Telegraph Avenue

V. Brokeland

They were like the kids in that newspaper comic, white nerd, black nerd, pretending at the bus stop on this fine Sunday morning that they were Jedi knights, samurais. Lost so deep in the dream, they didn’t have the sense to be embarrassed. FoxTrot: Bankwell read it sometimes, though the light had pretty much gone out of the funny papers for Bank Flowers back when the Chronicle got rid of the strip with the English basset hound.

Shorties rode the bus downtown, got off by Fourteenth Street, walked down to Franklin Street, where there was a donut place, egg roll place, the decor Chinese but the calendar by the telephone printed in some alphabet of snakes. Bank had long since incorporated the house bear claw into his ongoing survey of donut shops from Fremont to Richmond; this one was a notch above the run of the mill. If you were downtown and couldn’t hold out for the Federation or, farther north, the mighty Dream Fluff, Loving Donut would do.

White nerd, black nerd got off the bus and, for once with no swordplay, waited on the empty sidewalk in front of the donut shop as if something real was about to happen. Playing some kind of classic rock, had a flute in it, out of that old green-and-orange shoulder-strap eight-track the white nerd carried everyplace he went. Waiting for another bus to come along, tornado drop a house on them. After a minute or two with no tornado, the black nerd, Titus, said something out of the side of his mouth. Then they waited awhile longer. Titus was built lean, harder than the glasses and that retard bounce in his step led you to expect. Still growing, bound to work out to be tall like his father, maybe not as chesty. In response to whatever Titus said, the other one took out a plastic wallet, yellow and blue. Nestled it close to his chest as if it held magic ducklings, tiny orphan bunnies he was nursing back to health. He tweezed out a bill and passed it to Titus, who went in and returned a minute later holding what appeared to be a dead puppy.

“I see you a bear claw man,” Bankwell said to Titus through the windshield of the hearse, not the brokedown Cadillac or the borrowed Olds 98 but the Flowers & Sons workhorse, a 1984 Crown Vic. No fear or hope of Titus hearing him, kitty-corner away and through the safety glass. “Interesting.”

“You mean ‘nasty,’” said cousin Walter. Prince Walter, the favorite nephew, more like a son to a man who never had any sons of his own. In trouble, now, though. “What you always get.”

“It’s a longitudinal study,” Bank said. “Bear claw is my, what you call, control.”

“Uh,” Walter said, hand to his belly. “Like eating a deep-fried sock.”

“That is why bear claw have to be the control,” Bank explained patiently. “You want to see how much love and affection the chef put into the bear claw. If the bear claw’s good, the standardize donuts be even better.”

“You already had your donut for today,” said Feyd.

“Feyd, shut up.”

“You his conscience now?” little Walter said. “Fucking little Jiminy Cricket motherfucker.”

Walter in a pissy mood, squeezed into the front seat between Bankwell and Feyd. For many of the more reluctant passengers obliged in the past to occupy that spot, the back of the vehicle had come to seem preferable. But Prince Walter only saw his position, no doubt, for the indignity it was. Walter had graduated from the hearses years ago, from handling the dead, washing their horrible feet. Ushering crazy old ladies, keeping an eye on the gang-bang element, enduring the gusts of drama that caught people up, women especially, whenever funerals came along. Then from time to time, like today, paying a visit on behalf of Chan Flowers to somebody who did not want to be found, was not necessarily in the mood for visitors. Walter had left it all behind years ago, moved down to L.A. to work in the record business, come back from time to time showing off pictures of himself with Tupac, Jada Pinkett and Will Smith, Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg. Finding his way into Gibson Goode’s circle of love. Now here he was, back riding a hearse, not even driving it. Stuck between two cousins he used to know only as likely vessels for the downflow of family beatdowns.

“Feyd keeping track,” Bank said. “Everything I put in my mouth. Sometimes I see him writing that shit down. Boy is spying on my food.”

“Uncle Chan said put him on a diet, one donut a day,” Feyd said. “He said, uh, ‘Big bank,’ you do realize that’s just a figure of speech, right?’”

Walter laughed his scratchy laugh, Ernie from Sesame Street, working something loose at the back of his throat. Feyd took out his pocket vaporizer. He and Walter were well and fully vaped, deep into a fresh, veiny hank of Vineland County kush bought with Feyd’s auntie’s glaucoma prescription. Bank did not imbibe. Didn’t drink or eat swine, either. Seventy-five percent of the way to a five-percenter and thus enjoined to respect his elders, try not to violate Uncle Chan’s rules, which definitely included No Partying in the Funeral Vehicles. Also, No Profane Music, and here they were with Ghostface Killah playing on the CD, softly but the music so soaked in the world’s profanity that it bled like a saturated bandage.

“Shit,” Bank said. “You just a damn food spy.”

They watched white nerd watching black nerd ingest the bear claw, an alien feeding in a horror movie, even its teeth had teeth. White nerd looking duly horrified. Then it was his turn to go into the shop, but when he came out, he was holding a pink box tied up with white string.

“Bringing somebody a present,” Bank observed.

“Oh, shit,” said Walter happily. “No. Oh, no. It’s her, here she come.”

Here came Candyfox Brown, whatever her name was in the movies, that highjacked, big-titty mature, muscling past the boys on her Preakness haunches. Walking right past them without a glance.

“Valletta Moore,” Walter said, praying it. Sounding like he was feeling sorry for her or for himself. “Damn.”

White nerd black nerd swung their heads to watch the tick-tock of her bodily clockwork as she made her way past them. The motion of the two heads, whup-whup, so uniform, so abject, like those dogs they used to feature at the station breaks on Channel 20, whipping around with their tongues hanging out whenever somebody off-screen waved a pork chop.

“Why she didn’t stop?” Walter said. “Seem like she don’t know them.”

“She know them,” Bankwell said. He put the car into drive and turned right at the intersection, away from the boys and the donut shop. “She being careful. She going to come back around in a second, long as she doesn’t see us sitting here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Around the block.”

Somebody had speculated that Valletta Moore and the man, Luther, were most likely geeked up on crack, that it was just a matter of finding whatever hole they crawled into. But they had eluded Uncle Chan for some time, and obviously, she, at least, was capable of taking basic precautions. Maybe she was not as far gone as rumor had it, or maybe chronically paranoid. In any case, a hearse was by no means the ideal surveillance vehicle. Usually, by the time Uncle Chan sent Bankwell and Feyd around in the Crown Vic, the point was not about concealment. If Batman wanted to observe the thug life of Gotham City, he would not dress up in black rubber and drive around in a Batmobile; he would send Alfred in some poot-butt Daihatsu. The Crown Victoria was intended to make a Batmobile statement, a message of intent. But Uncle Chan, up against it, woke this morning willing to take his chances.

“There she is,” Walter said when they had circled around Fifteenth Street and Broadway. Two blocks down the street, Valletta Moore was opening the passenger door of an old, tired muscle car, looked like a Toronado, mottled gray and beige, streaked with green, like a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna after two months in the refrigerator. Titus and the other one fell into the backseat, then Cleopatra Clark or whoever got in and eased the door shut.

“Go,” Walter said, watching them pull away from the curb.

“You see I still got a red,” Bankwell said. “You want me to get a ticket? Police pull me over, how we going to follow them then?”

Bankwell was not afraid of Prince Walter.

When the light turned green, the Toronado was far enough ahead to be tailed with ease and discretion. Bank had himself ready, to tell the truth was hoping, to see the Oldsmobile put some evasive maneuvers into play, a Jim Rockford fishtail, something, but the driver of the Toronado, likely the very man they were supposed to be locating, made no efforts in that line. Right turn on Telegraph, up to MacArthur, then into the parking lot of a motel, the Selwyn, one of a number of fine establishments along the boulevard, looked like it catered to a select clientele of crankheads, day-raters, and the insects who loved them. The office was an A-frame, the motel a two-decker box, with a covered drive-through between them that the Toronado just managed to thread.

“Parking lot must be in the back,” Walter said. He settled between his cousins as if they were a couple of pillows and it was nap time for the little baby prince. “Go on, then.”

“What about you?” Bank said. “You coming, too, right?”

“Huh? I’m supposed to stay here.”

“What?”

“Monitor the situation.”

Bank stood there with the door open, patient. A man with time to burn. Presently, shaking his head at the low state to which he had fallen, Prince Walter got out of the car. “You strapped?” he said as they crossed the boulevard. Bank did not bother to dignify the question with a response.

In the front parking lot, there were three cars, a Band-Aid-tan VW square-back, a Jeep, an ancient B210. A housekeeping cart had the upper walkway all to itself. There was nobody in the office A-frame they could see. Two security cameras on light poles, but whatever. They were here only to pay a visit.

As Prince Walter had guessed, the covered area led to a smaller parking area behind the motel, gravel, subservient to a row of Dumpsters. The Toronado was tucked into a spot between the trash bins and the high stucco wall that kept the motel quarantined from the house behind it. The backside of the motel was blank stucco and frosted windows, a face that was minding its own business. On the ground floor beside the gas meters, a fire door warned that it must be kept unlocked at all times.

“I’m a wait here,” Walter said. “Case they see you coming, try to run out the back.”

It sounded cowardly, but it made sense, and some allowance needed to be made for Prince Walter’s likely uselessness in the event of trouble. Bank hiked up the left leg of his suit pants to take his little Beretta Bobcat out of the holster that was Velcroed to his ankle.

“Here you go,” he said, handing it over to Walter, who took it without bothering to hide his reluctance. “Remember to shoot at the horses’ legs.”

Prince Walter nodded solemnly before he caught what Bank had said. Scowled. As they went through the fire door, Bankwell was obliged to tell Feyd to shut up, man, quit laughing. They found themselves in a harsh-lit room, lollipop smell of laundry, a couple of coin-op washers and dryers. Something like a pair of sneakers was turning one of the dryers into a tom-tom. Purple tumbleweeds of lint rolled scattering as they passed through another door into a dim hallway, past an ice machine, and outside, under the second-floor walkway, right next to room 112. Aimless little flies hovered in the cool of the stairwell like the dots on a lacy funeral veil.

“You check out down here, I’ll go up,” Bank said. He had a feeling they would be on two.

It was not that he looked forward to trouble or violence. But he felt that it was better to rush up on it than to let it rush up on you. He rang his way up the steel stairs and was about to step onto the landing when somebody stuck out a leg. He fell hard. A lightbulb broke on his head. The stairway was a gong, resounding. While Bank was falling, though, he reached out to take instinctive hold of someone who turned out to be Titus. Shortie fell down beside him.

There was blood in Bankwell’s mouth, possibly a loose tooth.

“Motherfucker!” he said. Scrape against the concrete of the soles of his loafers as he reared up on his legs, flapping his necktie, flapping the tails of his jacket. Without intending to, he stepped on Titus’s stomach, and ho, shit, here came the bear claw, acrid brown slush in a jet. Bank jumped back, lost his footing, and then was attacked by a swordsman.

“Ya!” said the boy with the bunnies in his wallet. “Hiya!”

The first blow glanced off Bank’s right arm, just above the elbow, but the second caught him square on the back of the head. It was a practice katana, see them racked in a dojo, solid wood. Coming after Bank’s interaction with the concrete landing, the blow to his head did no favors to the clarity of his thought process. Luckily, he was armed with a fully licensed Sig Sauer .38 that he was more than qualified to use. Thinking was not required.

He stuck the gun in the face of little, what was it, Julie. Julie Jaffe. Five feet five inches of redhead Mr. Peabody samurai fury. Bank could not help smiling. “Check this out,” he said to Feyd when his cousin came running up the steps. “Check out little white-boy Zatoichi.”

