Telegraph Avenue

II. The Church of Vinyl

Can’t play a Hammond through no apology,” said Mr. Randall “Cochise” Jones. “ ’Less you got some new type a patch cord I don’t know about.”

Making it a joke, wanting to hide his irritation. Up all night, spinning five thoughts in his head: Gig tomorrow. Brown and gold plaid. Bird need his arthritis drops. Gas up the van. Get the Leslie. Gig, plaid, bird, van, Leslie; needle in a locked groove endlessly circling the spindle of his mind. Mr. Jones felt ashamed of that scanty midnight track list. When he was a younger man, his insomnia used to play it all. Sex, race, law, politics, Bach, Marx, Gurdjieff. All kinds of wild and lawless thinking, free-format, heavy, deep, and wide. Now, shit. Fit it all onto a pissant five-track EP going around and around.

“Said, be here Saturday,” Mr. Jones said.

“I know I did.”

“Black man my age, that could be asking a lot.”

“But here you are,” Archy said.

“Here I am.”

Here he was, sixty-six and still, in fact, lean and strong. The brown and gold plaid giving off that good casino-lobby smell of leisure suit fresh from the cleaners. Bird on his shoulder freely dosed with dandelion tablets mashed into a dish of Quaker grits. Van gassed up to the tune of fifty dollars, backed into the boy’s driveway. It was a white ’83 Econoline, odometer rolled over twice, napped with gray dust. Sitting there, rear doors open, empty as a promise. Boy had told him last week he was finished with the job.

“Mr. Jones, damn, I’m sorry, what else can I say?” Archy said. “It’s been a lot going on.”

“Told me it was finished.”

“Yeah, it pretty much was, but then, huh, turned out your treble driver went bad. I had to go all the way to this dude up in Suisun, pick up another one.”

Archy dialed the padlock on the garage door, unhooked the clasp. Stooped to grab hold of the door handle. Nine o’clock in the morning, boy in his pajamas. Slept in some kind of kung fu getup, satiny red with BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE stitched in white silk across the back.

“It really is almost done. Two, three hours, tops. Definitely for sure in time for the gig. When they expecting us?”

“You don’t know that, how you know you be ready in time?”

Archy shot a look at the bird, a roll of the eyes to say, Can you believe this man, waking me up at 8:57 in the goddamn morning to bust my balls with feats of logic? Archy Stallings to this day the only person besides Fernanda ever tried to engage the bird in conversation about Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones remembered the way Fernanda used to do it, how she would slam a bottle of pills down on the kitchen table, maybe, turn to the bird on its perch by the window, say something like You want to make sure he takes his medication, Fifty-Eight. Day he dies, I’m selling you to KFC.

“Nah, but seriously, Mr. Jones. I just need to put it back together, then you ready to go.”

“Young man,” Mr. Jones said, “I need to play it before the gig. See it works, how it sounds.”

The garage door swung upward on its hinges with a ringing of springs. The bird, a pound of warmth and steady respiration on Mr. Jones’s shoulder, greeted the Leslie speaker by reproducing the whir of its treble rotor when it powered up. But the Leslie, gutted, said nothing. Its cabinet was even emptier than the van, which at least had some furniture blankets piled into it, a tangle of rope and bungee cords, the dollies. All of the Leslie’s motors, wheels, drivers, rotating horns, and drum, its amplifier like a Kremlin of vacuum tubes, lay ranked in an orderly grid across the workbench at the back of the garage. Mr. Jones could see that everything had been cleaned and oiled and looked correct.

That gravitation toward correctness was something Mr. Jones had always liked about Archy Stallings. Even when Archy was a boy of five or six, kept his fingernails clean and square, never an escaped shirttail. Wrapped his schoolbooks in cut-up grocery bags. When he got older, fifteen, sixteen, boy started working those old-school hipster suits, the hat and a tie, styling himself somewhere between Malcolm and Mingus. Always reading some Penguin paperback, translated from the Latin, Greek; penguin the most correct of all birds, made even the fastidious Fifty-Eight look like a feather duster.

“I’ve been distracted,” Archy said. “And I dropped the ball. Between this thing with Dogpile, you know? And some other things…”

“You got to maintain focus,” Mr. Jones said, though the sound of his words made him wince. He recalled with perfect clarity the irrelevance of old men’s maxims to him when he was young. Rain against an umbrella, a young man all but sworn to the task of keeping dry. Archy was not so young anymore, and Mr. Jones had been raining down the pointless counsel on him for a good long time. No more able to restrain himself than a heavy-bellied cloud. “You made a commitment.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Archy said, shaking out his umbrella. “No doubt. Tell you what. You don’t have somewhere you need to be, I can put the whole thing together right now. That work for you? Take me, like, seriously, an hour. Then we can go over to your place, plug the Hammond into it, test out the whole rig. Thing needs adjustments, I make them right there. Then I help you load everything up into the van.” He straightened, tightened the string of his kung fu robe. “And you’re one. Ready for tonight. Okay? Sound like a plan?”

Using the placating tone he took with Mr. Jones, understanding like no one living, apart from one feathered savant, that Cochise Jones was in secret an angry man, prone to impatience, outrage, injury of the feelings. In the liner notes of Redbonin’, Leonard Feather called him “the unflappable Mr. Jones,” and at the time, in the chaotic midst of the seventies, that was the rap on Cochise, laid-back and taciturn like some movie Indian, Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow. Nowadays people took him for this harmless, smiling, quiet old parrot-loving gentleman who, from time to time, at the keyboards of a Hammond, adopted the surprising identity of a soul-jazz Zorro, fingertips fencing with the drawbars and keys. Mr. Jones felt as trapped inside that nice old gentleman, smiling, chuckling, as he had inside the wooden-Indian cool of his youth.

“Day I need help moving that thing,” Mr. Jones said, “is the day I give it up for good.”

The Hammond B-3 was diesel-heavy, coffin-awkward, clock-fragile. To gig with one, a man needed to be strong-limbed or willing to impose on his friends. From the day in 1971 when he bought it off Rudy Van Gelder, Mr. Jones had always gone with the former course.

“Find me a chair, then,” he said. “And maybe someplace I can put this damn bird.”

Archy went into the house, came back with two mugs of black coffee, a computer chair, and a broomstick that he rigged with a C-clamp for Fifty-Eight to perch on. He spread one of the furniture blankets from the back of the van on the floor of the garage. Turned out to be Count Basie’s birthday: KCSM was playing the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross version of “Li’l Darlin,” the Count himself taking a rare spin at the keys of a B-3, holding on to the mournful churchliness that the instrument had carried over coming, right around that time, into jazz.

Mr. Jones got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco and settled in to observe the boy work. He found it satisfying to watch Archy’s meaty Jazzmaster fingers take up one by one the Leslie’s unlikely components, items could have been scrounged from a kitchen drawer, a toy box, and a U-boat, then oblige them, one by one, to cohabit inside the cabinet. His pipe, an angular modernist briar, a gift from Archie Shepp, seemed to draw particularly well today. Alongside the driveway, bees lazed among the honeysuckle bells, and a hummingbird sounded its mysterious ping. Fifty-Eight rummaged idly with its black bill in its dappled breast. The Leslie would be fixed, and they would play their gig tonight up in the Berkeley hills. Everything was manifestly all right. And yet something continued to rankle at Mr. Jones, like a sour finger of acid in the windpipe, a failure that loomed ahead of or lay behind both Archy and himself.

“What ‘other things’?” Mr. Jones said.

Fifty-Eight pinged like a hummingbird.

“Huh?” Archy had the treble assembly mounted in the uppermost of the cabinet’s three stories, belted to the AC motor. He crouched, peering in, listening to the well-oiled silence as the disk with the two horns, the real horn and its dummy brother, whirled on the bearing tube. Blades of a propeller on a cartoon beanie. “What other things what?”

“You distracted by.”

Archy switched off the power, and the treble rotor came to rest with an audible sigh. He swung around to face Mr. Jones, laborious and purposeful as a bus turning a tight corner. Rocked back on his haunches, contemplating. Breathing through his nose. Making up his mind whether or not he wanted to start in on it.

“Turns out I got a son,” he said. “Fourteen years old. Showed up at the store yesterday out of the motherfucking blue. Turns out he’s been living right here in Oakland since June.”

Enough time went by for Archy to fairly conclude that Mr. Jones might have nothing to say. Even though Mr. Jones had suspected, even hoped, that Titus might be the “distraction,” the word “son” had caught him off-guard, which in turn left him nonplussed on a deeper level, irritated that the word should still, after all these years, reverberate. At one time you could drop it like a tray of dishes on a tile floor, cut off every conversation taking place inside of Mr. Jones. Now it played only with a soft tremolo of regret, more or less like any other regret that might be audible to the heart of a man of sixty-six. Mr. Jones sat there, confounded by grief, turning Archy’s information this way and that, a paperweight, something small and heavy cut with a lot of facets. Wanting to say something to this fine and talented young man, something lasting and useful about sons, loss, and regrets. The longer the silence stretched between them, the more irritated Mr. Jones became. Archy swung back to the Leslie. Unplugged it, picked up the bass rotor, and slid it into place, tightened the mounting nuts.

“You know your wife how long?” Mr. Jones said.

“Ten years.”

“Uh-huh.”

The pipe was dead, and Mr. Jones passed it to the bird. The bird nipped onto the pipe stem with a click of its beak, then flew off the perch and into the morning. Knock-knocking it against the sidewalk. Probably dropping its mess while it was out there, bird better housebroken than a child of five. A few seconds later, the bird came flustering back to light on Mr. Jones’s shoulder. Passed back the pipe with its freshly emptied bowl. Fifty-Eight had come equipped with that trick by some owner before Mr. Jones, before Marcus Stubbs, who had lost the bird to Mr. Jones in a poker game and who did not smoke a pipe and who furthermore could not have trained a shark to favor steak. Mr. Jones took the pipe, and the bird hopped back up onto the makeshift perch.

“I didn’t tell my wife yet, by the way,” Archy said. “Case you were wondering.”

“You didn’t know you had a son before now?”

“I knew, but I mean, we never had, like, contact. Boy was off in Texas somewheres, uh, Tyler, I think it is.”

“I know it.” Gigging at some corrugated-shack crossroads bar and grill, the night dense and humid and haunted by a smell of roses. Idris Muhammad on the drums back when he was a kid named Leo Morris. Going on half a century ago.

“Boy had his granny, the mom’s mom, living there,” Archy said. “The old lady sent me a picture one time.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mr. Jones poked another hank of his favorite perique into the bowl of his pipe, tamped it down with a finger.

“Nobody ever asked me to be a daddy to the boy,” Archy said. “And I didn’t… you know. Volunteer.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yesterday, boy shows up in my store, and I still don’t really understand why, but. He’s with Julie, you know.”

“Julie?

“Julie Jaffe.”

“I didn’t know that boy had any friends.”

“Julie got a full-on crush on the motherfucker.”

“Oh,” Mr. Jones said. “So he’s like that?”

“I do believe that he is,” Archy said.

Nothing in that to disturb Mr. Jones. When it came to lifestyles and behaviors, Mr. Jones played it strictly live and let live. Gays, Wiccans, people who wanted to punch a metal grommet in their earflaps. But somehow it made Mr. Jones sad, without surprising him, to learn that Julie Jaffe had come out a homosexual. That felt to him like something too complicated, too heavy, for a boy so young to lay on himself. He did not disapprove, but he could not see any reward in it. “Boy that age,” he said, shaking his head. “Smart, too.”

The bird beeped like Mr. Jones’s microwave, four times. Popcorn, popped. Then, following its own inscrutable logic, it began to articulate Groove Holmes’s version of the chorus to “American Pie.” A ghostly rotor whirring in its throat.

“Said they met up at some film class,” Archy said, setting the woofer drum into place in the lower story of the Leslie. “Over at the Southside Senior Center.”

“Is that right?” Mr. Jones said, staring at the parrot as if to warn it to hold his tongue about that evening in June.

“It’s a Quentin Tarantino class. I don’t know, I guess they’re studying Kill Bill or some shit, watching a bunch of kung fu movies, B movies. Surprised you didn’t sign up for it, loving that Pulp Fiction like you do.”

“Only I did sign up for it,” said Mr. Jones. “Sounds like you got to be talking about my boy Titus. No shit, that’s your son?”

Archy raised up slow and careful. Came around on Mr. Jones a little at a time, like he expected to find himself looking down the barrel of a gun. “You know him?”

Whenever Mr. Jones, again in the characteristic style of useless old men, wished to contemplate the brokenness of the world, or at least that part of the world bounded by the Grove-Shafter Freeway and Telegraph Avenue on Forty-second Street, he had only to look across and up two doors to the home of his neighbor Mrs. Wiggins. The woman already seemed old when he and Francesca first moved in with Francesca’s mother back in 1967. But Mrs. Wiggins was strong then, furious and churchgoing, pleased to be known for and to advertise her own iron rule over the tribes of loose children who flowed like migrants through her door—the late Jamila Joyner among them—taking what she could pay them in love and beatdowns, in clean clothes, food on the table. Years, decades, Mrs. Wiggins went on and on, like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the Solomon Islands or wherever, nobody ever showing up to reinforce her, tell the poor woman to surrender. But time, crime, and misery in all its many morphologies had at last ground old Mrs. Wiggins down. Though she lived still, she was a gibbering ghost of herself. You had to pity any child who found himself consigned by the high court of bad luck to her care. When Mr. Jones was growing up in Oklahoma City, he had been taken to a carnival whose sideshow featured a man purported to be John C. Frémont and a hundred and twenty-odd years old. Bone hands, a mat of hair, and a pair of filmy eyes peering out from a heap of blankets, shivering. All around the staring thing, in the shadowed tent, stirred the freaks and bodily horrors, sly, embittered, and cavorting. That was how Mr. Jones thought of old Mrs. Wiggins now, in that little house across the street.

“I might be the cause of this particular distraction coming your way,” Mr. Jones said. “Titus stays with Mrs. Wiggins. You know that house across the street from me?”

“Yeah, okay. She was Jamila’s, like, auntie.”

“I see the boy come out the house one day, something about him seemed familiar, you know? Boy had on a little sweater vest. Hair in order, crease in his jeans.”

“He does present a neat appearance, I will give you that.”

“We started talking.”

In those three words, Mr. Jones condensed a two-week history of passing nods. The boy coming and going on his bicycle at any given time of the day or night, Mr. Jones looking for signs of creeping doom on the child but observing, day after day, nothing of note except a small and fiercely maintained repertoire of button-downs and blazing white tees. Then, all at once, a blast of conversation, Titus drawn in by a burst of eerie parrot zitherings coming through Mr. Jones’s kitchen window, KQED having shown The Third Man the night before.

“Boy told me he wants to be a movie director,” Mr. Jones said. “Talking about Walter Hill, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick. I’m thinking, well, all right.”

“He has taste.”

“Then he mentions how he likes Tarantino. So I told him about the class. Only when we got there, this one dude in a wheelchair.” Mr. Jones broke off, pressed his lips together. Took a deep breath, shaking his head in furious sorrow. “Says he has a bird allergy.”

According to Dr. Hanselius at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, bird allergies were, quote, extremely uncommon, unquote, and something in the lingering sting of humiliation that Mr. Jones had felt that night, a sense that he and the bird had been the victims of some esoteric form of bigotry, fed the anger that had been mounting in him since finding out that the Leslie wasn’t ready for tonight’s gig; since being thrown out of the Tarantino class; since the assassination of Marcus Foster or Dr. King; since 1953, 1938.

“Son of a bitch probably sleeps on a feather pillow every motherfucking night,” Mr. Jones said.

He looked at the bird, feathers giving off that faint parrot smell of scorched newspaper, in whom all his loneliness and outrage were distilled. Fifty-Eight screamed like a slide whistle.

“So I had to leave,” Mr. Jones said, aware that his explanation of his role in bringing Archy his son had fallen somewhat off track. “Titus stayed. And Nat’s boy was, like, sitting right there.”

“In the front row, right by the teacher?”

“Right down front and center. Guess the two of them, they must have hit it off. I thought maybe it could happen, boy might find his way to you sooner or later.”

“You mean you knew?”

“Not for sure.”

“But, I mean, Mr. Jones, how come you didn’t just tell me?”

Mr. Jones squirmed at the question. “Figured I already played my part. Might be y’all’s turn next. You and him.”

“Wow,” Archy said. “Huh. You are a cryptic old motherfucker sometimes, Mr. Jones.”

“I can’t disagree.”

“You move in mysterious ways. Did you tell them?”

Maybe that was when Mr. Jones began to realize that he felt offended. “Think I would say something to them, not you?”

“Must of taken some serious figuring between them, find their way to my doorstep.”

“That where Titus is now, your doorstep?”

“Figurative doorstep.”

“Not living with you?”

“From, like, one day to the next? Uh, yeah, ‘Hi, I’m your son,’ ‘Great, okay, you can move in’?”

Mr. Jones tried to find the flaw in this scenario. He loved Archy Stallings and had always tried to see the best in him. He was struggling to understand what would keep a man from taking hold of the unexpected blessing of a live boy, good-looking and correct, with commendable taste in film directors.

“I don’t move that fast, Mr. Jones, you know that. And like I told you, I didn’t say nothing about it yet to Gwen. I’m already number one on her shit parade due to certain lapses in judgment.”

“But you didn’t leave him with Mrs. Wiggins?”

“Nah, he’s staying with Nat and them for right now. Figured, make Julie happy. Have himself a little slumber party up in the attic.”

“That ain’t what you figured,” Mr. Jones said.

“No,” Archy agreed. “No, you’re right. It’s just, with the baby coming, and the Dogpile thing…”

“Distractions.”

“Yeah.”

“Getting you off your main focus.”

“That’s right.”

“Which is what, again?”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Hey, Mr. Jones? What’s wrong?”

Mr. Jones was up and out of his chair. He reached out a hand to Fifty-Eight, and the bird sidled up the gangplank to its inveterate perch.

“Mr. Jones, what did I say? Why you leaving? I’m not quite done, but I’m almost.”

“Just bring it to the gig,” Mr. Jones said. “It don’t work, fuck it.”

He started toward the back of the van, wanting—or feeling that at the very least he ought—to tell Archy about Lasalle, born and died April 14, 1966. Tell him about the two hours and seventeen minutes’ worth of the pride and the joy that Archy had been squandering for fourteen years. He went to the Econoline, slammed the doors on the empty cargo bay. Mr. Jones helped the bird onto the headrest of the driver’s seat, where he liked to ride, clutching the shoulder belt with one claw to keep its balance.

“Maybe you need to start trying to focus on the distractions instead,” Mr. Jones said. “Maybe then they wouldn’t be so distracting.”

“Mr. Jones! Hey, come on, now. What’d I say?”

Mr. Jones got into the van, started the engine. Even over the slobbering of its three-hundred-horsepower V8 Windsor, he could hear Archy repeating uselessly, “Mr. Jones, I’m sorry.”

“Pulling a Band-Aid,” Gwen said.

“Not even,” Aviva said.

“You promise?”

“I promise. Be brave.”

Aviva was flying the bravery flag. Feet planted side by side, flat on the gray Berber wall-to-wall. New sandals with straps that crisscrossed in epic-movie-style up past her ankles, toenails freshly painted plum. Suntanned legs shaved, shins shining like bells in a horn section. Gray linen skirt and white linen blouse, not new but tailored with severity and maintained with care. Blouse buttoned to a professional altitude and yet at the collar managing to betray a fetching freckled wedge of clavicle and suprasternal notch. On her lap, an abstruse tome entitled Acupuncture: Points and Meridians.

“‘Be brave,’” Gwen said. She tugged at the hem of the overworked black maternity skirt she had pressed into service for this exercise in ritual humiliation. Her shirt, though crisp and clean, was originally her husband’s and Hawaiian. But her hair was looking all right. Clean, springy, baby locks freshly twisted. Her hair was definitely equal to this morning’s ordeal, and in that Gwen found a modicum of comfort if not, perhaps dangerously, defiance. She cleared her throat. “If I was brave, Aviva, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“I mean long-term brave,” Aviva said. “Big-picture brave.”

“The cowardly kind of brave.”

“Right,” Aviva said. “As opposed to the stupid kind.”

This distinction accorded with Gwen’s experience and, to a lesser extent, her beliefs; and yet making it did not comfort her at all. “You swear,” she said, seeking this guarantee for the third time that morning. “Aviva, you swear to me.”

“It does not mean a thing,” Aviva said.

“Because, I have to tell you, it feels so meaningful that I kind of want to vomit.”

“You going to be sick?” said the Saturday receptionist, looking over from her monitor to study Gwen, her tone saying, Don’t you throw up in my office. She had a vibrant head of sister curls, and Gwen recognized her as a fellow disciple of Tyneece at Glama. They had crossed paths a few times, pilgrims to the shrine. Something about the woman had always bothered Gwen, and now she knew what it was: an invisible, pervasive miasma of Lazar.

“You know, I might?” Gwen said. She lowered her voice to the peculiarly audible whisper common among the women of her family; peculiar not in its audibleness but in the disingenuous way that, like God handing down His commandments to a bunch of folks He knew perfectly well were going to break all of them repeatedly for all time, it bothered to be a whisper at all. A Shanks woman with a practiced embouchure could not only modulate the dynamics of her whisper but send it through closed doors, around corners, across time itself to echo everlastingly, for example, in the reprobate ears of a granddaughter married to a no-account man. “Having to eat you-know-what will do that to you.”

Aviva lowered her face to her textbook, not quite in time to conceal a smile. The receptionist, for her part, did not appear to find Gwen amusing. Her long fingernails resumed their furious clacking against the keys of her computer, a sound that had been annoying Gwen, she realized, since they sat down. Gwen shifted in one of the vinyl-upholstered steel chairs that furnished the waiting room, tipping herself first onto her left buttock and then onto the right. Whenever she leaned one way or the other, her thighs peeled away from each other with a sigh, like lovers reluctant to part. The muscles at the small of her back had gathered themselves into an aggrieved fist. Baby’s head was jammed up against the left side of her rib cage, just under her heart, right at the spot where Gwen ordinarily felt premonitions of disaster.

“What I need,” she said, in the same Shanks whisper, audible to the dermatologist in the office next door, “is something to wash it down with.” Thinking of a cup of creamy white suff, which she would never again permit herself to enjoy. “Something to get rid of the taste of—”

“Shush,” Aviva said. She reached down for her handbag, unzipped an inner pocket, and took out a miniature airplane bottle of Tabasco sauce. “Put a few drops of that on it.”

Gwen took the bottle and shook it a few times, thinking, Squeeze a few drops into Lazar’s bathroom soap dispenser. Massage the stuff right into his stubbly pink head. Work it right on down to the pores.

As she pictured herself, oddly satisfied, performing this bit of revenge grooming, the door between the waiting room and the examination area swung open and Dr. A. Paul Lazar, FCOG, came out. He appeared to be in a transitional state between the delivery room and the seat of his bicycle, green scrub top worn over slick black Lycra shorts and a pair of Nike bike shoes. In this hybrid getup, he looked perfectly suited to his waiting room, which conformed to the general aesthetic of Berkeley doctors’ offices by freely mixing elements of a secondhand furniture showroom, a real estate title company, and the Ministry of Truth from 1984. Lazar was better-looking and not as young as Gwen remembered him, not quite so pallid and dead-eyed. But there was still something fish-faced about the man.

“Ladies,” he said inauspiciously. He held out his hand for them to shake it, with an air of portent but also a hint of mischief, as if they had gathered to sign a treaty that would permit him to occupy their country in the guise of defending it. “Come on in.”

Aviva slid the acupuncture atlas into a canvas KPFA tote bag and stood up. Gwen leaned on Aviva’s arm for help getting to her feet. Lazar watched her rise with a bright diagnostic eye. Dread or the skull of her baby seemed to wedge itself deeper between the bones of Gwen’s rib cage as she followed Aviva into the office. It was a dull tank—black steel shelves, artwork by Pfizer, view of the parking lot—enlivened only by the disorder of Lazar’s medical texts and by a framed photograph of him sharing the sun atop some gray-green mountain with a horse-toothed young woman and two Italian bicycles. Lazar and his wife or girlfriend were smiling with an air of dutiful rapture, the way you did when some total stranger agreed to snap a photo of you. Gwen fanned the flicker of pity that lit within her at the sight of Lazar’s office, sensing that the light of its flame offered her sole hope of finding a path out of the mess she had gotten the Birth Partners into. Pity and pity alone could mask the bitter taste of shit.

