they might have been bleached right on down to the bone, he pressed her to him though she was as cold as the river in its deepest and darkest hole.

—

Mary Ellen Stovall was right about the house. We didn’t bid on it, of course, Chrissie and I, because that was only the thought of the moment and we’re content where we are. In fact, I never even told Chrissie about the afternoon I’d gone over there and what had happened between her walking partner and me, which I’m not proud of, believe me, and when Mary Ellen stops by these days I always find that I seem to be busy elsewhere. I look at Chrissie and the way the light shines in her hair or how her smile opens up when I come in the door and I know that I love her and only her.

The bulldozers — there were two of them — came in and leveled everything on that lot, the car hauled off to the wrecking yard, the trees splintered, the walls of the house collapsing as if they’d been made of paperboard and all that was Carey Fortunoff’s life — his journals, his music, the things on the shelves and the room where they’d found him — lifted into an array of clanking trucks and carted off to the landfill so that only the bare scraped dirt remained. And the views, of course.

Why I kept that volume of his journal, the one I pulled off the shelf on a hushed Sunday morning nearly a year ago now, and why it’s still out there in the garage behind a barricade of National Geographics no one will ever look at again, I can’t really say. Call it a memento, call it testimony. After all, you might ask, who was he, Carey Fortunoff, and why should anyone care? The answer is simple: he was you, he was me, he was any of us, and his life was important, all-important, the only life anybody ever lived, and when his eyes closed for the final time, the last half-eaten carton of noodles slipping from his hand, we all disappeared, all of us, and every creature alive too, and the earth and the light of the sun and all the grace of our collective being. That was Carey Fortunoff. That was who he was.

(2012)

Burning Bright

Tara

She was born in captivity at an English zoo in 1978, one of a litter of three Bengal tiger cubs. Once she was weaned, she was tranquilized, lifted into a cage and flown across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean to Delhi, where she was put in the back of a pickup truck and driven north to the Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, not far from the Nepalese border. There she came under the care of Billy Arjan Singh, hunter turned conservationist, who’d had success in rewilding leopards and now wanted to try his hand with tigers — and not out of any sort of vanity, as with the maharajahs and nouveaux riches who bred tigers for their own sport, but as a practical measure to reinvigorate the gene pool and save the species from extinction. The sad truth was that there were more tigers in captivity than in the wild.

He gave Tara the run of his house and yard, which was hemmed in by the serried vegetation of the park surrounding it, and he took her for excursions into the jungle in order to acclimate her. The first time the superintendent saw her ambling along at Billy’s side, he called out, “Why, she’s just like a dog.” And Billy, grinning, ran a hand through the soft fur at her throat. “Yes,” he called back, “but she’s just a big kitty, aren’t you, darling?” and then he bent to her and let her lick the side of his face with the hot wet rasp of her tongue. At first he fed her slabs of meat hacked from donated carcasses, then progressed to living game — rats, geese, francolin, civets — working up the food chain till she was stalking and running down the swamp deer and sambar that would constitute her natural prey. When she came into maturity — into heat — she left him to mate with one of the males he’d heard coughing and roaring in the night, but she allowed him to follow her to her den beneath the trunk of a downed sal tree and examine her first litter, four cubs, all apparently healthy.

What the tiger felt can only be imagined, but certainly to be removed from an enclosure in a cold alien place and released into the wild where her ancestors had roamed free through all the millennia before roads and zoos and even humans existed, must have been gratifying in some deep atavistic way. Billy’s feelings are easier to divine. He felt proud, felt vindicated, and for all the naysayers who claimed that captive-bred animals could never be reintegrated into the wild, here was Tara — and her cubs — to prove them wrong. Unfortunately, two problems arose that Billy hadn’t foreseen. The first was that the zoo in England had kept inaccurate stud records — shoddy, that is — so that genetic testing of her siblings would eventually show that Tara was not in fact a pure-bred Bengal but rather a hybrid whose father was of a different subspecies altogether — a Siberian. Billy’s critics rose up in condemnation: he’d polluted the gene pool, whether intentionally or inadvertently, and there was no going back because the animals were at large and the damage was done.

Still, this was nothing compared with the second problem. Within six months of Tara’s release, a resident of one of the local villages — a young woman, mother of four — was killed and partially eaten by a tiger that emerged in daylight and stalked down the center of the main street as if it had no fear of people whatever.

Siobhan

Her mother was going to keep a tight leash on her — that’s what she’d said, what she’d been saying all week, as the house swelled with relatives, and the Fongs, Dylan’s family, kept coming and going and the presents mounted and the flowers filled every vase in the living room and the family room and spilled out onto the patio too. Siobhan was in the sixth grade and she didn’t need any sort of leash, tight or loose, because she was dutiful and good and did what she was told, or mostly anyway. It was her mother. Her mother was in a state, yelling into her cell phone at the caterers, the florist, even the Unitarian minister she’d picked out to perform the ceremony, and if anybody needed a leash it was her.

Siobhan tried not to let it bother her. What she focused on, dwelled on, called up as if in some secret fantasy of glamour and excitement no one could begin to enter but her, was the fact that in less than an hour she would be leading the bridesmaids down the aisle at her sister’s wedding, dressed in a mint-green taffeta gown she’d picked out herself. Plus, it was New Year’s Eve, there would be fireworks at the pier and her mother had promised her she could stay up till midnight. Even better — and this had been the subject of a stream of breathless texts to her friends in Mrs. Lindelof’s class for the past month — was where the wedding was being held. It wasn’t going to be in a church or some cheesy reception hall or somebody’s backyard, but in the outdoor pavilion at the San Francisco Zoo, where you’d be able to hear the animals cooing and trumpeting and roaring just as if you were in the jungle. It was the coolest thing she’d ever heard of.

The limo came, a white one, longer than two cars put together, and she and her mother and father and Aunt Katie had it all to themselves. There was a bar in it, with Coke and 7UP and liquor and little packages of pretzel sticks, M&M’s and macadamia nuts. “Don’t,” her mother warned, snatching at her hand as she reached for the M&M’s. “The last thing I need is to have you with chocolate smears all over your dress.”

The last thing. Everything was the last thing, everything she did. But her mother was distracted, holding three conversations at once, with Aunt Katie and her father on either side of her and with Megan on the cell because Megan was in the other limo with her bridesmaids, and before they’d gone two blocks Siobhan had managed to stuff three crinkling packages of M&M’s into her purse. Very carefully, watching for her moment, she snuck a handful of the candy-coated pellets into her mouth, the dark rich savor of the chocolate melting away on her tongue because she didn’t dare chew. Her mother’s eyes, framed in eyeliner like an actress’s, were huge, twice the size of normal, and they flared from one thing to another, out the window, to the back of the driver’s head, to Aunt Katie, her father, but not to her, not then, not while the chocolate lay secretly on her tongue and the excitement built in her like a beating drum.

“You damn well better,” her mother said into the phone and then ended the call. “I don’t know, Tom,” her mother said, her voice jerking at the words as if each one was attached to a string that went all the way down her throat. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Aunt Katie — young, blond, pretty, with a face just like Siobhan’s mother’s, only without all the lines — said, “It’s all right. Everything’s fine. Relax, Janie, just relax.”

Her father let out a curse. “Christ,” he said. “What is it now?”

“I just can’t get used to it.”

“What? Oh, shit, don’t tell me—”

“Dylan’s father, with those teeth. And the mother — she’s the nicest person, it’s not that, but she’s so pushy and now we have to sit around and eat, I don’t know, sea cucumber and squid at our own daughter’s reception—”

“Just say it — they’re Chinese, right? Well, I’ve got news for you — they’ve been Chinese since the kids started dating. Can’t you give it a rest? Or are you just going to go ahead and spoil it for everybody?”

“I know, I know: you’re right. But she’s so dark. And short. Even in heels. I mean, really, have you looked at her?”

“What are you talking about? Who?”

But her mother, her eyes bugging like those cue-ball eyes the boys always brought to class on the last day of school, just jerked her head to stare out the window, both her feet in their ivory patent-leather heels tapping so furiously it sounded as if the limo was falling apart.

Vijay

A week earlier, on Christmas Day, he’d awakened feeling rinsed out and headachy, just maybe half a beat away from getting up and being sick in the toilet. He’d made the rounds of the parties the night before with his older brother Vikram, who was twenty-one and already had his associate’s degree in pharmacology, and his best friend, Manny, who was his classmate at Lincoln High. There’d been pot and plenty of booze, tequila and vodka mostly. And beer, of course — beer was like water to him now. He could drink with the best of them — had been drinking since his sophomore year — and he didn’t get silly or weepy like some of the retards in his class and he didn’t let it affect his grades either. He’d applied to Berkeley, Davis and San Diego State as his first-choice schools and six backup schools too, and he intended to get into at least one of the top three and win a scholarship while he was at it. But right now everything was a little hazy and the smell of his mother’s cooking seeping in under the door didn’t make things any better.

Curry. The eternal curry. But then why should she cook anything special today, which meant nothing to them, after all. If Jesus had gone and gotten born on some day approximating this one two thousand years ago and then went on to get nailed to a cross, sacrificed like a lamb or some Hazuri goat, what did it matter? His parents were Sikhs, both of them born in Punjab, and he and Vikram were American, pure and simple, and all the hocus-pocus of priests and incense and kneeling and chanting that Manny’s family bought into as if it were the biggest thing in the world was beyond irrelevant. He knew firsthand. Because he’d gone to the big drafty church on Ashton Avenue for Manny’s confirmation when he was fourteen, and while the whole thing was interesting in a kind of anthropological way — Manny in a suit, Manny mumbling back at the priest, Spanish and Latin and English all leaching into one another, people dipping their fingers in a trough of water that was no different from what came out of the tap except that it had been blessed by the priest — it was the party afterward that had lit him up. There was a piñata. Tamales. And Manny’s father — because this was an initiation and they were grown up now — allowed them each a glass of thin red wine that tasted like the wax of the white candles blazing over the shrine in the living room.

The sheets felt stiff. And there was a smell, a vague nameless funk that seemed to rise around him every time he shifted position. Were they stained? Had he come home and masturbated last night? He couldn’t remember. He lay there a moment longer, then pushed himself up and went into the bathroom across the hall and drank down two glasses of water. Vikram’s door was closed. What time was it? It felt late, past breakfast anyway. He padded back into his bedroom and pulled his cell from the front pocket of his jeans and checked the time: 12:30. Then he thought of his mother downstairs cooking and his father, on this universal day off, sitting there in front of the TV, watching soccer on the Spanish-language channel, though he didn’t understand a word of the language—What do I care, Vijay? I see the ball, I see the referee, I see the ball go into the net—and then, on an impulse, he hit Manny’s number.

“Hey,” he said, when Manny answered.

“Hey.”

“How you feeling?”

“I don’t know. Hungover. How about you?”

He shrugged, no big deal, though Manny wasn’t there to see it. “Maybe a little. But I just got to get out of here today, what with my dad watching soccer and moms doing whatever, cooking, the crossword puzzles, I don’t know. I was thinking — you cool with it, you done with the family stuff?”

“I don’t know, sure. What do you got in mind?”

“There’s nobody going to be at the zoo today, it’ll be like deserted, so I thought, once I tear Vik away from his sexy dreams, maybe we just go over there and hang out, you know?”

No response. But he could hear Manny breathing on the other side.

“We can like grab a burger on the way. And Vik still has that Stoli from last night — so even if the stores are closed… And weed — weed, of course. What do you say?”

Tatiana

She was a Siberian, four and a half years old, with the wide head, heavy frame and pale fur that distinguished her subspecies of Panthera tigris. Like Tara, she’d been born in captivity — at the Denver Zoo — and then transferred to San Francisco for breeding purposes two years earlier. That first day, when she came out of sedation, she found herself in the cage she’d been forced into just before dawn in the thin dry air of the Rocky Mountains, the only air she’d ever known, but there was something different about the cage now and it took her a moment to apprehend it: the front panel stood open. The smell must have come to her then, dank and lingering, the reek of the sea that was less than a quarter mile away, and then all the other smells she would have recognized from that morning and the morning before and all the mornings of her life, animal smells, the scent of urine and feces and the riveting anal discharge big cats use to mark their territory.