Mr. Peabody lowered the sword, possibly because he now had two guns pointing at him and a sword made out of wood. But it looked more to Bank like amazement than surrender. More like Bank had guessed his secret identity. Bank twisted the sword free of the boy’s grip.

“Zatoichi!” Feyd said. “That’s good, I could use me a massage.”

Feyd looked down at Titus, saw what had become of the bear claw, wrinkled up his face.

“Look at you, bitch,” he said to Titus, who rose dripping to his feet, boy full of hateful thoughts he sent out his eyeballs toward Bankwell Flowers III. “What the fuck you do to yourself?”

“It’s okay. Okay, come on. Leave them alone.”

Bankwell turned to see Walter bringing up the rear of a short procession, the apex of a loose triangle whose remaining points were Valletta Moore and Luther Stallings with their hands up. Walter held the Beretta high and crooked, one-handed, in that movie style Uncle Chan abhorred.

“You found me,” Luther Stallings said, the old-school kung fu movie star, wiry and fit in a kimono, parachute shorts, pair of black cloth Bruce Lee slippers. Gray in his hair and chest fur, more lines on his face than Uncle Chan. “Put up the thumpers. Let me get my clothes on. Go on home, boys. I’ll be fine.”

Bank had seen, not recently, a movie or two with Luther Stallings in the lead. This was pretty much what he remembered: to the point, monosyllables, the lazy smile. So either this was acting, too, or there was no acting involved.

“Go ahead, Julie, Titus,” said Valletta Moore. “Boys, go on. You can go.”

“Fuck they can,” Bank said.

“It’s all right,” Walter said. “We got no room for them, anyway.”

While Bank was distracted by how stupid Prince Walter could be sometimes, Titus woke up. He grabbed hold of Julie’s shirt and dragged him down the stairs, four feet in sneakers chiming on down to the parking lot, sneakers against the blacktop.

“Dammit, Walter!” Bank said.

Now that he was thinking again instead of just doing, he made a futile show of going to the railing, weighing whether it made sense to take a shot at the runners. But it was only a show, and everyone knew it.

“It’s a hearse, you dumb-ass!” Bank said. “We could of fit Nell Carter in that thing, in a extra-large box.”

“Whatever,” Walter said.

“Kung Fu?” Luther Stallings said. He turned to take a closer look at his captor. Valletta Moore turned to look at him, too. “Kung Fu Bankwell!”

“Yo, what up, Mr. Stallings. How you been?”

Sheepish, Prince Walter underwent a headlock at the mercy of the old movie star. Valletta, though; the lady was not prepared to join in the warm and heartfelt reunion just yet.

“Walter Bankwell, Lord have mercy,” she said. “How did it ever come to this?” She lifted up her sunglasses to beam her most full-strength shaming rays at Walter. “Mixed up in this kind of fool behavior.”

“What I been saying to myself all day,” Prince Walter said. “Word for motherfucking word.”

In Archy’s last dream of the night, he was a youngster and yet also his present-day self, talking to his mother in an apartment of the 1970s. Mauve was healthy, no shadow hanging over her, and although he was dreaming, a part of Archy’s mind marveled at how much clearer and more present she seemed in this dream then she ever did when he tried, in waking life, to picture her. It was that type of dream—self-conscious, fathomable as you were dreaming it. All the pain and longing that had to do with his mother’s death, the untouchable spot lodged inside him like the black meteorite in the Kaaba, was palpable as he sat with her, making absurd conversation. As he dreamed, he understood that the conversation didn’t make any sense, that the dream was a form of grieving, with the passing of Mr. Jones acting as a trigger, an undercurrent. In the dream, it felt good to grieve. The record playing in the background of the dream apartment was a classic collaboration between Maceo Parker and Curtis Mayfield, the soundtrack from a well-known blaxploitation movie called Top Hat and Elbows. He listened to the beautiful music, fat beats, sunshine horns and shadow bass, and talked nonsense to his mom as she would always be. Thank goodness, thought his present-day self, I am having this wonderful dream.

Then the song playing in the background of the dream apartment, with its silver wallpaper, rolled slowly over into “Trespasser” by Bad Medicine. Archy woke up on the floor of the dead man’s house, stacked into a pile of moving-van blankets. He heard his phone ringing and knew that his mother was dead, and that Top Hat and Elbows would be a horrible title for a movie regardless of genre, and worst of all, that except in a vanished dream, there was no soundtrack album, no visionary collaboration between Maceo and Mayfield.

“Your phone,” said Kai. Supposed to be a lesbian, with that Bowser haircut and how she filled out the shoulders of her borrowed leisure suit, but at five in the morning—after they sneaked in through a basement window in the backyard of Mr. Jones’s house to let Kai, who turned out to collect gospel and Southern church music, hold a private listening party with Mr. Jones’s small but interesting selection of rare Savoy and Checker sides—the picture had turned out to be more complicated than that. “Yo, your phone.”

“What’s wrong?” Archy said into the phone.

“This is Julie.”

“Yeah, I get that. What’s wrong?”

“Okay, first of all, I know we totally messed up.”

“That’s first of all?”

Archy hauled himself with a wobble to his feet, hangover gumming up his inner gyroscope, and went to the dormer in the parlor. The sun fell in bars through the iron on the windows, and he slotted his eyes into a line of cool shadow and looked out at Forty-second Street. A peanut-butter-colored cat skulked, hunting, along a bed of nasturtium and blown newspaper. It was Sunday morning, August 29, 2004. The funeral was past. Today was the day he was sworn to get serious about his life.

“This has to do with Luther,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“Man, I thought I told you two, keep away from him.”

“Archy, they got him. They went into his room and they carried out his, you know, all his file boxes. And they took him. And then Valletta started to, like, she was kicking them and stuff. Not like some kind of Wing Chun roundhouse kick or something, just straight-up knee in their crotch, biting them and shit. So they had to take her, too.”

“Who?”

“Oh, and I hit this one guy with a sword.”

Titus came on, talking on top of Julie in a put-on voice like some old white chemistry teacher from Iowa. “That is a true story,” he said. “I can vouch for that.”

“Julie? Hit who with a sword?”

“Those guys from the funeral home. I think the big one is named Bank.”

Archy felt the sense of relief, or at least reassurance, that came with certain kinds of failure. Yesterday Chan Flowers had asked him to choose between his future—responsible dad working for an admirable employer with a good job doing what he loved—and protecting his no-account, pipehead, washed-up, full-of-shit, lying, smiling poor excuse of an absent father. Archy had walked out of the situation, which was a weak-ass way of choosing Plan B, for no good reason at all except some pathetic residual loyalty to the man who had done nothing but squirt some key proteins into his mother’s belly. And because, why not finally admit it, a man like Archy was never likely to go for a plan like Plan A. Come on. He was no better than Luther Stallings, and the theoretical loyalty to his father on display yesterday consisted of nothing more than that. Like so many kinds of masculine loyalty, it was really only a manifestation of cowardice. Now Luther was beyond protection, Archy’s lack of resolve having outlasted both Plans A and B, a proven technique otherwise known as Plan C.

“Where’d they take him?” he said.

“We don’t know. They had the hearse, so… yeah.”

“Okay. Where are you and Titus?”

They were at an Eritrean restaurant, way down Telegraph by MacArthur. They had cash and a phone. They knew how to get the bus back to the Jaffes’ place. Julie said they would definitely be okay, but Titus did get a bloody nose, plus he had vomited on himself, his nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it looked gross, and he smelled bad, and also he had a headache.

Archy had known Julie since he was not even two, from a little old man wringing his hands in a bouncy chair hanging in a doorway. Bouncing never did much good, but you could settle the kid right down by putting on the most Out shit you had on tap, the deepest kind of Sun Ra jazz-as-cosmic-background-radiation. Long as it was playing, little Julius would stop looking like he was about to be audited by the IRS and just sit there, watching the music like a cat watching ghosts. It was not hard for Archy to hear in his voice that the boy was freaked out.

“Are you going to call the police?” Julie said. “Or should we?”

Archy perched in his underpants on the windowsill. He looked at Kai in the bed, born a girl but not feeling it, maybe 50 percent of the way toward becoming a man. Still carrying all her reproductive organs of origin but unwilling to let Archy make use of them, asking him to please fuck her in the ass, nothing to ease the passage but a handful of spit. Kai was following a recipe, a series of steps: hormones, paperwork, surgery. And then one day she would wake up and be a dude, and in all likelihood, credit where it was due, a fairly dope one at that. Archy wondered if all the mental and emotional side of being a man flowed in with the hormones, like when you were digging in the sand and broke through to water. Maybe if you actively chose to be a man and followed all the prescribed steps and procedures, you would end up with some kind of clear convictions and never find yourself, say, walking out as a weak-ass way of implementing some dumbshit Plan B that you hoped would simply expire before you had to go through with it.

“Stay where you are,” he told Julie. “I’ll see to Luther and Valletta, have your dad come get you.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Okay. Just, yo, don’t tell my mom?”

“Promise you’ll never say ‘yo’ again.”

“I swear.”

Archy sorted out and put on his sour shirt and funeral suit, cupped water at the bathroom sink, tried to ignore the lunar ruin of his hair. Patted the hip pocket of his jacket.

“I took your keys,” Kai said. “Your car is parked by the store.”

“Thank you,” Archy said. Something else from one of the short night’s vivid dreams bobbed at the surface of his memory. “Right.” He rummaged through Kai’s leisure suit and came up with his keys. She had pulled the moving-van blankets up to her chin. Her small brown eyes were watching him. “I have to go.”

“Sounds like it,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“Um, ow?” She sat up, uncovering her wide mouth, those smart-ass lips. “Good luck in Belize.”

“Yeah—what?”

The bobbing memory surfaced. Driving by the house on the Street of Lost Toys in the indefinite time after the lights came on at the Lakeside Lounge. Gwen standing on the front porch in her robe, silent as an idol to be robbed of its forehead ruby. Archy telling her to get out the way, grabbing a suitcase from the hall closet. Shoving all kinds of miscellaneous belongings in there, cans of tuna, probably a bra. Belize!

“Yeah, uh, thanks for getting me out of there in one piece.”

“Oh my God, I’m so fired. Gwen was pissed.”

“Yeah, I’m, uh, I’m sorry.” He glanced around the room one last time, then nodded goodbye, wishing he had a hat to cover the abomination of his hair, all shoved up to the front of his head. “As of now, okay, like two, three hours from now, I’m out of the picture.”

“In Belize.”

“I got all the maps.”

The eyes, the snarky mouth. Disappointed in him. Thinking he was better than that. “Have fun,” she said after a pause.

“Huh,” Archy said. “Not what I thought you were going to say.”

“What did you think I was going to say?”

“‘Man up.’”

“Fuck you.”

He took her yacht-captain hat out of the grocery bag she was using to carry around her discarded band uniform. “Yo, can I borrow this?”

“Keep it,” she said. “It looks stupidly good on you.”