“So,” Lazar said. “Here you are.”

“Here we are,” Gwen agreed, trying to stand up to his blue eyes as they further annotated her case. Edema, melasma.

“I know I have you two over a barrel,” he said. “I appreciate the gesture nevertheless.”

He smiled insincerely to show them that he was pretending to be kidding. The flame of Gwen’s pity was snuffed out. She screened a brief martial arts sequence in her imagination, perhaps a hundred frames in all, ending with a different gesture, one that would introduce her foot to the knob of Lazar’s larynx. She retained control of herself and resisted the urge to share this scenario with him. Still, his remark proved difficult for either of the partners to rally back over the net.

“I—” Gwen glanced at Aviva. “I spoke to Lydia this morning. She sounds good. I don’t know if you—”

“She’ll pull through just fine,” Lazar said. No thanks to you, said his eyes.

No, no, Gwen was only being paranoid. She had been out of line yesterday. Allowed her emotions to overcome her judgment, which was not at all like her, by nature and fiat, by habit and preference. Powerful as her emotions could be, she had known since she was seven years old that they were good for very little, and that by contrast, her judgment was uniquely reliable. It was all that, and the long, bloody unraveling of the birth yesterday, and then the hormones rolling like a thunderhead across the prairie of her third trimester, that had led Gwen to betray her principles. From a medical point of view, Dr. Lazar had performed flawlessly. Gwen had no clinical beef with him, none worth jeopardizing their standing at the hospital, which, like that of all nurse-midwives who had privileges at Chimes, was always mysteriously fragile. Now, thanks to an intervention by Aryeh Bernstein, all that Gwen needed to do was speak the two most meaningless words in the English language to Paul Lazar, and she would be forgiven. An apology, what did Nat always say, supposedly quoting his dad: It was a beautiful thing, no, a miracle of language. Cost you nothing and returned so richly. Easy for Nat to say.

“Yesterday was long and confusing,” she began, knowing this would not do, that the logical conclusion of the line, were she to follow to it, must be that fault lay not with Gwen or bad luck but with poor, long, confusing yesterday afternoon. “Normally, Doc, I am way too proud ever to put myself in the kind of position that I put myself into yesterday when I lost my cool.”

Aviva sneaked a glance at her partner and, somewhere in the profoundly dark recesses of her deep-set eyes, sent up an arcing flare of warning. Gwen had not come to discuss with Paul Lazar, MD, the flow and vagaries of her pride or her cool.

“And so,” Gwen tried.

She became aware of a flat, fetid taste building up at the back of her tongue. In coming here, she saw, she had been instructed not only to swallow her pride, apologize to this man who had insulted her with a racial slur, but also to put up with his smugness, and his bike shorts, and worst of all, the equine grin of his woman in the photograph, which no longer struck Gwen as pitiably friendless so much as self-satisfied, boastful, the smile of someone who felt that she most belonged on the tops of mountains. Or, no, maybe the bike shorts were the worst thing of all.

“And so,” she resumed, “looking back over my conduct. And taking into consideration the strong recommendation of my partner. Who has spent her whole professional life standing up to doctors, hospitals, insurance company bean counters…”

“Gwen, darling,” Aviva said, mixing forward the Brooklyn, either to ironize the term of endearment or else by way of genuine warning.

“…so that you can be sure she knows, the way I know, that just like we have to be twice as competent, twice as careful, twice as prepared, twice as sensitive, and twice as cool under fire—”

“Are we talking about midwives or Jackie Robinson?”

“—as some Lance Armstrong wannabe doctor with a diploma from—” she checked the med school sheepskin—“Loma Linda—”

“Whoa,” Lazar said. “Excuse me?”

“—just like she knows we have to be twice as good at everything as you all—”

“For God’s sake, Gwen—”

“—you can be sure that Aviva knows, because she’s the one who told me, and because God knows I’ve seen her do it enough times herself, that we also have to eat twice as much shit.”

Aviva fell back in her chair.

“So that’s what I’m here to do. In two bites. Two little words. Not the two words I might choose to say if I had any choice in the matter, but I don’t.”

Gwen stood up with what felt to her like remarkable alacrity and even, for the first time in many weeks, a kind of grace. The sight of Aviva slumped and fuming in her chair, the glitter in Lazar’s eyes—he would move to have their privileges pulled, no doubt about it—stirred no answer of remorse or regret. She went to the door, and put her hand on the knob, and turned back to Dr. Lazar, and, not quite as if she were telling him to go fuck himself, not quite as if she were suggesting that he conduct an experiment to see how far up his ass he could fit the saddle of his three-thousand-dollar Pinarello, but rather with the full force of the pity to which lately she had pinned her hopes of slipping through this ordeal without ruining everything that she and Aviva had both worked so hard to accomplish, found two little words to sum up her feelings toward this narrow-assed, C-sectioning, insurance-company-obeying excuse for a doctor, toward his entire so-called profession, toward the world that regarded everything that was human and messy, prone in equal measure to failure and joy, as a process to be streamlined and standardized and portion-controlled:

“I’m sorry.”

Feeling as if she were kicking her way across a swimming pool, free of mass, momentum, inertia, Gwen went through the outer office to the door. Aviva caught up to her at the elevator, change jangling against a key ring in her tote bag.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen said again, and this time it was not an expression of regret for the things she had said or done but rather the opposite: Her apology was, as apologies so often are, fighting words. She was sorry only that she was not sorry at all.

She rolled to a stop in front of the house, footsore, craving a shower, each soft part of her body affixed with an epoxy of hormones and sweat to at least one other part. Nauseated by the tide of jasmine that surged down the front porch across the yard to beat against the slat fence in a spiky spray of blossoms whose color and smell reminded her of the flesh of spoiled bananas. Irritated by the insect buzz of a harpsichord on KDFC (which she obliged herself to tune in to for the supposed relaxing properties of baroque music, despite its always having struck her as the auditory equivalent of trying to fold origami in your mind). Preoccupied not by the proper strategy for facing the inevitable board to which, after her latest self-righteous outburst, she and Aviva must now submit themselves but instead by trying to cook up some plausible excuse to bail on tonight’s childbirth class. She cut the engine. The door to the garage, irremediably cluttered, swung open on its hinges, irreparably creaky. And here came Archy, dressed in his three-piece Funky Suit—ten yards of purple satin—backing a massive wooden chunk of gig equipment along the driveway toward the bed of his El Camino, apparently in no need at all, as usual, of any excuse to forget about Lamaze.

The class was held Saturday evenings in the community center of a Baptist church on Telegraph. Gwen had selected it, from among the dozens that weekly rehearsed the expectant of Berkeley and Oakland in techniques of breathing and relaxation, because she had heard that it drew young black couples. She hoped not only that she and Archy might thus (so ran the fantasy) befriend the nice 60/40 boho-to-bougie-ratio mommy and daddy of some future nubby-headed little playmate for their baby but also, by an unhappy mathematics, to reduce the possibility that she would bump into one of her patients among the circled yoga mats. As it turned out, the only other black people attending the underenrolled session that convened each week beneath the humming fluorescent tubes of the recreation hall, with its lingering fug of feet and armpits from the capoeira class that preceded it, were a pair of single mothers having only their own mothers to coach them, and the husband halves of two biracial couples, one Asian wife, one white. The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church’s religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory. In any case, there was nothing for Gwen to learn: Apart from whatever marital and parental unity it might symbolize, their attendance was manifestly, even blatantly, for the benefit of Archy. Yet every week he forgot about class until Gwen reminded him, then he tried to pretend that he hadn’t forgotten, then he spent the entire class wearing a look so earnest, so engaged, so eager to absorb the parturient wisdom of that bitter and treacly old windbag Charmayne Pease that there was no way—and Gwen had tried—to credit it as genuine.

This facial expression, too patient, too forbearing, too sincere to be anything but mocking, had begun to occupy the space between his chin and forehead sometime early in her pregnancy. It was a kind of précis, for Gwen, of her husband’s whole attitude toward impending fatherhood as its duties and obligations had so far been revealed to him. He could take the business seriously, it seemed to her, only to the extent that he knew enough, most of the time, to pretend to take it seriously. Even then she had to push his nose in it to get him to pay attention, forcing on him articles and Web links related to spina bifida, dorsal sleeping and SIDS, the pros and cons of pacifiers. Reading aloud to him from pregnancy books that she bought and feigned to study, bored and perpetually quarreling in her mind with the authors, only so that Archy would be obliged, lying beside her in bed at night, to listen to her reading aloud. It was like one of those Piaget experiments on babies: The prospect of being a father, when you removed it from his immediate view, ceased, in his mind, to exist. And the reappearance, whenever Gwen reminded him, was more painful to her than the vanishing.

So she arrived home that night, having spent the afternoon listening like some Zen apprentice to the sound of Aviva not saying anything about the meeting with Lazar—the silence more painful than any reproach, Gwen’s life furnished perhaps too amply with people who wore you out with paradox—feeling that smooth cranium of dread lodged against her rib cage, prepared to let her lying, cheating, no-good Darling Husband off the hook tonight—and look at the fool! Saving her the trouble. Messing around with his bungee cords and his moving-van blankets. Big and purple as the cause of all her problems, the ridiculous splendor of his platform saddle shoes measuring in lofty inches the distance between him and any world that might construe itself in terms of duty and obligation.

Though only a few minutes earlier, she had been trying out on herself various backhanded or gently sarcastic ways of telling Archy that she wanted only to spend tonight tangled on the couch with him, eating Fentons Swiss milk chocolate from a half-gallon carton and watching whatever program he felt like watching, now she perceived that she would rather let him fuck every woman in Ethiopia and Eritrea, in twos and threes, than let him miss out on the company of Ms. Pease.

Then she caught sight of the play of muscle across the back of his jacket, glints like the naps of knife blades, as, in a single effortless arc, he hoisted the big wooden cube of the amplifier—old Mr. Jones’s precious Leslie, on whose repair Archy had lavished their final weeks of childless freedom—into the back of his car. Hoisting that great big thing as if it were a carton full of packing peanuts. Gwen let out a sound that slipped unintentionally from the intended hmmph of disapproval to a bass thrum like the loosing of some inner string.

“Uh-oh,” he said, turning. “You got your hand on your hip, that way.”

“I know you must be unloading,” Gwen said. “Even though it looks like you’re putting stuff in.”

“Yeah, no, uh, we got a gig tonight. A good one. Kind of political fund-raiser, up by Kensington. Cragmont, someplace, off the Arlington or—” He saw that she was not interested in details of North Berkeley geography. “Oh, shit. It’s Saturday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the thing. They really don’t need me. It’s Nat and Boom and Mr. Jones, and long as I get him the Leslie, that man with just his one left foot can do anything that I could offer on bass with two hands. Seriously.” He consulted his watch. “We run it up there, drop it off, grab you something to eat, raise that blood sugar up to a useful level, we can make it back down for the birthing class right on time. Sound like a plan?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, that does sound like a plan,” Gwen said. “But not your plan. Your plan, let me guess: Toss the rest of that stuff in there.” She gestured to the J Bass in its case, the bass amp and preamp, stacked beside the right front fender of the El Camino. “Head on up to North Berkeley, not even give a second thought to the only important thing you have going on in your life right now. I bet you didn’t even write me a damn note.”

At this grave charge, Archy started to register a protest, prepared to make his objections known, feeling his way into it like a man backing down a hallway in the dark, as if hoping that when he reached the far end, he would discover, with a cry of vindication and triumph, that indeed, au contraire, he had written a note and simply, in the interval, forgotten. But no; the hope of this died in his eyes. Then he got himself an idea. Held up a finger. Patted his pocket. Nodded. Overplaying the whole thing with an air of comic pantomime, trying to defuse her by acting cute, a tactic with a decent record of success over the years, though failures were numberless and spectacular. He reached into the breast pocket of the Funky Suit jacket, took out a black Sharpie and a scrap of paper that proved to be an unpaid city of Emeryville parking ticket issued two years earlier, scrawled a few words on the back of it, and passed it to her with a ceremonious lack of ceremony. Gwen folded it in half without reading it, wondered why on that June afternoon two years previous his El Camino had been parked in front of 1133 Sixty-second Street, concluded that it was either a woman or a basement full of some dead man’s records, folded it a second time, and poked it back into his hand.

“I am going to take a shower,” she said. “Go to La Calaca Loca right now, and get me one of those elotes they have, light on the chile, and a fish taco, two fish tacos, the batter kind. And a bottle of that tamarindo, and have it back here and waiting for me when I come down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Archy said.

A funny look passed across his face, like the flicker of a television during a brownout, and his eyes darted from right to left, tracking the cicada whirr of a bicycle. She turned to see the back of a long-limbed boy on a bicycle, maybe a neighborhood kid, nobody she could place, and when she looked back at Archy, he was swinging the rest of his gear into the El Camino, saying,“Elote, huh, yeah, that sounds good. I could eat Mexican every day.” He turned back to her. “I love Mexico.” He wiped his forehead with the back of one satined arm. “Baby, let’s go to Mexico. Like, tonight. Come on. Let’s do it. Let’s move to Mexico.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m serious.” He made his face all serious, or maybe it really did fall out that way for once. “I am being totally sincere.”

“And I am totally, sincerely, about to have a baby, Archy. How am I going to go to Mexico?”

Even as the words burst from her lips, she regretted them, realizing, probably before Archy did, that when he went to Mexico, he need not take her along. Archy could go to Mexico, flat out move there, any damn time he wanted to. He could leave tonight.

Archy took off his sunglasses to wipe the lenses on the end of his necktie. Barefaced, he gazed at her, expression ironic, just kidding, for now.

“Fish tacos,” he said. “For days.”

The valet parkers in matched tan coveralls stood shoulder to shoulder like convicts chained at the ankle, heads back, chins pointed at the sky. Something up there causing them to ponder. Archy nosed the El Camino up the hill toward them and the venue: round tower of butterscotch stucco with a Juliet window, blue-tiled arch in a butterscotch gate. Creeping up the street as it traced the switchback course of some old arroyo, neighborhood cars shouldering in from both sides to leave clearance just sufficient for his wide-track choogling slab of lost Detroit. Archy already feeling crowded enough by the marital silence that at present filled the vehicle, knowing perfectly well, with all the almanack sagacity the word “husband” implied, that the present silence was more portent than aftermath. A formulating stillness. That pressure drop, brooding and birdless, right before the touchdown of a tornado.

They passed Nat’s Saab, rolling up to the valet stand where the four parkers in their Carhartt zip-ups stood gawping at the sky, Hispanic kids as varied in size and girth as sample popcorn servings ranged along a movie theater snack bar. Gwen poked her head out the window on her side of the El Camino, saw what they saw, slumped back against the bench seat. Fitted her folded arms between her breasts and belly. Spoke for the first time in approximately eighteen minutes, or at any rate laid down an utterance, troubling to pack it beforehand, like a jihadi packing an IED, with shards of irony, nails of bitterness, jagged chips of bleak wonder.

“Huh,” she said.

Archy got out of the car. For a second or two, his eyes were diverted by the great canvas of city, bay, and bridges stretched across the frame of eucalyptus trees beyond the terra-cotta roof tiles of the venue. Paint laid on with brushes fat and fine, washes of fog and winking sun on window grids, the foundered wreck of Alcatraz, the iron giant jubilating up there on Twin Peaks. And then there it was, against the curve of August sky.

As long as his forearm, as fat around, humming to itself like Nat Jaffe evolving a theory about the profound effect on world history if Hank Crawford had not stood up Creed Taylor for the sessions that became the first album by Grover Washington, Jr., the Dogpile blimp slid by. All black from nose to fins, emblazoned on its flank with a red paw print and the Dogpile name in bold red slab-serif type. A taunt implied in the sloth of its passage, lazy and deliberate as a Benz-load of bangers rolling by your door with their windows down.

“We’re not staying,” Archy told the valets as he went around the back of the El Camino to unstrap the Leslie in its swaddling clothes.

“How about you just leave the suit, then,” one of the parkers said. “Because my flashlight is dead.”

Archy might have liked to offer the young man, if not a return critique of the brown bag he was standing stuffed into like a furtive forty-ounce, at least an anatomical storage suggestion with regard to the putative flashlight. But like all pure stylists, Archy had long since learned that in handling those who could not dig, the only proper course was to carry on confusing them. Light ’em up, blow ’em out like candles. The intended effect of his withering stare was diminished to a degree by the snort of laughter that came out of Gwen.

“Flashlight,” said his betrayer. “I love it.”

The musicians had been asked to set up out-of-doors, beside a goldfish pond at the far end of a slate-flagged courtyard strung with chili-pepper lights and paper lanterns: pink concertinas, green pagodas. Archy came huffing and heaving through the French doors, moving fast under a hundred pounds of Leslie, harried along by a calmly panicking little Asian chick with a clipboard over which her pen hovered, ready to inventory every ding or scrape Archy might be inclined to put into a wall or doorway.

“Thank you for coming, by the way,” she said. “At such short no—oh. Oh my God, please be careful.”

“I am known for my carefulness,” Archy assured her. “I would say thank you for letting us play, but the truth is, I’m doing you a favor, ’cause we are way better than that weak shit that canceled on you, fully three of those guys are dentists.”

“Oh, well, thanks,” said the girl from the campaign.

Nat, wearing his red Jazzmaster slung low across his narrow hips, raised an index finger and the opposite eyebrow, signaling to Archy. Warning him not to interrupt or spoil the effect of the display of ferocious swearing being mounted by Stanley “El Boom” Ellerbe, hunched over the leg bracket of his floor tom, fiddling at it with a plastic table knife. El Boom was a bus driver, as notorious for jinxed equipment as he was for letting out, in long and enthusiastic skeins, the choice words he bit back and stored up all day long in serving the public and the whims of traffic behind the wheel of the 51. Cool as a cup of crushed ice on the drums, though, El Boom kept time like an atom clock.

No sign yet of Mr. Jones or his Hammond, a circumstance guaranteed to complicate Archy’s own marital timing since A) he could not in good conscience drop off the Leslie without first verifying that it worked all right for Mr. Jones, B) the old man, despite his pride or vanity, would need help getting the Hammond down all those stairs, and C) Archy liked the way Mr. Jones always seemed to dig it when he swung the Leslie around, taking the pleasure an older man sometimes took in the exertions of a younger one. Flashing all those little Krugerrands he kept salted away up inside his mouth there, saying, “Look out! Comin’ through!,” getting his whole bony self into it the way he might snuffle up the breeze off a snifter of Hennessy, a plate of fried catfish, or something else forbidden by his doctor. Tears in the man’s eyes when Archy first offered to repair the Leslie; Archy wished Gwen could have seen that. No need, of course, to mention that Mr. Jones had those pearly oyster eyes, always a certain film of moisture. Or, for that matter, what a grouch he was that morning, something mysteriously offensive to him in talk of Titus Joyner.

“Y’all go on, do what you have to do,” Archy told the clipboard girl, who was glancing toward the ever darkening cloud of blue air over El Boom Ellerbe as if trying to decide whether it presented a security threat. “I need help with this, I’ll be sure to call you.” His eyes went to her name tag so he could give proper emphasis to the dismissal and there read, with a smile, LESLIE.

El Boom left off questioning the maternal purity of his drum kit and stood up to greet the amplifier, venerable and pedigreed, a Model 122 known to have been owned at one time by Rudy Van Gelder, in whose Englewood Cliffs studio it was employed by Johnny “Hammond” Smith and Charles Earland before passing into the possession of Mr. Jones, on whose Redbonin’ it could be heard to everlasting glorious effect. Cleaned, oiled, restored, and rewired. Archy had been grateful for the chance to climb inside of history like that, walnut-paneled, belt-driven, analog history with all its parts spinning, however many hours of his spare time the job had required. What kind of insensitive, disrespectful, superficial person with the necessary skill set would ever turn his back on an opportunity like that? Not to mention the chance to help out a lonely old gentleman living off his Social Security, nothing but that and a small royalty on the co-credit (with a white record producer whose label kept the rights to every other song Cochise Jones ever wrote) for “Cold Cold Sunday,” a minor 1969 hit on the soul charts for Wilson Pickett that had been used in the late eighties in an ad campaign for Dreyer’s ice cream? Thus arguing on with the Gwen who lived inside his head, Archy eased the Leslie—the wooden one—down onto the flagstones and rumbled it, stately as a hearse, across the patio.

“Deep purple!” said El Boom, taking stock of Archy in his Funky Suit. Across the beeswax-buffed surface of the Leslie, the drummer ran the varnished walnut of his big-hitting right hand.

“Yeah, Boom, what up. How you doing?” Palm slap, finger tangle, shake, the older man’s hand dry and cool. “I got some tools in the car, you need pliers, a socket wrench, anything like that.” Archy fought down somewhere around 92 percent of the smile that tried to break loose on his face. “Blowtorch.”

“She-it,” said El Boom, reduced by helpless despair to this monosyllable, though he sustained it. “Thing’s a brand-new secondhand Ludwig.”

Archy shook his head in sham sympathy and turned to Nat, letting fly the smile. Nat played a lick on his unplugged guitar, a comic snippet of Carl Stalling’s cartoon jazz. With Mr. Jones sitting in at the organ, and with the original contractor for this evening’s musical entertainment laid up at home with some chronic alphabet letter of hepatitis, being a (soporific, in Archy’s opinion) guitarist, Nat had come armed with his Jazzmaster and a finicky old Epiphone to which he was attached for sentimental reasons, guitar being his second best instrument after piano. Guitar, organ, drums, they would be fine without Archy. He tried to work some of that reassurance into his eyes, then drew back a step and inclined his head in a way meant to signify the need for confidential communication with his partner. Nat fitted the Fender into its stand and picked his way among the cables to join Archy beside a man-high cactus in a Talavera pot, where only the goldfish would be able to overhear. Ugly things, technically koi, Archy supposed, freaky mutant motherfuckers all dappled and pop-eyed and tangled up in the shimmery scarves of themselves.

“Mr. Jones running late?”

Everything would be fine, Archy thought, at least until Nat looked up at the sky, got an eyeful of that big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety.

“Generally speaking,” Nat said. “Did you call him?”

“I saw him this morning. He was on it, giving me shit about being on time.”

“I find you have to tell him to come half an hour before you actually need him to be there. Now, not unlike you, he’s”—checking his watch, a Swiss-railroad number Nat kept set, out of habit from long-ago days tending bar, seven minutes ahead—“twenty-three minutes late.”

Something—pre-gig jitters, the last-minute-sub nature of the booking, the high caliber of the venue and clientele, for all Archy knew the politics behind the event itself, the candidate for president whose campaign the event would benefit not doing as well as might be hoped at this juncture—was bringing an edge to Nat’s voice. He had on a black sharkskin suit, by design too short at the cuffs of trousers and jacket and too snug across the chest. Black cowboy shirt snapped all the way up to its collar button. A bolo tie whose cinch was adorned with a miniature black-and-white portrait of Richard Nixon. Any one of these items of apparel might contribute to the increase of Nat’s native tight-assedness. Archy elected to forestall for another second or two having to tell Nat that, Leslie delivered, he would be blowing off the chance to expose the Wakanda Philharmonic to a mansionful of deep-pocket East Bay tastemakers any number of whom could be counted on in the near future to get married, turn fifty, or bar mitzvah their children, in order to go sit around, instead, on a rubber mat in a foot-stanky church rec room, learning a set of procedures and techniques without which, for fifty, sixty thousand years, fathers had managed to do all right. Even though it was becoming more difficult to imagine that Gwen would in any way welcome his feckless presence at the birth. Archy all stumbling and dropping shit around the castle like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein while Gwen plunged two-handed and full-tilt into the thunder and the lightning (life! life!) of the business, the job that she knew better than anyone with the possible exception of Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who for that matter was going to be there, too, rendering Archy more useless than he already felt.

“Is that how you do?” he said. “Tell people to come half an hour early just because you anticipate they going to be half an hour late?”

“Black people, yeah,” Nat said. “Thirty-seven minutes.”

“So, including me, you routinely—”

“You I cheat at least forty-five. And somehow, go figure, you’re still twenty minutes late.” He gave the back of his head a puzzled scratch. “I don’t claim to understand the math of it.”

“Yeah, look here,” Archy said, running a confidential finger alongside his nose. “I got Gwen in the car, and uh…”

“She okay?”