She didn’t emerge right away, not that first day. She seemed to prefer the cage, with its impermeable top and the fading odors of her home, safe there from whatever loomed over her, above the high concrete walls of the outdoor enclosure in which the cage had been placed. Sounds came to her: the harsh broken cries of parrots and macaws, the noise of traffic out on the street and the engines of planes that were like insects droning across the sky, the trumpeting of an elephant, a snarl, a roar, and over it all the screeching of monkeys, monkeys and apes.

Vijay

He hadn’t confessed it to anyone, not even his brother, because he wasn’t a dork and didn’t want to be taken for one, like all the other Indians and Chinese he’d been lumped together with in school since kindergarten, but his secret love, his true love, wasn’t for the engineering degree his parents kept pushing him toward, but for animals. He wanted to be a zoologist — or better yet, a field biologist, studying animals in a state of nature, just like on the TV shows. Both Vik and Manny would say things like, Why the zoo all the time, man, what’s the deal? You in love with a gorilla, or what? And he would shrug and say, I don’t know, you got a better suggestion? And they didn’t. Because the zoo was five blocks from the house and he and Vik had been going there since they were kids, just to get out from under the critical eye of their mother, who would have objected if they were going to just hang out on the street like hooligans (Hooligans and I don’t know, gangbangers, isn’t that what they call them?) but found the idea of the zoo vaguely educational. It was a place where they weren’t going to get in trouble anyway — or that was the way she saw it.

By the time they got to the burger place on Sloat across from the zoo, it was already three in the afternoon and it just seemed natural to doctor their Cokes with a hit or two from the bottle, especially since it was a holiday and it was a hair-of-the-dog kind of thing, though Manny said it was disgusting to waste good vodka like that so he ordered an orange drink to go with his. It was a gray day, heavy with mist rolling in off the ocean. The burger place was deserted, the streets were empty. Christmas. They stared out the window on nothing, chewing.

“What time you got to be home?” he asked Manny. “It’s like a special dinner today, right? With like your aunts and uncles and all that?”

Manny ducked his head, took a pull of his orange and vodka. He was in his board shorts and a black hoodie and he was wearing a brand-new Warriors cap, a Christmas present from his sister. “I don’t know,” he said. “Six, six-thirty. And yeah, I got to be there.”

Vik hadn’t said much to this point, his eyes raw and red, his cheeks puffed out as if the burger was repeating on him. “Hey, if we’re going to go,” he said now, “we ought to go because we can’t smoke here and I think I’ve had about enough of sitting and staring out the window on nothing — anybody comes by and sees us here they’re going to think we’re losers, right? Primo losers.”

So they got up and shuffled out the door, Vijay secretly pleased it was his brother who’d got them motivated instead of him because he wouldn’t want to seem too eager, but the fact was the zoo would be closing at dusk and they didn’t really have all that much time. Out on the sidewalk, Vik lit a joint and they passed it hand to hand as they crossed the street to the zoo’s entrance. “So Christmas,” Vik was saying to Manny. “Do you have a tree and all that?”

Manny had his head down as if he had to watch his feet to be sure where they were going. He seemed rocked already. “Yeah,” he murmured.

“That cool?”

“Yeah. We put lights on it, ornaments, colored balls.”

“Spangles? Those silver things, I mean?”

“Tinsel, yeah.”

They were almost at the ticket kiosk now, Vijay digging into his wallet for the family pass their mother renewed each year. All he had to do was flash it at whoever was behind the window, usually a bony red-haired girl with no tits and an onyx stud like a mole under her lip, and she just waved them in — Manny, with his dark skin and black buzz cut, passing for just another brother in the Singh family.

Vik said, “That’s a German thing, you know.”

“What, tinsel?”

“The tree. ‘O Tannenbaum.’ Didn’t you guys have to sing that in elementary school?” Then he was laughing, one of those warm-up laughs that promised more but really wasn’t out of control yet. “I mean, it’s not Mexican or even American, but German. Can you picture it, all those Nazis handing out these scrawny little trees to cheer up the Jews at what, Auschwitz?”

They were there now, at the window, and Vijay was flashing the family membership card, and though the girl wasn’t there—Christmas—but some fat old man instead, it wasn’t a problem. He barely glanced up from his iPhone, the old man — fat, fat as a Butterball turkey stuffed with sausage and chestnuts and cranberries and whatever — fixing them for half a second with his beady brown dog’s eyes, and then he waved them in.

Siobhan

Of course, the wedding didn’t start right away (and the groom couldn’t see the bride because that was bad luck), so she had to go into this little back room that looked like somebody’s office with her sister and her friends, everybody putting on makeup and texting like mad and passing around a silver flask with Sambuca in it. Nobody offered her any, which she wouldn’t have taken anyway, even out of curiosity, because liquor was for adults and she wasn’t an adult and was in no particular hurry to be one. She did have a Red Bull though, and it made her feel as if she were in the final lap of a race at school and beating everybody by a mile.

Then her mother came for them and they were outside in the damp air, the fog misting around them and the smell of the animals sharp in her nostrils. There was a hooting in the distance, one of the monkeys, the ones with voices like fire alarms. It just kept going, this monkey, and when you thought it was going to stop, when it slowed down and the hoots were softer and spaced further apart, it was only gathering breath for the next blast. That was the thing about having the wedding at the zoo — it was weird, but in a good way, because you never knew what was going to happen. Unlike in a church. Here was this thing out of a jungle someplace that didn’t care in the slightest about weddings and caterers and the volume of the string quartet her mother had hired to play the wedding march as they came down the walk and under the roof of the open-air pavilion.

She was watching her feet, afraid to trip or stumble or do something wrong, all the adults standing now and looking back over their shoulders to get a glimpse of the bride, while the string quartet strained to drown out the monkey. All the men were in tuxedos. Some of the women wore hats. There were flowers everywhere. And then, just as she got to where the minister was waiting along with Dylan and the best man, she saw Dylan’s little brother Jason, who was thirteen and a secret smoker of clove cigarettes, Jason, dressed in a suit and tie and giving her his starving zombie look to make her laugh. But she didn’t laugh, though the Red Bull was pulsing through her. She just swept up the aisle the way she’d practiced it at the rehearsal, smiling at everybody as if she were the one getting married — and maybe someday she would be.

Afterward, when people were standing in line for food and drinks and the DJ was setting up his equipment, Jason came up to her with a plate of pot stickers and offered her one. “Did you hear that monkey?” he said. “I thought he was going to bust a gut.”

She hadn’t noticed till that moment that the sound was gone, long gone, replaced now by the prandial buzz of the adults poised over their plates and wine glasses. “It was so funny,” she said, using her fingers to pluck a pot sticker from the edge of the plate.

“If any monkey knows any reason why these two should not be joined together, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”

She laughed at the very moment she bit into the pot sticker, which caused a dribble of grease to run down the front of her dress. She glanced up guiltily to see if her mother was watching, but her mother was on the far side of the pavilion with Aunt Katie, waving a glass of yellowish wine as if it were a baton.

“Hey,” Jason said, his smile narrowing till it was gone, “you want to see something?”

“What?”

He shot his eyes at the adults bent over their canapés and drinks, then came back to her. He lifted his chin to point behind her, down the steps of the pavilion where the walk wound its way into the depths of the zoo. “Out there, I mean?”

She didn’t know what to say. The zoo was closed, yellow crime-scene tape—Do Not Cross—stretched across the path, and her mother had strictly forbidden her even to think for a single second about leaving the pavilion. And her mother meant it. The whole last week she’d been in a fury, constantly on the phone with her lawyer and the zoo people and the mayor’s office and anybody else she could harangue because they were threatening to cancel the permit for the wedding. Because of what had happened on Christmas. The accident. The attack. It was on the news, on Facebook, Twitter, everywhere — the police were investigating and the zoo was closed until further notice. But her mother had prevailed. Her mother had connections. Her mother always got what she wanted — and they’d reserved the pavilion a whole year in advance, because Megan and Dylan had met here at the zoo as interns on summer vacation from college and it was the only place in the world they would even consider exchanging vows. They’d hired the caterers, the DJ, sent out invitations. There was only one answer her mother would accept. Megan and Dylan got their pavilion, but the rest of the zoo was off-limits. To everybody. Period.

She just looked at him. He knew the situation as well as she did.

“I found something,” he said. “On the walk there? It’s like two hundred feet away.”

“What?” she said.

“Blood.”

Tara

Typically, there had been one or two tiger attacks in the reserve each year, usually during the monsoon season when people went into the park to collect grasses for their animals. Over the years, going all the way back to the last century, long before the park existed — and long before that too, as long as people and wild animals had been thrust together in the same dwindling patchwork of bush and farmer’s fields — the region had had its share of man-eaters, but these had been hunted down and eliminated. Now, after the second and third victims were found lying in a tangle of disarticulated limbs along a path that lay just a mile from the site of the first attack, Billy Arjan Singh began to have second thoughts. Publicly he continued to maintain that the attacks could have come from any of the park’s tigers, especially those that had been injured or were too old and feeble to hunt their customary prey — and Tara, demonstrably, was as young and vigorous as any animal out there — but privately he began to admit the possibility that his experiment had gone terribly wrong.

There came a respite. Several months went by without report of any new victims, though one man — a woodcutter — went missing and was never heard from again. Billy dismissed the rumor. People went missing all the time — they ran off, changed their names, hitchhiked to Delhi, flew to America, died of a pain up under the ribcage and lay face-down in some secret place till the jackals, carrion birds and worms had done with them. All was quiet. He began the process of obtaining permits to bring another animal into the country, this one from the zoo at Frankfurt.

Then it all went to hell. A woman — a grandmother barely five feet tall — was snatched while hanging laundry out to dry and half the village witnessed it — and before the week was out, a bicyclist was taken. In rapid succession, all along the perimeter of the park, six more people were killed, always in daylight and always by a tiger that seemed to come out of nowhere. Outrage mounted. The newspapers were savage. Finally, Billy gave in to the pressure and mounted a hunt to put an end to the killings — and, he hoped, prove that it was some other animal and not Tara that was responsible.

In all, before the tiger—a tiger — was shot, twenty-four people lost their lives. Billy was there for the kill, along with two of the park’s rangers, though when the tiger came to the bait — a goat bleating out its discomfort where it had wound itself around the stake to which it was tethered — his hand fluttered on the trigger. They followed the blood spoor to a copse and stood at a safe distance as the tiger’s anguished breathing subsided, then Billy moved in alone to deliver the coup de grace. The animal proved to be young — and female — but it had no distinguishing marks and to the last Billy insisted it wasn’t Tara. Whether it was or not, no one will ever know, because he chose to bury the carcass there deep in the jungle, where the mad growth of vegetation would obliterate the evidence in a week’s time. In any case, the attacks ceased and life in the villages went back to normal.

Vijay

He always had specific things he wanted to see — the African savanna, where zebra, kudu, ostrich and giraffe wandered back and forth as if there were no walls or fences and you could watch them grazing, watch them pissing and shitting and sometimes frisking around, and the koalas, he loved the koalas, and the bears and the chimps, the little things that were different about them each time he visited — but Vik and Manny didn’t care about any of that. For them the zoo was just a place where they could watch girls, get stoned and kick back without anybody coming down on them. He didn’t mind. He felt that way himself sometimes — today, for instance. Today especially. It was Christmas. They were out of school. He’d worked hard all term and now it was time to let loose.

They barely glanced at the savanna but went on into the primate center as if they’d agreed on it beforehand. There was hardly anybody around. The chimps looked raggedy, the gorillas were asleep. Vik wrinkled up his nose. “Man, it stinks in here. Don’t these things ever take a bath?”

“Or use underarm deodorant,” Manny put in. “They could at least use deodorant, couldn’t they? I mean, for our sake?” And then he was lifting his voice till he was shouting: “Hey, all you monkeys — yeah, I’m talking to you! You got no consideration, you know that?”

And this was funny, flat-out hilarious, because they were all feeling the effects of the weed and weed made everything hilarious. He laughed till he began to feel oxygen deprivation, Vik’s face red and Manny’s too.