Archy walked down to Telegraph in the L. Ron Hubbard hat, flipping open his phone, thinking about Julie’s question. First thing Aviva was going to say: Call the police. Tell somebody, don’t keep it a secret. Silence equals death. Take back the night. Aviva had been trained by bitter experience, like a lot of women doing the kind of work she did, to go by the book. Same with Gwen, her family packed with cops and lawyers; she would almost always throw in on the blue side of a question. Neither of them understanding that Chan Flowers would be only too happy to have the police in the mix. He was a city councilman, chair of the Public Safety Committee, tight with a lot of OPD captains and brass. When they died, patrolmen, firefighters, Chan Flowers buried them gratis, with somber pomp universally commended. The police would always be there to protect Chan Flowers. Once the man got back whatever Luther had taken from him, it would be full-on Patch me through to McGarrett, motherfucker. After that, you could tell the story of what happened when OPD met the sad old ex–kung fu champ blackmailer, and at the end of that story, in the way of the aptly named criminal justice system, it would probably be the woman, poor lost-tooth Valletta, who might have tried to be a mother to Archy if Luther had been willing to let her, who ended up doing the time.

That was something Aviva could surely understand, but Archy had no time to explain. He was reasonably certain that Chan Flowers would not endanger his position and reputation by doing anything to hurt Luther, have a couple Flowers boys curb-stomp him out behind the mortuary, but then again, within the shroud of power and funereal dignity, something internal to Chan Flowers was still on fire. Maybe the odd exemplary curb-stomp was the exact means men of position and reputation employed to stay that way.

“He around?”

“He is,” Aviva said, a warning in it. “How are you, Archy?”

“Gwen’s there?”

“Right here in my kitchen.”

That was good, in a way; Gwen could sit there saying, Fuck it, I can have a damn cup of coffee if I want to, calling down curses on Archy’s head, finding the strength at long last in the cheerful kitchen of her best friend to do what she ought to have done so long ago, see Archy for the feckless showboat he was. Brewing up the Peet’s in that fancy French cyclotron coffee drip of Nat’s while they handicapped divorce lawyers, Aviva naturally pushing the do-it-yourself model, talking about how you can go on down to that Nolo Press on Parker Street in Berkeley, they have all the forms and books you need. Frigid weather had obtained between the women lately, and something like this was all they needed to thaw things out. Meanwhile, Nat could slip out the door without attracting too much attention, too many questions.

“You hearing all the dumbshit things I got up to last night?”

“Probably not all,” Aviva said. “Enough.”

“So can I get with Nat?”

“What?” Nat said when he came on the line, the sulk laid on thick so one might think it was for show, but Archy knew that sulking was a gift Nat could not control, the lonely gift of Achilles in his tent.

“You have to drive to that Eritrean restaurant on Telegraph, the one down by MacArthur, pick up the boys, they’re waiting for you there. Okay?”

“You can’t be serious.” Deep in that dive helmet of his, down in the Yap Trench with his lead-soled boots. “I’m in my underpants.”

“I know Gwen’s loving that.”

“Eat me.”

“I got to run, Nat. You know the place, we went there that time.”

In a few blocks, Archy came upon his car. Last night’s madman suitcase was still in the truck bed, half hidden under the furniture blanket. Furniture blankets, motif of the day. Symbolizing nomadism, impermanence, the need to coat yourself against the damage of transit. He pulled back the blanket and looked at the old blue plastic Samsonite, blinking away a few more jump-cut memories from last night, at the house, him doing all the yelling, Gwen not saying a word, eyes measuring him, seeing him for what he was, loud and drunk and fixing to leave. Three thousand seven hundred and fourteen dollars in the Brokeland Records account at Wells Fargo. Draw it out. Get in the car, start driving, 680 to the 5 to I-10, turn south at Tucson into Mexico. Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Veracruz. Hit Belize in three, four days. Find a hammock and a breeze, eat tacos made with the meat of some large jungle rodent. There was nothing a man couldn’t do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres. The car was called an El Camino for a reason.

He threw the blanket over the suitcase and walked up the street to Flowers & Sons, stopping in at the Fed to pick up a sack of holes. There was bound to be a funeral today, but as of nine A.M. the august pile sat dozing under its eaves and ivy. Nothing moving, doors shut tight. Archy walked around to the back of the building. Two hearses, the old LTD Crown Victoria and a newer Town Car, waited calmly in their stalls. The hood of the Crown Vic ticking like a pot on the boil. Archy went up to the service door and knocked twice, polite but with intent.

“What’s up, Bank?” he said when the door opened up to him. “Here to pick up my pops.” He tried to make it sound prearranged, part of everyone’s schedule for the day.

Something above and to the left of Archy’s head, possibly something microscopic or invisible, interested Bankwell more than Archy did. “Can’t help you,” he said.

For the first time, somewhat belatedly, Archy gave serious consideration to the danger of this, huh, undertaking. “Bank, look here,” he said. “Check it out.” He held out the sack, a plain white paper bag free of logos or labels, but there was no mistaking it. Chance and their connoisseurial natures had brought Archy and Bankwell together at the counter of the United Federation of Donuts at least twice in the past few years. The man would know that promising bulge, the neat pleat across the top when Mrs. Pang filled your sack.

“Raised glazed,” Archy said. “Six, have them all.”

Bankwell could not help glancing at the bag, but in the end not even half a dozen raised and glazed could compete with the invisible or microscopic thing behind Archy’s head.

“Geeked old fucker told me everything,” Archy tried. “Blabbing, all rambling. Talking about that killing him and Chan did back in the day, the gangster in the Panther club, killed him with a shotgun, nobody ever got charged?” It was a wild guess, a string of them, charms of rumor and gossip hung from a chain of audacity. Half-remembered talk in the kitchens of his earliest childhood, mingled with the acrid hiss of a hot comb and the chink of ice in glasses of Flavor Aid. A strange look of recollection on his father’s face once, halfway through a broken anecdote about Huey Newton. For all he knew, it might be his father and not Chan Flowers who had pulled the trigger. “So, Bank, you not letting me come in there off the street, I don’t know. I can easily hear your uncle characterizing it in the future as stupid.”

For the first time, for a second or two, Bankwell’s eyes lingered on Archy, and they were not cold or hostile. Only weary, worn out, like he was just so fucking tired of trying to avoid doing any and all of the ten thousand things that Chan Flowers might one day, reviewing them, come to characterize as stupid. Then—resembling Gwen last night to a degree, when she had swung aside to let Archy come ranting into the house, looking to equip his journey to Belize—Bankwell stepped back. A stone gate rolling away to let the doomed archaeologist into the snake-riddled temple.

“Do come in,” Bankwell said.

Along with the backyard coops of heirloom laying hens, the collectively owned pizzerias, the venerable Volvos that had rolled off the line at Torslanda before ABBA first went gold, the racks of Dynaco tube amplifiers, the BPA-free glass baby bottles, and the ramshackle wonderland known as the Adventure Playground, one minor component in the patchwork of levees erected by the citizens of Berkeley, California, in their ongoing battle to defend their polder against the capitalist flood tides of consumerist uniformity, was a telephone hanging on the wall of the Jaffe family’s kitchen, a model 554 with a rotary dial, smiley-face yellow, its handset connected to its plastic shell by a snaking twenty-five-foot helix of yellow cord, kinked by old and unsolvable knots. In conspiring with Archy to retrieve the boys, Nat was obliged to tax this cord to its limit, stretching it across the living room with its gray-green shag carpeting (another little dike against the flood), right to the point where the carpet trim met the inlaid oak border of the front hall floor. Then, little by little, Nat wound himself up, looping himself in coils of yellow cord like a fork involving itself in a plate of spaghetti, Cleopatra sending herself to Caesar in a carpet. By the time his conversation with Archy was over and he went to hang up the phone, Nat had coiled himself all the way back to the kitchen and was as thoroughly tangled as Charlie Brown in kite string.

“Why do you do that?” Aviva said from somewhere behind the haycock of balled-up tissues that Gwen had been heaping on the kitchen table over the past hour or so, bringing in the harvest of her marital woes. “I worry it’s a bondage thing.”

“What did he say?” Gwen said, blowing her nose, tossing the Kleenex onto the pile.

“What did he say?” Nat repeated. A shameless bit of cheap stalling. He wondered—it was a new variation on the question that had been preoccupying him all morning—how much to share with the women in the kitchen. Before he could resolve the question, the phone rang again. A woman at the other end of the line identified herself as Officer Lester of the Oakland Police Department.

“Are you the owner,” she wanted to know, “of a black Saab sedan, a 1990, California license plate 3AUH722?”

“Uh, yes,” Nat said, feeling a lurch in his chest, “yes, I am, why?”

Gwen and Aviva looked over, alert to the crease in his voice as Nat backed out of the kitchen. Tangled up from ankle to waist in the phone cord, moving too fast. Hungover, if not still slightly drunk, from last night. Losing his balance, struggling to stay on his feet, he put out a hand to grab hold of the back of the Morris chair. The cord ripped loose from the telephone and, at this sudden release of tension, began to unwrap itself from Nat’s legs, arcing outward with a kind of majestic sweep, accelerating as it spun faster and faster until, as the last loop arced free, the severed tip of the cord lashed up and stung Nat on the cheek, painfully.

“Ow,” Nat said, feeling his cheek for blood. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Who was that?” Aviva said, and then her cell phone rang, and once again Nat was saved from having to come clean. Aviva studied her phone, snapped it open. “This is Aviva. Yes? Oh, hi. Are we on our way? Okay, now. Listen to me.”

Hours, inches; water broken, the bloody show; contractions coming with some urgently measured regularity. Even at times when he was not wanted by the Oakland police, Nat had long since stopped attending to the variably unvarying particulars that accrued by telephone as his wife went about her work bringing new hotheads, failures, and fools into the world. But standing at the kitchen sink, printing roses onto a paper towel with his cut cheek, Nat noticed an uneasiness creep into Gwen’s face as she listened to Aviva patiently instructing the latest father to drive the latest mother to Chimes General, where every day new fools were minted by the dozen. The mournfulness, the air of resignation that been there from the time Gwen came in the front door, seemed to give way to something colder, something closer to resolve.

“Audrey and Rain are headed to the hospital,” Aviva told Gwen, closing the phone.

“Uh-huh,” Gwen said, as though Audrey and Rain were the stuff of rumor, friends of friends. “Well, good for them.”

Aviva pushed back from the table, scooping up blooms of tissue and herding them into the kitchen trash. “You okay?”

“Kind of wrung out, but.”

“Let’s test-drive those privileges.”

“Ah…”

“I know you’re— I mean, honey, I know you’re hurting. That’s why you need to work. Work is good.”

Moving around the kitchen, Aviva a series of dissolves, seven things at once, stacking rinsed tea things in the dish rack, zipping a fresh package of Chux into her bag, tying back her hair with a scrunchie, fishing a Band-Aid out of the hell drawer, taping it to Nat’s cheek. Only thing she was not doing: seeing what Nat saw as it gathered in Gwen’s face. Across the background noise of panic and impatience, he began to detect a steady signal of regret.

“I mean, Gwen, I love you,” she said. Whiff of chocolate on her breath as she leaned close to tend Nat’s wound, sour, burnt, almost smoky. “And Archy’s acting like a complete ass. But in the end, how far is sitting around crying going to get you.”

“I agree.”

“I mean, if you aren’t feeling well, or—”

“I feel like shit, actually, but otherwise I’m fine.”

Now Aviva picked up on it. Turned, shouldering her go bag, to see the face that matched up with Gwen’s tone. “What?” she said.

“I’ve been trying to tell you, wanting to. But I just—”

Aviva sat down heavily and lowered her bag to the floor. It was an authentic replica of the kit bags carried by the crew of the Sulaco in the movie Aliens, something Julie had picked up at WonderCon a couple of years back. Nat was not sure how ironically Aviva intended her patients, as they contemplated the fearsome creatures who were about to burst from their abdomens, to take it.

“Let’s hear it,” Aviva said.