“Yeah, no, she’s fine. She uh, she just, I forgot—”

“I heard she’s been, I don’t know”—Nat pretended to search for the right word, though Archy could see it unboxed, unwrapped, plugged in, sitting there in the man’s mind all ready to go—“a little irrational past couple days. Stuff with the birth and the… incident. With the doctor. Guy sounds like a royal turd, but the way things work around that place—”

“Yeah, I don’t know, she—”

“You tell her about Titus yet?”

It was like dropping into a manhole, hearing that name. Every motherfucking time. Walking down the street, sun on your sunglasses, beats in your earbuds, rolling with your own particular roll along the pavement, and then fwoop! Not even the puff of smoke or patch of ashes that a thunderbolt might leave behind. Gwen was always accusing Archy of not thinking or caring about, not preparing for, the baby who was on its way. Which only showed how little she knew him or, to be fair, how parsimonious he could be in sharing with a woman, with anyone, the almost constant state of anxiety in which he was living. Anxiety that, for example, had led him to volunteer to keep an eye on little Rolando yesterday, to see how he could manage the whole diapers-and-formula routine. But this boy. Titus. His son, half grown and staring him down from the far side of all that resentfulness and abandonment. If Gwen knew about Titus Joyner—and sooner or later, she was going to find out—then there would be justice in her charge of obliviousness, lack of consideration. Because since yesterday Archy had been trying to resume his former state of happy ignorance and think as little as possible about the child he already had.

“That revelation is still, uh, forthcoming,” he said.

“Maybe you should try it out on her now,” Nat suggested. “Holistic approach. Cure it with poison. Fire with fire. Drive her insane from a totally different direction, she comes out at zero.”

“Yeah,” Archy said without enthusiasm. “Right now we’re at week thirty-six, I don’t think I have too much influence over the situation inside her head anymore.” Nat inclined his head, pursed his lips, nodding, having nothing to offer in the way of argument. “How’s he comporting himself round your house? Titus.”

“Oh, uh, fine. I don’t know. He’s okay. Funny kid.”

“Funny.”

“Solemn little motherfucker.”

“Solemn as in?”

“Solemn as in somewhat restrained in his emotional palette.”

“Fronting? Being hard?”

“Maybe some of that. But it seems like he and Julie—”

Before Nat could continue, he saw something that made both his eyebrows shoot up. His face went blank, like the screen of an Etch A Sketch, in a single shake.

“Hey, lady,” he said.

El Boom said, “Look out.”

Look out, here came Gwen, through the French doors that connected the patio to the living room with its arcing vaults and folk-art Virgins. She had checked a vintage bowling shirt out of Archy’s library, pink on black, originally sported, according to the inscriptions in silkscreen and embroidery thread, by an inferably large gentleman named Stan, bowling in the service of Alameda Wire and Pipe. She was bearing straight for Archy, endowed by pregnancy with that locomotive chug. No chance that she was coming to tell him he was off the hook, forgiven his sins, large or small. Gwen had never in her life arrived at forgiveness in the physical absence of its needful object. Not, at least, without the intervention of some external force: the advice of her father, for example, or of Dr. Nickens, the pastor of her childhood church, or, under certain conditions, some trumping piece of bad news. Said absence affording too convenient a vessel for the laying in of refined counterarguments, further supporting examples, freshly recalled instances of past infractions, etc.

“Hello, Nat,” she said. “Arch. Um. Okay. Listen here.”

Level and cool, she looked from Nat to Archy and back, and with an interior lurch, Archy concluded that Gwen had descended from the El Camino to issue an ultimatum in the presence of Nat Jaffe and the world, and whatever it was or however she phrased it, he would have to tell her about Titus, and that would be that, adieu and later to the second great partnership of his life, not because he had a son on the side, which, all right, was maybe no big thing, but because he had never mentioned the fact to Gwen, ever, neither in passing nor in detail. Because in ten years or more, Archy had never thought of the boy, not once, a habit of oblivion that continued even now, with the kid back and smacking up against the outside of their life like a moth banging against a lampshade. Stashed there, up in the Jaffes’ attic.

Archy knew an instant of pure panic. Nothing caused him greater revulsion than signs of weakness in a man, keenest of all in himself; and there was no one in this world weaker than someone trying to keep something secret, unless it be someone obliged to confess.

“I can’t stay, Nat,” he said, deciding to throw the littlest confession overboard first, see where that got him. “I’m really sorry. Gwen and I have birth class tonight, and when I said I could play, I just fucking forgot.”

“No,” said Nat and Gwen at the same time. Jinx, lock, you owe me a soda. And then Nat, without waiting for anyone to speak his name and release him, said, measuring the words, always happy to take the opportunity to educate, “Please, no, I totally get it. That shit is important, Arch. They’ve done all kinds of studies. You’re on your game, things are going to go a lot easier for Gwen and whoever that is in there.” He pointed a furry finger at Gwen’s belly. “Y’all go on and go.”

“No,” Gwen repeated. “Guys, I— Archy, your phone rang, in the car. I answered it.”

The mainspring of Archy’s panic tightened farther, his thoughts, like Nat’s watch, running seven minutes ahead of themselves. Ransacking all the files, thinking what girl, bitch, or lady, what mess did he leave lying around.

“It was Garnet Singletary,” Gwen was saying. “Archy, Mr. Jones. He, oh, Archy, he died. He’s dead.”

“He… what?” Archy said, feeling the words first as a surge of blood to his cheeks. “No, I saw him this morning.”

“I guess—I guess the neighbor lady, uh, Mrs. Wiggins, across the street. She’s the one who called the ambulance.”

Archy not all the way there yet, enough presence to notice how Gwen seemed rattled, shaky. This is true, he thought.

“I talked to him two hours ago!” Nat said, as if he thought these words could disprove, discredit, the nonsense Gwen was talking. He ran his fingers through his steely Brillo. Fished his phone out of the hip pocket of his jacket. “Yeah, hey, Garnet,” he said. “Nat Jaffe. What the fuck?”

He spun away across the patio, his back to Gwen and Archy, skeptical to a fault, doubting every story he heard on principle until he got independent confirmation, anything at all remarkable that anyone felt like putting out there an “urban legend,” a “misnomer,” a “popular delusion,” a “false etymology.” One of the man’s balls there to question the testimony of the other, both of them doubting what his dick had to say. Probably hoping Garnet would help him get hold of Mrs. Wiggins, the police report, the coroner’s statement.

Oblivious, El Boom woke up the kick drum, divvied out sixteenth notes between the hi-hat and snare, then began to lean heavily on the one, working up a half-drunk second-line crab-step rhythm that stumbled somehow into the break from “Funky Drummer” (King, 1970). Mr. Jones always claimed James Brown as a cousin on his mother’s side (offering no evidence that would satisfy Nat Jaffe beyond an unsupported mention in the liner notes for Redbonin’). Archy remembering the way Mr. Jones one time got down off his stool at Brokeland to execute a tricky Mashed Potato across the tile floor, studying his bitty bird feet with a dazed smile as if they were a couple of miracles.

“Oh, no,” Gwen said. “Archy, please don’t start that.”

She wiped at her own cheek with a forearm. She came over and did her best to get herself around him. He was too high and she too deep. So she pulled him over to a chair, one of those Mexican affairs made out of pigskin and sticks. She fell onto his lap, panicking the chair. In her arms, Archy let go of himself for a minute. The smell of Gwen’s hair, cool against his cheek, clean, flowery.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know.”

All at once—just like that—he could feel her forgive him. Somewhere in the midst of the continent of shock and grief that was Archy Stallings, a minor principality rejoiced.

“Closest thing I had to a father,” he said.

“That’s what you always said.”

She meant it to sound sweet, he knew, but it came out sounding like reproof as much as eulogy. Gwen got along with Mr. Jones, but to her he was a sweet-natured, emotionally vague, and reticent man whose greatest steadfastness, away from the keys of his organ, was loyalty to his parrot and to leisure wear of the 1970s, nothing at all like a father in any important way. Archy did not disagree with that assessment. He was okay with coming in second to Fifty-Eight, parrot was like some kind of prodigy, a Mozart of the birds.

“He was loading the Hammond,” Nat said, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “I guess he didn’t have the straps right on the dolly. The Hammond fell on top of him.”

Day I need help moving that thing is the day I give it up for good. Archy had let him go, let him walk out of the garage. Angry, stirred up about something that Archy would never understand. Careless, distracted, nobody to help him lift that heavy, heavy thing.

“Oh, uh, hi,” said Leslie the clipboard girl, peering out from behind Gwen, the one they sent in with a stick to poke the wrestling bear. “So, people are starting to show up? Robin and David were thinking you might want to, uh. Start?”

“We’re ready,” Nat said. “Just, uh, I’m going to have to make a little adjustment in the fee for you all, a reduction, I mean, because my bass player has a birthing class, and it turns out, wow, tragic thing, my organ player, he, uh, he just died.”

“Oh, no,” Leslie said, blinking. She glanced down at the clipboard, looking for a little help from the campaign on how to proceed in the event of a dead musician. “I’m so sorry.”

“So I only have a two-piece for you tonight. Guitar and drums. But we can—”

Two of the valet parkers came out onto the patio. One had Archy’s Jazz Bass in its soft gig jacket, the other coming right behind him with Archy’s tubes and wires. The lead parker handed Gwen a claim ticket for the car, and Gwen nodded them toward Archy.

“You got a trio,” she said to Leslie. “Plus one pregnant lady in a bowling shirt.”

Just before his hostess for the evening, who held the patent on a gene that coded for a protein to prevent the rejection of a transplanted kidney, directed everyone to gather under the carved and stenciled fir beams of her living room, and sent the young woman from the campaign out to tell the band to knock it off for ten minutes so that the state senator, Obama of Illinois, could address his fellow guests, each of whom had contributed at least one thousand dollars to attend this event, an address in which he would attempt by measured words and a calm demeanor to reassure them (vainly and mistakenly, as it would turn out) that their candidate for the presidency of the United States would not go down to inglorious defeat in November, Obama stopped in the doorway that opened onto the flagstone patio to listen for a minute to the hired band. They were cooking their way with evident seriousness of intent through an instrumental cover of “Higher Ground.”

The rhythm section consisted of a gray-haired older man in a white turtleneck, who had that deceptive stillness of the rock-solid drummer, whaling away and at the same time immobile as a gecko on a rock. A big dude in a preposterous suit, a younger man, played bass through a huge old wooden organ amplifier that was the size of an oven. Its acoustics lent a fat, muddy, molasses-black grandeur to the bass line. Off to one side, a grim-countenanced stick figure of a white guy coiled up the notes in high jazzy meringues on top of the heavy, heavy bottom of the tune, a personal favorite of the state senator. He lingered there in the doorway, his hostess getting a tiny bit antsy. Obama tapping his foot, bobbing his close-cropped head.

“Those guys are pretty funky,” he observed, directing his remark to a short, extraordinarily pregnant woman in a man’s bowling shirt who stood beyond the open patio doors, dark, pretty, her hair worn in a fetching artful anemone of baby dreadlocks. The fingers of her right hand flicked shadow bass notes on her belly. At his remark, the pregnant woman nodded without turning to look at him—there was an elaborate candelabra of a potted cactus behind whose tapered thorns she appeared to be attempting, somewhat punitively, to conceal herself. Obama was running for the United States Senate that summer and had given a wonderful speech last month at the Democratic Convention in Boston. When she did turn to him, her eyes got very wide.

“Friends of yours?” he said.

It was a reasonable inference, given the fact that, in her bowling shirt, she stood out from the other women in attendance, most of them done up in cocktail attire. She was also one of a strikingly few women of color in the room. She nodded again, more stiffly, no longer playing along with the bass, stare going glassy. Feeling big, he supposed, underdressed, and trapped behind a cactus by a celebrated black man in a fancy house full of white folks. He went further out a limb.

“My man on bass?”

The pregnant woman looked sidelong at him, a droll look, and seemed to recover from her initial bout of self-consciousness. “Well, that’s the question, now,” she said with an asperity that took him aback. “Isn’t it?”

“Senator?” said the hostess, looking very handsome in an elaborate thing, all crinkled and structural. “If you’re ready? I can ask the band to—”

“Let’s let them finish this number,” Obama said.

His memory filled in the missing vocal line, the lyrics that somehow managed to be at once hopeful and apocalyptic, perfectly in keeping with the mood of the hour politically, if there were anyone in the crowd to attend, which, frankly, the state senator from the 13th district of Illinois, judging from the bright unrelenting roil of chatter and gloomy expatiation going on, inside the house and out, kind of doubted. He listened awhile longer.

“Shame nobody’s dancing,” he said.

“I guess it’s not that kind of party,” said the pregnant woman.

“They seldom are,” Obama allowed. “All too seldom. Now, I would ask you to dance, but I don’t think my wife would be happy if it got back to her that I was observed dancing with a gorgeous sister in your condition.”

“I like the underlying philosophy of that,” the pregnant woman said, staring fixedly at the bass player in a way that confirmed, to the senator’s satisfaction, his earlier inference. “That’s a philosophy I can get behind. Shame it isn’t more widespread.”

The senator felt compelled to smile. “Brother puts his heart into it, though,” he observed. “You can see that. A lot of heart.”

The bass man felt his way up and down the fretboard like a blind man reading something passionate in Braille. The senator recalled having caught a few words over the PA earlier tonight, to the effect that the band wanted to dedicate tonight’s performance to someone who had died, name of Jones. He watched the man in the purple suit play his kaddish.

“That is quite a suit,” Obama said. “Takes a special kind of man to go around wearing a suit like that.”

“You know, he isn’t even aware of that?” the pregnant woman said. “Man doesn’t feel self-conscious, not one little bit embarrassed, walking around in that thing.” Scorn and admiration in her tone in about equal measure. “The outside of him matches perfectly with the inside. It’s like, I can’t even tell you. Not stubborn, I mean, yes, he can be stubborn as hell, stubborn and full of pride, but to walk around looking like that, I mean, a purple suit even a pimp might have doubts about it, and saddle shoes… you have to have—”

“Dignity.”

At the sound of the word, the pregnant woman looked at him. A strange expression passed over her face, as if, he thought, she might be experiencing a contraction.

“He just had a loss,” she said.

“I gathered that, something about a man named Jones.”

“Yeah, yes, he was supposed to be here, he played the organ. It’s Cochise Jones.”

“Cochise Jones, okay.”

Perhaps the name registered, a shallow footprint tracked in the sand of the senator’s memory. But the print might as easily have been left by Elvin or Philly Joe.

“He was supposed to be here, to play. It just happened, he passed this afternoon.”

“I am so sorry to hear that.”

“He was like a father to my husband.”

Somehow, seamlessly, the band morphed into a cover of Bad Medicine’s “Trespasser.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” Obama said. “You know, I could hear it in his playing. Something grieving. But I didn’t know what it was.”

“Mr. Jones was his own kind of shiftless fool,” she said gently. “A musician. He made, I guess he made, all these elaborate plans for his funeral, a marching band, a Cadillac hearse.” She shook her head. “The past two weeks, when we could have been getting ready for the baby, enjoying our last time alone together? My husband chose to spend them in the garage, repairing that dusty old dinosaur of an amplifier over there. Now, with a month to go? He’s going to get caught up in all this funeral foolishness. Instead of what he should be focusing on.”

“But you know,” the senator said, “I, I understand your frustration. We’ve all heard, we all know how musicians can be. But traveling around, campaigning, at home, around the country, I have seen a lot of people, met a lot of people. The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.”

At these words, perhaps, the state senator felt a slight misgiving, a mild Braxton-Hicks spasm of dread, recalling the purpose for which he had been flown up here yesterday, aboard Gibson Goode’s private airship, the Minnie Riperton, Goode on his way to some kind of memorabilia show, the senator catching a ride.

“And that reminds me.”

He turned back to the hostess, her evident impatience with his delay motivated less by some schedule she was sticking to than by her possible desire for reassurance about the upcoming election, which he hoped he would be able to provide.

“All right, Robin,” he told her. “Let’s do this.”

He shook hands with the pregnant woman, who appeared distracted, lost in thought, even surprisingly, given her original discomfiture, uninterested in the rising star from Illinois.

“You’re right,” she said, and for a second he could not retrieve the thread of conversation that she was following. “I have been wasting my life.”

“Oh, don’t be too hard on the brother, now,” he said, trying, with departure imminent, to keep his tone light.

“I don’t mean him,” she said. “I mean, I do, but I don’t. I mean what you said about work. About putting your heart and soul into something meaningful. Thank you for that.”

She shook his hand with a puzzling solemnity.

The band was silenced, the guests assembled, and Barack Obama loped into the living room, at ease and smiling. He stood against a high wall painted cinnamon brown, under a display of retablos, battered squares of scrap tin and steel on which credulous souls of Mexico had painted, with painful and touching simplicity of technique, scenes that depicted their woes and expressed in stark terms their gratitude to the Holy Mother of God or various santos and santas for the granting of relief. The state senator seemed to at least one observer to feel the weight of such wishes upon him. He paused for a couple of seconds before opening his remarks.

“He was the closest thing you had to a father,” said the pregnant woman to the man in the big purple suit, filling, at least for those standing nearby, that prolonged silence with her grave whisper, “of course you’ve got to bury him properly.”

The kid sat at Aviva’s kitchen table, wearing the cast-iron dungarees, sweater vest, and short-sleeved plaid shirt in which he had bade her good night the previous evening. If Julie was always a premature zayde, born nostalgic, born cranky, born 103 years old, then maybe that was the connection he felt to old man Titus, what to make of him, hunched over a magazine beside a box of Nat’s All-Bran in an acrylic sweater vest, sinking his palm into the cheek of his inclined head, so lost in whatever he was reading that he did not look up when Aviva stopped in the doorway, belting her robe more tightly around her waist, and said, “Morning, you.”

Titus sat there, perfecting his stillness. She had yet to make up her mind about the kid—she was still collecting evidence—but Aviva liked him for his immobility, his effortless parsimony of movement. He was not a Drummer on All Resonant Surfaces, like Julie, or a Perpetual Hummer of Infinite Tunes, like Nat. She was willing to give Titus credit for that much, at least.

Over the course of the day and two nights of his exile among the Jaffes, Aviva had gotten into the habit of doling out to Titus these modest quanta of credit, none larger or more valuable than, say, a nickel, or a pinto bean. For his neatness, his familiarity with soap and water, his polite manners, his readiness to clear his place after dinner without being told. Behind each of these qualities, she felt the ghostly hard hand of the late Texan grandmother, and it must have been in honor of that lost woman of iron that Aviva was keeping Titus’s file open, because from the instant he came limping into the house with that constipated granddaddy walk of his, humping a stained sailor’s duffel, bearing, safety-pinned to his soul like a note scrawled in his putative father’s hasty hand, an indefinite embargo on sharing the news of his existence with her partner and best friend, Aviva’s snap judgment on the kid was: Trouble. Trouble for everyone but trouble especially, she guessed, for Julie, who had clearly fallen into some kind of inchoate and disorderly love with Titus Joyner.

Nat agreed (a rare pairing of those words) that on the advent of Titus, all the recent incidents of inexplicable behavior on the part of their son appeared to snap into alignment. Only Aviva’s long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction—the boy was trouble—and admire Titus’s stillness. Here was yet another quality that he did not share with her own ill-washed, ill-mannered, sloppy, and hyperactive offspring.

Then she heard the moist, slow rasp of Titus’s breathing: The kid was sleeping. His hair, hitherto maintained with curatorial punctilio in an archival 1973 Afro, was lumps and nap, a topographical globe. He sat propped up and snoozing in the mild gray sunshine that irradiated the morning fog outside the kitchen window, over a copy of—she went over, reached in, and peeled back the front cover of the magazine—American Cinematographer.

Out of the self-assembling nanoparticles of her pessimism, in Aviva’s imagination, a narrative began to take shape. Titus’s nappy head, the unchanged clothes to which there clung an unmistakable if faint smell of Berkeley at night (purple salvia, jasmine, fog, cat spray), the evident depth of his slumber.

Oh, the sneaky little shit!

She backed out of the kitchen so as not to wake him before her theory could be confirmed. Like most people with a suspicious nature, she was gifted at sneakiness herself and inclined to be stealthy in the corroboration of her theories. She crept upstairs to Julie’s room and eased open the door, ignoring three separate tacked-up signs warning off a variety of intruders in Klingon, runic, and (presumably) simulated blood. In the dim light, in his IKEA bed, Julie lay curled into a ball so impossibly tiny that she didn’t dare look at it, lest nostalgia for the vanished little old man he once had been impede her investigation. On the floor of the attic room, the futon bed, unrolled two nights earlier to accommodate Titus, bore a faint oblong indentation, but it was still made, the covers as tucked and taut as the boy’s shirttails and pleats. To Aviva, this suggested or rather confirmed that Titus had lain down on it, fully dressed, until he felt that it was safe to sneak out through the lone attic window, whose lower sash was open as wide as it could go. Under the window, Titus’s megalith sneakers lounged at louche angles, suggesting that he had kicked them off as soon as he came tumbling back in from outside.

Aviva went over to stand beside Julie’s bed, trying to determine from the visible evidence—the arcing bones of his spine, a tangled sketch of knees and elbows in the bedclothes—whether he, too, had sneaked out of the house last night, then sneaked back in. Using perspicacity as a shield against panic. No telltale shoes, no flung socks.

Aviva went back down to the kitchen and began angrily to cook Titus’s stated favorite breakfast, pancakes and bacon. She broke the eggs as if they were the spurious arguments of unworthy adversaries. With the contempt we reserve for those who fail to deliver on arrant boasts, she watched the bacon shrink in its own fat. She peeled the bubbling pancakes from the griddle and flipped them over with a sense of cutting off a pointless discussion. In the batter, buttermilk and baking soda enacted their allegory of her emotional pH. By the time she had, in her view, cashed out the boy’s account in silver-dollar pancakes and a sizzling rasher of the Berkeley Bowl’s best applewood-smoked, she had worked through and expended most of the outrage that her discovery of his nocturnal adventuring had stirred in her. This was in compliance with Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s official policy on outrage, which was that, even when justified, it was an ineffective tool.

“Okay, mister,” she said, setting the plate in front of him. “Wake up.”

He started, opened his eyes wide, unstuck his cheek from his hand. He looked at her, at the plate, back to Aviva. Putting it together, where he was, what she had made for him, those wide brown eyes going all moist and puppy-dog. Just as Aviva felt the last inch of annoyance drain away, she saw Titus remember what a hard-on he was supposed to be. His gaze iced over. His nostrils flared as if they detected in the steam off the pancakes a distinct whiff of something vile.

“Thank you,” he said, neutering his voice of any gratitude, cutting a neat wedge out of the stack of pancakes.

“When did you get in?”

Instead of replying, he hoisted up stratified forkfuls, one after another, as if they were riding a conveyor belt to his mouth.

“You can drop the man-of-few-words routine, dude. I hear you running your mouth to Julie. I know you think you’re making a statement about how pointless it is to talk to adults or white people or whatever, but you’re just being disrespectful. I haven’t done anything to deserve your disrespect. I know your grandmother didn’t raise you to be rude.”

He chewed the last mouthful, weighing her argument, thinking it through. He swallowed. Took a sip of milk. “Could you please repeat the question?” he said.

“What time did you get in? I know you were out, Titus. Your bed hasn’t been slept in. Don’t even try to lie to me.”

“Huh, yeah, well, I don’t wear no watch, so….”

The confirmation of her guess did not amaze her—her guesses, rooted in pessimism, were tantamount to Laws of Physics—but neither did it console her. She felt her initial sense of panic begin to return. “Did Julie go out with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my God.”

Aviva fell into a chair at the table. Sometimes in the event of a shoulder dystocia, after everything else had failed, a doctor would attempt the Zavanelli maneuver, planting his hand on the head of the shoulder-bound baby, pushing it back up into the darkness. Aviva effected a similar maneuver on the sense of panic that was struggling out of her into the light of morning.

“Well,” she said. She sat back, trying to come up with something reasonable and authoritative to say. “Where did you go?”

He seemed genuinely to consider attempting to answer her question. Then he picked up a piece of bacon and shrugged. “Everywhere,” he said. “Just, like, walking around.”

“Walking around?”

“Riding my bike. Him riding his skateboard. Can’t do much beside ride it, but he can hook a ride on my bike, I kind of like give him a tow.”

She could see it: Julie rolling along behind Titus through the summer darkness of Berkeley, holding on to his friend’s shoulder, the way she had seen other pairs of skater boys do.