“Remember the time,” he was saying, trying to catch his breath, “like maybe two years ago or something, when we were here and those dudes were painting the cage?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Manny gasped, and they were all laughing again at the thought of it, the day they’d come into the ape house and there were two workers inside one of the empty cages, painting the back wall, and they’d all crowded up to the bars making jokes about the new species of ape on exhibit and how clever it was—Look, it’s Bigfoot, and look, look, it can dip a paintbrush, cooooool—until one of the workers turned around and told them to go fuck themselves.

Was it really all that funny? Yes. Yes it was. Because it was a routine now and they could call it up anytime they wanted, the three of them united and the rest of the world excluded.

So they laughed, drifting from one exhibit to another, not really paying attention, and if there were any girls to look at they were few and far between. Because it was a holiday. Because it was Christmas. At some point they were out front of the snack bar — the Leaping Lemur Café, another joke — and Manny said he wanted a fresh orange drink to make the vodka go down and maybe some nachos. “Anybody want nachos?”

Vijay got himself a Coke because his throat was dry and watched the kid behind the counter pour a glob of neon-orange cheese over Manny’s nachos while the only other people there — a mother with a baby in a stroller and an older couple gobbling hot dogs — looked on as if the whole world had come to a stop. The kid behind the counter had the name of some pathetic metal band tattooed across his knuckles—Slayer—but since there were six letters and only five knuckles, the er had been squeezed in on the last knuckle, which was the smallest one, and what did that say about planning and foresight? Not to mention basic IQ? After that, they drifted over to the big cats, hoping to see them up and about, if only for the sake of breaking the tedium, but the lions — a male and two females — were lying there unconscious. “Shit, look at them,” Vik said. “They might as well be rugs.”

“Zoned out,” Manny said. And then he got up on the metal rail where you’re not supposed to be and started waving his arms and shouting—“Hey, lions, hey! Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!”

Vik joined in and this was funny too, the two of them goofing, the lions stretched out as if they were dead, the sky closing in and everything as dim and gray and depressing as only a winter’s afternoon in San Francisco could be. They began to roar then, roar like lions, and he joined in just for the sheer crazy throat-rattling rush of it, but still the lions never moved, not even to twitch their tails. They all three roared till they were almost out of breath and then they broke down and laughed till they were.

Finally Vik straightened up and said, “I don’t know — this is boring. I’m ready to bag it, how about you?”

Manny shrugged.

And then, surprising himself because it really didn’t matter one way or the other and they were going to have to go home eventually, everybody knew that, he said, “What about the tiger?”

Siobhan

Her mother wasn’t watching, her mother was busy air-kissing everybody and waving her wine glass, and once the music got going people started dancing, which provided a natural screen. She ducked away under the cover of swaying gowns and tuxedoed shoulders and met Jason in the bushes just off the path, where nobody could see them. “Come on,” he whispered, taking her by the hand, “it’s this way.”

She could feel her heart going. Her mother would kill her if she found out. Absolutely kill her. Plus this was Jason, a boy two years older, and he was holding her hand. He led her through a fringe of low palms and then back onto the walk where it looped away out of sight of the pavilion. It was dusk now and the bushes seemed denser, dangerous suddenly, as if anything could have gotten loose and hidden itself there in the shadows, waiting to spring out at them. The birds were chattering, the ones in the trees and the ones in the cages somewhere up ahead. Suddenly Jason let go of her hand and darted up the path, his dress shoes slapping at the pavement. She hurried on, nearly frantic with excitement, the smells coming to her now, the sounds of furtive movement, the low coughs and snorts and muffled roars. But there he was, just ahead, down on his knees and gesturing to her, the soles of his shoes palely glowing and his suit jacket bunched at the shoulders. “Over here,” he said, trying to keep his voice down. “Hurry!”

When she came up to him she saw that he was bent over a dark uneven stain on the concrete, a spot no bigger around than one of the desktops in school. “See it?” he whispered.

She looked down, leaned closer, then straightened up, hands on hips. “That’s just a wet spot.”

“Yeah?” he said. “And why do you think it’s wet? And it’s not just water, believe me”—and here he pressed his palm to the stain and then spread open his hand for her. “See that? See it? That’s blood.”

She saw nothing. Just his five fingers, the ones he’d wrapped around hers a minute ago, and his palm, which might have been slightly darker — or damper. “That’s not blood,” she said.

“Is so.” He gave her a strained look, his features melting into shadow. The sound of the music from the pavilion suddenly came clear, drowning out the birds and whatever else was out there. He held her eyes and wiped his hands on his pants. “Diluted blood anyway.”

Vijay

If the lions were comatose at this point, the tiger gave them what they wanted. The minute they appeared there at the edge of its enclosure — an open pit with a dry moat at the bottom of the wall and some fake rocks and a raked-over tree stump in the background — it looked up at them and started pacing. Or more than pacing — it was slinking, flowing like water from one place to another, its feet almost a blur and the muscles flexing hard in its shoulders. They all just stood there for a moment, watching it. He could feel the weed blurring things and the vodka trying to counteract it, burning through him. He felt rocked, dizzy almost, as if everything were floating a couple of inches off the ground. Vik said, “Now that’s what they’re supposed to do — give us some action. I mean, we’re paying customers, right? Or at least moms is.”

And then, without warning, Vik jumped atop the restraining bar and began roaring down at the tiger. The effect was immediate: the tiger froze, staring up at him in confusion. Vik roared, flapped his arms. The tiger seemed to cringe, then its hackles rose and all of a sudden it was flowing faster, around and around, down into the moat below them and then back up and around again. Next thing Manny climbed up and they were both roaring and Manny started sailing nachos out into the void, one after the other, the tiger shrinking away from them as if they were on fire. “Ka-boom!” Manny shouted. “Ka-boom!”

They laughed. They were excited. And though Vijay knew it was wrong, knew they could get in trouble, knew the animals shouldn’t be disturbed, let alone harassed, and that every sign warned against it, he found himself scrabbling around for something to throw — a pine cone, here was a pine cone in the dirt and he was snatching it up and rushing back to take aim. Why? He couldn’t have said, then or afterward. It was something primal, that was all. They had this thing on the run, this big jungle cat that was as scared as the fluffed-up little Pomeranian in the apartment next door, and when the first pine cone went skittering across the concrete floor of the enclosure he took off running for another one, for a stick, for anything.

That was when he heard the sound Manny made — it wasn’t a scream but something hoarser, deeper, worse — and he turned round to see the tiger’s head burst up right there at the lip of the enclosure and the tiger’s claws digging in, the big paws and clenched forearms clinging impossibly to the molded concrete for the smallest fraction of an instant before the striped flanks came surging into the picture and it was there like some CGI demon, grabbing hold of Manny and taking him down on the pavement in a quick thrash of limbs and a noise that was like a generator cranking up again and again. Vik’s face. Manny down. The noise. And then the cat was on Vik and Vik was screaming and before he could think the thing was on him, tearing at the back of his neck and dropping him to the pavement as if he’d been sledge-hammered. He was trying to ball up and protect his head, the smell of blood and rot and the froth of saliva hot in his face, thinking nothing, thinking death, his shoulders and forearms raked and bitten and his feet a thousand miles away, when the tiger suddenly let go of him.

Tatiana

In the wild, a Siberian of Tatiana’s age might have a range as extensive as sixty square miles, but she’d never been in the wild, had never known anyplace but this and the zoo in Denver, and her territory was measured in square feet, not miles. Industry standards vary on the minimum size of big cat exhibits, but restraining walls are mandated at sixteen and a half feet, a height no tiger, no matter the provocation or duress, could ever hope to surmount. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the incident at the San Francisco Zoo, the wall was found to be substandard, measuring just twelve and a half feet from the floor of the moat to its highest point.

Siobhan

She managed to make it back without her mother catching her — and what her mother didn’t know would never hurt her, would it? That’s what Jason said anyway, and, giggling, she agreed with him as he led her to the bar through the dense swaying forest of adults, who were dancing now, their arms in motion and heads bobbing to the beat. The DJ was playing Beyoncé, Fergie, Adele, Megan’s favorites. Megan was dancing with Dylan and the bridesmaids all had their boyfriends out on the dance floor now too. The bass was so strong it was like an earthquake and she could feel it thrumming through the soles of her shoes. People made way for them at the bar as if they were celebrities — and they were, or she was anyway, flower girl, sister of the bride — and she asked for a Diet Coke, no ice, and Jason got a club soda and cranberry with two cherries and a shot of grenadine, then they lined up at the food table for dim sum and ribs and still her mother never came looking for her.

Jason piled up his plate and then set it back down again on the table. “Oh, shit,” he said, “I better go wash my hands. Watch my plate?”

“Jason, it wasn’t blood.”

He gave her a look of disbelief. He was tall for his age and his head seemed to bob up over his neck like E.T.’s, and she wondered about that, if she could give him a secret moniker — just two initials — when she texted Tiffany and Margaret to tell them she was hanging out with a boy at the wedding. She liked the way his hair was clipped in two perfect arches around his ears. She liked the way he was grinning at her now. “I wouldn’t want to catch AIDS,” he said, holding out his palms as if to deny it.

And then he was gone and she started eating by herself at a table in the far corner of the pavilion, but when he came back, conspicuously wiping his hands on the legs of his suit pants, he picked up his plate and came right to her. They didn’t say anything for a long while, eating in silence and staring out at the adults as if they were going to have to take a quiz on the party. She heard her mother’s high whinnying laugh and the next minute her father was leading her mother out onto the dance floor and she watched them settle into some weird gyrating sort of dance they must have learned in college back in the seventies. “You know what?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents dance before.”

“My parents would never dance,” Jason said. She followed his eyes to where they sat stiffly in two chairs pushed up against the rail, Jason’s grandmother just to the right of them and just as stiff. “Even if somebody picked up an AK and said ‘Dance or die!’”

“What about you?” she asked and she felt her cheeks color. “I mean, do you dance?”

“Me?” He held the moment, straight-faced, before he broke into a grin. “I’m the number one best dancer in the world,” he said, letting his eyes flick over the dance floor before turning back to her. “Now that Michael Jackson’s dead.”

Vijay

What he did, and it was nothing anybody in any movie he’d ever seen would have done, was run. As soon as the tiger let go of him — to slam back into Manny so hard it was like a rocket flashing across the pavement — he scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could through the gloom of the day that was closing down around him, looking frantically for a way out, a tree to climb, anything, before he realized he was making for the snack bar, where there were people, where they could call 911, call the cops, call an ambulance. He didn’t think of Vik till Vik came pounding up behind him, blood all over, his clothes in strips and his eyes rolled back in his head. They didn’t say anything, not a word, just ran. It was maybe three hundred yards to the snack bar, three football fields, but it seemed to take forever to get there, as if they were running in place in some waking nightmare — and that was what this was, exactly what it was.

But when they got there, frantic, the doors were locked and they could see the guy inside, the metal head, the moron, and he wasn’t moving toward them—he was backing away! Vik was beating on the glass, they both were, shouting for help, shouting to open up because there was an animal loose, a tiger loose, open up, open up!

The kid didn’t open up. He just backed into a corner and tried to stare them down, but he had his cell in his hand and he was punching in a number (as it later turned out he was dialing 911, not because he believed them but because he thought they were on drugs and trying to rob the place). They kept beating on the glass and they would have broken right through it if they could, beating with the palms of their hands and shouting out for help, until they watched the kid’s face go slack and turned to see the tiger coming right at them, its feet churning and its head down — following the blood trail, following the spoor. Vijay felt it like a hot wind as it blew past him to careen into Vik, its paws raking and batting, and though he flattened himself against the glass, shouting “Vik! Vik!” there was nothing he could do but wait to die as the flashing teeth and furious claws worked his brother over.

Tatiana

This world. This world of apes, this screeching world. She was out in it, terrified, enraged, doing the only thing she knew to do, one down and dead and another beneath her, all the power of all the generations invested in her and burning bright. She roared. She showed her fangs. And she would have gone for the other one, the one frozen there by the shimmering wall, if it weren’t for the distraction of this solid rolling thing with its flashing lights and screaming siren and the hot quick shock of surprise that ended her life.

Siobhan

She danced till she was soaked through — and he was right, Jason, he was the best dancer in the world. The music seeped through her skin and into her blood. Her father danced with her, then she danced with her sister and everybody was taking pictures with their cell phones. And then there was a slow song and Jason put an arm around her waist and she watched what everybody else was doing, all the adults, and rested her head on his shoulder, on his chest, right where she could feel the flutter of his heart. She couldn’t hear any of the animals anymore, couldn’t have heard them even if they’d been roaring, because the music was everything. The night settled in. Jason rocked with her. And if she knew where she was at all, it was because of the smell, the furtive lingering odor of all those animals locked in their cages.