“This whole thing with Archy,” Gwen continued. “It’s just, seriously, it’s not the main thing. I mean, it could be, but I’m not going to let it be the main thing. This baby, whoever he turns out to be? He can be the main thing. Him and my work.”

“Well, that’s what I’m—”

“My real work.”

“Your real work. What’s your real work?”

“The other night, somebody told me how Archy is lucky to have found something that he can really put his heart into. However wrong or crazy it might look to some people.”

“Yes?” Aviva said, sounding wary. “Well, that’s true, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure it is,” Gwen said. “You have that, Aviva. Nat, too. But I…” She hesitated and seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “And then at the review board, with those doctors. Those smug, cocky, self-satisfied—”

“Gwen, it’s fine. You stood up to them, and they caved. Now you’re good. I— Nat? What are you looking at?”

There was a patch of sky fringed with Indian paintbrush, visible through the kitchen window, devoid of anything but blue. Nat could not keep his eyes off it. “Hummingbird,” he said.

“Gwen,” Aviva said, “you don’t need to worry about those assholes anymore.”

“I’m not worried,” Gwen said. “It’s just… I’m sick of having no power in this game, Aviva, and them having it all. Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won’t go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I’m sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass…” She stopped talking. She tucked her crossed arms between her breasts and belly like a pencil behind an ear.

“You were going to say white ladies.”

“Yes!” Gwen said. “With their white-lady latex allergies, and their white-lady OCD birth plans, and that bullshit white-lady machismo competition thing they all get into,” putting on a whiny white-girl voice, “‘I went twenty-seven hours without an epidural! Oh, I know just how you feel, I went forty-four!’ I’ll take out loans. I talked to my mom and dad, they’re willing to help me. My mother’s overjoyed, in fact.”

“Overjoyed, help you what?”

“I figure I start studying now. As soon as I have this baby, I mean. For the MCATs. By next September, I get my application together, this guy’s going to be a year old.”

“You’re going to medical school?”

“I told you. I don’t want to be fighting them anymore. So I’m just going to, I figure, I’m just going to go ahead and be one. Then when I reach out to a black woman while she’s having a baby, maybe then she’s going to reach back.”

“Okay,” Aviva said. “Great. Thanks for sharing.” She got up from the table and picked up her Nostromo bag, her eyes two small dark Ripleyesque coals. “I’m going to go be useless. Audrey is so overprivileged, she’s paying for this birth with her unemployment.”

Nat started toward her, but she was out the door before he could reach her. Down the stairs of the deck to the backyard. A few seconds later, they heard Hecate’s agitated rattle, the inveterate scrape as she backed down the curb.

“Whoa,” Nat said.

“I know.” Gwen looked dazed. “Crazy, right?”

“So you aren’t going to the birth.”

“No. No, I’m not.”

“Can I ask you a question, then?”

“Sure.”

“Can I get a ride?”

“Huh? I mean, yes, yeah, but where’s your car?”

Nat returned to the kitchen window and found again only a trackless, shadowless, and above all, zeppelin-free patch of sky. This benign expanse of blue offered, alas, little in the way of reassurance.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.”

Flowers had stashed them in a visitation room, under a gable of the sweeping bungalow roof. It was a minor room, cramped and out of the way, with latticed wallpaper that invited tedium. Window curtains the color of scorched ironing, a disturbance of pigeons outside. A room reserved for dead folks who were forgotten or unmourned, with the strange angles of a theater carved from the balcony of a chopped-up movie palace. In his spaghetti-western black suit, Flowers straddled a backward chair facing Luther and Valletta, who sat installed on an armless sofa side by side, like mourning parents. A closed coffin on a velvet bier held someone unknown.

“Look here,” said Flowers as Bank showed Archy into the room. “We got Thurston Howell III.”

“Luther,” Valletta said, and gave his knee a shove.

In Archy’s dream, it had felt like such a revelation to encounter again, to recall with such force, as if he had forgotten them completely, the crook of his mother’s fine Cherokee nose, the down on her forearms, the lingering hint of her childhood lisp. The dream had returned all that, the way a day at Stinson—the sourdough bite of a Negro Modelo, the rattle of a kite on the wind—could be restored to you by an old calendar page in a bottom drawer. At Motor City the other day, Archy had come in so pissed off at Titus and Julie, so unwilling to be there, wedged so deep in the pocket of his fury, that he hadn’t been able to see the real Luther, only the Luther required by his anger. Only whatever you saw when you pictured a dead mother and a father you had long since cut out of your life, for your own protection. Photographs and phantoms on the retina.

Now he remembered: The man sat low and scatter-limbed, but he could bounce up out of a chair, on his feet and ready to go, faster than anybody Archy knew, as if someone had dropped a coffee in his lap. That was still true. The cleft in his chin, how it seemed to have been incised by a pottery tool, deft and deliberate. The way he would scowl at you just long enough for it to make you uncomfortable, long enough for you to wonder whether he was kidding around or if you’d actually committed some sin, some forgotten transgression, before he finally pulled the rip cord on the Cleon Strutter smile.

But he was so wintry now, snow in his hair, frost on his eyebrows! Though the height and the breadth of him remained impressive, he had lost mass, gravity. He scowled at Archy from under the icy ledge of his eyebrows. Clear-eyed, possibly sober, but Archy had seen Luther sober before. That was no big thing. With Luther, a period of sobriety was a kind of Groundhog Day, a shadow needing sunshine to foretell interminable gray. Archy hung back by the door and waited. At last, like a fading custom, the Stallings smile revived.

“I hope you don’t mind, Chan,” Luther said, still looking at Archy, “if I asked my mediator to join us.”

Here it came: Time for Luther to put on a show. Archy’s heart sank, and he was about to say Hold up when it occurred to him that he had come for no other purpose than this.

“I parked my zeppelin in the clergy spot,” Archy said. He settled the yacht cap more firmly on his head, thinking it best to own the hat, to live up to it. “Hope that’s all right.”

He let his father take hold of him for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. Laundromat, motel air freshener, no shower, Valletta’s perfume. The bones of his shoulders. Luther making a sound, deep down, sounding like Cochise Jones at the foot pedals of his B-3.

“Hey, Valletta,” Archy said, getting free of Luther.

“Hello, Archy. I’m sorry you got mixed up in this.”

“You okay?”

“I’m just fine, thank you, honey.”

She looked like she had been fighting. No doubt, she had directed some energy toward putting herself together that morning, sleeveless white blouse, clementine-red skirt short enough to arrest the breath in your lungs. But she had since come apart here and there. One shirttail was untucked. Springs and coils broke the long rolling sweep of her hair. Luther had his bathrobe on, blue happi coat patterned with white cranes, gray kung fu shorts, Yip Man slippers. Bank and Feyd must have rolled him out of bed.

The nephews had taken up their accustomed foo-dog posts on either side of the door. Feyd looked correct, even daring, for a nephew, in a brown suit with an orange shirt and a dark purple tie, but the malandro swagger was out of the boy, standing with his head hung and his toes together, freshly scolded by Uncle Chan, Archy would have bet, for the spectacle they must have made beefing with a couple of bokken-wielding, vomiting fourteen-year-olds in the stairwell of a MacArthur Boulevard motel. Bank looked abused, his right cheek chewed up, his tie askew, radiating an air of outraged humility, as if he had been assaulted, say, by a skinny little gay kid armed with a hickory sword.

“Who’s in the box, Kung Fu?” Archy said.

Walter stayed behind his glasses, saying nothing. He picked at the zipper of his midnight-blue tracksuit, stitched with the name Ali in huge red script, slumped in a bentwood-back chair reserved around here for the worker, often one of the younger nephews, who was supposed to sit up with the body, keep it company when there was nobody around. A job that, in former days, often fell to little Walter Bankwell. Boy and a Sports Illustrated could feign wakefulness for hours on end.

“That is Mr. Padgett,” Flowers said. He uncrossed his legs and, reaching out a hand, got up to give Archy a straight up-and-down funeral-director special. “He was a teacher. Called home last Tuesday. He’s our two o’clock.”

“Terrell Padgett? From Oakland Tech? I had him for algebra.”

“Least he survived that,” Luther said.

“He was a pussy,” Walter said from behind his hand, into which the entire lower portion of his face was sunk glumly.

Flowers uncurled an index finger and jabbed it three times at Walter as if shaking out an umbrella full of rain. “Not. Another. Word.”

Walter lost himself in the false-color planet charted across the surface of his late-model kicks.

“Councilman,” Archy said. “Chan. What is all this? What are you doing?”

“I—I apologize, Archy, for how this went down. I think, if you hear me out, you’re going to acknowledge that I did not have a choice but to do it in this manner. Please, sit down.”

Flowers looked at Bankwell, Feyd. “Go on, clear out, now. Ms. Moore, my apologies. You want to go, you are free to go. Feyd, help Ms. Moore to the door.” He turned to Walter, narrowed his eyes to lizard slits. “You, too, fool.”

Valletta warned away Feyd when he came to clear her out, and set about doing what was necessary to remove herself from the room, sweeping herself up off the mourners’ couch, a cyclone gathering its skirts for a run at a trailer park. For a second or two she hung above Luther, looking down at his bald spot like she was willing it to widen, to engulf him in a hairless shine of ruin. Or maybe the poor girl loved him in some way that was even more incomprehensible to Archy than his own love for Luther, under its bell jar of years, flickering impossibly on. Maybe as she stood there, she was wishing that bald spot away, ungraying the hair, unlining the face, unburning the days. As far as Archy knew, Valletta had been in love with his father, on and off, high or straight, treasure to trash, since the Monday morning in 1973 when he first walked onto the set of Strutter. You had to figure thirty years of on-and-off love was some kind of heroic feat. Not even God could hold onto the love of Israel in the desert without the jewelry getting melted down, now and then, to make a calf.

“Give it to him,” she said to the bald spot.

Luther didn’t move or otherwise acknowledge her words, smiling at Flowers as if he had come of his own free will to sell him a magazine subscription or the formula for eternal salvation.

“Motherfucker,” she said, “you don’t give it to him, I’m gone. I’m serious. You won’t be able to find me with a satellite and a X-ray machine.”

Luther and Valletta had been costars in their mutual disaster for too long not to milk the beat, Valletta darting her eyes back and forth to read Luther’s the way that only actresses in close up ever did, reading his gaze like the screen of a teleprompter.

“Go, then, bitch,” Luther said, not without tenderness. “I ain’t folding on two pair.”

Valletta rocked back. Wavering in her resolve. Knowing she should make good on her threat and go, but trained by the Pavlovian bell of love to confuse contempt with affection and indifference with reserve. Then she shrugged, kissed the air between her and Archy, flashed her palm like a badge. “Bye,” she said.

Archy watched her and that swinging ass of hers as they headed for the door, pendulum going tick, tock. Waiting to see if she would look back at Luther, but she was true to her promise and gone. The three nephews trudged after her, and it turned out to be old Kung Fu who cast a backward glance—at Archy—as he stalked out, head down, hands shoved into the muff pockets of his track jacket. Backward and sidewise, filled with reproach, as if all this were Archy’s fault. Maybe resenting the fact, on a more basic and juvenile level, that Archy got to stay in the room and he did not. Embroidered across the back of the jacket in big red letters were the words I AM THE GREATEST. Greatest bitch, Archy thought, as Walter slammed the door behind him.

It was Archy’s fucking plan in the first place: Meet back at Brokeland after the burial, smoke a bowl, put a dent in the mess from the old man’s funeral. Spin a few records, restore some order. Say what there was to say, see where things stood: Dogpile, COCHISE, their lives. As friends, partners, bandmates, fathers. Decide to go down fighting on the burning deck of the Brokeland, or scuttle her and try to jump clear of all the flaming flotsam.