“I don’t want you doing that anymore,” she said. “Not while you’re a guest in my house. You go to bed, you stay in bed, you wake up in bed in the morning. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had to admit that she loved the “sirs” and “ma’ams” that flowed from his lips so readily, drawled out like pats of butter smeared across a biscuit. She remembered hiking in Yosemite with Nat and Julie a few summers back. Climbing to the top of the Mist Trail up a preposterous stairway of stones proposed, cut, hauled, and fixed immovably into place, proof against time and earthquakes, under the auspices of the WPA. She remembered feeling grateful to those long-dead men, the planners and the workers, for their foresight, their labor, the heroic absurdity of that granite stair. That was how she felt, whenever he would “ma’am” her, toward the dead grandmother of this boy.

“When you do that, Titus,” she said, softening her tone because she was getting in his face, “when you sneak out of my house like that, you are showing disrespect toward me.”

The boy shook his head, face indented with the thumbprint of a smirk, eyes downcast to show his pity for her.

“What?” Aviva said. “You don’t agree?”

“I ain’t— I’m not saying nothing.”

He took up the study of the backsplash behind the sink, tiled in iridescent rust red and cream. Aviva once hated that tile, then for a decade ignored it, and now felt toward those earth tones the same poignant derision she felt toward much of the surviving evidence of the 1970s. The boy might have been staring longingly at some bleak and lonely peak of snow.

“I don’t even want to be here.” His eyes abandoned their scrutiny of the high cold home of his soul long enough to toss a mocking look in her direction. “No disrespect.”

“Really?” Aviva said, knowing that she had him on that one, wondering what she hoped to gain from prolonging this conversation, asking herself why she couldn’t cut the kid a break. “That isn’t what Julie said. He said you begged him to let you stay with us.”

“What? Nah, he just—I—nah, no, ma’am.”

They were coming more abject and automatic now, those “ma’ams,” and she pressed it, channeling an old, dead Texan woman she had never met, getting her thumbs into the seam she had found.

“That’s what I heard. Stay with the Jaffes, eat all the tempeh you can hold.”

He looked at the plate in front of him with the face of one betrayed. “You put tempeh in the pancakes?”

“Only a little,” Aviva said. “Kidding. Nobody’s going to force you to eat tempeh against your will. So, uh, okay, so where did you go?”

He pushed the suspect plate away and started to stand up.

“I didn’t excuse you, mister.”

Titus nodded; that was indeed the case. He sat back down in the chair and turned to an article in American Cinematographer, a man in a white suit gazing at a wedding-cake riverboat that was stuck on a jungle mountain, she forgot the name of that one. An old back issue Julie had picked up somewhere, the Flea Market, the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. She got up, rebelted her robe, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down across the table from him. Fitzcarraldo. She had seen it at the Telegraph Repertory junior year, right around the time she met Nat, who tore tickets there two nights a week. Eighty-four, ’85, right toward the bitter end for that stuffy old black box. Not long before the night he came to her rescue. Who knew what might have befallen her if he hadn’t come along, with his belated Isro and his unlikely, heart-melting Tidewater accent? Remembering Nat as he was then, the world’s most pretentious high school dropout, coming on to her with some complicated theory about Peter Lorre and a jumbo cup of free popcorn. Simultaneously working at Rather Ripped Records and Pellucidar Books, all long gone. The man like some exiled Habsburg, bred and schooled to unite the crowns of kingdoms lost. At one time she had been able to console herself with his air of heroic obsolescence for the burden, material and emotional, that being married to him imposed upon her. Now the best she could hope for most of the time was to shake her head at him with more amusement than scorn.

“So, okay, you don’t want to be here. Where do you want to be? With your dad?”

The boy appeared to find the article about Fitzcarraldo quite fascinating, or perhaps he had fallen asleep again. Aviva couldn’t see his eyes.

“You and Julie have your last class tonight.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Julie says you want to be a movie director.”

No answer.

“He said you’ve written a screenplay.”

He dipped the tip of his left forefinger—he was a lefty—into the pool of maple syrup that remained on his plate. She resisted the urge to slap his hand, as she would have slapped Julie’s. It took him a while to figure out what he wanted or could permit himself to say.

“That he knows about.”

“You’ve written more than one?”

“Five.”

“Tell me the title of one of them.”

“May I be excused now?”

“Just another minute of torture.”

“Incident at Al-Qufa Bridge.”

“Al-Qufa Bridge? Is it—is it a war story?”

“It’s a, like, adaptation of ‘Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.’ Only in the Gulf War, not the Civil,” he said, catching her endlessly policed racist self red-handed. “By Ambrose Bierce, so it’s in the public domain, so I don’t got to pay no rights.”

“You know, your father, Archy, he served in the Gulf War. In the army.”

No answer.

“Did you know that?”

“Can I go?”

“Go where?” She had a sudden intuition. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Where who lives?”

“Archy. You ride by his house, don’t you? At night. On your bike.”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time all morning. His eyes were filled with pleading, begging her to put him out of his misery.

“Fine,” she said, and as he darted around her to get out of the Torquemada chamber, she touched his shoulder with a right hand that had kept a thousand children from going too far, too fast. “But hear me out. I don’t want you getting my son into trouble, staying out all night. And don’t you ever lie to me again.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that anymore, please. Aviva will do.”

“Got it,” the boy said. “Now, please, get your fucking hand off me, Aviva.”

She let him go. He started out of the kitchen, then turned back.

“Your boy’s a little dick-sucking faggot,” he said. “Case you were wondering. And that ain’t no lie.”

“Way to start,” Aviva said. “Way to build that foundation.”

“Call me Moby.”

Gwen clutching her belly as she ran up the front walk of the Nefastis Building, a three-story concrete dingbat whose breezeway spawned dust devils of swirling take-out menus and bougainvillea bracts. Miles from the elevator, possibly the slowest elevator in the Western Hemisphere, miss it and she would have to wait at least ten minutes. Calling, “Oh, Mr. Oberstein, could you please hold that for me?”

The name on the shingle that Gwen walked past every working day of her life read OBERSTEIN, and she had never met anyone who looked more like an Oberstein, particularly in a three-piece suit. Plus, it always seemed to her that the man’s preferred nickname preceded a silent Dick. But the man stuck out a Weejun to keep the elevator doors from closing in her face, and he spent a lot of money every month helping to thin the vinyl herds at Brokeland, so she called him what he wanted her to call him and thanked him for holding the door.

“Thank you, Moby,” she said.

She observed that, along with his blue suit and brown loafers, he was wearing white tube socks with a blue stripe. “You’re up early,” she further observed. Six-thirty in the morning—on Mondays, Berkeley Birth Partners kept early-bird hours, to serve the workingwomen. Moby would be the only life-form in the building besides Gwen and the turtles in Dr. Mendelsohn’s terrarium.

“Gots to be in federal court at nine A.M.,” Moby said, going into that strange ghetto minstrel routine of his, or maybe trapped inside it permanently, a soft white moth caught in a drop of hip-hop amber. “And I am not ready. I’m trine to get legal standing for whales, bring suit against the navy on their behalf?”

“Oh, right,” Gwen said, only half remembering the story, whales in perdition, baffled by submarine ponging. Still, the man was one-up on her. He was following his heart in his working life, doing what he loved, loving what he did. “Good for you.”

They inched skyward. The elevator banged, mooed, and screeched, sounding like Sun Ra and that whole awful Arkestra trapped inside of an MRI machine.

“Low-frequency sonar? Like the navy is testing? That is some bad shit. Fucks with their internal guidance systems, they beach themselves, get brain damage. Every time they test it, you have dead whales washing up in the dozens.”

“I have to be honest, Moby,” Gwen said, aiming a magician’s-assistant ta-da! at the surprising feat that was her belly. “I’m not too fond of the word ‘whale’ these days.”

“You due any day, right,” Oberstein said. “ ’Bout to pop.”

“Four weeks.”

“Whoa.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. Truthfully, I’m impressed we both fit in this elevator. Come next week I might need to get an elevator of my own.”

“Least in five weeks you ain’t gonna be pregnant no more. But I’m a still be fat.”

“Oh, let me tell you something.” She had not slept well, troubled by the struggling knot in her belly, by the throb of her aching back. By black and red bursts of Lydia Frankenthaler bleeding out, Cochise Jones pinned and gasping under the juggernaut weight of his B-3. By thoughts of Archy and his furtive approach to grief. Holding his sadness close, as if it were a secret, the man always moving from one thing he couldn’t talk about to the next, sneaking across the field of his emotions from foxhole to foxhole, head down. She knew it had to be the loss of Mr. Jones, though she couldn’t shake a sense that there was something else bothering him. She wondered if maybe he already had something else going on the side; if he was in love with Elsabet Getachew; if he had lied when he said Mr. Jones left money to pay for the funeral, and was secretly bankrupting them to put the old man in the ground in what he termed, worrisomely, fitting style. But mostly, the problem was the throbbing of her back. “I will always be pregnant.”

“I would like to be done,” agreed Gwen’s first early bird, Jenny Salzman-House, who shared Gwen’s due date but had gained only twenty-eight pounds to the forty-seven that Gwen had managed to pack on. “How about you?”

Jenny was pale pink and long-limbed with a boyish face and blond hair cut in an unflattering Volvo-shaped bob made popular by female tennis stars of the seventies. The swell of a thirty-week child offered little in the way of spectacle, even when she lay back on the examination table and bared her abdomen to the heavens and to the shadowless glare of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. She carried her pregnancy like a football tucked into the crook of a fullback’s arm, invisibly and with aplomb. Whereas Gwen’s belly was like some kind of Einsteinian force, warping the fabric of space-time as she moved through it. She was not, this morning, inclined to sympathize with Jenny and her nineteen-pound shortfall of woe.

“I am done,” Gwen said. She squeezed a shining coil of ultrasound jelly onto Jenny’s modest dome and then settled the business end of the Doppler against it. “Over and done.”

“Tell me about it.”

Gwen switched on the Doppler, and they listened to the tide of static that flooded the room. Jenny smiled bravely through the usual instant of informationless panic. Then that steady whistling emerged from the void: an interstellar signal, a jet exhaled from the pulsing gill of some denizen of the deep. Rhythmic evidence of life from the bottom of the sea or the farthest rim of the universe. A set of valves and pistons speaking a machine’s simple language.

“Hello, baby,” Jenny said.

Gwen added the baby’s current heart rate to her notes on Jenny’s weight, temperature, and abdominal girth. Everything was normal, hardly worth noting at all. Everything was always normal until it wasn’t. Until the roar of static endured in the examination room without interruption. Until the arc of the belly measured no greater than it had at the previous visit. Until the typical placenta got stuck in the average uterus, started hemorrhaging, and you ended up rushing in the back of an ambulance through the chicanes of Berkeley, sticky with blood and uterine goo, mouthing off to doctors, trying to save two lives. It was not that there was no point or purpose in notating the normality of Jenny’s pregnancy. It was that nothing was normal, ever, in midwifery or life; there were only levels of ignorance and denial, of obliviousness to the cetacean looming of disaster. Her marriage was founded on deception and lies. The work that she did meant nothing to the people—her people—to whom she most hoped and desired that it—that she—would matter. In the end, everything was only a ceaseless flow of static, fundamentally no different from silence. The background noise of creation. The implacable flood of time.

“Everything’s fine,” Gwen told herself, shuddering, switching off the Doppler. “And you’re feeling okay.”

“Just huge.”

“Oh, girl. Don’t even.”

“Yeah, no, the only problem I’m having right now is that my husband finds pregnant women sexually arousing.”

“I am so sorry to hear that.”

“Yours?”

“If I would ever let him near me.”

In the first third of the second trimester of her pregnancy, Gwen for a time had permitted Archy to indulge in her like a cartoon wolf with a knife and fork, a napkin knotted around his neck. Laid herself out and piled herself high as a Las Vegas buffet and let him keep filling up his plate. From the thirteenth week to the seventeenth, some kind of hormonal messaging crackled along the wires between them, and their bed was lit as by lightning. She could not quite take pleasure in his conventional presence within her, but she discovered, for those strange weeks, an unheard-of appetite for taking him in her ass, some kind of peptide flood that opened her up down there as she had never been opened before. That was over now; she was done with that, too. Sometimes in the night, his leg would arc across her, and she would feel a kind of rage at the contact, an insult to her person, a flicker of fire along her skin. Clearly, in his banishment from her interiors, he had rebelled. He had taken his empty plate and his napkin and gone to Ethiopia to get his fill. Licking his animal chops.

“Would you like me to instruct you not to have sex anymore?” Gwen said.

“Oh, would you?”

“No problem.”

Gwen wiped the gel from Jenny’s belly and rinsed the Doppler, adrift in a poignant memory of those vanished weeks of fire. Jenny wandered in her conversation as she resumed her suit, blouse, and briefcase, from an account of madness in the Rockridge housing market to a description of something preposterous and beautiful that had been done to figs at Oliveto.

“Can I also tell him you ordered him to make me a root beer float every night for the rest of my pregnancy?” Jenny said as they left the examination room.

An urge to consume root beer, dark, astringent, foaming, and sweet, tore through Gwen’s soul.

“Have him call me,” she said. She felt demeaned, mocked by her servitude to hormones and to the winds of her moods, powerless in her hugeness as a whale with no attorney, hollow and tired and faking it (as Mike Oberstein, Esq., would have put it) 24/7.

These sensations only increased when she emerged into the waiting room, with its 1980s-modern oak armchairs padded in raspberry wool and its random gallery of foam-core mounted Gauguin posters salvaged from some ancient Roth-Jaffe trip to Denmark, brown-skinned bare-breasted wahines and somber van Gogh potato fields under the arcane legend NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK, and saw the next three early birds stacked up and waiting. A shrink, a real estate agent, and a new patient, another white lady, Coach briefcase at her feet, looking like, of all things, an attorney.

“Goodbye, Jenny,” Gwen said, fighting down the obscure, Danish-illiterate discontent that stirred in her every time the words NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK forced themselves into her mind. She turned to the ladies in the raspberry chairs. “Hello, Jenny. Hello, Karen.” She considered the new patient, an older mom in a loose black pantsuit, a classic Berkeley cat lady, suit and wearer both adrift in an aureole of dander. “Hello…”

“Jenny.” The cat lady smiled. “Believe it or not.”

“Three Jennys,” Gwen said. “How about that.”

“This is the second time it’s happened since I’ve worked here,” said Kai, the Birth Partners receptionist. Born female but not feeling it too strongly. Hair worn slicked and short, white T-shirts, cuffed jeans, played saxophone in an alternative marching band. They worked street fairs, hipster potlatches, the edges of open-air concerts, showing up flash-mob-style, dressed in yachting hats and frogged military jackets like that Chinese funeral band over in the city, performing skewed Sousa marches, brass-band church music, and Led Zeppelin songs. They called themselves Bomp and Circumstance. “Only the other time it was Carolyn.”

Gwen smiled back at the third Jenny and turned with a shameful yet profound and yawning dread to face the second, who gathered her own purse and briefcase and hoisted her baby freight with a lurch, then aimed the whole payload in Gwen’s direction.

The door to the office creaked open with its trademark creature-feature spookiness, a sound, impervious to oil can and WD-40 alike, that had in turn haunted the practices of a Jungian analyst, a couples therapist, a specialist in neurolinguistic programming, a hypnotherapist, a shiatsu practitioner, and a life coach before settling in to mock the tenure of the Birth Partners in suite 202. A very young woman with a wide Mayan face looked in and said softly, “Sorry.”

Karen, the Jennys, and Gwen all turned to regard the young woman. She was at once tiny and voluminous, at least three inches under five feet tall and call it seven months pregnant, with nowhere to put her unborn child but way, way out in front of herself. Indian features, hair black and glossy as a well-seasoned skillet, yanked to one side of the back of her head and knotted with a sparkly pink scrunchy. Over a pair of black leggings, she wore an extra-large T-shirt that randomly advertised a liquor store and bait shop in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. The shirt strained across her belly and gaped at the armholes, where her arms emerged sharp at the elbows and thin at the wrists. As she spoke her tiny sentence, her cheeks flushed in circles so precise they seemed to have been painted on. This might be her fifteenth summer of life.

She took half a step into the waiting room, glancing from the face of one woman to the next, connecting the dots with an expression of mounting regret. Struggling to read the unfamiliar text of this wan and well-worn room, which, for all Gwen knew, looked exactly like the Bureau of Human Vivisection down in Tegucigalpa, or wherever it was the girl had started out.

“Hi!” Gwen said so loudly that the girl started. At the sight of this young woman with her skinny arms, her shadowed eyes, her look of lostness, her shirt on which a largemouth bass leaped joyfully onto the hook that had come to destroy it, Gwen’s heart seemed to expand with a kind of dark longing and, like the Grinch’s, with a shattering of glass. “Come in! It’s okay.”

“I think maybe she called yesterday,” Kai said. “Was that you? Areceli?”

“Areceli,” Gwen said. The girl nodded once, then stopped, narrowing an eye as though she had been warned to expect false blandishments in the grim reception room of the Vivisection Bureau. “Do you speak English?” Areceli gave her head a tentative shake, drawing back toward the door. “Entre,” Gwen begged her, her UC Extension Spanish serviceable but bearing inexplicable traces of a Boston accent, “por favor, entre, puedo verle enseguida.”

“Lo siento mucho, pero tengo un desayuno muy importante a las siete y media,” said the next Jenny, “y no puedo esperar.”

Gwen laid a hand over her chest as though to hold back the heart before it could fly forever out toward the young woman who was going to redeem everything. Reluctantly, but recognizing the need to undertake at least a minimum of patient management—a skill, chore, or art that she generally preferred to leave to Aviva—Gwen turned to the second Jenny.

She said, “¡Usted habla muy bien español!”

“He pasado dos años en Guatemala,” said Jenny II, “enseñando al Quiché como manejar una cooperativa del tejer.”

Gwen blinked, picking her way along, getting entangled in Quiché and then landing facedown in tejer. She had just realized that she did not give a shit where Jenny learned Spanish when she heard the mausoleum creak of the door hinges and the sigh of the door as it closed.

Gwen was paralyzed by a panic that was half outrage, as if she understood from the sudden lurch in her belly that she had been scammed or shortchanged, as if the young pregnant woman were a confidence artist who had lightened Gwen’s wallet of a painful and irrecoverable sum.

“Excuse me,” she said softly as she chased after Areceli, and once again the demon in the door hinges mocked the possibility of therapy, healing, recovery, of having one’s life coached. She ran down the hall, past the offices of the whale attorney, to the elevator. When she jammed her finger against the button, the doors slid open at once. Areceli must have taken the stairs.

This was a barren arrangement of concrete slabs strung on rebar like vertebrae on a spinal cord. Gwen went to the second-story landing and stood listening for the scrape of the girl’s descending tread, the telltale bass chiming of the stairway’s steel frame. There was nothing, just the steady breeze that came ceaselessly whistling up the stairwell with a Halloween plangency even on the most windless of days.

One by one she took the steps, rocking the whole building as she descended, or so it seemed to her, calling Areceli! And then she burst out into the morning, Telegraph Avenue, the chiming rattle of a train of grocery carts being driven across the parking lot of Andronico’s, a watery shout echoing from Willard Pool, the urgent sigh of a kneeling bus across the street—a shuffle of folks toward the bus doors, among them a ponytail spray of iron-black hair.

“Wait! Areceli! Espera!” Gwen threw up a hand as if to hail the AC Transit bus like a taxicab, and with a heedlessness remarkable even for Gwen, she threw herself into the middle of the avenue. A voice said, “Look out,” and then she got lost in metal and the smell of metal and the cruel metallic ring of her tailbone against the curb.

“Sorry,” said the bicyclist. He had not hit her, she realized; he had pushed her out of the way of an oncoming bus. He was a wiry teenager wearing neat jeans, a hoodie cinched low and shadowy over his face. “You hurt?”

There was a gash in the leg of her pants. She poked a finger into it and discovered a scrape; no other apparent injuries apart from those to her everlasting pride.

“I’m fine,” Gwen said, trying to catch her breath. “I’m pretty sure. Thank you.”

She waved to the boy, who nodded. Before he climbed back on his bicycle and pedaled off, he seemed to be considering—it would seem to her later—whether or not to offer her, from deep within his Ringwraith hood, some piece of advice or useful information.

“You just aren’t a careful person,” said a voice, familiar, soft-spoken, a man’s. “Are you?”

Garth Newgrange, the dad, behind the wheel of a lettuce-pale Prius. Nosing his way into the driveway that led to the underground structure of the office building that recently went up next door to the Nefastis Building. Jacket, tie, dressed for work, though as far as Gwen could remember, Garth worked in downtown Oakland. He must be here bright and early to see his doctor or dentist.

“How is Lydia?” Gwen said, feeling she lacked the energy to puzzle out how Garth had meant to engage her with his opening remark; let alone energy sufficient to engage him in return. But there was something off about his words, no doubt, something broken in his tight smile.

“How is Lydia? Lydia is very upset, actually. We are all very upset. The whole thing was traumatic for everyone. It was literally a trauma. All right?”

He was, and she did not believe she had ever encountered such a thing before outside the pages of a novel, white with anger.

“Garth—”

“Lydia had a dream, Gwen, and you and Aviva, you guys just— You fucked it up.”

“A dream?”

“Yes.”

“Garth, Lydia had a baby.”

“I am aware of that,” he said. “Yes, Lydia had a baby. She has a baby, and I have an attorney. His office is, ha, in the building right next door to you. Funny, right?”

“Are you— You’re suing us?”

“I plan to,” Garth said. “I very much plan to do just that.”

“But… what? Why? I know it was hard, things could have gone better, but she and the baby are fine.”

“Who knows if the baby is fine?” he said. “You don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Garth, please.”

They were already in enough trouble, she wanted to say, without him piling on some nonsense lawsuit, waste of everyone’s time and money. But if she said that, he would probably go and report it to the attorney in the next building, and somehow it would end up getting used as evidence against them.

“I hope your lawyer is better at their job than you are,” he said, easing his foot off the brake, punctuating the remark and the interview with an exclamation mark. The part of the exclamation mark was played with aplomb by Garth’s middle finger.

“Nice,” she said to the rear end of Garth’s Prius as he rolled down the ramp to the underground garage. Then, because it seemed to hold out the promise of expressing everything that she had been feeling that morning—toward her practice, toward her life, toward the world—she gave the finger to Garth, held it up so he could see it in his rearview as he drove away.

“Nice,” Aviva agreed, pulling up in front of their building in rattletrap old Hecate. “Like the Bob’s Big Boy sign, only hostile.”

“Ten years I’ve known you,” Aviva said, down on her haunches, poking around the cabinet beside the sink in examination room 2. The office was closed for lunch; the partners had suite 202 to themselves. “Never once had to give you first aid. Suddenly, it’s, like, our little thing we do.”

“Uh.”

“It’s like some kind of not-good date you keep asking me on.”

“I’m under stress, Aviva,” Gwen said, sounding peevish even to herself. She struggled ankle-deep through a wrack of regret, an unfamiliar ebb-tide stink of remorse. She had badly mishandled the situation with Garth Newgrange, and she knew it. It was time to confess, to acknowledge failure, to submit once again to Aviva’s crusty but goodhearted discourse of reproach. “I’m pregnant.”

“I know that, honey. It’s okay. You don’t have to explain.”

Gwen instructed herself to ease up on the woman, who had made no mistakes, ruined nothing. “That AC Transit had hit me?” she tried. “I would have owed Alameda County a new bus.”

“Funny,” said Aviva. “Aha.” She pivoted from the supply drawer and stood up, holding in each hand a small cardboard box containing an elastic support bandage. She had on an April Cornell dress patterned with morning glories, bought secondhand at Crossroads, knee-length, with a V collar and quarter-length drawstring sleeves. On anyone but Aviva, it would have looked matronly, but Aviva had those wiry arms. The whole woman was like a wire, all 104 pounds of her. She coiled and uncoiled. The flowered dress was trying to keep up, a bright but inadequate container for her movements. “Which look you want to go with? Caucasian or leper?”

“The beige. I don’t know, I guess… I guess I was just so excited to see a brown face.”

“I guess you must have been.”

“It’s so pathetic. Chasing after the child. You should have seen me taking those stairs.” She laughed, low and rueful. “Don’t laugh.”

Aviva stopped laughing. “I know why you went after her,” she said.