(2012)

The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award

If you’d happened to spot Riley on the train that afternoon, your eyes drifting up momentarily from your BlackBerry, iPod or other hand-held device, you probably wouldn’t have made much of him. He was in his fifties then, taller than average, thinner than average, with a tendency to hunch inside the black leather coat he affected (knee-length, of a style thirty years out of date, replete with once-shining buckles, zippers and studs in the shape of miniature starbursts) and hair that would have been gray or even white but for the providence of the Clairol Corporation. He’d applied a mixture called “Châtain Moyen” in the shower just that morning, expecting, as the label promised, medium brown, but getting instead something between the color of a new penny and a jar of marinara sauce. In any case, he was oblivious. He had his head down, studying the stained typescript of his generic acceptance speech, abbreviating in the left-hand margin the title of the award he was now on his way to receive, though he already had it by heart: The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award in Regional Depiction from the Greater Stuyvesant Area Chamber of Commerce and Associated Libraries. He just didn’t want any slip-ups, that was all. Especially if alcohol was involved. And alcohol was always involved.

He’d left Buffalo at seven-forty a.m. and expected to be in Albany by two — at least that was what the Amtrak timetable proposed, and whether or not Amtrak would deliver was beyond his control. In Albany, he was to be met by Donna Trumpeter, of the Greater Stuyvesant Women’s Service Club, who would drive him in her own personal blue-black SUV the remaining forty-eight point five miles to the town itself. There would be a dinner, served either in the town hall or a school cafeteria gussied up with crepe paper and a banner, he would give his speech and read a passage from his latest novel, Maggie of the Farm, accept a plaque and a check for $250 and drink as much scotch as was humanly possible before he was presented at the local Holiday Inn for a lukewarm shower, a stab at sleep and, in the morning, acidic coffee and rubberized waffles, after which Donna Trumpeter or one of her compatriots would return him to the train station so he could reverse the journey he was now undertaking.

“Why do you even bother?” his third wife, Caroline, had thrown at him as he was shrugging into his coat that morning for the drive to the station. “It’s not as if you don’t have a trunk full of awards already — awards you never even glance at, as far as I can see.”

He had his hand on the doorknob, the slab of the door thrown back on the awakening light of a bitter morning desecrated with sleet, an inch of it already on the ground and more coming. “For the publicity.”

“Publicity? What kind of publicity you think the Greater Stuyvesant area is going to give you? Nobody in New York’s ever heard of it. I’ll bet they’ve never even heard of it in Albany. Or Troy either. Or what, Utica.”

“It all adds up.”

“To what?”

He sighed. Let his shoulders slump into the cavernous hollows of the coat. “For the money then.”

“The money? Two hundred fifty bucks? Are you kidding? That’d barely cover dinner at Eladio.”

“Yes,” he said, the draft raw on the left side of his face.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I’m kidding.”

She might have had something more to say about it, but really, what did it bother her what he did — she had a car and a credit card, and a night alone never killed anybody — but she just bunched her chin and squinted her eyes as if to get a better read on him. The sleet whispered over the pavement. The air tasted of metal. “My god,” she said. “What did you do to your hair?”

—

He was in the club car, scarring his palate with superheated coffee out of a cardboard container and masticating an ancient sandwich advertised as chicken salad on wheat but which managed to taste of absolutely nothing, when a powerfully built middle-aged man came swaying down the aisle, pushing a boy before him. Riley glanced up, though he wasn’t naturally curious, despite his profession. What he knew of people he knew from his early wild years — and from the newspaper and movies, or films as he liked to call them — and that had been enough to get him through fourteen novels and counting. He believed in giving people their space and if he didn’t really have much use for the rest of humanity, that was all right — he led a pretty hermetic existence these days, what with his books, the cats (six of them) and Caroline, Caroline, of course. He liked to say, only half-joking, that he resented strangers because they always seemed to be in his way but that he was willing to tolerate them — and here he’d shrug and grin — because, who knew, they might just buy his books.

At any rate, there was something about these two that caught his attention, and it might have had to do with the fact that they were the only other people in the car but for the attendant, a recessive little man of indeterminate age and origin who looked as if he’d rolled over more miles than all the truckers in western New York State combined. Still, they made an odd pair. The man was white, fleshy in the face, with eyes that seized on Riley and then flung him away just as quickly, and the boy — he looked to be eight or nine — was dark-skinned, Hispanic maybe. Or maybe Indian — from India. All this went through Riley’s head in an instant and then he dismissed it and returned to his sandwich and the newspaper he’d spread out on the plastic tabletop, even as the big man and the boy settled into the booth directly behind him.

After a while he felt the booth heave as the man got up and went to the counter to order a coffee for himself and hot chocolate and a sticky bun for the boy. It took no more than a minute or two for the attendant to irradiate the drinks in the microwave and hand over the cellophane packet with the bun smeared inside, but the whole while the big man kept his gaze fixed on Riley, a gaze so steady and unrelenting Riley began to wonder if he somehow knew him. A single jolt of paranoia sizzled through him — could this be the deranged yahoo who’d called up early one morning to say how disgusted he was by Maggie of the Farm because Maggie was such a slut, and go on to wonder, in a pullulating spill of profanity, why that had to be, why every woman in every book and movie and TV show had to be such a fucking slut? — when he realized that the man wasn’t looking at him at all. He was looking beyond him to where the boy sat, as if the boy was a piece of luggage he was afraid somebody was going to dash by and snatch.

Then the man was swaying down the aisle again, this time more gingerly — and dangerously — because he had his hands full, a cardboard cup in each hand and the sticky bun dangling from two fingers in its shrink-wrapped package. Again the booth heaved. There was the faintest rasp as the cardboard containers made contact with the table. The rails clacked. Scenery rushed past the windows. The man said something (Spanish, was he talking in Spanish?) and it was followed by the noise of crinkling cellophane as the treat was unwrapped — whether by the boy or the man, Riley couldn’t say.

All of a sudden he was irritated with himself — what did he care? Since these two had come into the car he’d been stuck on the same paragraph, reading it over and over as if the words had no meaning. Exasperated, he glanced out the window as a lone clapboard house flashed by, then a series of brown rippled fields, then another house and another expanse of field, equally brown and equally rippled. He’d just brought his eyes back to the paper when the man’s voice started up behind him.

“Hello, Lon?” A pause. “I am on the train, yes. Just passing Syracuse. Were you able to place that bet for me? Two hundred, the over/under on the Bills, yes?” The voice was needling, breathy, the vowels elongated and the diction too precise, as if it were being translated, and here it was stuck in Riley’s head. In disgust, he folded up the paper and slid out of the booth, leaving the empty cup and sandwich wrapper for the attendant to deal with. He didn’t glance behind him, though he wanted to give the guy a look — cell phones, God, he hated cell phones. Instead he just brushed imaginary crumbs from the front of his coat and started up the aisle.

“But I just wanted to tell you,” the man’s voice flew up and batted round the molded aluminum ceiling like an asthmatic bird, “don’t wait for me at the Albany station — change of plan. I’m going to be taking a different route.” He pronounced it “rowt,” but then what would you expect? “Yes, that’s right: I have something I need to dispose of. A package, yes. That’s right, a package.”

—

Anent Riley: he was a committed technophobe, forever pushed to the brink by the machines that controlled his life, from the ATM to the ticket dispenser at the parking garage and the clock radio that kept him awake half the night with its eternally blinking light. Card keys baffled and frustrated him — he could never seem to get the elevator to work or open the door to his own room in a hotel, and once he did manage to get inside, the TV remote, with its gang-piling options, invariably defeated him. He distrusted computers, preferring to write by hand, the way he’d always done. And the keyless car Caroline had talked him into buying put him in a rage every time he got behind the wheel — it seemed to change its agenda randomly, confronting him with all sorts of warning beeps and whistles, not to mention a sinuous female voice with an Oxbridge accent that popped up out of nowhere and never seemed to have anything good to say, when all he wanted was to turn a key, shift into gear and go. To drive. To get somewhere — his destination—without having to take a mechanical aptitude test. Was that too much to ask? Wasn’t that what cars were for?

Worst of all was the cell phone. He refused to carry one—If you want to know the truth, there’s nobody I want to talk to—and it irritated him to see the things stuck to the sides of people’s heads as if generating a nonstop stream of vapid chatter was essential to life, like breathing or eating or shitting. What he valued was simplicity, pen to paper, the phone on its stand in the front hallway where it belonged, starry nights overhead, wood split and stacked beside the fireplace in the hundred-year-old farmhouse he and Caroline had bought six years ago (though admittedly the farm itself was long gone, replaced by tract houses, another irritant). Simplicity. Unmediated experience. Maggie, on her farm, tossing feed to the chickens or tugging at a cow’s udders in the absence of electronic babble. Still, for all that, as he settled back into his seat after his annoying encounter in the club car, he couldn’t help patting his pocket to feel the burden of the alien weight there — Caroline’s iPhone, which she’d insisted he take in the event anything went wrong on the other end of the line. What if Donna Trumpeter failed to show? What if the train derailed? What if terrorists bombed the Albany station? Then I’ll just go ahead and die, he’d said. Gladly. Because I won’t have to carry, this, this—but she’d thrust it on him and that was the end of the argument.

He’d set the newspaper aside and had just opened the new novel by one of his former classmates at Iowa — Tim McNeil, whose skyrocketing fame made his stomach clench with envy — when the pneumatic doors at the end of the car hissed back and the big man entered, pushing the boy before him with one oversized hand and clutching a valise in the other. Riley noticed the man’s clothes for the first time now — an ill-fitting sport coat in a checkered pattern, pressed pants, shoes so black and glistening he must have shined them three times a day — and what was he? Some sort of foreigner, that was evident, even to someone as indifferent as Riley. The term “Pole” jumped into his head, which was immediately succeeded by “Croat,” though he couldn’t say why, since he’d never been to Poland or Croatia and had never known anyone from either country. Russian, he thought next, and settled on that. But Jesus, the guy wasn’t going to sit across from him, was he? If he was, he’d just get up and—

But no — the man chose a seat facing him, two rows up. There were other people on the car, a trio of nuns bent over their cell phones, a young mother with two comatose babies, a few salesman types, what looked to be a college girl with a book spread open in her lap though she too was busy with her phone, texting wisdom out into the world, and nobody so much as glanced up. The man made a show of heaving the valise up onto the overhead rack, then deposited the ticket strips in the metal slot on the seatback, pushed the boy into the inner seat and sat heavily in the other, his eyes raking over Riley so that he felt that tympanic thump of discomfort all over again. Enough, he told himself, dropping his eyes — he wasn’t going to let it bother him. Nothing was going to bother him. He was on his way to pick up an award and he was going to have a good time because that was what this was all about, a break in the routine, a little celebration for work well done, an a-ward, a re-ward, something Caroline could never even begin to understand because she was about as artistic as a tree stump. And it all added up, it did, no matter what she thought. He was in the game still and any one of his books could go big the way McNeil’s had. Who knew? Maybe there’d be a movie, maybe Spielberg would get involved, maybe word of mouth was operating even now…

He bent to the book — a sequel to the New York Times bestselling Blood Ties, which immediately made him wonder if he shouldn’t attempt a sequel to Maggie—and followed the march of the paragraphs up and down the page for as long as he could, which was no more than five minutes, before he fell off to sleep, his chin pinioned to his breastbone.

—

Riley wasn’t one to dream — sleep came at him like a hurtling truck — and when he felt the hand on his shoulder, the gentle but persistent pressure there, he was slow to come back to the world. He found himself blinking up into the face of the erstwhile Russian, the big man with the careful accent, who was saying this to him: “Sir. Sir, are you awake?”

He blinked again, the phrase I am now coming into his head, but he merely murmured, “Huh?”