“He say anything about Belize?” Gwen wanted to know.

They were in her BMW on their way to pick up the boys, KMEL playing some 120-bpm thumper, girl singer, the usual combination of finger-crooking and sass homiletics. Gwen had fitted herself improbably into the space between seat and wheel like some novelty marvel, a ship in a bottle, a psalm on a grain of basmati. Still a great-looking woman, even this close to the event horizon, maximum gravidity. Hair wrapped up in a Ghanaian head scarf, sunset reds and oranges. Pistachio ice cream–colored cat’s-eye sunglasses. Those hands of hers gripping the wheel, beautiful freaks, almost as big as her husband’s but long and supple, fingernails clipped man-short but glossy as meringue.

“He didn’t say anything, is my point,” Nat said. “Dude never showed up. At the cemetery, he got into his car, he waved, that was the last time I saw him.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Gwen said. “I’m still not sure how Kai fits into it all. If I wasn’t already messing things up for Aviva, I’d say she was fired.”

“I mean, at least you know Archy didn’t fuck her.”

Gwen said, at least that.

“So, wait, you really are quitting?” Nat said, the news seeping in along with the first fizzy milligrams of panic and dismay. For years his life had balanced like the world of legend on the backs of great elephants, which stood on the back of a giant turtle; the elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva’s with Gwen, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. Here along the water margin, along the borderlands, along the vague and crooked frontier of Telegraph Avenue. Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering, toppling like the tower of circus elephants in Dumbo. Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding, rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice. No one was lobbing vile epithets, reverting to atavistic tribalisms. The differences in class and education among the four of them canceled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectation: Aviva and Archy both had been raised by blue-collar aunts who worked hard to send them to lower-tier colleges. The white guy was the high school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated. It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world.

“You think I was playing with the poor woman, saying I was quitting when I’m not?”

“No.”

“Nat, do you seriously think I was taunting her?”

“No, ma’am.”

Sounding annoyed, she said: “So, okay, you went back to the store.”

He told her how he had found himself alone in the horror that was the aftermath of Mr. Jones’s wake. Bones and scattered beans, puddled sauces inter-oozing on discarded plates in Mandelbrot sets of grease and tomato. A stack of uneaten tortillas swollen and curling like the pages of a book that had fallen into the bathtub. And Cochise Jones officially and forever dead. Over everything, over life itself, that sense of encroaching shadow Nat was always left with when someone he loved had died. A dimming, the world’s bulb browned out. He remembered taking Julie to the Gardner Museum on a trip to Boston a few years earlier, seeing a rectangle of paler wallpaper against the time-aged wall where a stolen Rembrandt once hung, a portrait of the very thing that perched atop the stool where Mr. Jones used to sit: emptiness itself. Empty cans, empty bottles, empty store, empty night, Nat’s empty life lived fruitlessly and in vain.

“A Nat Jaffe alone,” Gwen summarized, “is a dangerous thing.”

“Bitch,” Nat said, trying to jaunt himself out of it. “I’m always alone.”

“Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of Existential Drama Queen.”

“Born alone, die alone.”

Nat keeping up his end by saying what was in his heart, leaving out only the secret central event of his proposed human time line, namely Do a bunch of stupid shit alone, repeatedly, because you can’t control your dumb-ass self.

“Okay, now,” Gwen said, “ease up, big guy.”

On the dilapidated sign of Steele’s Scuba, a ghostly diver confronted the lost submarine mysteries of Telegraph Avenue. Gwen slowed as the bus in front of them knelt like a cow before the newborn Jesus to take on, was it, yes, the Stephen Hawking guy. Nat watched the poor bastard increment himself and his chair, patient and stubborn, onto the bus’s power lift. Talk about alone. But look at him, dude was unstoppable, ubiquitous. Basically, a head on a meat stalk, strapped into a go-kart, motherfucker would take a bus to Triton if AC Transit ever put it on a route. Nat might have felt ashamed of the self-pity in which he currently wallowed, if self-pity knew any shame. He looked away, left, right, and then, tasting his hangover at the back of his mouth like a flavor of dread, up at the sky. Afraid he might see above him, at any moment, the evidence of last night’s stupid shit, looming and vengeful as Spiny Norman in the old Monty Python sketch.

“Whatever,” Nat said. “I’m going to tell this or not?”

“Let me guess. You started drinking.”

“I found a six-pack of warm Corona. Some miracle it didn’t get drunk.”

Nat had opened the first beer, found a slice of lemon, poked it through the mouth of the beer can. Knocked the photograph of Mr. Jones from its ceremonious stool with a satisfying sense of desecration. Got up into the old man’s chosen spot, maybe trying to dispel the emptiness that had gathered there. Figuring he would wait for Archy, who lived in his own personal CP time zone, his own little Guam of lateness. In the meantime have a beer, try to think his existential drama-queen way out of—or anyway, around—the situation. Then, for sure, do a little cleaning up.

By the fourth Corona, Archy had not showed or called, the store was no nearer to being clean, and Nat no longer bothered with the lemon. The goal was still to think his way out of or around the situation, but by this point, admittedly, his grasp of the complexity of the situation was pretty diminished. The improvidence, carelessness, and lack of acumen that he and Archy had shown in operating their business; their tendency to view the taking on of responsibility for every task, errand, or chore that Brokeland Records required—to conduct their lives, mutual and individual—as a prolonged if not infinite game of chicken, each waiting for the other to blink, to give in; the rise of electronic file sharing of digital music; the low revenue generated by the bargain-hunting and transient crew of dormitory DJs and homeboy mix-tapers who made up the greater share of their customer base, far outnumbering the high-roller collectors; the collapse of the Japanese and overseas markets generally; not to mention Archy’s evident dissatisfaction with the nature of their partnership and the algae bloom of financial panic, of provider anxiety, in the normally tranquil pond water of Archy’s soul: All these proximate and precipitating causes of the imminent failure of Brokeland Records seemed by the fourth Corona to have been rinsed from Nat’s mind, leaving only a mildew-black residue of rage against Gibson Goode. Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.

When the beer was gone, Nat poked around amid the dead soldiers stacked on and under the folding tables until he came up with a bottle of Hungarian slivovitz, God knew who had brought it. It was a quarter full. Nat sloshed a little into a red hot-and-cold cup, then quickly knocked back two or possibly three shots. Slivovitz was the cordial of grief, the mourner’s brandy. Nat could remember his newly widowed father, the first Julius, lost in a helpless scrum of uncles in somebody’s kitchen after his first wife’s funeral, gasping at the fire in his chest as the slivovitz went down.

Nat climbed back onto Mr. Jones’s stool with his glass of burning wine, put on A Love Supreme. Reliably, it destroyed him. Yes, it had passages of lyric majesty, passages that embodied the modernist union of difficulty and primitivism, and some kind of groove beyond groove, funk beyond funk; and yes, it had been intended as a kaddish of sorts, an expression of praise in the face of all sorrow for the Creator of John Coltrane, with thanks from His magnificent creation; but to Nat, it had always come off as music that was—like Nat himself— secretly powered by currents of rage. Probably that was a projection of Nat’s own feelings toward his own fucked-up Creator, some lesser cousin twice removed of the Perfect Being that had made John William Coltrane. But as he listened to the A-side, with its furious repetitions, the saxophone bashing itself over and over against some invisible barrier, a bee at a windowpane seeking ingress or escape, Nat felt his low-frequency rage with motherfucking Gibson Goode and his motherfucking Dogpile Thang begin to spike. The stylus dragged itself to the locked groove, and he needed to take a piss, and it was at this point, as far as he could remember, that he decided it would be a good idea to forgo the routine pleasure of pissing in his own toilet, in the bathroom behind the curtain with its bug-eyed portrait of Miles Davis. He decided that he would walk down to the future site of the Dogpile Thang and piss on that instead.

“They put that sign up,” he said to Gwen. “You’ve seen it? Big black and red sign. With the paw print, future home of.”

“You peed on the sign.”

“I thought it might feel good.”

“Did it?”

“Well, I mean, it always feels pretty good. But, like, in terms of my morale… ?”

“And what, somebody saw you peeing on it?”

“Oh,” Nat said, grabbing at this possibility, “do you think it’s that?”

“Do I think what’s that?”

“What the police want to talk to me about.”

“Why, did you do something else?”

“The whole,” deciding to adopt Gwen’s word, which sounded so much more innocent and harmless than “pissing,” “peeing thing, I don’t know. I was kind of drunk. But I wasn’t drunk enough to kid myself that it wasn’t kind of a lame thing to do.”

“‘Kind of.’”

“It pretty much made me feel more useless. So that’s when I decided to head out to the airport.”

“You drove drunk.”

“If you want to get technical.”

“What’s with everyone making travel plans all of a sudden?” Gwen wanted to know. “Where did you think you were going? Belize?”

“‘Travel plans’? How well do you know me?”

“No, of course, right.”

“I just wanted to get a look at that motherfucking zeppelin.”

“Why? So you could pee on it?”

“Pissing on a zeppelin,” Nat said, regretting bitterly the loss of this opportunity. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He kept the radio off, making the argument to himself that if music divided his impaired attention, then logically, silence would augment it. It was a timeless, placeless transit through a strobe-lit hyperspace of beer and slivovitz, scored only by the quarter-note rumble of I-880 under his tires. Vaguely, he remembered someone reporting a sighting of the airship early that morning, moored somewhere off Hegenberger Road. If it had not already returned to its home base in Southern California, he might find it there, shiny and gigantesque as the ego of Gibson Goode. Let it be huge, shiny, and awesome, then. Nat was prepared—maybe even hoping—to be awed. At least let a failure of his, just this once, partake to some measure, however indirect, of grandeur.

He traced and retraced the barren cipher written in the darkness by airport roads whose names commemorated heroes of aviation. The silence in the Saab was replaced by humming as Nat’s original curiosity about the zeppelin, half larkish, half irritated, mounted in the darkness, until it became a full-blown longing and, as with Ahab’s fish, the airship came to bear the blame, in Nat’s imagination, for all the ways in which the world was broken. And then, right around the time Nat began to understand that he was drunk and lost and would never find the motherfucker, and furthermore had probably already attracted the notice of Homeland Security’s flying robot thermal cameras—around the time he realized that for some reason he was humming the chord changes to “Loving You”—it startled him: a zeppelin-shaped hole cut into the orangey skyline of San Francisco.

What happened then: He must have swerved. Someone threw a big luminous net at the car. After that—all within the span of the three or four seconds it took him to crash through the chain-link fence—came a lot of really interesting sounds. A ringing of bells. A raking of tines. A boing, a thump, a scrape, a crunch. Finally, a gunshot bang, as the same clown who had thrown the giant steel net at the car decided it would be funny to give Nat a face full of airbag.

After that there was a gap in the archive. The next things Nat remembered were a taste of salt in his nostrils, the blacktop sending the day’s heat up through the soles of his socks, the dwindling hiss of the Saab’s radiator, and the consciousness—alas, not yet sober—of having benefited from a miracle. He was fine, whole. And the God of Ahab at last had delivered him from his lonely quest. He stood a hundred feet from his beast in its nighttime pasture. He was not sure what had happened to his shoes.

As he started across the sweep of pavement toward the zeppelin, he tripped some kind of sensor. Stanchions studded with floods lit up all around the airship, snapping it on like a neon sign. Nat fell back into shadow and waited to see what happened. Expecting to find himself confronted by a Bronco full of security guards, an android sentry equipped with lasers, a lonely old night watchman named Pete or Whitey who would leap up from his chair, already halfway to cardiac arrest, as the latest Field & Stream tumbled from his lap.