Gwen kept her legs dangling over the edge of the table, the crinkling paper offering its running commentary on her shifting behind as Aviva wrapped her right foot from arch to ankle. It didn’t appear to be serious, but Gwen had been on it all morning, and now whenever she put her weight on it, her bones thrummed like wire. The abrasion on her shin Aviva had already cleaned and taped with a Band-Aid. She bound Gwen’s ankle with the implacable tenderness of a practiced swaddler. She had that way of not talking; Gwen was powerless against it.

“It was Garth,” Gwen said. “That you saw me flipping off when you drove up.”

“Huh? You mean Garth Newgrange?”

“Right after the kid on the bike crashed into me, Garth pulled up. Going to see a lawyer next door.”

“A lawyer.”

“Talking about suing us. Seeing if they have a case.”

Aviva rocked back, letting go of Gwen’s foot. “Oh, fuck,” she said. She pressed the close-trimmed tips of her long fingers against the orbits of her eyes. “What?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“So you flipped him the bird?”

“He flipped me off first.”

“Yeah, but see, Gwen, you…” She shook off whatever she had been about to say. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You think it’s my fault that he flipped me off. That he’s suing us. You think he’s in the right. Because we screwed up so bad.”

“I— No. No, I don’t. Honestly. But I can’t help thinking that if we just, you know, went to him.”

“No.”

“And, you know.”

“Don’t say it.”

“Apologized.”

“We are not going to do that, Aviva. No. We have nothing to apologize for. We did nothing wrong.”

“Yes, okay, I agree with you, Gwen, but he’s fucking lawyering up.”

The door opened; it was Kai, chewing something leafy rolled in a lavash. “In case you wanted to know, can your one o’clock appointment, who showed up early, can she hear it, out in the waiting room, when you guys are having a fight in room two? I have your answer: yes.”

“We’re fine,” Aviva said.

“Really?” Chewing, acting unconcerned, tugging at the collar of her embroidered cowboy shirt.

“Sure, whatever. I’m fine. Gwen’s fine. Gwen will be fine for at least another…” Aviva looked at her watch, a man’s Timex with the face worn on the inside of the right wrist, as if she had everything timed, down to this pending revelation, and was committed to staying on schedule. She frowned, looking disappointed by what her watch told her. “Like, call it five minutes.”

Kai frowned, eyebrows knitting Sal Mineo–style, and closed the door behind her softly, as if in reproach.

“What’s happening in five minutes?” Gwen said.

“Gwen,” Aviva said. Then there was another long Aviva pause, profound and charged. “Gwen, have you talked to Archy?”

Archy has cancer and is hiding it from you, his wife; that was what Aviva’s grave expression implied.

Gwen ripped a fistful of sanitary paper away from the sheet beneath her. “What’s wrong?” she said, and once again she felt herself caught up in a cyclone of metal and pavement.

“So he didn’t say anything.”

“What would he say? Is he sick?”

“Oh, God. No. No, he’s fine. He, too, is totally fine. For the moment.”

“For the next five minutes.”

“Call it four now.”

“Aviva, what is this?”

“Shit. Okay. You’re sitting down. That’s good.”

“Just a minute,” Gwen said. “Hold on. I feel like maybe I want to be standing up.”

“Gwen, no, I think you should—”

“Let me put a little weight on it, Aviva.”

Aviva fussed at the bandage, found it acceptable, then released the ankle to Gwen.

“Much better,” Gwen said. “Thank you so much. Now, what the heck?”

There was a soft knock on the examining room door. Aviva looked at her watch again.

“Aviva, what is this?”

The door swung open, and Gwen saw Julie walk in with the kid who had shoved her out of the path of the bus. The kid pushed back the hood of his sweatshirt. He was like a smaller, skinnier edition of Archy’s dad, a 45 to Luther’s LP. It took less than a second for her to formulate that first wild guess.

“Oh, dear Lord,” Gwen said.

The boys stared each in his own all-consuming way at his shoes, at Gwen’s ankle, at the floor.

“Titus,” Aviva said. “Meet Gwen.”

“Hey,” said the boy. He looked to be about the same age as Julie, fourteen, fifteen. Gwen undertook the biographical math, syllogized a couple of stray remarks separated by years, guessed at the rest.

“Your last name Joyner?”

The kid looked up sharply but got his playful Luther Stallings smile in place just before meeting her gaze. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay,” Gwen said. And then somebody turned over the record, and Archy’s Cheatin’ came back on, and the first track on side B was called “Jamila.” Gwen had never met Jamila Joyner, which, as always, made it so much easier for her to sketch the woman in her mind, with all her wicked contours. “Is she in town?”

The smile winked out like a drop of water on a hot range. “No, ma’am.”

“Uh, his mom passed away,” said Julie. “A long time ago.”

The throb of jealousy subsided, and Gwen’s heart, taking its first tentative steps since Aviva had unlocked the office door, went out to Titus, who suddenly looked closer to twelve than fifteen.

“Titus is staying with us,” Aviva said. “At the moment.”

“What? Since when?”

“Since Friday. Gwen, I’m sorry. I was respecting Archy’s wishes. God only knows why. He said he was going to tell you. He said he needed a little time to sort things out.”

So this, and not his grief over Mr. Jones, or his shame at being caught with the Queen of Sheba, or cancer, was the secret that Archy had been keeping from her, the hollow underlying his physical presence in the room, the delay in replying to her questions. Not that he had a son but that said fruit of his loins was going to be moving in with them. Then Gwen would be responsible for three babies instead of the two she had ordered.

“You should have just let that bus hit me,” Gwen said. “You should have ridden right on by.”

Gnat. In his ear, born with it. Hearing the current of his own blood, neural crackle, the omnipresent pulse of the worldwide electro-industrial power and information grid, the unheard music. His head a dish to pull down cosmic background radiation, sines and signals, diminished sevenths coming through the wires of time and space to vibrate secret membranes. Hearing something. His moods (unmedicated at the present) prone to act as filters on the input. Melodies on the up days, harmonic structures, polyrhythms, samples and snatches, phrases and hooks, discrete musical ideas. On the down days or in a mixed state, only that rhythmic humming, theorized by one of his many former psychiatrists to be—what else—a dim dull echo of his ma, deceased when Nat was not yet two. A lullaby in the darkness, a steady soothing pat on the diapered behind. Yeah, whatever. But always, inside, beneath, interlaced with the auditory hallucination du jour, that constant invariant tone, at once low and sharp, infuriating, precious, steady as a handrail. On the menu for this morning, a looping Maceo-style fill, a joyous stab of horn, today shaping up to be an up day, oh, fuck yes, bee-da-lee-dop ba-deeda-la-dee!

Also on the menu: fried chicken, Richmond-style. Biscuits. Beans and rice. And most assuredly, greens. Greens the secret weapon, the skeleton key to the soul of a man of Garnet Singletary’s age and provenance. Collards the thing to catch the conscience of the King of Bling.

But the kitchen, oy, the kitchen. Ba-deeda-la-dee-dop! A fucking disaster area. Nat recalled with a pang how his stepmother, Opal, a bookkeeper in the billing department of Thalhimer’s department store, would always stay on top of the disorder, cleaning up after herself in measured intervals, a logic in the steps of her preparations, scraping the trimmed-away ribs and veins of the collards into the garbage while the leaves came to a low simmer in their pot of fatback liquor; the bowl in which the beans had been put to soak the night before washed and sparkling in the wire dish rack as they boiled; the biscuits mixed—the recipe, passed down from the lifelong employer of Opal’s mother, a Mrs. Portman, calling for both yeast and baking soda—then left all night to rise under a damp towel in the refrigerator, nothing to be done but roll them out and cut them, put them in the oven ten minutes before you rang the dinner bell. Opal Starrett, aleha hasholem, rendered justice with her Scotch Brite pad to every pot, pan, and dish along the way, wiping down every surface to a laboratory shine, leaving herself to contend at the end only with the baking sheets, the big cast-iron skillet, and the blast radius of spat fat on the stovetop.

As with so many other things about her, Nat admired the orderly progression of his stepmother’s kitchen, but he could never hope to emulate it. He came wired, like Julius the First, to do everything all at once. Puffs of flour escaping from the requisite brown paper bag in which, with cracked black pepper, cayenne, and salt, he shook the pieces of chicken—legs and thighs, as today’s clientele required. A whole weather system, storm fronts of flour moving across the kitchen from west to east. A scatter of dried beans underfoot, their comrades steeped for an hour in boiling water in lieu of the overnight soak rendered impossible by his impulsive play for the King of Bling’s support. The lard—another secret weapon in the battle for the soul of Garnet Singletary—starting to mutter and pop in the skillet. It was Opal’s skillet, inherited along with her Panzer-plate baking sheets on which half the projected three dozen biscuits lay in domino-spot arrangements, and the big gray Magnalite pot that held Nat’s simmering collards, their trimmings piled on the counter alongside peeled onion wrappers, a cut-away strap of fatback rind, the arctic landscape of Nat’s uncompleted biscuit rolling. Better not to think about the rice, Christ, the rice, some of it duly sucked up into the belly of the dead-battery DustBuster that was lying abandoned on the floor in the middle of all the unsucked rest of it. All that rice, raining down when he yanked the bag from the pantry shelf, someone, likely Nat, having put it back with its wire tie very loosely twisted. Though it was kind of remarkable the way the sound of raining rice seemed to lay itself down so sweetly over the horn riff in his head, a shimmer of steel brushes on a hi-hat.

At 9:45 A.M. the first batch of chicken parts sank, to the sound of applause, into the pig fat. The fat set about its great work, coaxing that beautiful Maillard reaction out of the seasoned flour, the smell of golden brownness mingling with the warm, dense, bay-leafy, somehow bodily funk of the beans, and with the summertime sourness of the greens like the memory of white Keds stained at the toes with fresh-cut grass, Nat stepped through the time portal that opened within the ring of seasoned iron. Riding the kitchen time machine. Turning the pieces of chicken with a pair of tongs, his hum, which he did not even know he was emitting, like the steady press of massaging fingers at the back of his neck, he remembered Opal standing at the ancient Hotpoint on East Broad Street in high heels and a Marimekko apron patterned with big coral poppies, cursing out Julius the First, furious over some fresh piece of poor judgment, some dud of a snack cake, that Monument Liquor and News was now stuck for to the tune of ten cases, some no-account relative of Opal’s to whom Nat’s father had, against her emphatic instructions, loaned three hundred and fifty dollars they could ill afford, while in the lower sash of the casement window behind the stove, a pair of tiny electric fans executed a broad parody of Nat’s father (and for that matter, prefiguratively, of Nat himself) going around and around and around, with unimpeachable intentions, to no effect at all. At last with her chicken pieces neatly mounded and her biscuits tumbled into a basket lined with a clean dish towel, Opal would knock on down the back hall in those high heels to the crazed wooden stairway, barrel staves and bent nails, something out of a Popeye cartoon, bolted to the back of their row house, throw open the door, and stand there on the landing, fanning up a hopeful breeze with her manicured brown hands, unimprisoning her soft dark dove-winged hair from its head scarf, saying in that wild negro Yiddish of hers, “That is sure enough a mechiah.” Thirty, almost thirty-five years ago that would have been, Nat’s professional expertise wanting to sweeten the memory with maybe some fresh-minted Isaac Hayes filtering in from the stereo in the living room, or the first Minnie Riperton album, Come to My Garden. Opal had been into poor sweet Minnie in a big way.

Aviva, as in so many other respects, held to Opalish principles when it came to approaching a mess in the kitchen, and she was going to fucking freak when she saw what he had done, Time machine my ass, Nat, Jesus! She herself had knocked out some kind of semi-elaborate breakfast this morning for the boys, pancakes, bacon, and yet when Nat arose from bed pregnant with his scheme to win the heart of Garnet Singletary, and came into the silent and gleaming kitchen, he found only a corky trace of bacon in the air to betray her. Aviva, first white woman Nat had ever taken a romantic interest in, and the only one of his girlfriends who ever met the standard or received the approval of his stepmother. The latter being expressed, shortly before Opal’s death, in a brief speech to Nat that could have been delivered by Aviva herself: “Don’t fuck it up.”

Forty minutes after the first batch of chicken went into the fat—without his having restored a modicum of order to the kitchen—Nat was still busy with the tongs and the drumsticks, mindful of Opal’s absolute prohibition on crowding the pan. By the time all those hard-ass little red beans, rushed into their fatback bathwater, had managed to relax enough to jump on over into a casserole with the rice, it was nearly 10:40. Time to get moving. The King, more often one of his entourage, could usually be seen passing the windows of Brokeland with a bag of McDonald’s, maybe a fish sandwich from Your Black Muslim bakery, sometime around noon, twelve-thirty at the latest. Nat needed to get in there just as the man’s hunger was calling to him.

Like a dog in a cartoon, forepaws a turbine blur as he hunted up a buried bone in a churn of dirt, Nat excavated the cabinets and ransacked the drawers looking for usable serving containers and suitable platters. Piling up behind him mountains of mateless lids and lidless bottoms, rattling cake pans and pie plates. Souvenirs of ancient Tupperware parties, ice cube trays, Thermos cups with no Thermoses, Popsicle molds with no sticks, roasting racks, bamboo skewers, a kitchen scale! Nat figured on serving up to five or six Singletary satellites, hangers-on, maybe even K of B shoppers. He hoped that at least a few of them would find his arguments rendered sound and his blandishments persuasive by the invincible rhetoric of Opal Starrett’s cuisine. To begin with, he needed only to reach the King.

And Garnet could be reached. Oakland-born and -raised, his roots snaked back deep into Texas and Oklahoma. By laying out the meal that he now carefully packed in tubs, wrapped in foil, stacked into a plastic milk crate (whose freight of unsorted and mostly unsellable vinyl recordings, among them several offerings by Jim Nabors, Nat freely added to the disorder of the kitchen), and schlepped downstairs to load into the back of his aging Saab 900, Nat would be speaking to Singletary in a deeper language. Like a wizard to a dragon in a novel on his son’s nightstand, speaking in the Old Speech.

“Oh ho ho,” said the King of Bling as Nat backed, carrying the milk crate, through the steel mesh door of the eponymous establishment. Singletary reigned from his stool behind the glass counter in his cave of gold, atop his pile of rope and finger rings. Apart from the treasure in the cases, there was nothing else to look at in the shop: plain white tile floor, bare walls paneled in Masonite. Singletary himself devoid in his person, as always, of the least gleam or half-ounce of bling, filling out a guayabera shirt, looking sweaty-hot in his Jheri curl, toward which he took a studiously historicist stance. Strapped like Bullitt over the arm with a licensed .44 that, as he never tired of assuring the curious, had more than once, in the service of the King, been called upon to do what its manufacturers had intended. “I had a feeling. Soon as I saw that little flyer you was passing around.”

“Did you, now,” Nat said, doubting it.

As his trade demanded, Garnet Singletary was a keen assayer of human alloy, though he would say what he needed to say, Nat knew, to induce among the general public, whether buying or pawning, that he was even sharper than that. But it wasn’t like Nat was attempting some subtle bit of statecraft, or considered himself inscrutable, a master of neighborhood diplomacy. This was a fairly straight-ahead play.

“Read me like a book,” he said.

He winked at Ervis Watson, more often known as Airbus, who quite amply served as muscle for the King of Bling, a six-five, three-hundred-pound first line of defense in a velour tracksuit, weaponless apart from his ordnance arms and his howitzer legs, beyond whose bulk, events rarely penetrated to the point that the services of Singletary’s sidearm were required. King of Bling was half the size of Brokeland, dividing with the United Federation of Donuts the former premises of an Italian butcher, and between Singletary, Airbus, and the stock in trade, arranged in two long and two short table showcases on the floor and a tall cabinet that ran the length of the north wall, there was not a lot of room to turn around.

Airbus did not acknowledge the wink or indeed move the slightest feature of his face. Nat understood that the attempt to elicit a superficial comradeship by winking was a standard gambit of the environmentally nervous white man. He was not the least bit nervous, having grown up in the black part of Richmond with a black stepmother, black friends, black enemies, black lovers, black teachers, and culture heroes who, barring a few Jewish exceptions, were almost exclusively black. But he had so profound a horror of black-acting white men, such as Moby, that he drove himself with a near-pathological rigor to avoid any appearance, in manner or speech, of trying to pass. He would let his chicken do the talking.

“I brought you guys some lunch,” he said. He set the milk crate on the counter behind which Singletary sat on his stool. “Thought you might be getting a little tired of the Big Macs.”

Singletary squinted at the crate, then looked at Nat, running through possible negative scenarios that might arise once Nat opened the containers stacked in the crate: hustles, robbery schemes, some kind of nasty hummus or shit you were supposed to eat off a leaf. Then the smell coming from the food, a breeze off the coast of the past, worked its way into his nostrils, well defended as they were by his Billy Dee Williams mustache, and a wild surmise lit up the chilly precincts of his face. Nat lifted the platter of chicken and paused, milking the moment, fingers ready to peel back the blanket of aluminum foil at any time. All that was required was a sign from the King of Bling.

Singletary stared at Nat with a curious mixture of hopefulness and misgiving. He glanced at Airbus as if uncertain whether to split or double down on a soft eleven. Then he nodded once: Hit me. Nat ripped away the sheet of foil.

“Ho, shit,” said Airbus.

“I was expecting maybe you might have a few more people around,” Nat said as he set out the containers of beans, rice, and greens and tore open the foil packet of biscuits. Forks, knives, paper plates. A small ottoman of foofy Marin County butter. “Maybe feed a couple of your customers, too.”

“Aisha was here, but she getting the baby’s picture taken up at Hilltop Mall,” Singletary said. He smiled. “I might have scared away some of the other people like to waste my time and theirs sitting around here all the damn day. Medication I been taking for my blood pressure have a tendency to make me a little irritable, from what I hear.”

Airbus looked prepared but declined to comment on this rumor.

“Customers,” Singletary continued. “That I don’t know. Business been a little slow this morning.”

“Fuck the customers,” Airbus said. “More for me.” He skyhooked a plate piled high with some of everything.

“Hope I brought enough,” Nat said.

Singletary contemplated the well-encumbered plate that Nat had made up for him, but held off from tasting the food. He reached around behind him, shuffled through some papers, pulled out one of the flyers printed on blue paper. Nat had typed it up on the store computer, got it copied at Krishna. Singletary lifted to his face the plain black half-rims he wore around his neck on a thin rubber thong—another spurned opportunity to model his wares. He studied, or affected to study, the text Nat had composed last night in a fever of righteous defiance.

“‘COCHISE,’” he said. “That’s for Mr. Jones.”

“Another little tribute.”

“Funeral’s Saturday?”

“At the store, two P.M.”

“‘Conserve Oakland’s Character against Homogenization, Impact, and Stress on the Environment.’”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“That works.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Homogenization?”

“In the corporate sense. Chain stores, franchises.”

“I see. Yeah, that’s real clever.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Singletary put down the sheet of paper as though it weighed ten pounds, as though, contrary to his stated opinion, its text left him, on the whole, unimpressed. He returned the half-glasses to struggle for purchase, belayed by the rubber thong, atop the Half Dome of his belly. His eyes were the steel pans of a precision scale.

“Let me see if I understand,” he said. “In your opinion, the opening of a Dogpile shopping center on the site of the old Golden State market at Forty-first and Telegraph, which has the support of some highly respected figures in the community, such as Chan the Man, coming out of a company that works hard to lift the economic status and neighborhood pride of black people, is actually something that would have a negative impact.”

“It’s called a Thang,” Airbus said through a mouthful of beans and rice. “It’s really more like a mall.”

“Sixty thousand square feet,” Nat said. “Two levels of parking. The equivalent of five stories tall. Built right out to the sidewalk all the way around. It’s going to dwarf everything around it.”

“A lot of things in this neighborhood, I hope you don’t mind my saying, could get dwarfed by a midget. Ain’t like we got a lot of mansions and terrazzos and whatnot. Historical landmarks.”

“True,” Nat said. “We also don’t have a traffic or a parking problem, but we will if that Thang gets built. As far as economic uplift of the community? Gibson Goode is looking out for himself. I mean, come on, King. I came in here for two reasons, and one of them is that of all the people up and down this avenue for two miles in either direction, white, black, Asian, or from Tajikistan, you’re the only one more willing than I am to come out and say you hate that community-uplift bullshit.”

Singletary weighed the intended compliment in those proving steel pans. “The enemy of bullshit,” he said at last. “That’s you, huh? And this whole thing”—he flicked the sheet of paper—“don’t have nothing to do with the fact that a Dogpile Thang moving in two blocks from here, it’s liable to put you and Archy Stallings out of business so fast you going to have to declare bankruptcy last Christmas to catch up?”

“Of course it does,” Nat said. “I should have led off with that. You’re right. I guess I just got a little tired of walking around all day saying, ‘We’re fucked.’” He rubbed at his chin. “I’m going to come all the way out with it, Garnet. I talked to a guy at Councilman Abreu’s office.” Abreu was the at-large member of the Oakland City Council. He had no particular interest in Brokeland or music generally, as far as Nat knew. Based on his past record, Abreu would have no particular philosophical, environmental, or other beef with a project like Dogpile. But Abreu was rumored to dislike Chan Flowers, and their clashes in session were a matter of record. “He said that Abreu might be willing to show up, talk to COCHISE, hear what we had to say. But not if—”

“Not if at”—checking the flyer—“twelve-thirty or so, you got a store full of sniffy old white people.”

“I could use some influential people of color there,” Nat said. “For sure. Prominent local merchants.”

The King of Bling considered his next words. “Chan and me, we don’t see eye to eye on too many subjects,” he said. “And he has said things, both to my face and in a way that it got repeated back to me, about my line of business, comparing the sale of gold rope, et cetera, to a cancer, a plague, and so forth. But if this neighborhood have a heart and soul, Chan the Man got to be a candidate for that position. And you ought to know better than anybody, because you a smart, intelligent man with a lot of experience and credibility, that just because it’s all right for a cold-eye, skeptic motherfucker like me to go around saying all that community-uplift jive is a bunch of bullshit, don’t make it all right for you.”

“Right again,” Nat said. “Point taken.”

“What’s the second reason?”

“Oh. Well, I know how much you like collard greens.”

Singletary nodded and picked up his fork. He got himself a nice mouthful of the collards and chewed, reflectively at first and, it seemed, with a hint of doubt. Abruptly, he closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath as though surrendering the burden of many long years. When he opened his eyes, they were brimming with emotion in a way that would have astonished the hangers-on recently banished from the premises by his ill temper.

“What time you need me?” he said.

Solemn, smiling, mildly puzzled, or with a beneficent swish of Glinda the Good, each Concerned Person put down his or her alphanumerics, then passed along the clipboard and the souvenir pen from Children’s Fairyland that was tricked out with pink and purple tinsel as a magic wand: Shoshana Zucker, who used to be the director of Julie’s nursery school, a chemotherapy shmatte on her head; Claude Rapf the urban planner, who lived on a hill above the Caldecott Tunnel in a house shaped like a flying saucer, where he once threw a party to mark the unwrapping of a pristine original pressing of In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969), which he then catalyzed on a fifty-thousand-dollar analog system; a skinny, lank-haired, Fu Manchued dude later revealed with a flourish to be Professor Presto Digitation, the magician from Julie’s fifth birthday party; two of the aging Juddhists who had recently opened a meditation center called Neshama, a block down from the old Golden State, the male Juddhist slurping with a vehement mindfulness from the rubber teat of a water bottle while the female rummaged with melancholy chopsticks through the strips of flesh-gray tofu skin interleaved in her bento box as if ruing the slaughter of innocent soy plants that her appetite had ordained; Moby; that freaky Emmet Kelly–as Gloria Swanson–impersonator lady from the apartment over the Self-Laundry, holding her Skye terrier; Amre White, godson of Jim Jones, now the pastor of a rescue mission adjacent to the Golden State site, his ears, nostrils, and the ridges of his eyebrows cratered with the ghosts of renounced piercings; a city of Berkeley arborist named Marge whom Aviva once shepherded through a grievously late-term abortion; that Stephen Hawking guy who was not Stephen Hawking; the lady who owned the new-wave knitting store, teasing into life from the primal chaos of her yarn bag what appeared to be a doll-sized pair of cock-socked Eldridge Cleaver pants but also might have been a pullover sweater for her pet wyvern; weirdly, the accountant who got caught embezzling minor sums from a number of her clients, among them Brokeland Records, and was obliged (as a result of a bee that flew into a previous bonnet of Nat’s) to settle in small claims court; a noted UC Berkeley scholar of Altaic languages who specialized in collecting independent-label seven-inch soul releases of the mid-to-late sixties, carrying on his right shoulder without acknowledgment and for unspoken reasons a ripe banana, onto the nub end of which he (or someone) had drawn in black felt pen a smiling cartoon face; one of the eleven shrinks Nat had seen over the past ten years, a Dr. Milne, who spent the whole time casting a restless diagnostic eye across the framed album covers on the walls, the inoperative iron fuchsia of the fan whose downrod receded into the time-furred webs and shadows of the high tin ceiling, Julie’s painted bead curtain looking more like Sammy than Miles Davis, the battalion of miniature plastic Shriners in their miniature tuxes and fezzes massed along the plate rail of the wainscot at the back of the store, architectural relic of some pre-Spencerian establishment rumored but not confirmed to have been for a time the Oakland headquarters of the Black Hand; Sandy the dog trainer, who had been lobbying the city for nearly a decade to convert the Golden State site to a dog park and who had taught the Jaffes’ beagle-schnauzer mix, Jasper, later slain by cancer, to play dead; and S. S. Mirchandani, there only because he was always around that time of day, the wandering star of his mysterious system of motels, nephews, and liquor stores. Last to sign his name, grunting and shifting and looking like he would have preferred to consult beforehand with his attorney, the King of Bling on his usual stool, minimally fulfilling the racial requirement imposed on Nat by an anonymous aide to Councilman Rod P. Abreu; though Airbus, unrecorded by wand, was also present, way at the back, to sew a second patch of verisimilitude onto the motley cloak of diverse community support behind which Abreu, in his ongoing struggle with Chan the Man for control of the Oakland City Council, might plausibly clothe his presence and his intentions.