The man’s face hung over him, pores cratered like the surface of the moon, tangled black eyebrows, eyes reduced to slits—Cossack’s eyes—and then the man was saying, “Because I must use the facilities and I am wondering if you would watch over the boy for me.” And there was the boy, his head no higher than the seatback, standing right there. Riley saw he was younger than he’d first thought, no more than five or six. “I will thank you,” the man went on, making as if to usher the boy into the seat beside Riley but hesitating, waiting for assent, for permission. Caught by surprise, Riley heard himself say, “Sure. I guess.” And then, before he could think, the boy was sitting limply beside him and the big man leaning in confidentially. “I am grateful. There are bad people everywhere, unfortunately, and one doesn’t like to take chances.” He said something to the boy in a different voice, the tone caustic and admonitory — Spanish, it was definitely Spanish, but then why would a Russian be speaking Spanish, if he was a Russian, that is? — then gave Riley’s shoulder a brief squeeze. “Very bad people.”

Riley craned his neck to watch the man’s heavy shoulders recede down the length of the car behind him before the door to the restroom swung open to block his view and the man disappeared inside. He turned to the boy, more baffled and irritated than anything else, and simulated a smile. He’d never done well with children — to him they were alien beings, noisy, hyper, always scrabbling and shouting and making incomprehensible demands, and he thanked God he’d never had any of his own, though his second wife, Crystal, formerly one of the students in the itinerant workshops he’d given over the years, had twice been pregnant and had actually thought of giving birth before he’d managed to make her see the light. But here was this boy, lost in a nylon ski jacket two sizes too big for him, his eyes fixed on the floor and a cheap tarnished cross suspended from a chain round his neck. Riley turned back to his book, but he couldn’t focus. A minute passed. Then another. Scenery flashed by. And then, over the rattling of the wheels and the shrieking metallic whine of the brakes — were they already coming into the Schenectady station, the stop before his? — he heard the boy’s voice, whispering, a voice no louder or more forceful than the breath expelled from his lungs, and turned to him.

The boy’s eyes jumped to his. “Socorro,” he whispered, then glanced over his shoulder before dropping his gaze again. Very softly — the screeching brakes, the shudder of the car, the rafters of the station fixed in the window — the boy repeated himself: “Socorro.”

It took him a moment — French had been his language, both in high school and college, though he recalled little of it now and had no access to Spanish whatever, if this was Spanish the boy was speaking — before he said, “Is that your name? Socorro?”

The boy seemed to shrink away from him, down, down into the depths of his jacket and the scuffed vinyl of the seat that loomed over him as if it would swallow him up. He didn’t say yes, didn’t say no, didn’t even nod — all he did was repeat the word or phrase or whatever it was in a voice so small it was barely audible. There was a whistle, a shout, the train lurched and the wheels began to revolve again. Riley wasn’t slow on the uptake, or not particularly — it was just that he wasn’t used to people, to complication—but an unraveling skein of thoughts began to suggest themselves to him now. He glanced up at the rack above the seat the big man had vacated and saw that the valise was no longer there and then he thrust his face to the window, jerking his eyes back to the platform and the receding crowd there — men, women, strollers, backpacks, luggage, the nuns, a seeing-eye dog and a woman in dark glasses, all that color and movement, too much, way too much, so that he couldn’t be sure what he was seeing even as the checkered sport coat flickered suddenly into view and vanished just as quickly.

—

What went through his head in those first few ruptured moments as he turned away from the window? That his eyes had deceived him, that the big man was in the restroom still and would be back any second now to claim the boy, who must have been his nephew or an adopted son or even his own natural child by a Hispanic woman, a Latina, an immigrant maybe with a green card or even citizenship. Wasn’t that how the Russians did it? Marry a citizen and get a free pass? He glanced up and down the car but no one had got on and the conductor was nowhere to be seen. The boy was hunched inside his jacket, absolutely motionless, his eyes on the floor. Riley saw now that he wasn’t wearing a shirt under the ski jacket, as if he’d dressed — or been dressed — hurriedly. And his shoes — he was wearing only one shoe, a scuffed and dirt-smeared sneaker. His socks were wet, filthy. He looked — and here the awful truth slammed at Riley like a ballistic missile—abused.

He came up out of the seat so suddenly he cracked his skull on the luggage rack and for just an instant saw lights dancing before his eyes. “Stay here, I’ll be right back,” he breathed, and then he was out in the aisle and heading for the restroom, the skirts of his coat flapping behind him like great enveloping wings. He seized hold of the handle, flung open the door. There was no one inside.

A quick glance into the car beyond — nothing, nobody — and then he was easing himself down beside the boy and the boy was shrinking, getting smaller by the moment. The boy’s limbs were sticks, his eyes two puddles gouged out of a muddy road. Riley bent his face toward him, fighting to control his voice. “Where’s your father?” he said. “Where’d he go? Votre père? Papa? Where’s your papa? Or uncle? Is he your uncle?”

The boy said nothing. Just stared down at the floor as if Riley were speaking a foreign language. Which, in fact, he was.

“Where are you going? What town? Where do you live — do you know where you live?”

More nothing. Advanced nothing. Nothing feeding off of nothing.

What he had to do, right this minute, was find the conductor, the engineer, anybody — the nuns, where were the nuns when you needed them? — to take this, this situation off his hands. He’d actually started to get to his feet again before he realized how sketchy this all was — he couldn’t very well leave the kid there. What if the big man came back? What if somebody else—? What if they thought he was somehow responsible? He shot his eyes round the car. Something came up in his throat. It was then that he thought of the phone, Caroline’s phone, this miracle of instant communication secreted in his pocket for just such a moment as this.

He eased to one side to slip it from his pocket, a hard mute monolithic thing, cold in his hand, its screen decorated with the imprint of his wife’s fingertips. He’d call Amtrak, that was what he was thinking — the emergency number. There had to be an emergency number, didn’t there? Or 911. He’d call 911 and have the police meet him at the Albany station. All right. But how to turn it on? He’d seen Caroline do it a hundred times, her fingers flicking lightly over the screen as a steady stream of colorful icons rolled dutifully into position. He pressed the screen, expecting the thing to jump to life, but nothing happened. Again he pressed it. The kid was watching him now out of the reddened pools of his eyes — had he been crying, was that it? “It’s okay,” he heard himself say. “Everything’s fine. Just give me — give me a minute here.”

The car rocked. Bleak dead trees flailed at the windows. The sky was made of stone. Finally — and he felt a surge of satisfaction so powerful he nearly sang out in triumph — he found the on/off switch hidden in the frame and indistinguishable from it, as if the manufacturer, clearly a sadist, had put all the company’s resources into making its function as obscure as possible. No matter. The screen flashed at him, a parade of icons there, and they shimmied at the merest touch of his finger. But where were the numbers? How did you make a call? Why were—?

And now the train was slowing and the loudspeakers suddenly crackled with a mechanical voice announcing Station stop Albany/Rensselaer even as he shoved the phone back in his pocket and sprang up to jerk his bag down from the overhead rack, the decision already forming in his brain because it was the only decision he could have made — anyone in his position would have done the same thing and you didn’t have to be Albert Schweitzer to weigh the moral balance of it. He took the kid by the hand, pulled him up out of the seat and down the aisle to the door, which at that moment clattered open on the platform in a burst of noise and confusion, people swarming everywhere, and where was a cop? He needed a cop.

A dirty white pigeon fluttered into the air. Somebody said, “Laura Jean, you look terrific, I hardly recognize you,” and a pair of policemen surfaced amidst the crowd, moving toward him now, and here was a too-thin vaguely blondish woman rushing for him with her hands outstretched and the light of redemption in her cracked blue eyes, and she was going to say, “Mr. Riley?” and he was going to say, “Ms. Trumpeter?” but that never happened, because the policemen wrestled him to the pavement even as he felt the cold metallic bite of the handcuffs gnaw into his flesh.

—

Sometime later — he didn’t know how much later because they’d taken his watch — he found himself in a desperate place, a place even the wildest of his wild years couldn’t have begun to prepare him for. There were strange smells, unsettling noises, the rhythmic tapping of heels on linoleum. Cold steel. Corridors within corridors. Here he was in the midst of it, his hands shaking as if he’d had a hundred cups of coffee, and he couldn’t stop pacing back and forth across the stained concrete floor of the solitary cell they’d put him in, the guard or deputy or whatever he was giving him a rude shove and announcing in an overheated voice that it was for his own protection. “The people we got in here, they don’t like creeps like you. And you want to know something? Neither do I.” And then he added, as a kind of oral postscript, “Scumbag.”

Donna Trumpeter, aflutter with righteousness, had tried to explain that they’d made a mistake, that he — Riley, the man in handcuffs with the heart rate surging like Krakatoa — was a famous writer, a celebrity, an award winner, but the cops wouldn’t listen. They produced a blanket for the boy, as if he were cold, as if that were the extent of his problem, and another cop — a female with a face like a blazing gun — wrapped the boy up and led him away. Riley talked himself hoarse. He protested in a high buzzing whine while they led him in cuffs through the cavernous station, and everybody, even the crackheads and bums, stared at him; fulminated while they strong-armed him into the back seat of the cruiser and drove him down the bleak cold street; alternately raged, threatened and pleaded as they read him his rights, took his fingerprints and photo — his mug shot! — and booked him. Was he allowed a phone call? Yes. On a real phone greased with the slime of ten thousand penitential hands, a phone attached to a wall with an actual cord that disappeared inside it before connecting with a vast seething network of wires that ran all the way to Buffalo and beyond. It took four rings for Caroline to answer, each one an eternity, and what was the name of that attorney they’d used when the neighbor’s pinhead of a kid set fire to the fence?

“Hello?” Her voice was guarded, caller I.D. alerting her to the suspect number. Absurdly he wanted to throw his voice and pretend to be a telemarketer, make her laugh, goad her, but things were too desperate for that.

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m in trouble.” He felt as if he were in a submarine deep under the sea and all the air had gone out of it. The walls were squeezing in. He couldn’t breathe. “I’m in jail. I’ve been arrested.”

“Listen, I’m just sitting down to a salad and a glass of wine and I really don’t have time for whatever this is — humor, is that it? You think you’re funny? Because I don’t.”

He dredged something out of his voice, something real, that stopped her. “Caroline,” he said, and now he was sobbing — or almost, right on the verge of it—“I’m in jail. Really. It’s crazy, I know, but I need you to… I need your help. That lawyer, remember that lawyer, what was his name?”

“Lawyer? What are you talking about?”

He repeated himself for the third time, angry now, the humiliation burning in him, and what if the papers got hold of this? “I’m in jail.”

Her voice tightened. “For what?”

“I don’t know, it’s all a mistake.”

Tighter yet: “For what?”

There was a deputy right there, pointing emphatically at his watch. The corridor smelled of cleaning solution, vomit, bad shoes, bad feet, bad breath.

It took everything in him to get the words out. “They’re calling it”—and here he emitted a strained whinnying laugh—“child abuse.”

“Jesus,” she snapped. “Why don’t you get a life? I told you I’m trying to have a bite of dinner here—in peace for once? Go try your routine on one of your groupies, one of the literary ladies of where is it? Greater Stuyvesant. I’m sure they’ll all love it.” And then, because Riley must have committed some sin he wasn’t aware of in another life and another time, something truly heinous and compoundedly unforgivable, the phone went dead.

—

Four hours later — half-past eight by the watch they’d returned to him, along with his wallet, his belt and the flat inanimate slab of Caroline’s iPhone — he was sitting across from Donna Trumpeter in a booth at the bar/restaurant of the Stuyvesant Marriott, trying to nurse his pulse rate back to normal with judicious doses of Johnnie Walker Black. He’d ordered a steak, blood-raw, but it wasn’t there yet. Donna Trumpeter flipped the hair away from her face. She leaned into the table on both her elbows and cupped her chin in her hands. She’d just finished telling him, for the tenth time, how very sorry she was about all of this and that of course the ladies of the service club and her book group and the mayor and all the citizens of the Greater Stuyvesant area who’d driven who knew how many miles to hear him speak all understood that the circumstances were unavoidable. They’d held the ceremony anyway, apparently, the mayor’s wife reading aloud from Maggie of the Farm in the booming tones she’d employed as a high school thespian a quarter century earlier, and everyone — at least at last report — had been satisfied with the evening, the high point of which was the turkey schnitzel, garlic mashed potatoes, brown gravy and peas provided by the high school cafeteria staff doing overtime duty. “But,” and here she drew in a vast quavering breath, “of course, they all wanted you.” Her eyes, giving back the nacreous sheen of the overhead lights, fluttered shut and then snapped open again. “There’s no substitute for genius.”