Nothing. Most of the light from the stanchions was squandered on the gasbag, or whatever it would be called on a zeppelin—the word “envelope” slid in through a slot in his memory—but Nat thought he could make out a few small buildings over on the far side of the asphalt field. Maybe Gibson Goode and his entourage were asleep inside that glossy plastic gondola. It was not hard to imagine somebody in that crew feeling obliged to bust out with a gun and take a few shots at the intruder. Nat wondered if he ought to be afraid. But no light came on in the windows of the gondola.

The zeppelin floated three or four feet off the ground, lashed at the nose to a steel mast that rose in turn from the wide bed of a parked truck that looked small next to the airship but must in fact be massive. The airship lay perfectly still, as if listening for Nat. The breeze off the bay did not appear to trouble it. Yet at the same time it thrummed, verging on some kind of outburst of motion. It reminded Nat less of a whale now than a Great Dane or a thoroughbred horse. An animal strung with nerve and muscle but, for all that, lovable.

“Poor thing,” he said to the zeppelin.

He came out of shadow and went over to the truck, across whose grille in chrome letters ran the weighty inscription M • A • N. The mooring mast was a business of telescoping poles, like the arm of a cherry picker without the elbow. As Nat drew closer, the mast chimed deep inside itself, and the breeze sang along the length of guy wire that held the zeppelin fast. The truck was meant, from the ground up, to be climbed. At the back, three steel steps led up the bed, and then you scooted around the base of the mast to the bottommost of a column of metal spikes or cleats, like the steps on the side of a telephone pole, which led up the lower segment of the mast to a narrow steel ladder, which in turn carried Nat all the way to the top.

Here his lingering intoxication, and maybe a touch of loopiness from the collision, contended against his desire to set the noble zeppelin free. He spent awhile clinging to a cold rung at the top of the mast. He reached a hand, palm outward, fingers spread, like a man feeling for the kick of a child in a woman’s belly. In the instant before contact, he recalled having heard that a static discharge had ignited the Hindenburg. But there was no spark, only the cool taut bellying of the airship against his palm. He wished wildly for an ax, a pair of shears, a torch to cut the cable. Then he noticed a heavy lever on the shaft of the mast, alongside the spinneret from which the cable emerged, helpfully labeled EMERGENCY RELEASE. He opened the clasp that held it in place, snaked his shoeless feet around the poles of the ladder, and dragged down on the release, wrestling its rubber grip with both hands. The lever shunted out and down, and with a whistle of steel against steel, the guy wire whiplashed loose of the mast and swung from the big carabiner that clipped it to the airship’s nose.

“Go ahead, Arch,” he said, perhaps uncovering the source of the sudden flood of tenderness he felt toward the zeppelin. “Fly and be free.”

The zeppelin disdained his gesture of liberation. It continued to hang, drifting minutely, almost invisibly, three or four feet off the ground.

“Ballast,” Nat inferred. “Right.”

He climbed down the mooring mast, dropped to the ground, and took a slow walk around the gondola, looking for something to release, a system of weights, bags of sand like in The Wizard of Oz. There was nothing. He sat down on the ground, abruptly tired, and looked up at the gondola’s underside. There were two round hydrants, sealed with caps. Modest red capital letters identified them as ballast tanks. Nat reached up, went on the tips of his toes, and got hold of one of the caps. He got just enough purchase on tiptoe to pop it loose. The cap tore loose of his fingers. He felt himself hammered by something cold and implacable that turned out to be a hundred gallons of water. The shock of the water sobered him at once, enough to drench him in an equal or greater quantity of cool, clear regret for what he had done, as the zeppelin, with appalling grace and lightness, took to the luminous night sky.

“How did you get home?”

“Walked. Found a cab.”

“You just left the car there?”

“I now realize the folly of that.”

“That’s how the cops found you. From your registration.”

“No doubt.”

“Oh, Nat.”

“I know, I know.”

“You stole the damn Dogpile blimp.”

“Liberated,” he suggested, but he knew that in all its long history, the word had never sounded more lame.

“Where is it now?”

It occurred to him that a grave and narcissistic fallacy lay at the heart of the fear that he was going to look out the window of his house or Gwen’s car and catch sight of the zeppelin. The zeppelin would not be stalking him. It was mindless, trafficking only with gravity and wind.

“Up in the sky?” he suggested.

“You hope! Let me ask you a question. When the police called? Can I ask why you did not immediately confess?”

“Panic? Shame?”

“Nat, the thing could crash into the Transamerica Pyramid, the Bay Bridge.”

Privately, Nat wondered if a celebrated giant landmark was more attractive to catastrophe than, say, an egg farm or a Best Buy. “Maybe,” he said, wishful, “it’ll just keep going up. Right on into space.”

They were a few blocks north of MacArthur, and here came Merkata on the left. It was clad in fake half-timbering and stucco with a concrete thatched roof, leftovers from the day, three or four cuisines ago, when it had been a fish-and-chips joint.

“If you want to pull over,” he said, happy to change the subject, “I can go get them.”

“Here they come.”

“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

The boys came shuffling out of Merkata like prisoners chained at the ankle. Curtis & Poitier, brothers in woe. Something weighing on them, the burden of captivity, their secret escape plan. Julie clutching that portable eight-track to his chest with a weird, splay-fingered fierceness. Nat got out of the car, remarking the boys’ sheepish and hangdog expressions, wondering if maybe he needed to prepare his angry-dad routine. If he had it in him right now to do that; not to mention, given the events of last night, a moral leg to stand on.

“Julius Lawrence Jaffe, what did you do?”

He was shocked by the influx of his son into his arms. The bony shoulders, the soft lank hair against his cheek. Shocked by the tears that wetted the front of his shirt.

“Pop, I broke my tape player,” Julie said.

Disconsolate. Going slack against Nat like one of those little wooden puppets when you pushed the button in the base.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Nat said. For all the loneliness and anger, for all the stupidity and shame, for all the pain that losing Archy, the store, the vision that Brokeland had always—exactly like Archy said in his eulogy—represented to Nat, with a warrant out for his arrest on a charge of zeppelin rustling, and the possible destruction of the Bay Bridge or, who knew, the Sphinx, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, on his conscience; right then, with his little boy restored sobbing to his embrace, it honestly did feel okay. This was something useful, maybe the sole useful thing, that he still knew how to do. “Let’s go home.”

Julius nodded, then looked up into Nat’s face. “Titus, too?”

“Sure, of course. Titus, you okay? Oh, Jesus, look at you, what happened?”

There was blood on Titus’s face, his shirt collar, and something else staining his shirt. His eyes were wide and shining, about to well over, and his expression was yearning as he watched Julius crumple into Nat’s arms. Standing there, blood on him, no one to hold or be held by. Looking at him, Nat felt ashamed. He opened his arms to make room in the embrace for Titus.

Titus shook his head once, disgusted, cool returned. Then he turned and ran away.

“Titus!” Julie called after him. “Pop, come on! Titus!”

He started to drag himself loose, but Nat held fast, and after a brief struggle, Julie gave up and turned to Gwen in the car, watching them.

“We have to go get him,” Julie said. “Gwen, let’s go.”

“I really don’t think he wants to be around us,” Gwen said. “And I need to go in and talk to these folks about something.”

There was no suff on the menu, but an understanding was reached, and after a brief wait and some blender activity, Gwen was able to allay this unlikely pain at last. She took the tall clear plastic tumbler filled with what Nat understood to be the thin beige milk of roasted sunflower seeds and tipped it to her lips. The joy and sweetness of it on her face, the orgasmic flutter of her eyelids, was stark, arousing.

“Oh, baby,” she said.

But then the weird-looking infusion seemed to go down badly.

“Excuse me,” she said. She put her long and beautiful fingers to her lips, opened her eyes wide, closed them again, and ran to the front door of the restaurant. Out on the sidewalk, she bent double and spasmed, making a sound that Nat would never afterward be able to unhear, a kind of robotic braying, over and over. Nat, an atheist, prayed for it to stop. It sounded like her stomach was tearing itself in two. When she returned, her cheeks and forehead were lustrous with sweat.

“Wow,” she said. She breathed, and swallowed, and breathed again. When she opened her eyes, Julie passed her a napkin, and she dabbed her lips with an improbable daintiness. “Thank you, baby.”

She stood still, scowling, as if listening for something, probing a tooth with her tongue, trying to remember whether she had left a burner lit on the stove at home. And then Nat smelled something that reminded him abruptly of Cochise Jones’s basement. That cheese-cellar whiff, faint as a whisper, of rot. A darker shade of black seeped across the front of Gwen’s stretchy black leggings.

“I’ll be right back,” she said with a chilling show of cheeriness. Her progress toward the bathroom was slow, her waddle exaggerated by the need to keep her legs apart. Behind her, splashes of water marked her passage. When she came out, she had pulled off her leggings and apparently disposed of them. The sight of her bare legs, emerging from the tails of one of Archy’s shirts, came as a shock to Nat. She looked vulnerable, and he understood that she was about to set out for a place, come what may, where she would be completely alone, so much more alone than an existential drama queen like Nat could possibly imagine.

“You need to get me to the hospital,” she said.

With Valletta gone—beyond the reach of X-rays, uplinks, and his unquenchable thirst for an audience—old Luther had lost his defiant aspect. He sat shifting in his chair as if it were greased or electrified, not meeting Archy’s eyes. Eyebrows arching, lips moving, telling Flowers to go fuck himself, saying nothing out loud. A whole great big argument going on there, inside his mind. A knife fight, a televised debate, a sumo match.

“Your father,” Flowers began. He paused, ordering his next words, putting them through their paces before he set them loose in the room. “Your dad has been trying to blackmail me,” he went on, keeping his tone light, amused by the idea. “Over something that happened a long time ago, that no one even cared about at the time, to somebody no one remembers. Been skulking around from rathole to rathole. Leaving scurrilous messages. Spreading scandal and lies.”

“Scandal, maybe,” Luther said. Shake of the head, going jowly, trying to match his old friend’s affectation of amusement with a show of moral severity every bit as unconvincing. “Not lies.”

“Naturally, I have a problem with this behavior,” Flowers went on, ignoring Luther, making his case directly to the appointed mediator, who was already five minutes past regretting having gotten mixed up in this shit in the first place, even though he knew that the choice not to get himself involved would, in the end, have proved just as big a pain in the ass. “But given the nature of the accusation, I haven’t felt—yet—that it would necessarily help clarify the situation to call in my good friends at OPD.”

“I hope you do,” Luther said. “I would love to tell them all about you.” He looked around, seeing if somebody might give him a high five, pound his fist. But it must have been looking right then like a pretty tough room.

“Let him say his piece,” Flowers suggested to Archy, speaking through the interpreter, “after I say mine.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Archy told Luther.

Luther shrugged, clapped one of his big paws to his mouth, Black Bolt holding back a fatal syllable. Scattered his limbs farther and looser in his chair.

“Even though I have been tied up with a number of other important matters,” Flower said, “I’ve also been trying to dig this man up out of whatever hole he was hiding in so I could bring him here, sit him down in front of me, and make him at least look me in the eye while he was trying to shake me down.”