“Let me start by telling you folks,” Abreu said, “why, I think, we are not here.”

Rod Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical workers’ union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked by the malefactor thumbs of life. Yet in spite of his hangdog stoop and sorrowful countenance, his manner leaned aggressively toward an irrepressible and uniform pep, pep sprayed in snaky jets all over everything he said like concrete onto rebar.

“We probably should not be here today at this time,” he put it to them, “thinking we’re going to try to stop or turn back the clock on the Dogpile proposal. All right?”

Awaiting objection in a way that seemed to promise a swift overruling, courtroom-tested, Abreu held up his chin. No objection was forthcoming, though the lady with the Skye terrier looked disappointed. Nat was disappointed himself but, supposing this might be some kind of Brutus-is-an-honorable-man rhetorical gambit, settled in to hear what came next. The chin was duly lowered.

“To say anything like that, all right, would not only be premature, it would also be unfair. Maybe even a mistake.” Talking to a jury, a labor board, people who believed themselves, no matter how scant the supporting evidence, not to be simpletons. “Yes, I have seen the initial proposal, my staff and I have had a chance to look it over, and I would say that the best word for it is ‘ambitious.’ It is an ambitious proposal, and Mr. Gibson Goode, a terrific athlete, a human highlight reel—I mean, seriously—is an ambitious dude, okay, who has made amazing use of his gifts and his competitive edge, those leadership skills. If you ever saw him play, you know he has the goods. He can do it all. Guy you want in the huddle, third and long, take the ball and run with it, I mean, pick your favorite football cliché, to be honest, I’m more of a baseball fan. Go A’s?”

This tentative sentiment was seconded with scattershot but genuine fervor, the Oaklands a game and half out of first that August and seriously contending, and then the hinges of the front door let out a contrarian jeer. Everyone turned to see, hesitating at the threshold, a large man dressed in a stained Captain EO sweatshirt, sleeves cropped and curling at the shoulder seams to expose two high-reaching power forward arms. A pair of official Team USA basketball shorts as worn by that summer’s inglorious Olympic squad. White-on-white Adidas kicks, scarred as warhorses and wrinkled as elephants. The man looked flummoxed, lost, and, to his business partner, crestfallen, as if a grim fate that he had always feared might befall their establishment—say, a massive influx of strange white people—was now come to pass. He was carrying a square black frame from Blick art supplies, the kind they used to display album covers. He didn’t say anything, just stood there sweaty and breathing carefully through his nose.

“My partner, folks, Archy Stallings,” Nat announced, aware of a change of pitch, a downshift, in the music he was hearing in his head. For the first time since he had begun to craft the flyer that summoned COCHISE into being, it occurred to him, maybe a bit late, that he might have wanted to drop some hint of his intentions on his partner, folks, Archy Stallings. If for no other reason—again a bit late, he saw that there might be plenty of other reasons—than to prevent the calamitous breach of personal-style code that his oversight had obliged Archy to commit. Every so often, maybe, if he was running way behind, Archy might stop by the store on his way from the courts at Mosswood Park, before he went home to shower and change. He never did so except with reluctance, discomfort, and apologies to whoever was at the counter to see him looking so raggedy-ass.

“Sorry,” he told the room before settling on his partner as the likely source of his underdressed confusion with a frown and a furrowing of eyebrows. “I—uh. Whoa. Nat—”

“Archy, this is Councilman Abreu,” Nat said, trying for the sake of appearances to make it sound like he was reminding rather than informing. “He graciously found some time to stop by today and talk to us, give us his views on the Dogpile thing. And,” he added, seized by a happy if disingenuous inspiration, “to hear what we have to say. Our neighbor and good friend Mr. Singletary—”

Garnet Singletary pressed his fingers against his sternum as though feeling for the bullethole.

“We need to fight!” said the lady who lived over the Self-Laundry, goosing her dog on the word “fight” as though encouraging it to second the motion. The dog abstained.

“HELL, YES,” intoned the Stephen Hawking guy through his vocoder, rolling his Mars rover out of Archy’s way.

“Huh,” said Archy quietly. “Is that right? Fight, okay.”

Nat noted the passage across his friend’s wide, mild features of what appeared to be genuine distress. Eager to ascribe that painful sight to anything other than the fact that, in an access of hypomania, he had convened—without consulting anyone, in the middle of a “transitional” neighborhood in a city that was largely black and poor and hungry for the kind of pride-instilling economic gesture that the construction of a Dogpile Thang represented, however gestural and beneficial only to Our Beloved Corporate Overlords it might turn out to be—this motley gathering of freaky Caucasians united, to hazard a guess, only by a reflexive willingness if not a compulsion to oppose pretty much anything new that came along, especially if it promised to be big and bright and bangin; in the process, creating and abandoning an unholy mess in his own kitchen, a mess that, his rapidly cycling brain chemistry began to whisper to him, was probably a metaphor, a prophecy of how this whole thing was going to turn out; hoping to forestall this realization, Nat sought explanation for Archy’s evident dismay in the picture frame. Archy had used it to mount the sleeve of his cherished copy of Redbonin’, with its starkly lit, extreme close-up Pete Turner photograph of Cochise Jones looking lean and hale but far more menacing than he ever had in life, cheeks printed with a calamitous history of freckles.

“I just came by to hang this picture up,” Archy said.

“Aw, man, condolences,” said Moby, letting loose some kind of absurd dap congeries which, remarkably, Archy returned slap for slap, flutter for flutter, pound for pound. Then, like sparring bears, they fell into a woozy clinch. “So fuckin sorry to hear about that, bro. Mr. Jones was a legend and a hella nice guy.”

“True, true,” Archy said, wading toward the front counter with everybody goggling silently at him in a way that reminded Nat of Jesus among the moneylenders. Archy took note of the remaining fried chicken, beans and rice, collards, and biscuits laid out on the counter. He pressed his lips together as if in token of a Juddhist detachment from such worldly (not to say unclean) productions. Exchanged with the King of Bling a curl-fingered clasp of Zen simplicity. Went to a shelf on the wall behind the counter, moved aside an old Seth Thomas digital clock, a James Brown bobblehead, and a stack of AT&T bills one or the other of the partners was long since supposed to have gone through with a highlighter pen. He unfolded the cardboard foot at the back of the frame and propped up the album sleeve with its matte-finished border of funereal black. He stepped back to contemplate it and heaved a big old big-man sigh. Then he turned to face the inexplicable room and reached for a chicken leg. He bit and chewed and swallowed without apparent pleasure, by which token Nat saw that his partner was truly angry.

“Arch—”

“I’m here to listen,” Archy said to Nat. “You listen, too.” Chomp. “Excuse me, Councilman. Please continue.”

“Okay,” Rod Abreu said. “Well, like I explained, Mr. Stallings, just a minute ago, at this point in the game, I actually don’t think we should be thinking of fighting anything. I was just saying…” He looked sheepish. “What was I saying?”

“Go A’s,” said Dr. Milne.

“Right. Football. Yes. Folks, there is no question, if you don’t know, take it from me, Gibson Goode has done great things for the community down in L.A., a community where not a whole lot of great things were happening before. I commend and admire him for that, and I commend the people, some of my colleagues on the city council, who look at what Mr. Goode has done in L.A. and say, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could make something like that happen here in Oakland. And hey, he’s a hometown boy, right? A homeboy. Wouldn’t something like that be awesome? A shot in the arm. Well, yes, maybe it would be awesome. It sounds awesome. It looks awesome on paper. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, and hey, I’m a homeboy, too? Born in East Oakland, right at Highland Hospital? It’s this: I have seen a lot of impressive people come through this city over the years with a lot of awesome ideas that looked good on paper. Hey, when you look like I do, on paper’s your only hope.”

That got a laugh, Shoshana in her chemo scarf nodding, other people nodding. Abreu worked those doleful eyes, those Marrano eyes, abreu meaning “Hebrew,” as Nat would have liked to inform Archy, in Portuguese, or maybe it was Catalan.

“Whenever you have a proposal as ambitious as this one, and folks, no doubt about it, this is a very ambitious proposal, you have to be careful. People tend, when you have a charismatic guy like Gibson Goode, a genuine superstar, hey, somebody like that generates a lot of excitement, people get kind of caught up, right? And when people get excited, they get carried away, then they rush into things. And that’s why we are here today. Because somebody has to kind of hang back a little, say, okay, let’s slow down. Let’s take our time with this. That’s the message I’m bringing you today.”

Slow down, admittedly not quite the message that Nat had envisioned when he first began to lay his fevered plans, but his nose detected subterfuge in Abreu’s words, and he did not believe that a mere retarding action was all the councilman had in mind.

“And it’s the message that I’d like to take back from you and share with my colleagues on the city council.”

S. S. Mirchandani leaned in close to Archy. “I have been reliably informed,” he said in a portentous and inadequate whisper, nodding toward Abreu, “that he was the one getting Chan the Man’s sister fired from the port of Oakland.”

Like Archy, making his joyless way through a biscuit that might have brought joy to Eeyore, Nat affected not to have heard Mr. Mirchandani, but he glanced over at the likely source of the information. Singletary arched an eyebrow, then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button of a homemade jet pack. He did not look too impressed by the putative founding membership of COCHISE, their ranks drawn largely, as Nat would have been obliged to concede, from the recipients of an e-mail sent in bee-meets-bonnet haste to those addresses in his personal contacts file who shared a zip code with Brokeland, a relatively modest number (Nat at best a fitful electronic correspondent) amassed over a period of several years from a disparate set of social contexts.

“Now, I want to thank our hosts today, you two are really pillars of this neighborhood, for organizing this get-together.”

“Huh,” said Archy.

Abreu turned at the sound and caught Nat in the midst of offering his landlord an elaborate shrug, lips down-twisted asymmetrically into an expression meant to convey 1) that his willingness to concede both the unlikeliness of COCHISE’s success and the regrettable preponderance, thus far, of white faces among its membership was accompanied by 2) a respectful suggestion that Singletary reserve judgment, because hey, you never knew what might happen, and a second, still more respectful suggestion that 3) Singletary go fuck himself; such elaborate, densely layered shrugs being a particular specialty of the Jaffes going back to their days of never knowing what might happen along the banks of the Vistula.

“No, really,” Abreu said, misinterpreting Nat’s shrug as modesty. “Brokeland Records, right, I mean, this place is so much more than a store. It’s a neighborhood institution. I know a lot of you folks have spent a lot of your time and money in this place over the years.”

“Lot more time than money,” Archy said, and Moby, who had dropped thousands over the years, loyally laughed.

“It’s the kind of independent, quirky, welcoming place…” Abreu went on, voice wavering as though he were picking up on the crackle of politics that troubled the air between the partners. The Spinozan sadness in his eyes seemed to balloon, and the thumbprints beneath them to deepen: “…that gives a special character to this part of the city. And it’s that special character we’re going to have to really consider as we look at the Dogpile plan going forward. There are also possibly some environmental-impact issues to look at. Now, I understand, from talking to, uh, Ms.—”

“Sandy,” said the former light in the eye and wag in the tail of poor Jasper. “That’s why I was told we couldn’t put a dog park there. The back end of the property used to be a factory or something. I heard there was mercury. You can’t dig it up without doing some kind of big cleanup.”

A number of people nodded and murmured that they had heard reports of some kind of problem with the site, but many more seemed to be hearing the information for the first time, and Nat was gratified by the concern that it appeared to engender, news of the danger forking outward, in his imagination, along a network of gossip and bloggery until it reached a crescendo of outrage that would doom the Dogpile proposal now and for all time, bring it with a creak and a crumble and a great cloud of dust to the ground. He wanted to turn to Archy, standing irritated next to him, turn to Aviva as in his imagination she ran screaming from the devastated kitchen of the home that was, after all, also threatened by the advent of the Thang, turn to the ghost of Opal Starrett, who always used to say, not without affection, that Nat was incapable of organizing an empty drawer, throw out his arms, and cry, Da-deeda-la-dee-dop!

Just as Nat was congratulating himself and mentally boasting to the living and the dead for his remarkable aim with the ancestral Davidic sling, he saw Singletary sit up electric-shock straight, then nod cool and wary at someone beyond the frame of the front window, out of Nat’s line of sight.

“So the Dogpile folks are probably going to run into some questions right there. And of course, and here’s the end of what I have to say, the city council and the planning commission are going to be looking for a lot of input and comment from you—”

And then in walked Chan the Man, in his Sergio Leone hat and funereal suit, steps precise, eye bright and quick as a rooster’s. He stopped in the doorway with two of his nephews paired behind him. “Oh my goodness,” he said. “I am sorry. I did not realize.”

He raised a hand to his mouth and looked embarrassed. Dumbfounded to discover his favorite record store almost if not quite packed with people in the middle of the day. Far more people, perhaps, than had ever been almost but not quite packed into this space at any time in its history, even back when it was Spencer’s Barbershop. For a kinescoped instant Nat cut away in his imagination from the scene at Brokeland to an afternoon forty years earlier, men and boys, maybe Chan Flowers and Luther Stallings among them, jostling around a portable black-and-white to watch Cassius Clay take down the Big Bear. Nat wished intensely that this gathering could be that gathering, these people could be those, with all the years of ferment and innovation in the music and the life of black America ahead of them. Hope unfulfilled, not yet betrayed.

The crafty old fucker, acting surprised. It was barely possible that he felt surprised by the decent turnout Nat had managed, but Nat did not buy for a second that the guy was embarrassed, that he just happened to walk in on the organizational meeting of COCHISE, oh my goodness, so sorry to interrupt, I see I will have to come back later. Flowers made a more rapid but careful survey of the human contents of the room. When he reached the King of Bling, he paused.

“Mr. Singletary,” he said with cold affection. “Well, well. An august presence.”

Singletary said, “Mm-hmm.” Savoring it, all at once content to be there in the room, the King of Bling kicked back on the stool. He smiled slowly. Chan the Man smiled right back.

“So many faces I don’t know,” he said as if fault for the ignorance were entirely his. “Oh, now, Elisheva, isn’t it?”

“Yes, hello,” said the lady rabbi from Neshama, wagging three fingers Girl Scout–style.

“Making your preparations for the High Holidays?”

“They’re getting close,” Elisheva said.

“That’s right! Rosh Hashanah!” On Flowers’s lips, the name of the holiday sounded like something much grander to Nat’s ear, roarsh ha-shanah!, a Klingon affair involving ritual combat and lunar howling. “And who else? Oh, excuse me, there, brother.”

The Steven Hawking guy joysticked his chair around to make room, causing Abreu to take a step back and thus come into Chan Flowers’s line of sight for the first time. He had been concealed by the certificate, mounted on a piece of foam core, advising all comers that in 2003 readers of the Express had declared Brokeland records to be the Best Used Record Store in the East Bay, a conclusion they had reached in seven out of the past ten years. Then Chandler Bankwell Flowers III looked, for real, dumbfounded.

“Councilman Abreu,” he said. “And very much at large.”

“This is terrific,” Abreu said with that untouchable chipperness, so like tedium, which must serve him well in his line of work. “I was just about to open it up to questions from these good people here. And you are so much more informed about this project than I am. I’m sure you all know, do you all know? what a big supporter of Dogpile and Mr. Goode the councilman has recently become after a certain period of sharing the reservations that I know many of us in this room also feel. So, Mr. Flowers, I don’t know, maybe you’d like to tell us some of the things you learned, or the decisions you came to, that helped you change your mind about this project.”

“I’d love to,” Flowers said. “Nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, today I do not have the time. I’m just on my way from one appointment to another. Not even time to stop and browse the new-arrivals bin. Leave a little more of my hard-earned pay in that cash register over there.”

This got a bigger laugh than any Abreu had managed to scrape together from this crowd, admittedly, a tough Berkeley/Oakland crowd, its sense of humor reduced, like the sperm count of a man who wore his underwear too tight, by the heat of two dozen outraged brains. It occurred to Nat that Chan the Man appeared to be in fine form and might take it into his head to make a speech. Might even have come today prepared to make one. An address that would reach out to the core of Nat’s constituency: the soreheads of the neighborhood, the purists, the lovers of minutiae, the inveterate hearers of invisible bees. All gathered together in one room, to be scooped up into the stern but forgiving arms of Flowers. Delivered at one blow like the brave little tailor’s flies. Courtesy of Nathaniel Jaffe, let his epitaph be: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Actually, I was just looking for you, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “If you’ve got a minute?”

It was an artless and genial question, and when the meeting resumed with a question from Dr. Milne about a peculiarity of Oakland zoning ordinances, no one paid it any mind apart from Nat, who happened to be looking at Archy when Archy, wary, unwilling, replied, “Yeah, you bet.”

In the cool penumbra of Chan Flowers’s office, Archy dropped into a wingback chair. It was big and soft as a grandmother, trellised cream chintz overwhelmed with pink roses. A chair for swooning in, for surrendering one’s dignity to, safe within the air-conditioned preserve of sympathy where, installed behind his desk, Chan Flowers received death’s custom with magisterial detachment, a gamekeeper crouched and watchful in a blind. Sweat cooled in cobwebs on Archy’s arms and forehead.

“Thanks for taking a minute, son,” Flowers said. “Didn’t seem to me you were necessarily involved in that mess over there.”

“Not necessarily,” Archy allowed. He fought the armchair, resisting its invitation to conform his frame to its armature of grief. Grief was itself a kind of chair, wide and forgiving, that might enfold you softly in its wings and then devour you, keep you like a pocketful of loose change. He found himself slouching in it, off-kilter, legs outflung, bare knees akimbo, covering his mouth with one hand like he was trying to bite back a smart remark.

“I thought maybe if it was convenient,” Flowers said, “you and I might have some details to go over for the funeral and all. One or two points that have come up in the fine print, so to speak.”

Archy nodded, already feeling some undercurrent in the conversation, this audience with the councilman, that he didn’t like. Bankwell and the other nephew, Feyd, stood guard at either side of the office door like a couple of foo dogs, too close to looming for Archy’s taste. They were the undertaker’s muscle, no doubt or question about that. At a funeral, if things turned unruly, a Flowers nephew might have to step in, keep the peace. If Flowers was burying a murder victim, somebody dropped by the logic of retaliation, if there was some history of blood and bad feeling abroad, a nephew might have to go strapped among the mourners. Bankwell and Feyd, in their copious suits, wore faces you could interpret as reflecting the tranquility of iron harbored at the hip. Archy remembered Bankwell obese and twelve, head too small for the rest of him, a neighborhood scandal after it was discovered that Bank had been getting his addled granny to pay him five dollars per book to solve her Dell Word Searches for her. Helping her to maintain her dignity, he claimed, so she could leave the books around her house with letters neatly circled, words crossed out. Archy wondered why Flowers felt that muscle was a necessary or desirable element for their rendezvous. He craned around to extend the nephews, by means of a bored slow stare, an invitation to go fuck themselves, saluting Feyd by hoisting his chin high. Feyd raised his own with an amiable coldness. He was reputed to be a tight and encyclopedic dancer, up on them all, from the Southside to turfing. Probably knew how to fight, too, did some capoeira, boy had that lean, springy malandro look to him. Bankwell, unquestionably, was grown to a very large size.

Archy returned to Chan, ready with a reply. “Do I have a choice?” he said.

“Of course,” Flowers said mildly, so mildly that Archy at once regretted his words and wished to retract them. Paranoid, imagining shit, guns and undercurrents. Come at the man sounding flip and disrespectful.

“If this is a bad time,” Flowers said, “I’m happy to—”

“Nah, no,” Archy said, “just kidding. Let’s do it.”

“Fine.”

“You were saying about Mr. Jones.”

“I was. Now, I’m sure Brother Singletary already told you, but Mr. Jones took care of everything, from the financial point of view and also in the matter of choices and selections.”

“Everybody knew that.” Singletary turning out to be Mr. Jones’s executor, fingers in every pie not already fingered up by Chandler Flowers. “I mean, shit, for a while he was carrying around a picture of his coffin folded up into his wallet, used to take it out and smile at it like he was looking at a centerfold or, like, a picture of Tahiti.”

“Mr. Jones, rest in peace, the man had his certain type of peculiarity, no doubt.”

“Asking to be buried in the Aztec number,” Archy said. “I heard.”

“Thing is hell of ugly,” Feyd said.

“The Aztec number was made by Ron Postal of Beverly Hills,” Archy said, grateful for the opportunity, as an alternative to adolescent slouching and mouthing off, to turn professorial and school the roostery motherfucker. “Acknowledged master of the American leisure suit. It’s truly one of a kind. Shit ought to be in the Smithsonian.”

“People can be very particular about burial attire,” Flowers said with all his perfected mildness. “No, the odd thing, what I’m talking about, maybe odd’s not the proper term. I was going through his instructions, you know, he has it all typed up single-spaced, six pages.” He opened a folder on his desk, forest green with hooks of white metal where you hung it from rails in the file drawer. With the tip of his middle finger, hardly larger than a boy’s, he began to tick off items on the first sheet of paper the folder contained. “He wanted the Cadillac hearse.”

“Naturally,” Archy said.

“Naturally. And we’re going to make that happen for him. He wanted it open casket—”

“How’s he look?”

“Now? Now he looks peaceful and dignified.”

“No sign of, uh, damage?”

“This is our art, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “Our profession. Please. Man wanted the Chinese marching band, the Green Street Mortuary Band, from over in the city.” He looked up from the folder. “How’s that coming?”

“Turns out they’re already booked,” Archy said. “Morning and afternoon.”

“That is going to be a problem, then,” Flowers said.

“Please,” Archy said. He had been trading messages with Gwen’s receptionist, Kai, to see about booking her outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, to play the funeral parade. Mr. Jones had checked them out one time at the Temescal street fair. Bunch of straight-faced, brass-brandishing cute little tattooed lesbianettes playing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” wasn’t ever going to have too much trouble putting a smile on Mr. Jones’s face. “This is my art and my profession.”

“Fair enough.”

“So I’m still waiting for the points that have come up,” Archy said. “In the fine print.”

“Well,” Flowers said, “the gentleman, rest his soul, he had an aversion, you might say, to religion. I’m sure you know.”

“He was deep, though.”

“Yes, he was. But he made it clear,” tapping the third typed sheet of paper in the green folder, “he didn’t want a preacher or a minister, didn’t want no church. Didn’t even want to hold the service here at the funeral home. What with the stained glass and, I guess, the pews in the chapels and so on. We got Bibles, we got hymnals. A general atmosphere of, call it, reverent solemnity. I mean, I try to keep the religious element unobtrusive, respectful. Technically, this is a secular operation. But, well, they are called funeral chapels, and Mr. Jones—”

“He was a true-blue atheist,” Archy said. “I remember my pops saying how Mr. Jones, at one time he was even a full-on Communist.”

“How is Luther?” Flowers said, tired, uninterested, milder than ever. Asking it pro forma. But one pop-eye peeper flicked left, checking in on Bankwell, telling the man, You pay attention, now.

“I wouldn’t know,” Archy said.