This last comment, coupled with the tranquilizing effect of the scotch, made him feel marginally better. “I guess that’ll teach me,” he said, sounding as doleful and put-upon as he knew how.

“Oh, no,” she said, “no. You did the right thing. The only thing.”

“If I had to do it again—” he began and then trailed off. He’d been trying to catch the waitress’ eye for a refill, and here she was — a huge woman, titanic, as slow on her feet as mold creeping across a petri dish — backing her way out of the double doors to the kitchen, his steak balanced on one arm, Donna Trumpeter’s Cobb salad on the other. The cops had realized their mistake after an interpreter was brought in to question the boy in Spanish and then they’d hurried to release him, their apologies rattling round the station like a dry cough. They didn’t care. He meant nothing to them. They’d branded him a pervert and a pervert he remained, just another perp, another scumbag, innocent or not. He could go ahead and sue. They were just doing their job and no jury was going to give him a nickel. If anything, he was at fault — for interfering, for letting the real abductor get away when all along they’d been waiting to take him at the station.

The waitress, breathing heavily — puffing, actually, as if she were trying to keep an imaginary feather afloat — set the plates down on the table and as the smell of the steak rose to him he realized how hungry he was. “Another scotch,” he said, and because he was calming down now, the earth solid beneath his feet the way it always had been and always would be, he added, “please,” and then, “if it’s not too much trouble.” He cut meat, lifted it to his lips, sipped scotch. Donna Trumpeter kept up a soft soothing patter which revolved around what an honor it was to be in his presence — she couldn’t believe it; it was like a dream — and how deeply each of his books had moved her, Maggie of the Farm most of all. “Really,” she said, “the way you portray day-to-day life — and the insight you have into women, my God! — it’s almost Tolstoyan. Or no: better. Because it’s real. In the here and now.”

He gently reminded her that the book was set in the nineteen thirties.

“Of course. What I mean is it’s not nineteenth century, it’s not Russia.”

“No,” he agreed, “it’s not.” It was about then that he noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. And that her eyes, for all the coiled springboard of theories and embroidery, vegetarian cookery, cats and poetry he saw lurking there, were really quite beautiful. Stunning, actually. And her mouth. She had a sensual mouth, full-lipped, just like the one he’d imagined for Maggie. And though she was thin, too thin for his taste, she had a pair of breasts on her. There they were, clamped in the grip of the tight pink angora sweater she was wearing, and what was he thinking? That skinny women, skinny literary women with full lips and syntactical adulation shining in their eyes, could be lavishly receptive in another arena altogether. And further: that he’d had a scare, a bad scare, and could do with a little soothing.

He was about to lay his hand on hers when she suddenly pulled back to pantomime a smack to her forehead. “Oh, my God, I almost forgot,” she said, and then he was studying the crown of her skull, the parting there, as she bent to her purse, which she’d tucked away beneath the table when they’d sat down. In the next moment she was straightening up, slightly flushed from the effort, and smiling so forcefully her teeth shone. “Here,” she said, and she was handing what he at first took to be a breadboard across the table — the plaque, the plaque, of course — and along with it an envelope embossed with the logo of the Greater Stuyvesant Chamber of Commerce. “God, if I’d forgotten…”

He must have looked surprised — he’d been through an emotional wringer, but not, he reminded himself, anything even close to the sort of horror that poor abused kid must have endured, and he didn’t give a damn what anybody thought, whether it was random chance that had put him there or not, he was a hero, he was, and he’d suffered for it — because she said, “I know it’s not much. Especially, well, considering.”

“It’s plenty,” he said, and was he tearing up? “And I want to thank you, all of you, but you especially, you, Donna, from the bottom of my…” He lifted his head, cast a watery eye on the shadow of the waitress drifting by on the periphery. “But what I’d really like, what I need, that is, I mean after all we’ve been through together — oh, hell, let me just come out and say it. Do you want to come up to the room with me?”

He watched her smile retract, lips tightening like wire. “I’m seeing somebody,” she said.

He was desperate. He’d been in jail. He’d never even got to deliver his speech. “He doesn’t have to know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said firmly and then she got up from the table. “I’ll take care of the check,” she added in a softer voice, and touched his hand in parting. The smile flickered back. “Sleep tight.”

He staggered up the stairs to his second-floor room like an octogenarian, as drained as he’d ever been in his life. For a long while he fumbled with the card key, trying it forwards, backwards, upside down, till finally the light went mercifully green and he was inside. The room was like any other. Stucco walls, beige lampshades, plastic night tables with some sort of fake wood-grain pattern worked in beneath the surface. Industrial carpeting. Sheets and blankets stretched tight as drumskin over the bed by immigrant women who’d seen too much in their own place and time and now had to rake through the daily leavings of the class of people who had the wherewithal to couple here and gulp booze and do drugs and clip their nails over the sink. He didn’t want to think about the women’s children and the hopes they might have had for them, about the boy and the big man and a room just like this one in Chicago or Detroit or wherever the bad people, the very bad people, did what they were going to do.

He went to the window and looked out into a vast parking lot, a great dark sinkhole illuminated by the sad yellow light of the arc lamps rising hazily out of it. It took him a moment, his reflection caught there in the window, his jacket like a dead thing wrapped around him, to realize it was snowing. Or no, this was sleet, definitely sleet, the storm that had hit Buffalo finally caught up with him.

—

In the morning, he took the train back, and if he lifted his head from the newspaper when anyone came down the aisle, it was a reflex only. The rails thumped beneath him with a pulverizing regularity that seemed to work so deeply inside him it was as if he were being eviscerated with each thrust of the wheels. His breath fogged the window. He tried Tim McNeil’s novel again and again it put him to sleep. Back at home, Caroline seemed to find the whole business hilarious and he just couldn’t summon the strength to give her the hard truth of it. Still, she did warm to him when they went out to Eladio and blew the two-hundred-fifty-dollar honorarium on abalone flown in from California, Kobe beef and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Demi-Sec chilled to perfection. Two days later he learned from the newspaper that the boy’s name was Efraín Silva and that he’d wandered away from his mother at the Home Depot in Amherst and was now reunited with her, though there seemed to be some question regarding her legal status, which had only come to light because of her going to the police. As for the abductor, the big man in the pressed pants and checked jacket, he was still at large, and whether he was Russian or Croatian or Fijian for that matter, no one knew. No one knew his name either. All they knew was what he’d done to the boy and where he’d done it and they knew too that he’d do it again to some other boy in some other place.

If Riley felt a vague unease in the coming days, he chalked it up to the cold he seemed to have caught somewhere along the line. And when the next invitation came — from Kipper College of the Dunes in Kipper, Oregon, informing him that he was one of three finalists for the Evergreen Award in Creative Literature for his novel Magpie of the Farm—he didn’t show it to Caroline or anyone else. He just went in through the house to the fireplace, stacked up the kindling there, and used the creamy soft vellum to guide the flame of the match into the very heart of the fire.

(2012)

Birnam Wood

It rained all that September, a grim cold bleached-out rain that found the holes in the roof and painted the corners with a black creeping mold that felt greasy to the touch. Heat would have dried it up, or at least curtailed it, but there was no heat — or insulation either — because this was a summer rental, the price fixed for the season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and the season was over. Long over. Back in May, when Nora was at school out west and I’d sent her a steady stream of wheedling letters begging her to come back to me, I’d described the place as a cottage. But it wasn’t a cottage. It was a shack, a converted chicken coop from a time long gone, and the landlord collected his rent in summer, then drained the pipes and shut it down over the winter so that everything in it froze to the point where the mold died back and the mice, disillusioned, moved on to warmer precincts.

In the summer, we’d been outside most of the time, reading and lazing in the hammock till it got dark, after which we’d either listened to records or gone out to a club or to somebody’s house. We had a lot of friends — my friends, that is, people I’d grown up with — and we could just show up anytime, day or night, and get a party going. On weekends, I’d unfold the geological survey maps of Fahnestock or Harriman Park and we’d pick out a lake in the middle of nowhere and hike in to see what it looked like in the shimmering world of color and movement. Almost always we’d have it to ourselves, and we’d swim, sunbathe, pass a joint and a bota bag of sweet red wine and make love under the sun while the trees swayed in the breeze and the only sound was the sound of the birds. Nora didn’t have a tan line all summer. Neither did I.

But then it was September and it was raining and I had to go back to work. I was substitute-teaching at the time, a grinding chaotic thankless job, but I didn’t really have a choice — we needed money to stay alive, same as anybody else. Nora could have worked — she had her degree now and she could have substituted, could have done anything — but the idea didn’t appeal to her and so on the three or four days a week I was summoned to one school or another, she was at home, listening to the rain drool from the eaves and trickle into the pots we’d set out under the worst of the leaks. I sprang for a cheap TV to keep her company, and then an electric heater the size of a six-pack of beer that nonetheless managed to make the meter spin like a 45. But then, we weren’t paying utilities — the landlord was. I’d given him a lump sum at the end of May — for the season — and now we were getting our own back. One morning when I was at work, he used his key to let himself in and found Nora in bed, the blankets pulled up to her neck and the TV rattling away, and he’d backed out the door, embarrassed, without saying a word. The next day we got the eviction notice. The day after that, he cut off the electricity.

I was cooking by candlelight over the gas stove a few nights later (Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli, out of the can, with a side of iceberg lettuce cut in wedges), when Nora edged up beside me. We’d been drinking burgundy out of the gallon jug we kept under the sink as a way of distracting ourselves from the obvious. The house crepitated around us. It wasn’t raining, at least not right then, but there was a whole lot of dripping going on, dripping that had emerged as the defining soundtrack of our lives in the absence of music, and I couldn’t remember a time, not a single minute going all the way back to the day we first met, when there wasn’t a record on or at least the radio.

Her hair shone greasily in the candlelight. She’d twisted it into pigtails for convenience because the water heater, which ran not on gas but electricity, was defunct now, definitely defunct, and there was no way to take a shower unless we went over to a friend’s house — and that involved the hassle of actually getting in the car and going someplace when it was so much easier just to pile up the blankets on the bed, get stoned and watch the shadows creep over the beams that did such an admirable job of holding up the slanted portion of the roof. Nora gazed into the pot on the stove. “I can’t live like this,” she said.

“No,” I said, and I was in full agreement here, “neither can I.”

—

The first place we looked at was also a seasonal rental, but the seasons were reversed. It was another crumbling outbuilding in the same summer colony, but it had been tricked up with heat and insulation because the landlady — eighty, ninety maybe, with eyes like crushed glass and hair raked back so tightly you could make out the purple-splotched ruin of her scalp beneath — saw the advantage of renting through the winter and spring to whoever was left behind when the summer people went back to the city. I didn’t begrudge her that. I didn’t begrudge her anything. I didn’t even know her. Nora had circled an ad in the Pennysaver, dialed the number, and now here she was, the old lady, waiting for us on the porch, out of the rain, and the minute we pulled into the driveway she began waving impatiently for us to jump out of the car, hurry up the steps and get the business over with.

There were two problems with the house, the first apparent to all three of us, the second only to Nora and me. That problem, hovering over us before we even walked in the door, was that we were looking for a deal because we didn’t have the kind of money to put down for a deposit or first and last months’ rent, just enough for now, for the current month — enough, we hoped, to get us out of the converted chicken coop and into someplace with heat and electricity till we could think what to do next. The old lady — Mrs. Fried — didn’t look as if she would let things slide. Just the opposite. She gazed up at us out of her fractured eyes with the expectation of one thing only: money.

But then there was the first problem, which obviated the need to dwell on the second. The place was too small, smaller even than the shack we were living in, and we saw that the minute we stepped through the door. There were two rooms, bedroom and living room/kitchen, and to the right of the door, in a little recess, a bathroom the size of the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai. We never got that far. We just stood there, the three of us, and gazed into the bedroom, which was off the narrow hall. The bedroom was too cramped for anything but the single bed squeezed into it. A second single, made up with an army blanket and sheets gone gray with use, was pushed up against the wall in the hallway so that you had no more than a foot’s leeway to get around it and into the front room. The old lady read our faces, read our minds — or thought she did — and gestured first at the bed in the hallway and then the one in the bedroom. “Ven you vant,” she said, shrugging, her delicate wheeze of a voice clinging to the hard consonants of her youth, “you come.”