“Here I am,” Luther said, knitting himself together, sticking out his jaw, as if being here were all his idea, a man of integrity walking the lonely path of truth and honor. When really he had been turned over like a worm on the blade of a trowel. “And I ain’t threatening you with nothing, Chan. What did I ever say, what note or message did I ever leave, besides, basically, the gist was, if you don’t want to help out your oldest friend, a man who been working so hard to clean himself up and get himself back on his feet, what’s that say about you? Which,” turning to Archy, “is more or less the message I been trying to convey to you, too.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Archy said. “Convey all you want, I’ll stamp it ‘Return to Sender’ every motherfucking time.” He turned to Flowers. “This is about that dude that got shot back in the seventies? Do I have that right? At the Panther bar, what was it, the Bit o’ Honey.”

“His name was Popcorn Hughes,” Flowers said. “He was a gangster, a cheap, ignorant, worthless East Oakland pimp. Wound up right where he was supposed to, a year, maybe two, ahead of schedule.”

“And you’re the one who hurried him along.”

“I had no reason to want to hurt the man,” Flowers said carefully.

“He was trying to make his mark,” Luther said. “‘Establish the legend.’ Impress Huey Newton. See, Huey, when he wants somebody gone, he knows all he has to do is wish it out, loud and clear. Like Peter O’Toole, what’s that movie?” Arranging his features into a kingly scowl, busting out a fairly respectable O’Toole. “‘Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?’ Chan the Man’s standing right there to make old Huey’s wish come true.”

It was not easy to read the face of Chandler Flowers. He had long since, years ago, composed its features with the same care that he had brought to interweaving the dead fingers of Cochise Jones. If you were telling him a joke or a sad story, he would smile as need be or incline his head in sympathy. Mild amusement, ready understanding. Archy had never seen anything in that unreadable fist of a face like he was seeing now. It might have been pain or regret. Maybe it was only wistfulness. His eyes were a pair of shadowy tunnels boring deep into the mountain of the past.

“‘Establish the legend,’” he said almost fondly. “That does sound like me at the time. I will give you that.”

“Ready, willing, and able to do whatever you needed to do, not to have to end up right where you are now. Whatever was the opposite of this.” Luther opened the compass rose of his right hand to direct their attention to the zones of irony all around them. “The opposite of what Chandler the Second wanted you to do. Shining on going to college. Dating white girls. Enlisting in the navy as a common seaman. Joining the Black Panther Party.”

Flowers crinkled his eyes with pleasure, enjoying the memory of the industry he had shown in scandalizing his father. He started to laugh, a scattering of droplets on a hot skillet, sounding like his nephew Walter. “That is the truth,” he said. “You got that right.”

“Trying to give your old man a epileptic seizure,” Luther said, keeping a straight face around the edges of which laughter leaked like light around a door. “Infarction of the heart.”

“I did my best,” said Flowers.

“‘You’re a stain on the name!’” Dusting off, like an old side of vinyl, the tight-assed, stuffy-nosed voice of some long-dead black man, putting it on. “‘Chandler Bankwell Flowers, you are a stain on the name!’”

“A stain on the name, good God, I totally forgot he used to—”

“Surprised you never tried turning faggot,” Luther said. “That would of done it real quick.”

The silence that followed this declaration, while nanometric, was abrupt and revelatory.

“Uh,” Archy said, feeling his cheeks flush, but Flowers’s face had resumed its folded-hands composure. “So, what, were you both in the Party, or…?”

“Nah, that was his bullshit,” Luther said. “I didn’t want no part of that business. I just went along for the ride.”

“Oh, yeah, okay. Because you are so opposed to bullshit,” Archy said. “You and bullshit, strangers to each other.”

“It was all a long time ago,” Flowers said, and in his voice there was a nasal, seddity echo of Luther’s impersonation of Chandler the Second that had, Archy realized, been there all along. “Water under the bridge.”

“Yeah?” Luther said, playing with the man, enjoying the company, Archy would have said, of his old running buddy. “Why you still so worried, then?”

Placid, leaning back, hands folded over the convexity of his abdomen in a weird echo of the way he posed his dead men, Flowers said, “I’m not worried, Luther.”

“Then why’d you change your mind about Dogpile? All of a sudden. The minute I go around, pay a visit to Gibson Goode, suggest that he ask you what happened to Popcorn. How come you threw in with Dogpile, then?”

“I’d like to hear the answer to that one,” Archy said.

Flowers just smiled that unreadable smile, forged in the fire of a hundred sessions of the Planning Commission, people popping up all around Hearing Room number 1 to ask the unanswerable, demand the undeliverable, give vent to the unassuageable.

“I told you my reasons, Archy, the other day when we spoke. I realized that however much personal love and loyalty I might feel toward that beautiful store of yours, not to mention all the history it contains—black history, Oakland history, neighborhood history, my history—it was selfish of me to oppose Mr. Goode. A Dogpile Thang is an opportunity for the community as a whole. Now. Today. In the present moment. Not to mention, and now I’ll be honest, an opportunity for some people near and dear to me, too, such as my sister Candida’s youngest son, my nephew Walter, in all his rack and ruin. An opportunity for people such as yourself, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Now, that is truly some bullshit,” Luther told Archy. “Chan, you knew this thing with Popcorn was going to come back on you someday. From the day you settled your ass down, followed in the footsteps, started pumping that formaldehyde, you been living in dread it would come out.” He turned to Archy. “I got evidence, son. DNA.” It was his turn to lean back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, flapping the rooster wings of his elbows. “Shit lasts a million years. Put it under a microscope, clone yourself a damn triceratops. One day, check it out, some Jurassic Park motherfucker’s going to come along, clone Chan Flowers for a prehistoric Oakland ride, Chan be standing there when Laura Dern goes by in her Jeep. Shit, Chan, I bet I can even lead them to the gun! That Mossberg’s probably still there in the woods, tangled up in some weeds and shit.”

“You’re in the weeds right now,” Flowers said. “Way out in the weeds, Luther.”

“What do you have?” Archy said.

“A glove,” Luther said. “Chan was wearing it when he did Popcorn Hughes, has Popcorn’s blood DNA all over it.”

“A glove,” said Flowers.

“You remember, it was your brother’s, Marcel’s. Little purple glove from the costume he was wearing—”

“A glove!” Flowers enjoyed or pretended to enjoy the idea that an accessory, a minor item of haberdashery, could ever inspire the kind of anxiety that Luther had described. “A glove, been in some crackhead’s back pocket thirty-one years? Even if it turned out to be real,” wanting Archy to come in with him on scorning this one, “I mean, even if the blood on this glove turned out to be mine, or Popcorn Hughes’, or Jimmy Hoffa’s, what does that prove?”

Here it came, bright and true as a streaming banner: the smile of Cleon Strutter, showing his hand.

“Just give me a hundred thousand dollars,” Luther said, “we never need to answer that question.”

“Luther, for real?” Archy said. “Blackmail?”

Tossing the word across to his father like a grappling hook, feeling one small barb catch hold. Luther looked down at his feet in their slippers, then up at Archy. Nodding. Good with it. “If you want to call it that,” he said.

“It’s true, you really clean and sober?”

“Thirteen months, one week, and five days,” Luther said.

“For, like, honestly, the first time in, since, what, the late eighties?”

Luther allowed that was probably accurate.

“So this is the real you, then. That right? Luther Stallings, clean and sober: a scumbag blackmailer.”

The flag of Luther’s smile failed, then caught a fresh breeze and streamed freely.

“I’m just trying to make a movie, son. Revive my fortunes. Maybe that seems like an impracticable plan to all y’all cynical motherfuckers, don’t have dreams of your own. I guess I’m sentimental. Foolish. I just thought maybe my oldest, longest friend might want to help me out.”

“Help you again,” Flowers corrected him. “Archy, he’s been trying to blackmail me on this alleged murder for years. It is not a recent phenomenon linked to sobriety.”

Archy picked up that bit about alleged murder and worked it like a smooth stone in the palm. He went back over the conversation so far, trying to remember if Flowers had admitted to or acknowledged any wrongdoing at all. He didn’t think so.

“Help me again,” Luther conceded. “On a grander scale. Basically,” he told Archy, “what happened, see, I had kept the glove the night of the killing. I don’t know why. Just held on to it like a souvenir of, you know, wild times. A few years down the road, when I got deep into the deepest badness of my life, and I’m not proud of that, I know I let you down, everyone down, but, uh…” Losing the thread, picking it up again. “I went looking for the glove. Thinking it might be, like they say, fungible. But it seemed like I had lost it somewheres, moving around all the time, in and out of jail and whatnot. Then I hooked up with Valletta again. Right after I got out of rehab. Turned out she had the thing all along.”

“So, Mr. Councilman,” Archy said. “Do you want this glove Luther has?”

Chan Flowers spoke slowly, through his teeth, as if it killed him to have to admit it. “I might,” he said.

“And let’s say, for whatever reason, Luther doesn’t give it to you, what are you going to do?”

The answer to this question was even slower in arriving, but when it did arrive, it appeared to cause him little pain. “I have more to lose than Luther does,” Flowers said.

“Oh, I see,” Archy said. “Going with cryptic but scary. And what about me, now that I know about the glove, too? Do you have more to lose than I do?”

“You aren’t ever going to blackmail me, Archy. I know that. It’s not in your nature. You must have got your mom’s strength of character.”

“Let’s don’t bring her into this, all right? I’m glad she never lived to see this sorry day.” He dared his father to challenge this assertion, and Luther quietly let it go by. “So, then, what?” Archy said. “If I promise not to say anything, then you just going to kill Luther over this but not me?”

“I deal in dead people every day of the year,” Flowers said. “Remember that. And I am looking to find a little security in these uncertain times. Whatever form that security might take.”

Archy wondered where the glove was right now. Luther must have it salted away someplace, stashed with some lowlife, some ex-cellie of his. Taped inside a toilet tank, inside a Ziploc bag. The thing to do, he thought, just get hold of it somehow. Take it to the police, let them decide the outcome. It might lead nowhere, point to nothing, incriminate no one. Or it might be the end of Councilman Flowers and, quite possibly, the Dogpile plan.

“If I walk out of here right now,” Archy said to Flowers, “leave this asshole to your ministrations—and I think we are all familiar with the quality of the work y’all do here—you say, you are going to trust me on this.”

“I do trust you, Archy. I respect you, and I know you would never disrespect me. You walk out of here, I will personally guarantee to make sure you and that little family you got on the way are well taken care of as long as I’m around. You just go with an easy mind. Let me and Luther settle this thing out.”

“So, for instance,” Archy said, “how about, would you back me up at Brokeland? Because, I mean, once our friend G Bad doesn’t have anything to hold over your head anymore… assuming you, uh, obtain this famous glove. In return for me keeping quiet.” As he said this, a rotor began to whirl in the Leslie cabinet of his chest. “Maybe you could, say, withdraw your support for the Dogpile Thang. Come back over onto the side of Nat and me? Because, you know, in our own small and modest way, we’re good for the community, too.”

“I will do better than that,” Flowers said. “I will truly back you. As a silent partner. Pay down your debt for you. Get your creditors to step off, whatever it takes.”

“I have to say, that sounds very attractive.”

“Archy,” Luther said. “Son, come on.”

“And all I got to do, let me get this straight, is walk out of here. Leave you and him to, uh, was it, ‘settle this out’?”

“That’s all,” Flowers said. “Of course, you have to remember, if it ever turns out to be the case the police do take an interest in this old unsolved crime? You might wind up being charged as an accessory after the fact.”