“You haven’t seen him?”

“Not for like two years. What he do this time?”

“Didn’t do anything,” Chan Flowers said. “I never said he did.”

“But you’re looking for him,” Archy said. “I get the distinct impression.”

“I might be.”

“If you’re looking for him,” Archy said, “he must of done something.”

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, at the bottom of Flowers’s face. Archy did not know the nature of the ancient beef that Chan Flowers had with Luther Stallings. The history of the matter was banned and obscure. His aunties had made inquiries, put out feelers. For years they continued to probe the gossip pits, turn over the ashes with their sticks. But even those legendary connoisseurs of scandal never found anything to definitively explain the break, apart from whispers of a connection to some mythic murder of the Panther years. As boys, Archy knew, Chan and Luther had been famously thick, chronic co-conspirators. Then, when Archy was maybe four or five years old, around the time Luther started acting in movies, the friendship was abandoned like a house, sealed by law, condemned.

“Whatever he did, I assume it is all his fault,” Archy said. “Let me just put that out there to start.”

“You may well be right,” Flowers said. “Luther may have done something, and whatever he did is probably, I’m sorry to say, his fault. But that’s not here nor there. I just need to see the man. I just need to talk to him.”

There was a photograph that Archy remembered, hung from the wall of his father’s various apartments. It was a glossy black and white, taken by a Tribune photographer, at an Oakland Tech dance, Luther Stallings and Chan Flowers and two fly girls of the period. Everybody dolled up and smiling but possessing that precocious dignity of your ancestors when they were young.

“If I knew where he was at, Councilman, I would tell you, straight up,” Archy said. “But I don’t know. By choice. And I don’t plan to find out.”

“And you don’t know anybody knows where he’s living. Not one single soul.”

He might have been gently chiding Archy for this ignorance. Implying there could, somewhere, for somebody, still be some use left in Luther Stallings.

“Nope. No, sir, no, I don’t.”

“Well, let’s say that situation changes, or maybe you have some kind of change in the way you’re looking at that situation. Say, one day you gaze out at the neighborhood water. See that fin popping up, that old familiar shark come swimming around. Just, you know, let me know. I have something to give him. Something he needs very badly.”

“Yeah? What, a sea lion?”

Flowers fixed his sleepy eyes on Archy, laid them on like hands. Slowly, skeptically, the heavy lids lifted. “I am serious, now,” he said. “You run across him or one of his known associates and running buddies. Somebody from his old crew that ain’t died yet, few in number as they are. Just let me know. Valletta Moore, for example. I heard she’s around.”

He came at Archy’s soul then with the flashlight and the crowbar of his gaze. Archy offered no purchase and gave nothing back. Maybe the man already knew that Archy had seen Valletta; maybe he was only fishing. Archy could not have said why he decided to keep silent.

“If she should happen to show up,” Flowers said, “let’s say. You just go on and call me on my personal cell. Feyd, give him the number. All right? Will you do that for me?”

Archy said, “I’ll think about it.”

“You do that,” Flowers said. “And maybe, you never know, I might be the one ends up putting in a word for you with Mr. G Bad.”

“Is that right?”

“It’s not out of the question, by any means.”

“‘Community relations,’ huh.”

“The new Dogpile store, I have been reliably told, is going to have the most extensive, most encyclopedic, jazz section of any store in the country. Also hip-hop. R and B. Blues. Gospel. Soul. Funk. Somebody will have to run that department, Mr. Stallings.”

Archy had a choice: Let the significance of these words sink in, or shed it at once without even giving it a try, like a dog encouraged to wear a hat. “Satan,” he said, smiling. “Get thee behind me.”

Behind him there was only a snort from Feyd, or maybe it was Bankwell.

“Up to you, of course. Baby on the way,” Flowers said. “Time you started making some real money. Get yourself that fat package of benefits they’re paying.”

“He could offer me a ride in the Dogpile blimp,” Archy said. “I am not for sale.”

“I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.”

“Living in a dreamland,” Bankwell suggested.

“Indeed,” said Flowers. “But the rent is coming due.”

“Hey, yeah, no, I really want to thank you,” Archy said, getting to his feet. “You really helped me organize my thinking about Brokeland all of a sudden. I appreciate it.”

“Did I?” Flowers’s turn to sound leery, doubting the trend of Archy’s thinking. “How so?”

“You made me realize, we have to do the funeral at the store. Push back all the record bins, how we have them on those wheels, you know? We can fit all kinds of people in there. Just like for the dances we used to put on.” It was not easy, dressed in skanky b-ball shorts and a Captain EO sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves, but Archy dived down deep and hauled up all the dignity he could snap loose from the sea bottom of his soul. “Councilman, you made me realize, thank you, but me and Mr. Jones and Nat Jaffe and our kind of people, we already got a church of our own. You, too, seemed like at one time, up to not too long ago, a member in good standing. And that church is the church of vinyl.”

“The church of vinyl,” Flowers said, looking half persuaded. But he shook his head and made a snuffling sound of amusement or disgust. “Well, well.”

Archy turned and left the office without looking to the Bankwell side or to the Feyd, admiring as he passed between them the echo of his own phraseology as it lingered in his ears.

“You see that fin in the water, now,” Flowers called after him. “You just go on and holler out.”

Wide as the abyss and rumbling like doom, the El Camino rolled into the street of forsaken toys and came to a stop in front of the house. Shudder, cough, soft bang; then the whole afternoon suffused with an embarrassed silence. Late afternoon in late August, the sky limited only by the hills and the imminent wall of night. Palm tree, sycamore trees, soaked in shadow. Slouch-hat bungalows blazing sunshine at their crowns. Archy took it all in with the ardor of a doomed man. Not that he believed himself to be in any danger or was dying in any but the slowest and most conventional of ways. The clarity and sweetness of the evening, the light and the way it made his chest ache, were only the effects of mild panic, panic both moral and practical.

When he got out of the car, the evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. He stood on the sidewalk in front of his house. The El Camino’s engine sighed and muttered to itself, settling. A toddler archaeologist searched the sandbox with a red shovel. Probably come up with some ancient bit of toy legend, a Steve Austin head, the head of an Oscar Goldman. Six million ways I use to run it. He would tell Gwen about Titus. After that there would be other things to say to various other people. A number of crucial decisions remained as yet unmade. At least he would have gotten to square one, if no farther.

“Stay right there,” Gwen said, and it turned out that the instruction was meant for young Mr. Titus Joyner, installed on the bottom step of the front porch. Indeed, it might be surmised from his wife’s expression, as she came huffing toward him down the front walk of their house freighted with a big green duffel bag, that rather than stay right where he was, the preferred course for Archy would be to turn around and run for those motherfucking hills.

“I took him to Trader Joe’s,” she said. She dropped the duffel on the ground between them, and it sounded like fifty pounds of property and possessions to Archy’s ear. “There’s canned black bean chili and frozen taquitos. Eggs and bacon and pancake mix and syrup.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you— Okay.” He bent down and picked up the duffel. Fifty pounds. No way could the things that Archy Stallings required to live free and equal and happy in this world weigh anything less than five, six hundred pounds.

“I bought him new socks and underpants.” She shuddered. “And you had better believe that I disposed of the old ones.”

Archy looked at Titus, head in hands, studying his Air Jordans. Archy imagined the new white socks on their plastic bopeeps, the fresh Fruit of the Looms in their crinkling package. It was when he looked at his son and pictured the underpants and socks that he first felt truly ashamed. This boy had no one in the world to ensure, to at least check from time to time, that his underwear was clean. And Archy was so low, of so little account as a man and a father, that Gwen, not even a blood relation, had been obliged to step in like Uncle Sam with a rogue state and intervene. Assume control over the situation.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, man. Titus. Is this how you want it?”

The boy thought it over, taking his time. No flicker of the process of thought was perceptible in his eyes. Then he shrugged.

“Okay, then,” Archy said. He reshouldered the strap of the duffel and looked at Gwen. “Thank you.” He turned away, getting choked up, trying to cover it with a cough, coughing like his El Camino. His broken old car, his broke barbershop full of old broken records, and the broken-down two-tone double town of Brokeland: That was the inventory of his life.

“Excuse me. Where are you going?”

He turned back, understanding that he had failed to understand but not yet fully understanding. Gwen came down the walk, snatched the duffel bag from his shoulder, and staggered off with it to her car. The duffel bag rode shotgun as she backed her Beamer out of the driveway. She rolled down the window on the duffel bag’s side and waited while Archy, checking the neighbors’ windows, finding a face or two, loped over to the car.

“I am going to tell you how to do it,” Gwen said, keeping a tight grip, Archy could see. “It is very simple. This is the only advice I’m ever going to give you, because there is nothing else to really say.”

“Okay,” Archy said. Even though he saw Gwen sitting in her car, getting ready to drive away with her fifty pounds of freedom, he still did not fully understand that she was leaving him. “I’m listening.”

“First I want to make sure you understand. You look confused. Are you confused?”

“Yes, I am a little confused.”

“I have a patient in labor. Amy. I am going to work her birth. And then I am going to sleep someplace else. I will not be returning. With me so far?”

Archy nodded.

“That child over there is your son. Titus. He just barely fits on an AeroBed in the back room. I have been told that he’s capable of speech but haven’t seen too much proof of that so far. Taquitos. Bacon.” She counted them off on her fingers. “You got it?”

“Got it.”

“Okay. Now here is the advice: You have to make them do things they don’t want to do, even when you don’t really care if they do them or not,” she said. “All the rest is, you know.”

It took Archy’s brain a couple of nanofarts longer, contemplating this Möbius twist of advice and the fine rear end of Gwen’s car as it receded, but at last he understood. The packages of underpants, the cans of Trader Joe’s black-bean chili. These were not reproaches thrown at him by an angry woman trying to shame him into paying attention to his child by the sacrifice she was bent on making. They were pieces of information that he was going to need.

“I’m hungry,” said the boy when Archy turned back to the house.

Whenever his mother and her sisters gathered to work hair and pronounce judgments in the kitchens of Archy’s childhood, they had two favorite terms of fulmination. The first thunderbolt they liked to throw, reaching back like Zeus to grab it from a bucket in the corner, was shameless. You used to hear that one a lot. It had an ambiguous shimmer. Shameless meant you suffered from a case of laziness so profound that you could not be bothered to hide your misbehavior; but it seemed to suggest also that you had nothing to hide, no need to feel any shame.

The second word lofted by the sisters from the heights of their insurmountable outrage was scandalous. This term they collapsed, like a switchblade on its hinge, into two syllables, “scanless,” so that when he was young, Archy heard it as a grammatical cousin of the first: an absence of that was also a freedom from. Scanlessness was a magic invisibility, a moral cloaking device wielded by the shameless in order to render them proof against the all-seeing scanners employed by proper-acting people who knew how to conduct themselves, the latter group reckoned by the sisters to be few in number, roughly coextensive with themselves.

Shameless and scanless Archy ducked into Walter Bankwell’s car, thus almost by definition up to no good. Back in the day, the vehicle in question would have been a hard-used but well-loved 1981 Datsun B210, the blue of testicular vasocongestion, its rear seat exchanged like the works of Doc Brown’s DeLorean for the flux capacitor of a pair of Alpine speakers capable of shaking loose the screws of time and space. Today, twelve-thirty P.M., at the secret bend of Thirty-seventh Street, a rendezvous chosen by Archy according to ancient habits of stealth, the vehicle in question was a sterling 1986 Omni GLH, turbocharged and nasty. Caution-yellow with black Band-Aid strips, its exhaust tuned to a baritone Gerry Mulligan growl. Lest Archy or anyone else currently inhabiting the surface of Sol III miss the homage intended by the paint job to the jumpsuit worn by former Oaklander Bruce Lee in his last, incomplete masterpiece, The Game of Death, Walter himself was attired in a vintage Adidas tracksuit, bee-yellow with a wide bee-black stripe up the side, and the requisite pair of bumblebee Onitsuka Tigers.

“Oh my goodness,” Archy said, aching with the beauty of the car as he swung his bulk into it, favoring his old running buddy with a long, slow head-to-toe of mock admiration. “Uma Thurman! Love your work.”

Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use. Giving off a vibe of irritation, of feeling put upon, as if he had better things to do, wilder geese to chase. He had e-mailed Archy from a Dogpile domain, destination and intentions left unstated and mysterious apart from a terse if not insulting (however accurate) allusion to Archy’s inability to decline a free meal.

“‘Uma Thurman.’” He shook his head, sorry for Archy, disappointed in him. “That ain’t even a insult.”

Archy considered. “You may be right.”

“When the mosquito bites her? And my girl Uma comes out that coma … ?” Walter laid two fingers against the wheel. “It’s, like, a simple two-step process. Step one, regain consciousness. Step two, tear it up.” He marveled. “When she chews that guy’s tongue right out his head…”

“Is that even possible?”

“Matter of fact,” Walter continued, ignoring the question, “I wish I was Uma Thurman. Then I would surely not have to be riding around the tired end of Temescal with no beret-wearing, soul-patch dee-vo-tay of Negritude, Charles Mingus–impersonating motherfucker.”

Walter put the GLH in gear, and they loped away from the curb with the engine blowing low notes.

“Ain’t like you got the way you are from people changing their minds about feeding you.”

There was merit in this reasoning that Archy could not discount. So he removed and folded on his lap the jacket of his linen suit, caramel brown, one-button, knife-narrow 1962 lapel; found the bar that let the seat roll back, all the way back; hooked his feet, shod in sugar-brown size-15 alligator ankle-zip boots, together at the ankles; adjusted the angle of his genuine Basque beret, also the color of brown sugar; and shut the fuck up. He had a feeling this mystery trip might be a sequel to his conversation yesterday with Chan Flowers, but his conscience wouldn’t let him take the idea any further than that. As they pulled out, he looked over his shoulder out the rear window to make sure Nat wasn’t standing there on the sidewalk.

Old Kung Fu, check him out. All those years scuffling and fucking up down in L.A., offering up his face to any door that cared to shut on it, trying to keep distance between himself and the uncle who loved him too strongly. Now here he was, back in Oakland, working for the fifth richest black man in America, driving this flawlessly restored piece of carflesh, blasting some Zapp or maybe it was solo Troutman on the in-dash factory cassette player, and in general, as he and Archy would have put it during their salad days, keepin it surreal.

“So, like, seriously,” Archy said. “Where we going?”

But Walter’s only reply was to get on the 24 heading west, and before long they were on the 880 with only Hayward, San Jose, and Los Angeles between them and the bleak unrestauranted expanse of Antarctica.

“Someplace by the airport?” Archy guessed. Still one or two old-school dives there, tucked in among the union halls and standardized burger units along the renovated stretch of Hegenburger, dark subaquatic holes for labor lawyers to crawl into, bikers, baggage handlers, short-haul stews adding up their croutons in their Weight Watchers booklets. Nothing to look forward to that Archy knew about, except insofar as he lived in constant expectation of discovering or being led, even along the most unlikely and brand-blasted frontage road, to some great unknown plateful of marvels.

“Supposed to surprise you,” said Walter. Boy had that raspy voice anyway, but something seemed to catch at the back of his throat, a pill of hesitation. Archy replayed the e-mail in his mind, certain that it had included words that could be paraphrased as I will buy you lunch. “Case you too blind, dumb, and stupid to come along under your own recognizance.”

“It’s a restaurant, though. Right?”

“Keep that a surprise, too,” Walter said. “Just for a little bit longer.”

Archy’s imagination starting to run wild on him, picturing maybe some kind of farm-food bullshit where you had to slaughter your own pig, a deep-fried termite stand, something like that.

“Because, swear to God, if you’re trying to punk me—”

“Whoa, ease up, Turtle. I straight-up guarantee, you going be in the hands of a excellent chef. All right?”

Universal and catholic in his appetites, Archy sat back, soothed by this information, allowing the prospect of an enigmatic luncheon—maybe al pastor sliced from the rotisserie by some obscure genius in a taco truck—to drive from his mind worrisome thoughts of the boy who was, by some loop in life’s tangling, now his responsibility. Stone-face, built and colored so much like Luther Stallings, the sight of the boy like the touch of pincers to Archy’s heart, stinging him in the past and the present at the same time, an ache that leaped decades, skipped a generation. Or maybe one of those Korean barbecues where the lady came and dealt out a whole deck of little plates and bowls of kimchi on the table in front of you like she was going to tell your fortune in chili and pickles, let you cook your own short rib sliced thin as lunch meat over your own private grill. For a minute Archy allowed a Korean cook-fire in his mind to burn away the bitter consciousness, pressing at him all the time, of the hurt and disappointment he had caused and would no doubt go on causing, through his scanlessness and shamelessness, to the woman he loved. A waffle truck, a gleaming chrome bus that dished up chicken and waffles, where the fate of Brokeland Records, of his long and tricky friendship with Nat Jaffe, could all be drowned in a ribbon of pancake syrup, spreading across the crisp grid of an imagined waffle to impinge, with its sweet hint of smoke, on a crispy drumstick. All those problems, and the loss of Mr. Jones, the calls and arrangements Archy needed to make—so much smoke and vapor to be sucked up into exhaust fans roaring over Hunan woks, bubbling pots of birria, grill tops hissing with onions for a patty melt or a Joe’s Special.

Then Archy saw, and realized, the surprise. It swung with a slow majesty from its tether at the end of a high steel mast that was in turn mounted on the bed of a tractor-trailer, at the farthest reaches of the Oakland airport, along a bleak, half-wild stretch of marshland.

“The blimp,” Archy said. It filled the windshield of the GLH, shiny and black, emblazoned on its flank with a red paw print and bold red slab-serif type. “The Dogpile blimp.”

“Ain’t a blimp, it’s a zeppelin.” That raspy Q-Tip voice of Walter’s turned soft, choked. Betraying, Archy might have said, possibly the slightest hint of fear. “Got the rigid structure.”

“Oh, right.”

“Blimp’s just a bag.”

They rolled up to a checkpoint manned by a pock-faced rent-a-cop where Walter exchanged his driver’s license for a long hard fish-eye, which, upon return of his license, he steadily countered. Walter rolled the car right up into the shadow of the airship, and they got out, slammed doors. The zeppelin appeared to be as long as a block of Telegraph Avenue, as tall as Kaiser Hospital.

Standing there, righting his beret, verifying the tuck of his shirttails, smoothing the wrinkles from the front of his butterscotch suit, Archy regarded the big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety and felt it trying, like Kubrick’s melismatic monolith, to twist the wiring of his brain. The late-August sun goaded him, the way Walter had always goaded him, urging him to give the slip to the thunderbolt-throwing aunties who dwelled in his soul, to emerge from the doomed cavern of Brokeland Records and the gloomy professional prospect of endless Dumpster dives and crate digs, every day dropping like a spindled platter on top of the next, Z out the cash register with its feeble tally, get home at the end of the day humping your box of scratched and moldering treasure to have your wife harangue you in instructive tones with quotes from some self-help book on the moral imperative to strip all that was not essential from one’s life. To throw over all ballast and soar. Starting with, say, your record collection, just shed the whole off-gassing pile in a scatter of 180-gram Frisbees and rise up. The high blue curtain of sky overhead, the tender wetlands reek of Alameda on the breeze that took hold of Archy’s necktie, seemed to hold a promise to redeem the unredeemed promise that he had always carried around, creased and tattered, in the billfold of his life.

“Lunch, motherfucker,” Walter explained.

Like a hoard of family diamonds sewn into the hems and hidden pockets of an exile’s cloak, Oakland was salted secretly with wonders, even here, at its fetid, half-rotten raggedy-ass end.

The zeppelin’s gondola was a streamlined dining car formed from some black polymer glossy as a vinyl record. It hovered just above the ground, a cushion for the reclining god. Through its front viewports, a pair of typecast pilots in captain’s hats saluted the arriving passengers, then resumed their preparations for ascent, fiddling with knobs, dialing in shit on their big old zeppelin mixing board. Between the new arrivals and the gondola, a laterally oriented brown man in a toque and white smock stood at a pushcart grill, practicing relentless artistry on two dozen big prawns with a pair of brass tongs and a brush. Wild-style lettering sprayed onto the front of the grill read THE HUNGRY SAMOAN.

“Don’t tell me,” Archy began, then stopped, for he was not yet prepared to understand or to accept what he knew to be the situation vis-à-vis lunch: that it was to be eaten in the sky. He eyed the smoke as it knit and unknit in dense skeins trailing from the grill top, catching along the flank of the airship.

“Filled with helium,” Walter said, following the worried course of Archy’s gaze, looking worried himself despite the cool expository tone. Self-reassuring. “Shit’s inert. Can’t burn. Can’t interact with nothing.”

Then a hatch in the side of the gondola sighed and swung open, divulging the airship’s secret cargo: a basalt monolith, the very thing to set half-apes dreaming of the stars. Black knit polo shirt, skull polished like the knob on an Oscar. Gold-rimmed sunglasses, gold finger rings, black Levi’s, Timberland loafers. Pausing at the top of a fold-down stair for a display of freestyle looming, brother looked like a celebrity golfer or as if perhaps he had recently eaten a celebrity golfer. Shoulders thrown back, chest out, he moved with a herky-jerk stop-motion fluidity, a Harryhausen Negro, mythic and huge. Behind him, tall and broad-shouldered yet dwarfed by the dude from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, came a tea-brown handsome man, lithe, slender. He stood considering his guests on the top step, then hopped down and made slowly for Archy and Walter, past the bodyguard, breaking out from behind his blocker, some kind of joint pain or old injury a slight hitch in his gait.

“Archy Stallings,” said Gibson Goode, like he was repeating the sly punch line to a joke that had made him laugh recently. “Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah, thanks for, uh, having me,” Archy said, his voice petering out at the pronoun and the unworthiness it designated. Walter put his fingers to his lips, corking a laugh as Archy fell all over himself trying not to fall all over himself. “Gibson Goode! I mean!” Archy laughing at himself now. “Goddamn.”

Print it on the back of the man’s Topps card, six-six, 230 pounds, Emperor of the Universe in 1999 when he led the NFC in touchdowns, completions, passer rating, and threw three four-hundred-yard games. Still long and wiry, built more like a center fielder than a QB, mostly leg with that loose equine sense of motion, Gibson Goode, aka G Bad. Head cropped to leave a faint, even scatter of coal dust. Wearing a pair of heavy tortoiseshell sunglasses with dark green lenses that left his eyes to go about the cold business of empire unobserved.

“What can I pour you?” he said.

“I don’t drink…” Archy said, and stopped. He hated how this sounded whenever he found himself obliged to say it. Lord knew he would not relish the prospective company of some mope-ass motherfucker who flew that grim motto from his flagpole. “… alcohol,” he added. Only making it worse, the stickler for detail, ready to come out with a complete list of beverages he was willing to consume. Next came the weak effort to redeem himself by offering a suggestion of past indulgence: “Anymore.” Finally, the slide into unwanted medical disclosure: “Bad belly.”

“Yeah,” Goode said looking appropriately sober, “I quit drinking, too. Coke, then? San Pellegrino? Sweet tea?”

“You going to like my sweet tea,” said the Hungry Samoan gravely. It appeared to be in the nature of a command.

“Yo, T.,” Goode said to the giant in the Timberlands, his bodyguard, majordomo. Wordless and obedient as a golem, the giant returned to the gondola. When Archy stepped up behind Goode into the cabin of the misnomered Dogpile blimp, the giant had a tall tumbler apiece of passionflower tea for Archy and Goode, and a can of Tecate for Walter, with a lime-wedge eyebrow.

The interior of the gondola was cool and snug, the whole thing molded continuously into a glossy surface of black plastic trimmed with brushed aluminum and covered, wherever it was likely to encounter a pair of human buttocks, in spotted pony skin. On the spectrum of secret lairs, it fell somewhere between mad genius bent on world domination and the disco-loving scion of a minor emirate. The decor made references, of which Archy approved, to Diabolik and the David Lynch Dune.

Goode dropped back to let Archy admire freely. “Welcome aboard the Minnie Riperton,” he said.

Walter stole a look toward Archy, who rocked back, caught off guard.

“Seriously,” Archy said.

“Seriously.” Goode was ready for it, had a line. “She’s black. She is beautiful. And she goes really high.”

The five-octave F-above-high-C singing voice of Minnie Riperton, who died of cancer in 1977 at the age of thirty-one, was an avatar of Archy’s mother in his memory; always a vanishing quality to it, an ethereal warmth. The two women, Minnie and Mauve, even looked alike, Cherokee noses, eyes large, deep brown, and pain-haunted. At the unexpected invocation of the name, Archy’s heart leaped and he grew confused, assuming for a dreamlike instant that Goode had named the zeppelin in his mother’s honor.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s so nice of you.”