If Nora found it funny, laughing so hard she couldn’t seem to catch her breath as we ducked back into the car, I didn’t. I was the one put in the awkward position here, I was the provider, and what was she? It was the sort of question you didn’t ask, because it stirred resentment, and resentment was what had brought us down the first time around. I put the car in gear and drove down the dark tree-choked tunnel of the street, turned right, then right again, and swung into the muddy drive where the shack stood awaiting us. Inside, it smelled like a tomb. I could see my breath, even after I’d flicked on all four burners of the stove. Not sixty seconds went by before Nora said something that set me off and I came right back at her—“We wouldn’t be in this fucking mess if you’d get up off your ass and find a job”—and when we went to bed, early, to save on candles, it was for the warmth and nothing else.

There was no call next morning, and I had mixed feelings about that. I dreaded those calls, but they meant money — and money was the beginning and end of everything there was, at least right then. When the phone did finally ring it was half-past twelve and it went off like a flash bomb in the dream I was having, a dream that made me so much happier than the life I jolted awake to I wanted it to go on forever. My eyes opened on the slanted ceiling and my first thought was that even the chickens must have hated staring up at it, the sameness of it, day after day, until you lost your head and your feathers and somebody dropped you into a frying pan. Nora was propped up beside me, reading. Rain rapped insistently at the roof. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

The cold pricked me everywhere, like acupuncture, and I clutched my jeans to my groin, fumbled with a sweatshirt and hobbled across the room to snatch up the phone. It was my best friend, Artie, whom I’d known since elementary school. He didn’t bother with a greeting. “You find a place yet?”

“Uh-uh, no.”

“Well, I might’ve found something for you—”

I glanced at Nora. She’d put down her book and she was watching me now, her eyes squinted to slits in the fierceness of her concentration. Who is it? she mouthed, but I ignored her.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I didn’t know if you’d be interested, because it’s not a real rental — it’s more like housesitting — and it’s only temporary, like from next week through the end of April. It’s a friend of my father’s. An old guy and his wife. They go to Florida every winter and they want somebody in the house — or the apartment, there’s an apartment in the basement, above ground, with windows and all — just so they don’t get anybody breaking in. I was there once when I was a kid. It’s nice. On a private lake. A place called Birnam Wood. You ever hear of it?”

“No,” I said.

“Would you be interested at all?”

“You got a phone number?”

—

I told Nora not to get too excited because chances were it wouldn’t work out. Either we wouldn’t want the place — there had to be something wrong with it, right? — or they, the old couple, wouldn’t want us, once they got a look at us. Still, I phoned right away and the old man answered on the first ring. I introduced myself, talking fast, too fast maybe, because it wasn’t till I dropped the name of Artie’s father that the voice on the other end came to life. “Yes, we are expecting your call,” the old man said, and he had some sort of accent too, hesitating over the w in “we,” as if afraid it would congeal on him, and in a sudden jolt of paranoia I wondered if he and Mrs. Fried were somehow in league — or worse, if he was Mrs. Fried, throwing her voice to catch me unawares. But no, the place was miles away, buried in the woods in the hind end of Croton, well beyond the old lady’s reach. He gave the address, then directions, but they were so elaborate I stopped listening midway through, thinking instead of what Artie had said: the place was on a lake. A private lake. I’d find it, no problem. How many private lakes could there be? I told the old man we’d like to come have a look — at his earliest convenience, that is.

“When”—the hesitation again—“would you like to come?”

“I don’t know — how about now? Now okay?”

There was a long pause, during which Nora flapped both hands at me as if to say Don’t sound too eager, and then the old man, in his slow deliberate way, said, “Yes, that will suit us.”

We were late getting there, very late, actually, one snaking blacktop road looking much like the next, the rain hammering down and Nora digging into me along the lines of You’re a real idiot, you know that? and Why in God’s name didn’t you write down the directions? For a while it looked like a lost cause, trees crowding the road, nobody and nothing around except for the odd mailbox and the watery flash of a picture window glimpsed through the vegetation, but finally, after backing in and out of driveways and retracing our path half a dozen times, we came to a long low stone wall with a gated entrance flanked by two stone pillars. The gate — wrought-iron coated in black enamel so slick it glowed — stood open. A brass plaque affixed to the pillar on the right read BIRNAM WOOD. I didn’t want to bicker but I couldn’t help pointing out that we’d passed by the place at least three times already and Nora should have kept her eyes open because I was the one driving and she was the one doing all the bitching, but she just ignored me because the gravel of the private lane was crunching under our tires now and there were lawns and tennis courts opening up around us. Then the first house rose up out of the trees on our left, a huge towering thing of stone and glass with a glistening black slate roof and too many gables to count, even as the lake began to emerge from the mist on the other side of the road.

“Wow, you think that’s it?” Nora’s voice was pitched so low she might have been talking to herself. “Artie did say it was a mansion, right?” I could feel her eyes on me. “Well, didn’t he?”

I didn’t answer. A moment ago I’d been worked up, hating her, hating the broken-down car with its bald tires and rusted-out panels that was the only thing we could afford, hating the trees and the rain, hating nature and rich people and the private lakes you couldn’t find unless you were rich yourself, unless you had a helicopter, a whole fleet of them, and now suddenly a different mix of emotions was surging through me — surprise, yes, awe even, but a kind of desperation too. Even as the next house came into view on the right — ivy-covered brick with three wings, half a dozen chimneys and a whole fairway of lawn sweeping down to the lake and the two red rowboats pulled up on a perfect little crescent of beach — I knew I had to live here or die and that I’d do anything it took, right down to licking the old man’s shoes, to make that happen.

“What’s the number?” I said. “You see a number on that house?”

She didn’t. She’d lost her glasses — she was always losing her glasses — and in our rush to get out the door she hadn’t bothered with her contacts either. No matter. The road took us over a stone bridge and swept us directly into the driveway of the house we were looking for — number 14. We got out of the car, the rain slackening now, and just stared up at the place, a big rearing brown-timbered Tudor that sat right on the lake itself. Around the corner I could make out a gazebo and a little dock with a rowboat tethered to it, this one painted green. And swans. Swans on the lake.

Everything seemed to brighten suddenly, as if the sun were about to break through. “All right,” I said, “here goes,” and I took Nora by the hand and led her up the flagstone steps to the front door.

—

I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that’s what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn’t just live together — they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they collected along the way. Mr. and Mrs. Kuenzli — Anton and Eva — were just like that. They met us at the door, two dwarfish old people who were almost identical, except that she was wearing a dress and had dyed her hair and he wasn’t and hadn’t. They gave us tea in a big room overlooking the lake and then escorted us around the house to show off their various collections — Mexican pottery, jade figurines, seascapes painted by a one-armed man they’d encountered in Manila. Every object had a story connected to it. They took turns filling in the details, no hurry at all. I knew what they were doing: checking us out, trying to get a read on us. I shrugged it off. If they were alarmed at the sight of us (this was in a time when people our age wore beads and serapes and cowboy boots and grew their hair long for the express purpose of sticking it to the bourgeoisie), they didn’t show it. Still, it was a good hour before we went downstairs to the basement, which was where we were going to live, after all. That is, if things worked out.

They did. I made sure they did. The minute we walked down the stairs I was hooked — and I could see that Nora was too. Here was a huge room — low-ceilinged, but the size of a basketball court — with a kitchen off to the left and next to it a bedroom with curtains, framed pictures on the walls and twin beds separated by matching night tables fitted out with ashtrays and reading lamps, just like the room every TV couple slept in, chastely and separately, so as not to confront the American family with the disturbing notion that people actually engaged in sexual relations. Nora gave me a furtive glance. “Ven you vant, you come,” she said under her breath, and we both broke up.

Then it was back out into the main room and the real kicker, the deal-sealer, the sine qua non — a regulation-size slate-topped pool table. A pool table! All this — leather armchairs, Persian carpets, gleaming linoleum, heat, twin beds, the lake, the rowboat, swans — and a pool table too? It was too much. Whatever the old man was asking for rent, because this wasn’t strictly housesitting and we were willing to make a token monthly payment, I was ready to double. Triple. Anything he wanted. I squeezed Nora’s hand. She beamed up at me as the old couple looked on, smiling, moved now by the sight of us there in the depths of that house that had no doubt harbored children at one time, grandchildren even.

I felt a vast calm settle over me. “We’ll take it,” I said.

—

At the end of the first week, after checking on us six or seven times a day (or spying on us, as Nora insisted, Mrs. Kuenzli fretting over how we were getting along—Fine, thanks—and even one night creaking down the stairs with a pot of homemade chicken-spaetzle soup), the old couple climbed into a limousine and went off to the airport, leaving us in possession. The main house was sealed off, of course, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was getting out of the shack. What I cared about was Nora. Making her happy. Making myself happy — and everybody else too. Within days of the Kuenzlis’ departure, my friends began showing up unannounced for the purpose of shooting 8-ball and cranking up the volume on the Bang & Olufsen sound system the Kuenzlis had at some point so fortuitously installed, then maybe getting wrecked and taking the rowboat out on the glittering surface of the lake while the trees flamed and the swans bobbed in our wake. Even the weather cooperated. If September had been a loss, one of the coldest and rainiest on record, October tiptoed in on a streak of pure sunshine and temperatures that climbed into the seventies.

I was shooting pool one Saturday afternoon with Artie and another friend, Richard, all three of us wired on Black Beauties and chain-drinking cheap beer, when Nora came in the door looking flushed. She had news. While we’d been frittering our time away — that was how she put it, “frittering,” but she was smiling now, hardly able to contain herself — she’d gone out on her own to interview for a job.

I loved her in that moment, loved the way the color came into her face because she was addressing all three of us now, not just me, and that made her self-conscious no matter the news, which was good, very good, I could see that in an instant. “Well,” I said, “you get it?”

The smile stalled, came back again. She nodded. “It’s not much,” she said, already retreating. She looked from me to Artie and Richard. “Minimum wage — but it’s six nights a week.”

I’d set down my pool cue and was coming across the room to her, that big room with its buffed floors and the carpets thick enough for anything, when I noticed she was all dressed up, and not in business clothes but in the fringed boots and gauzy top she wore when we were going bar-hopping. “What is it,” I said, “that hostessing thing?”

She nodded.

“At Brennan’s?”

Her smile was gone now. Her eyes — she was wearing her false lashes and pale blue eyeshadow — sank into mine. I was the one who’d told her about the job, which Richard had heard about from the bartender there. All you have to do is smile, I’d told her. All you have to do is say ‘Party of four?’ and let them follow you to the table. You can do that, can’t you? I hadn’t meant to be demeaning. Or maybe I had. She was strong-willed but I wanted to break her down, make her dependent, make her mine, but at the same time I wanted her to hold up her end, because we were a couple and that was what couples did. They worked. Both of them.

I took her by the hand, tried to peck a kiss to her cheek, but she pulled away.

“It means I’ll be gone nights.”

I shrugged. I could feel Artie and Richard watching me. There was a record on the stereo — I remember this clearly — something drum-based, with a churning polyrhythmic beat that seemed to fester under my words. “At least it’s something,” I said.

Artie lined up a shot. The balls clacked. Nothing dropped. “Hey, it’s great news,” he said, straightening up. “Congrats.”

Nora gave him a look. “It’s only temporary,” she said.

—

We settled into a routine. The phone rang in the dark and I got up, answered it and found out what school I was going to because somebody who just couldn’t stand another day of it had called in sick — either that or hung himself — and I was back home by three-thirty or four, at which point she’d be drinking coffee and making herself scrambled eggs and toast. Then I’d drive her to work and either sit there at the bar for a couple (depending on how I was feeling about our financial situation), or go back home and shoot pool by myself, pitting Player A against Player B and trying not to play favorites, until she got off at ten and I went to pick her up. Sometimes we’d linger at the bar, but most nights — weeknights anyway — we’d go back home because I needed the sleep. We climbed into our separate beds, snug enough, warm and dry and feeling pampered — or if not pampered, at least secure — and when I switched off my reading lamp and turned to the wall the last image fading in my brain was of the steady bright nimbus of Nora’s light and her face shining there above her book.