Goode looked at Walter or, at any rate, appeared to be regarding Archy’s old friend from behind the blast shield of his D&Gs.

Walter shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “You got to feed the man.”

“Skip breakfast?” Goode said.

Archy said, “Never.”

Goode hung halfway out of the hatch, gripping the frame, and called to the chef to ask him how long it would be until lunch. Chef held up three thick fingers, then commenced plating lunch with DJ aplomb. Two minutes and forty-eight seconds later, Archy found himself sitting at a posse-sized plastic table topped with speckled laminate, called upon to conduct deep research into a plate piled with some kind of Thai-Samoan South-Central barbecued shrimp thing served, with plentiful Sriracha, over coconut rice. Black-eyed peas in a hoisin garlic sauce. A scatter of okra tempura doused in sweet and peppery vinegar.

“Kind of a soul-Asian fusion-type deal,” Archy said.

“Hey,” Goode said. “That’s your thing, right? Soul-jazz. Soul-funk. Walter tells me you like to work the hyphens. Walter— Ah, shit.”

Walter had his eyes closed, holding himself like a plateful of water, as, with an eager kick at its traces, the airship bucked gravity and took to the sky. Goode smiled, slowly shaking his head. “Boy spent his life cutting up dead folks, telling a bunch of homicidal rapping gangbangers they got dropped by their label, but he’s afraid to go up in a damn balloon.”

“Uhh,” said Walter.

Swiftly, Oakland fell away beneath them. The Bay Area shook out its rumpled coverlet, gray and green and crazy salt pans, rent and slashed and stitched by feats of engineering. Twin Peaks, Tamalpais, then Mount Diablo rising up beyond the hills. Archy had flown in and out of his hometown a dozen times or more but never in such breathless silence, never with such a sense of liberation, of having come unhooked. An airplane used force and fuel and tricks of physics to fight its way aloft, but the Minnie Riperton was returning to its rightful home. It belonged in the sky.

When they reached one thousand feet, Walter swallowed and opened his eyes. “Oh, the humanity,” he said.

Archy got up to tour the windows, meet the captains, squint through the shipboard telescope at a far-off disturbance in the haze that he was told to call Lassen Peak. He checked out a bunch of snaps and candids pinned to a corkboard beside the jump seat where T., the bodyguard, sat behind his gold-rimmed sunglasses, containing, as a fist might contain a bauble, his unimaginable thoughts. Pictures of G Bad, the man posed against varied nocturnal backgrounds of city lights or flashbulb darkness with famous singers and actors, black and white, holding the Golden Globes they had won for directing or starring in Dogpile films or their Grammys for Dogpile records. Or caught up in the thick of various posses, or maybe it was the same posse, an ontogeny shaped by time and fashion and the whims of Gibson Goode. Brothers in caps and game jerseys, smiling or blank-faced, throwing up gang signs, holding glasses and bottles. Women of the planet dressed in candy colors, necklines taking daring chances, eyelids done up lustrous as one of Sixto Cantor’s custom paint jobs. Gibson Goode looking exactly the same in every picture, sunglasses, enigmatic half-smile, Super Bowl ring, might as well be a blown-up life-size picture of himself mounted on a sheet of foam core.

“My peeps,” Goode said, taking the pin from one of the photos on the corkboard. “Check out last week.”

He passed the picture to Archy. It showed a particularly unruly group of ladies, strewn as if by a passing hurricane along the laps of a number of gentlemen, among them Walter Bankwell, who peered out from behind the wall of horizontal sisters with an expression of evident panic.

“My boy Walter’s first flight.”

“I never knew him to be afraid of heights,” Archy said.

“I hear you and him go way back.”

“Heard from him or somebody else?”

“Might have heard it from a number of sources.”

You do that. And maybe, you never know, I’m the one ends up putting in a word for you with Mr. G Bad. Undertaking motherfucker worked fast. Wanted to get hold of Luther Stallings with considerable urgency, indeed. Archy telling him, I’ll think about it.

“So where’s the posse?” Archy said, nodding toward the bulletin board. “You leave them at home?”

“Yeah, they okay for a party cruise, but they don’t appreciate the, uh, stately pace of the journey up from Long Beach,” Goode said. “They just a waste of time anyway. Nobody but Tak around, I can get a lot of work done.”

Trying to let Archy know what a serious guy he was, snaps and candids to the contrary, sending himself like his own stand-in to attend such trifling matters while his real self went on tirelessly planning conquests, a hip-hop Master of the World in his Vincent Price airship.

When they reached the featureless blue-gray world beyond the Golden Gate, the pilot brought them back around and they bore down on Oakland again, watching from the port-side window as their hometown gathered its modest splendors.

“Highland Hospital,” Goode said, pointing. “I was born there.”

“Me, too,” Archy said.

“Moved down to L.A. when I was three, but I came back in the summertime, Christmastime. Whenever school got out. Lived with my grandmother in the Longfellow district. Her brother had a record store for a time. Was on Market and Forty-fifth, over by the Laundromat there.”

“House of Wax,” Archy said. It was almost a question. “Seriously? I used to go in there. Your grandfather, he was, uh, kind of a portly man?”

“My uncle. Great-uncle. Uncle Reggie was pretty much spherical.”

“I remember him,” Archy said. And then, as if the line that hooked it had been snagged all these years on some deep arm of coral, an afternoon bobbed to the surface of his memory. A boy, the offhand sketch of a boy, reading a comic book or a magazine, long feet hooked through the slats of a metal stool, a pair of brand-new Top Tens. “Maybe I even remember you.”

Goode lifted a hand to his cheek and patted it as if checking the closeness of his morning shave or monitoring a toothache.

“You used to read comic books?” Archy said.

“Most definitely.”

“You were reading a comic book.” Archy took hold of the line with both hands and hauled up the afternoon, streaming years like water. “I’m thinking it was a Marvel book, but—”

“It was Luke Cage,” Goode said, picking off the memory from Archy like a bobbled pass. Too positive about it, stripping the ball.

“Was it?”

“Yeah, Luke Cage, Power Man. And we got into a discussion, a long discussion,” turning to Walter, who lifted his head from his hands and stared, the food on his plate sitting there untouched. “Got ourselves way down deep.”

With the sunglasses, the smile that twisted Goode’s mouth could not be read for levels of irony or nostalgia.

“Well,” Archy began.

“This motherfucker was peeling off all these sophisticated interpretations. Inner meanings. In Luke Cage. Talking about the American penal system as portrayed in Marvel Comics. Referencing all kinds of heavy reading materials. Eleven, twelve years old, telling me what, like, Frantz Fanon has to say about the possibility of black superheroes in a white superpower structure and whatnot.”

“Huh,” Walter said, looking doubtful, life returning to him in the form of irritation. This claim was almost certainly 90 to 97 percent false. The shimmer of what Archy remembered from that afternoon at House of Wax was only an awkward mutual series of passwords exchanged, the chance encounter with a random nerd brother in an unexpected location. Right up to this very instant Archy possessed no theory of black superheroics, only a vague idea of who Frantz Fanon was, and apart from the redoubtable Black Panther, particularly during the operatic run of McGregor-Graham on the book, Archy had never taken particular interest in the skin color of the comic book superheroes he loved, most of whom, now that he thought about it, had been white. The world in which those characters lived and operated was plainly not the world in which Archy lived, and on the whole that was the way he preferred it. On that long-distant afternoon at House of Wax, there had been no theory spun, no deep knowledge displayed. Goode was flattering him, either because he was a flatterer or because he wanted to see if Archy was a hound for flattery. Archy had to admit that there was something gratifying about the flicker of envy he saw in Walter’s eyes as Goode falsely lionized his critical acumen at eleven.

“You have a better memory than I do,” Archy suggested, guarded, leery, unable to shake a feeling not just that he was stepping out on Nat Jaffe, up here dining on shrimp and flattery and all kinds of piquant sauces, but that he was in over his head, that he was going to be edged into doing something or agreeing to something that he did not want to do or agree to, into something at least that he did not understand, some kind of business being transacted by Goode and Flowers that would prove costly to Luther Stallings, maybe other people, too. To judge from things Archy had read about G Bad, as well as from memories of watching him on television as he conducted instantaneous Einstein-deep analyses in the pocket under a heavy rush (not to mention the simple fact that he was visiting the man in the cabin of his personal zeppelin that flew on the gas of burning dollars), Gibson Goode was smarter than Archy on many levels. “But I remember you, and I remember your uncle.”

Goode got up and went over to a beautiful Thorens semi-automatic, perched atop a low plastic cabinet that formed part of the plastic wall of the cabin. On a shelf along the bottom of the cabinet, beneath the turntable, a row of LPs lounged like boys at lazy angles. Beside the albums, a steel mesh box held a couple of dozen 45s. Goode flipped through them, chose one, and did what he needed to do to the turntable to switch it over to forty-five revolutions per minute.

“Name that tune,” he said.

He lowered the tonearm, and from a pair of speaker grilles, a drum pattern emerged and repeated itself, b-boom boom CHICK! in 4/4 time, the kick muffled, mixed very dry and miked with the attention to detail that marked 1970s recording of drums but partaking, through having been sampled so many times by subsequent hip-hop acts, of a timelessness beyond period or style.

“Manzel,” Archy said, knowing that he was being tested, thinking it was kind of a bullshit move and yet incapable of resisting the challenge, which was hardly a challenge at all. “‘Midnight Theme.’ That was on the, uh, Fraternity label. 1975.”

The single played on, adding textures, stacking up layers. A moody wash of piano, a stab of ARP strings. The swirl and growl of a Hammond B-3 played through the whirling orrery of a Leslie cabinet. Scritch-scratch guitar, coming in on the 2, along with paired lines of space-funk Minimoog that sidled in, late arrivals, to carry the melody and bass line, that Minimoog sound popping the bubble of timelessness and returning the track, comfortably, to its home in the mid-1970s.

“Sounds good,” Archy said. “Nice pressing.”

“Know where I bought it?” Goode said.

“Was on Saturday afternoon,” Goode said. “Walter here had told me about you, your store. Thought I should check it out. I had to be up here anyway. So I came in the store, your boy was there. Nat, right? Said you was home, gone for the day, some shit.”

“Yeah, I had to meet somebody.” Archy kept his thoughts off that last encounter with Mr. Jones, ran back the tape on every conversation he’d had with Nat since Saturday that had contained the words “Gibson Goode,” looking for hints of guilty knowledge, a secret suppressed. “Damn. MVP quarterback media mogul comes in our store, cagey motherfucker never says a word to me.”

It did not strike Archy as the kind of thing Nat was likely to keep quiet about, let alone forget.

“He didn’t know me,” Goode said. “I was just a customer. Between you and me, dude didn’t seem too keen on making conversation. Up there at the cash register all mumbling to himself, making these fucked-up Keith Jarrett noises, like hnnh. Only wasn’t any piano around.”

“He has days like that,” Archy said.

“To be honest,” Goode said, “I mean, look here, y’all have a nice store and everything. Really nice. Lot of charm, inventory goes deep, goes wide. But it wasn’t just your partner that seemed kinda out of it. Business seemed pretty fucking slow.”

“We’re doing all right.”

“Oh, really? I stayed twenty-two minutes, I was the only one in the place the whole time. That place was desolate. On a Saturday afternoon.”

“But I mean, Saturday was a beautiful day,” remembering the scent of honeysuckle in sunshine, the knock-knock of Mr. Jones’s pipe against the sidewalk, “lot of folks were probably—”

“Your partner up by the cash register, all groaning and moaning. Felt like I was in the motherfucking Omega Man in there. Last man alive, trapped with a zombie.”

For the first time since they came in sight of the Minnie Riperton, Walter smiled and burped up something that sounded like a laugh. Archy turned away, watching the approach of Berkeley as they turned to the north. Anger and shame braided themselves like wires through his interior cabinetry, with shame carrying the greater flow. He did not like to stand there while G Bad or anyone tore off woof tickets about Brokeland, which, along with some of the sounds that had issued at times from his Fender Jazz Bass, Archy had always considered the only truly beautiful thing he had ever made. He knew that he and Nat were financially circling the spindle in an ever narrowing gyre. Now here came this man who could afford, even in these times of failing record chains and of infinite free downloadable libraries that fit in your hip pocket, to open a bangin used vinyl store, five times as big as Brokeland and tenfold deep and, just for the glory and goodness of it, let it fail, forever, inexhaustibly bankrolled by his media empire, his licensed image, his alchemical touch with ghetto real estate. Breezing into Brokeland on a Saturday afternoon, a king in mufti, come to lay his sandal upon the necks of the conquered.

Archy felt ashamed, too, remembering the longing that had stirred in him, not half an hour before, to throw over, once and for all, the burden of the store. Remembering the first time he had met Nat Jaffe, after that last-minute wedding gig up in the Oakland hills, Archy fresh from the Saudi desert, dragging his honorably discharged ass through the streets of Bush I America, disoriented, lonely, unable to connect to anyone, black or white. How he and Nat had sat on the floor of the Jaffes’ living room till five o’clock in the morning, little Julie asleep, Aviva out wrestling some other new human into the world. Nat rolled fat numbers packed with the Afghan butthair, threaded and hoary, that he routinely scored at that time, and stoned and cross-legged, they fell through the circular portals of Nat’s record collection, one after another, flat-out tumbled awestruck arm in arm like that team of chrononaut dwarfs in Time Bandits, through those magic wormholes in the fabric of reality. Archy was so impressed by the scope and detail but most of all by the passion—relentless, nettlesome, ecstatic, inspiring—of Nat’s knowledge when it came to music, “in all its many riches,” from Storyville whorehouse rags to South Bronx block-party sound-system battles. It had been a long time since Archy had seen a man so willing to betray himself by exuberance, by enthusiasm for things that could not be killed, fucked, or fed upon. Nat already dreaming of opening his own store, lacking only half the cash, half the records, and half the foolishness necessary for the undertaking.

“My partner is a cantankerous pain in the motherfucking ass,” Archy said, recalling the eagerness with which he had leaped at the chance to make up that holy trinity of shortfalls. “Also my best friend.”

He gazed down at Golden Gate Fields as it slid under them, the grandstand half full of losers, the horses blowing like confetti along the futile oval. They passed over the giant oil tanks of Richmond, ranked along the slopes like secondhand turntables on a pawnshop shelf. “Midnight” came to an end. The tonearm worked itself loose of the label’s edge and sought its well-deserved rest.

“Now,” Goode said. “I know you already know what it is we are planning to do in Temescal, and I gather the councilman already made a suggestion of what I might like to obtain from you in that direction.”

“You’re offering me a job,” Archy said.

“You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it, I am offering you a mission.”

“That’s right,” Walter said.

“I am building a monastery, if you like,” Goode said, warming up, “for the practice of vinyl kung fu. And I am asking you to come be my abbot. And, yeah,” with the enigmatic half-smile, “that does make me the Buddha, but don’t go too far down that analogy, ’cause, check it out, now I’m a bend it a little. What I am asking you to do, to be— Look here, did you ever read this book, Taku over there turned me on to it, A Canticle for Leibowitz?”

“Good book.”

“You know it. All right, then, look at it this way. The world of black music has undergone in many ways a kind of apocalypse, you follow me? You look at the landscape of the black idiom in music now, it is post-apocalyptic. Jumbled-up mess of broken pieces. Shards and samples. Gangsters running in tribes. That is no disrespect to the music of the past two decades. Taken on its own terms. I love it. I love it. Life without Nas, without the first Slum Village album, without, shit, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? Can’t imagine it. Can’t even imagine. And I’m not saying, just because we got sampling, we got no innovation happening. Black music is innovation. At the same time, we got a continuity to the traditions, even in the latest hip-hop joint. Signifying, playing the dozens. Church music, the blues, if you wanna look hard. But face it, I mean, a lot has been lost. A whole lot. Ellington, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, we got nobody of that caliber even hinted at in black music nowadays, I’m talking about genius, composers, know what I’m saying? Quincy Jones. Charles Stepney. Weldon Irvine. Shit, knowing how to play the fuck out of your instrument. Guitar, saxophone, bass, drums, we used to own those motherfuckers. Trumpet! We were the landlords, white players had to rent that shit from us. Now, black kid halfway to a genius comes along? Like RZA? Can’t even play a motherfucking kazoo. Can’t do nothing but ‘quote.’ Like those Indians down in Mexico nowadays, skinny-ass, bean-eating motherfucker sleeping with his goat on top of a rock used to be a temple that could predict what time a solar eclipse was going to happen.

“I’m not going to blame nobody, and I don’t know what the reason is, because I haven’t studied it, and like with everything misfortunate in life, I bet there’s ten, twelve reasons for musical civilization getting wiped out by this here particular firestorm, what’s he call it in the book—?”

Goode glanced over at the bodyguard, Taku, who sat immersed in a copy of Shonen Jump magazine. “‘The Deluge of Flame,’” Taku said, not looking up.

“Record companies. MTV. Corporate radio. Crack cocaine. Budget cuts to music programs, high school bands. All that, none of that. Doesn’t make no difference. I’m saying we are living in the aftermath. All’s we got is a lot of broken pieces. And you been picking those pieces up, and dusting them off, and keeping them all nice and clean, and that’s commendable. Truly. What I’m offering you is a chance not just to hang them up on the wall of your museum, there, maybe sell one every now and then for some white dentist or tax attorney to take home and hang on his wall. I’m offering you, I’m saying, come on, let’s really put them out there where the kids are, where the future’s spending its money. Teach them. Explain what all those broken-up old pieces mean, why it’s all important. Then maybe one of those kids, maybe he’s going to come along, learn what you have to teach, and start to put things back together. If you feel me.”

“Huh,” said Archy. “So you want me to be Saint Leibowitz of the Funk.”

“More like, T., who was it? In that, what’s it? Foundation.”

“Hari Seldon,” Taku said.

“You can be Hari Seldon,” Goode said. “Preserving all the science till civilization gets reborn, man had a whole planet—”

“Terminus,” said Archy, right before the bodyguard could come out with it. Taku nodded once, solemn.

“Planet of the Negroes,” Walter said. “That’s what you should call your band. Y’all still play, right? You and your boy Nat?”

“When we can get the gigs.”

“What instrument he play, piano?”

“Some guitar. Mostly piano.”

“Like Bill Evans.”

“A touch.”

“Elton John. Barry Manilow.”

“Lennie Tristano,” Goode suggested.

“Actually,” Archy said, “Nat digs Tristano. Tristano sang at his birthday party, bar mitzvah, some kind of shit like that. And we already got a name, Walter, the Wakanda Philharmonic.” He looked at Goode, calling him out on the boyhood reminiscences, the secret comics-nerd lore. “I know, given our history, you can dig the reference.”

“I like it,” Goode said. “And speaking of names. How do you like this: the Cochise Jones Memorial Beats Department?”

“That’s nice. That’s a nice tribute. You ought to do that.”

“Come over, then. I will. I know you don’t believe me. But I’m not in it for the money. Record stores, brick and mortar, they’re dying. Large and small. Any fool can see that.”

“And so alls I have to do in return for this generosity? Is come up with an address for my pops. Is that right? Let Bank and Feyd pay the man a visit so they can give Luther something he wants very badly.”

“I don’t know too much about that,” Goode said. “Don’t want to know. Less I have to do with Luther Stallings, the better.”

“You know him?”

From behind his Shonen Jump, Taku made a kind of rhinoceros noise.

“We met,” G Bad said. “Brother came to see me, to be honest, I have to say, he actually did help me out with this Golden State deal. For real. But that was an accident, a side effect. Luther wasn’t trying to help nobody but himself.”

“You do know him.”

“I’ll say this: The man already got himself mixed up in it. Nothing you going to do can mix him up worse.”

“Mr. Goode,” Archy said. “Truly, I thank you for your generous offer, and how you took me up in your zeppelin, and fed me some truly delicious prawns. Oh, man! That hint of mole in the marinade? But even if I, like, followed my general lifelong policy and left the old man out of it? I already have a record store. A whole store that’s my own, half mine, not just a department in somebody else’s chain outlet, with bar codes and inventory software and probably a little badge with my name on it.” He tried to look through the lenses of Goode’s sunglasses, to send some Nat Jaffe–style gamma rays right on through that polarized plastic. “‘If you feel me.’”

“By this time next year,” Goode said, “you won’t have a store. You know that. You already dipping one wing in the water. I got three storage units in West Covina, any one of them carries inventory bigger and just as motherfucking deep as what you and your partner have on offer, at an average of three to five dollars less per disc, not to mention all the new music, too. Compilations, box sets, books and video relating to music, I open my doors four blocks away from you with all that, you are through.”

“No doubt,” Archy said, turning away from Goode to face the wide strip of windows at the front of the car.

“Aw,” Goode said. “You’re just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.”

“I have proven that many times in my life,” Archy agreed.

Gibson Goode joined Archy at the front window. They had turned east of north, and a great barren stretch of empty land forked with silver stretched out below them.

“That’s Port Chicago down there,” Goode said. “You know about that?”

“Yeah. Munitions ship exploded in World War II. Killed a mess of black sailors. Had to work as longshoremen in the Jim Crow navy. My grandfather was there, he got blinded, burned his lungs. Died like a year later.”

“My mom’s uncle was left deaf in both ears,” G Bad said. “Standing outside having a cigarette on a cargo pier almost a mile away.”

“I heard it was really a A-bomb,” Walter said. “That’s what I heard.”

Archy had heard this, too. A test bomb, pre-Hiroshima, that detonated prematurely as it was being loaded on a ship bound for some Pacific atoll. The whole thing covered up without too much trouble, all the victims of the blast being black, with no recourse except to keep on being dead. He did not entirely disbelieve it, thinking of the breast cancer that afterward clustered in Marin County, in the women of his family.

“Fireball was three miles wide,” Goode said. “Air was filled with burning Negroes falling out of the sky. Only thing they ever did wrong was try too hard and work too fast to fight somebody else’s war.”

“It was their war,” Archy said.

“Maybe. And Oakland was their town. Our town.”

“Giving me a history lesson,” Archy observed. “Going to tell me now’s my chance to make history as the presidente for life of the Cochise Jones Department of the Oakland Dogpile Thang. And strike a blow for the race by bailing out on my white oppressor, on the Man who was forcing my granddaddy to load so many carpet bombs so fast that he came raining down in pieces.”

“I might of been headed in that direction,” Goode said, rubbing his chin, little crooked smile. “Be honest, I was pretty much scrambling.”

“Got me up here with my old running buddy. Put those classic sounds on through an excellent system, maybe have too much bottom in your EQ settings, but whatever. Start me reminiscing about Luke Cage, House of Wax. Feed me all that good food. Playing on my nostalgia and my stomach, that is a highly effective approach.”

“So forget about the mission, Turtle,” Walter said. “It’s a damn job.” He had stationed himself on a bench at the precise center of the gondola, equidistant and out of view of all the windows. “Take it or don’t. Sooner you say something, sooner we can land this motherfucker.”

“It is a job,” Goode said. “And from what I understand, congratulations are in order, right? Got a baby on the way? Based on my observations of what you have going on down there at Brokeland Records, you all living up to the name so well, I’d say you might soon be looking for any kind of job. Forget about a sweet opportunity like this one, which, furthermore, as I tried to explain, has a chance to give you something important and meaningful to do with your life. Make your son proud of you.”

His son. Goode meant the unborn one, possibly a daughter who would be highly likely not to give anything resembling a fuck about the transition of the James Brown band from the Bernard Odum to the Bootsy Collins era; but Archy thought at once of Titus, face like a false panel, some unknown and possibly hostile intelligence peering out at his father and the world through the Judas holes of his eyes. Archy had only to consult the map of his own feelings toward the father who had abandoned him to know that a feeling of filial pride was the farthest kingdom, unreachable, beyond deserts and ice caps and seas. A job. A baby. Sons, daughters, wives, and lovers. Paychecks and payrolls.

“How far you can go in this thing?” Archy said abruptly, as they sailed beyond the void of dust and brackish silver where seven hundred Negroes had come to grief. Bearing for Mount Lassen, the Yukon, the moon.

“Huh?” Goode said.

“What’s the effective range?”

“On a tank of fuel? Five hundred miles. Except for gas and supplies, I mean, she don’t ever have to come down.”

“That sounds good,” Archy said. “That sounds like a plan.”