The weather held all that month, even as the leaves persisted and the lake rippled under the color of them. Whenever we could, we went out in the rowboat, and though we never acknowledged it I suppose we were both thinking the same thing — that we’d better take advantage of it while we could because each day of sun might be the last. I’d row and Nora would lie back against the seat in the stern, her eyes closed and her bare legs stretched out before her. What did I feel? Relaxed. As relaxed as I’ve ever felt in my life, before or since. There was something more to it too. I felt powerful, in command, the muscles of my arms flexing and releasing while Nora dozed at my feet and the rest of the world went still as held breath.

It was a feeling that couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Less than a week into November there was frost on the windshield when I got up for school and the sun seemed to have vanished, replaced by a low cloud cover and winds out of the north. Finally, reluctantly, I pulled the rowboat ashore and turned it over for the winter. Two days later there was a rim of ice around the lake and the temperature went down into the teens overnight. But, as I say, the house was warm and well-insulated, with a furnace that could have heated six houses, and when we went to bed at night we couldn’t resist joking about the shack, what we’d be suffering if we were still there. “My feet,” Nora would say, “they’d freeze to the floor like when you touch the tip of your tongue to the ice-cube tray.” “Yeah,” I’d say, “yeah, but you wouldn’t even notice because by then we’d be dried up and frozen like those mummies they found in the Andes.” And she’d laugh, we’d both laugh, and listen to the whisper of the furnace as it clicked on and drove the warm air through the bedroom and into the big room beyond where the pool table stood draped in darkness.

And then came the night when I dropped her off at Brennan’s and had my first drink and then another and didn’t feel like going home. It was as if some gauge inside me had been turned up high, all the way, top of the dial. I felt like that a lot back then, and maybe it was just an overload of testosterone, maybe that was all it was, but on this night I sat at the bar and kept on drinking. I knew the regulars, an older crowd that came in for dinner and gradually gave way to people like Nora and me, the music shifting from a soft whisper of jazz to the rock and roll we wanted to hear as the late diners gathered up their coats and gloves and doggie bags and headed out into the night. I’d been talking a lot of nothing to a guy in a sport coat who must have been in his thirties, a martini drinker, and when he got up and left a guy my own age slid onto the stool beside me. He asked me what was happening at the same time I asked him, then he ordered a drink — tequila and tonic, very West Coast, or hip, that is — and we started talking. His name was Steve, he had rust-red hair kinked out to his shoulders and he wore a thin headband of braided leather.

What did we talk about? The usual, bands, drugs, what concerts we’d been to, but then we started in on books and I was pleased and surprised because most of the people I ran into in that time and place didn’t extend themselves much beyond the Sunday comics. We were debating some fine point of Slaughterhouse Five, testing each other’s bona fides — he could quote passages from memory, a talent I’ve never had — when Nora leaned in between us to brush a kiss to my lips, then straightened up and shook out her hair with a quick neat flip of her head. “My heels are killing me,” she said. “And this top — Jesus, I’m freezing.” She stole a look around, gave Steve a vacant smile, picked up my drink and downed it in a single gulp. Then she was gone, back to her post at the station by the door.

Steve gave a low whistle. “Wow,” he said. “That your old lady?”

I just shrugged, nonchalant, elevated in that instant above everybody in the place. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but something stirred in me whenever I looked up and saw the way the men watched her as she tapped across the floor in her heels, trailing husbands and wives and sometimes even kids behind her, but it wasn’t something good or admirable.

“Man, I’d love to—” he began, and then caught himself. “You are one lucky dude.”

Another shrug. My feelings were complicated. I’d been drinking. And what I said next was inexcusable, I know that, and I didn’t mean it, not in any literal sense, not in the real world of twin beds and Persian carpets and all the rest, but what I was trying to convey here was that I wasn’t tied down—old lady—wasn’t a husband, not yet anyway, and that all my potentialities were intact. “I don’t know,” I said, “she can be a real pain in the ass.” I took a sip of my drink, let out a long withering sigh. “Sometimes I think she’s more trouble than she’s worth, know what I mean?”

That was all I said, or some variant of it, and then there was another drink and the conversation went deeper and I guess somehow Steve must have got the impression that we weren’t really all that committed, that living together was an experiment gone sour, that we were both — she and I — on the brink of something else. There was an exchange of phone numbers and addresses (Birnam Wood? Cool. I used to swim in the lake there when I was a kid) and then he was gone and the crowd at the bar began to thin. The minute he left I forgot him. Next thing I knew, Nora was there, dressed in her long coat and her knit hat and gloves, perched high on the platform of her heels.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

She gave me a tired smile. “Have fun?”

“Yeah.” I smiled back.

“Did you know it’s snowing out?”

“Really?”

“Really.” And then a beat. “You want me to drive?”

—

It was a long way home, twenty, twenty-five minutes under the best of conditions, but with the snow and the worn tires and the fact that Nora didn’t see too well at night, it must have taken us twice as long as that. We were the only ones on the road. The snow swept at the headlights and erased everything out in front of us. I tried not to be critical but every time we went around a curve the car sailed out of control and I suppose I got vocal about it because at one point she pulled over, her lips drawn tight and her eyes furious in the sick yellow glare of the dashboard. “You want to drive?” she said. “Go ahead, be my guest.”

When we got home (finally, miraculously), the phone was ringing. I could hear it from outside the door, making its demands. It took me a minute, pinning a glove under one arm and struggling to work the key in the lock as the snow sifted down and Nora stamped impatiently. “Hurry up, I have to pee,” she said between clenched teeth. Then we were in, the phone ringing still — it must have been the sixth or seventh ring — and I flicked on the lights while Nora made a dash for the bathroom and I crossed the room to answer it.

“Hello?” I gasped, out of breath and thinking it must be Artie, because who else would be calling at that hour?

“Hey, what’s happening,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “This Keith?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Steve.”

“Steve?”

“From the bar, you know. Like earlier? Brennan’s?” I heard Nora flush the toilet. The cover was off the pool table because I’d left in the middle of the climactic match between Player A and Player B, all the angles still in play. I listened to the water rattle in the pipes. And then Steve’s voice, low, confidential, “Hey, I was just wondering. Is Nora there?”

The bathroom door clicked open. There was a buzzing in my skull. Everything was wrong. “No,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis though there was no one there to see it, “she’s not in.”

“When’ll she be back?”

I said nothing. I watched her swing open the bathroom door, saw her face there, the pristine towels on the rack and the copper-and-gold wallpaper Mrs. Kuenzli must have gone to some special store to pick out because she wanted the best, only the best. The voice on the other end of the line was saying something else, insinuating, whispering in my ear like a disease, and so I bent down to where the phone was plugged into the wall and pulled it out of the socket.

“Who was that?” Nora asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “Wrong number.”

She gave me a doubtful look. “You were on the line long enough.”

I wanted to do something right for a change, wanted to take hold of her and press her to me, confess, tell her I loved her, but I didn’t. I just said, “You feel like a game of pool? I’ll spot you two balls—”

“You play,” she said. “I’m beat. I think I’ll get ready for bed and read for a while.” She paused at the bedroom door to give me a sweet tired smile. “You’ve got to admit, Player B’s a lot better than I am anyway.”

No argument there. I turned on the light over the table, cued up a record and took up the game where I’d left off. I was deep into my third game, on a real roll on behalf of Player A, the balls dropping as if I didn’t even have to use the stick, as if I were willing them in, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. Two thumps. A pause. And then two thumps more.

I was just laying down the stick, any number of scenarios going through my head — it was a stranded motorist, the guy who drove the snowplow come to complain about the tail end of the car sticking out into the street, Artie braving the elements for a nightcap — when Nora came out of the bedroom, looking puzzled. She was in her pajamas, the kind kids wear, with a drawstring round the waist and a fold-down collar. Pink. With a flight of bluebirds running up and down her limbs and flapping across her chest. Her feet were bare. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Artie?”

I didn’t know what was coming, couldn’t have guessed. I was in my own house, shooting pool and listening to music while the snow fell outside and the furnace hummed and my girlfriend stood there in her pajamas. “Must be,” I said, even as the knock came again and a voice, muffled by the door, called out, “Keith? Nora? Knock-knock. Anybody home?”

I opened the door on Steve, his hair matted now and wet with snow. He was holding a bottle of tequila by the neck and raised it in offering as he stamped in through the door. “Hey,” he said, handing me the bottle, “cool place.” He shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it right there on the floor. “Anybody down for a little action? Nora, how about you? A shot? Want to do a shot?”

She looked at him, bewildered — or maybe it was just that she wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to squint to take him in. I just stood there, the bottle like a brick in my hand — or no, a cement block, a weight, avoirdupois, dragging me down.

Steve never hesitated. He crossed the room to her, digging in his pocket for something, grinning and glassy-eyed. “Here,” he said, producing an envelope. “After I saw you tonight? You’re so beautiful. I don’t even know if you know how beautiful — and sexy. You’re really sexy.” He handed her the envelope, but she wasn’t looking at the envelope, she was looking at me. “I wrote you a poem,” he said. “Go ahead. Read it.”

“Steve,” I was saying, “look, Steve, I think—” but I couldn’t go on because of the way Nora was staring at me, her lips parted and her eyes come violently to life.

“Read it,” he repeated. “I wrote it for you, just for you—”

“Look,” I said, “it’s late,” and I moved toward him and actually took hold of his arm in an attempt to steer him away and out the door, back into the snow and out of our lives. “Nora’s tired,” I said.

He never turned, never even acknowledged me. “Let her say it. You’re not tired, are you?”

For the first time, she shifted her eyes to him. “No,” she said finally. “No, I’m not tired at all.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I’d set the bottle down on the desk and I was pulling on my coat, furious suddenly, and then I was out the door and into the night, the snow swirling overhead and Steve’s voice—“So you want a hit of tequila?”—trailing off behind me with a soft hopeful rising inflection.

—

Outside, the snow made a noise, a kind of hiss, as if the night had come alive. I walked twice round the house, cursing myself — and I wouldn’t go back in, I wouldn’t, not till whatever was going to happen happened and he was gone — and then I found myself huddling under the gazebo. I turned my collar up, pulled on my gloves. There was a wind now and a taste of cold northern forests on the air. I walked out on the dock and stood there for I don’t know how long, the lake locked up like a vault below me. That was when I noticed the light in the house directly across from ours, the one with all the chimneys and the two red rowboats that were turned over now, twin humps like moguls in the snow. It was the only light visible anywhere, a single lamp burning in a window on the ground floor of the wing nearest the lake. What came over me, I can’t say — what the impulse was, I mean — but I lowered myself down off the edge of the dock and started across the lake. The wind was in my face. There were no stars. And the footing was bad, drifting powder over ice as clear as if it had come out of a machine. I went down twice, hard, but picked myself up and kept on.

When I got close, when I came up the crescent of beach past the rowboats and on up the slope of the whitening lawn, I saw that the curtains were open, which explained the resiliency of the light. The people there — and I didn’t know them, not at all, not even by sight — must have left them open purposely, I realized, because of the snow, the romance of it, first snow of the season. It came to me that I was trespassing. Peeping. That anybody could have seen my tracks. But as soon as the thought entered my head I dismissed it, because I didn’t care about any of that — I’d gone out of myself, fixated on that light. Still, I kept to the shadows. I might even have crouched down in the bushes there, I don’t know.

What I saw was an ordinary room, a bedroom, lit like a stage. I saw a bed, an armoire, pictures on the wall. A shadow flickered across the room, then another, but for the longest time I didn’t see anything. And then the man came into view, padding back and forth, undressing, getting ready for bed. How old was he? I couldn’t tell, not really. Older than me, but not old. He settled into the bed — a double bed, queen-sized maybe — flicked on the lamp there and picked up a magazine and began reading. At some point, he set it down and seemed to be saying something to the other person in the room — the wife, I guessed — but of course it was just a murmur to me. And then, as if she’d heard her cue and stepped out of the wings, there she was, in a nightgown, fussing around her side of the bed before finally settling in and turning on her own light.

I felt guilty. I felt sick. And I didn’t see anything revealing — or sexual, that is — no snuggling or stroking or even a kiss. They were night owls, those people. That light burned a long time. I know. Because I stayed there till it went out.

(2012)