Archy stood up, nodding, as if all this struck him as a reasonable, even enviable, proposal. Then he reached down and smacked his father hard on the back of the head, as if swatting a particularly vicious and slow-moving horsefly that had settled there. “Give him the motherfucking glove, Luther,” he said. “And then get the fuck out of here. I can’t stand the sight or smell of either of you blackmailing, lying, murdering old motherfuckers. Give Mr. Flowers the glove before I take it off you and give it to the police myself.”

“I can’t do that,” Luther said.

“Why not? Because you’re going to take all that money he ain’t never going to give you, use it to make a movie you ain’t never going to make?”

Archy might have counted on one hand the number of times in his life when he had left his father with nothing to say. He figured it was the slap on the head, or maybe there was something persuasive in the nakedness of his contempt for Luther’s project. Luther fell back to muttering, shaking his head. Reminding Archy of that wino on his crate the other day outside Neldam’s, clinging to his little sack of rolls.

“Give him the glove,” Archy said, fighting—for his own sake, not for Luther’s—to keep any tone of compassion out of his voice. “And I will pay for your movie.”

Steak through the bars of a shark cage. Luther looked up, wary and hungering. “How?”

“Sell the store. Whatever I get from my half, I give it to you.”

“Now, why would you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Archy said. “It can’t be because I give a fuck what happens to your worthless black ass.”

“Boy,” Luther said, drawing himself up out of the chair, still with a good two inches on Archy though giving up at least twenty-five pounds, “I am grateful for the generous offer, but I am tired of your disrespect. I am going to issue a warning. You speak to me again in that fashion, you going to find yourself in possession of one genuine, old-school beatdown like you haven’t had in thirty years.”

“Man,” Archy said in an unconscious echo of his own son’s words to him the other morning, “fuck you.”

“Gentlemen,” Flowers said. It was too late.

Archy’s historic decision, taken sometime around 1983, no longer to give a shit about his father, coincided almost precisely with the last time he had attempted to kick Luther’s ass. Like the five or six preceding it, that attempt also failed. Even big and strong and flooded with the manhood that he was then well on his way to attaining, and even with Luther geeked and anorexic, Archy’s bulk and raw anger were no use against his father’s deep-grained skill.

But this was a sneak attack, and Archy exploited the advantage. He hurled himself onto Luther, toppling him over onto the little couch, which in turn tumbled over backward, and the two men fell on the floor. Before Luther could begin to recover, Archy scrambled across him, straddling him, and flipped him over so that Luther’s face was pressed against the low-pile gray carpet. He sat on his father’s ass and pinned his wrists together with one hand while, with the other, he grabbed hold of his hair. Digging in his fingers, he jerked his father’s head back. “Give it to him.”

“Fuck you.”

Archy dug deeper, jerked harder. “Give him the glove, Luther.”

“I can’t. Get off me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I lost it.”

“Lost it? You mean you never did find it? Valletta didn’t have it?”

“She had it. But in the last move we did, I don’t know, it got lost. I can’t find it. I swear. Get the fuck off me.”

“What?”

“I had it,” Luther said, writing his own epitaph without trying. “But I lost it.”

“I would really like to believe that,” Flowers said. “I’m going to need some kind of guarantee. What happens when it turns up again?”

“How about a sworn statement,” Archy said. “An affidavit he writes in his own words that he’s been blackmailing you for years, that he made up the whole story about the glove and the murder, how you didn’t have nothing to do with it.” He gave his father’s head another jerk, for emphasis, really. “You do that, confess that you’ve been blackmailing, Luther? I’ll give you whatever I manage to get from selling the store. Then you get to keep on living this admirable life of yours.”

“That would be acceptable to me,” Flowers said. “But huh, we’re going to need a lawyer for an affidavit like that. I can’t imagine what kind of lawyer. I know mine wouldn’t want to even hear about this. ”

Archy said he thought that Mike Oberstein might be prevailed upon, but first of all, what did Luther have to say about it?

“Had three things on my wish list,” said Luther, “coming out of the program last year. And one of them was not ‘Please let my son slap me upside my head, pull my hair, and sit on top of me, motherfucker must weigh two hundred and forty, two-forty-five.’”

“Yeah,” Archy said. “Oh. Sorry about that.” He unstraddled his father, lurched to his feet. Luther rolled over onto his back and lay there, staring at the cottage-cheese ceiling, at the box that held Terrell Padgett. His eyes brimmed over, but he blinked the tears away, and they were gone.

Archy reached down and held out a hand to Luther. Luther took it. He let Archy pull his weightless wiry armature off the floor. When Archy tried to get his fingers loose, Luther held on to them. His grip was the inveterate iron thing that had punished cinder blocks, pine planks, Chuck Norris. Archy gave up and let his father shake his hand.

“That was number two on the list,” Luther said.

The mom was a kid, two months shy of twenty-one, her baby’s father out of the picture. She worked the line at Chez Panisse and from time to time sold cupcakes out of a taco truck. When Aviva had first met her, she was a strawberry-blond third-grader named Rainbow, the daughter of the facilitator of a women’s-business network Aviva had belonged to at the time. A wordless slip of a girl, moving sideways at the edges of rooms. Now she was dyed to a shade of blackberry brunette, had dropped the second syllable of her name, tattooed maybe 60 percent of her body with a gaudy loteria of half-allegorical objects (a bee, an umbrella, an egg in an eggcup), and, for today at least, taken center stage in her world. In the world; Aviva still felt that way after all these years, after having caught a thousand babies and been afforded every opportunity by routine, patient-borne neurosis, or the health care industry to grow disenchanted, jaded, or bored with the work. A person tended to see herself as a streetlamp on a misty night, at the center of a sphere of radiance, but that was a trick of the light, an illusion of centrality in a general fog. A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.

“I feel like I’m going to shit,” Rain said. She had gotten all the way to eight centimeters within two hours of her first contraction, but the journey to the hospital seemed to have slowed her down. “What if I shit in the bed?”

“I dare you,” said Aviva.

Click of the door latch, inrush of hospital hum. Aviva had her back to the door of the pretty new LDR that Rain had lucked into, blond wood and chrome trim, a suggestion of slim Danish moms giving birth to strapping young socialists. Audrey, Rain’s mother, leaped up from the armchair to drag the curtain around the bed with a rattle of BBs.

“Ms. Jaffe?” It was one of the nurses, a Filipina named Sally, a good nurse, with the same well-trained way Gwen had of being sugar-sweet and kick-ass at the same time. “Your darling husband is here.”

It was Aviva’s turn to leap to her feet. She could not recall Nat ever having shown up at the hospital, unbidden. Maybe to bring her a more comfortable pair of shoes, something to eat. For him to turn up out of the blue had to mean bad news, disaster. As she followed Sally down to the nurses’ station to meet him, she fished her phone from her back pocket, looking for the voice mail she must have missed. No calls from Nat or Julie. No calls from anyone at all.

He was drawing an invisible mandala across the glossy tile with his high-top Chuck Taylors, head down, hands in the back pockets of the jeans she liked best on him, humming the soundtrack to his impatience. When he saw her, the panic in his face gave way so suddenly to relief that she thought he would cry.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Gwen’s in labor.”

“Is Archy there?”

“No. She’s not home, Aviva. She’s here.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. Her water broke, there was meconium?”

“A lot?”

“Not a lot, but some. The doc said we probably don’t need to worry yet, but they wanted her admitted and on the monitor. In case there’s some fetal distress.”

“Who’s the attending?”

“Your boy.”

“Lazar?”

“Quite the charmer.”

“Shit! Were you with her when her water broke?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

A blankness drifted across his face like ink from a squid, alerting her that the next words to issue from his lips were going to maintain a fraught if not adversarial relation to the truth. “I lost my phone,” he said.

“Lost it where?”

He shrugged. “In the car.”

She decided, whatever the lie, to let it go for now. “How is Gwen?” she said.

Since leaving the house to meet Rain and Audrey at the hospital, Aviva had been aware, a ground underlying the figure of every calm suggestion she made to Rain, every forbearing interaction she had with the staff, that the whole of her emotional capacity—carefully concealed from everyone around like the blacked-out windows of some wartime aircraft factory—had been shifted over to the production of anger; she was furious with Gwen.

No, it was something deeper and more selfish, more craven than fury, which had to Aviva’s ear a notion of scourging, of refining fire. Aviva was hurt. And her anger was the especial, bitter anger of the indicted. Gwen was breaking their partnership, renouncing their shared calling, for reasons that Aviva could not dismiss without doing violence to certain inconvenient and embarrassing facts about the nature and demographics of their practice, about the paradoxical taint of the boutique that hung over modern midwifery, a profession that had at one time, not long ago, confined its ministrations to poor and to rural women. Aviva was annoyed—though this annoyance was also not uncontaminated by consciousness of those fucking facts—by the deft and ruthless mau-mauing to which Gwen had, with perfect justification, subjected the hapless review panel. And that in spite—or because—of Gwen having saved their asses by so doing.

“She is not happy,” Nat said. “She doesn’t know where Archy is, that’s one. Two, no way is she ever letting that fuckhead Lazar lay one hand on her, quote unquote. Three, get your ass down there, please, as fast as you can. She needs you, Aviva. She says she’s not going to have the baby without you there to catch it.”

“How sweet.”

“I’m just the messenger. And I better get back to her. I don’t think Julie is a whole lot of support.”

“Julie?”

“He’s with us. He’s kind of—”

“How did that happen?”

Again a mild facial paralysis, a narrative dystonia slackened his features. “I picked him up,” he said. “Uh, on the way.”

“What the fuck is going on, Nat? No, forget it. I’ll kill you later.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Later works for me.”

“Good. Now. Tell Gwen—”

“Aviva?”

It was Audrey, standing in the corridor making a tentative little handwringing gesture, her head inclined toward the door of Rain’s LDR. “She says she wants to push.”

“Ho-kay,” Aviva said. She gave Nat a push of her own, fingers to his sternum, rocking him back a step or two. “Tell her I’ll be there as fast as I can. You help her get settled, see her into a room, all right? Make yourself useful. Play the dad. Think you can do that?”

“I think I can fake it,” Nat said.

“Meantime, where the fuck is Archy?”

“I’ve been trying him, he doesn’t answer.”

“Try sending one of those text-message things.”

“What is that, I don’t know what that is.”

“I don’t, either. Ask Julie.”

“Aviva?” Audrey said, venturing closer in her tone toward accusatory.

“I have to get back to Rain,” Aviva said. “Go. Tell Gwen I’ll be there soon.”

“What if you get hung up, though?” Nat said. “They send in Lazar, I think she’s going to fucking bite his head off.”

“It’s a hospital,” Aviva said. “They can sew it back on.”

“I think I would have to say, ‘Mirror, Mirror’,” Julie said.

“The beard,” Gwen agreed vaguely as another contraction gathered out there in the gulf of pain on whose shore she was planted like a low-lying town, levees buckling under the advancing wave. She had put Julie’s hand against her stomach during the last one, let him feel the skin turn from upholstery to plate. “Spock with a beard.”

“The beard is, like, even more stylish nowadays than it was back then,” Julie said. “Goatees are in.”

She had instructed him to distract her, though he suspected that she didn’t mean it, that she was not capable of being distracted from her purpose today. The contractions took up all of Gwen’s attention. Each one became, as it arose, the object of intense study. But Julie was trying his best, even though, for his part, he was feeling, if anything, too distracted. Knowing he ought to be there, totally there, for Gwen, at least until his father got back or, better, until his mother showed up. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Titus, wondering where he was, where he might choose to run, if he was ever coming back. The elusive Titus, a cat burglar rappelling down the sheer wall of Julie’s life. Fugitive as a passing aspiration, one of those daydreams that you knew, even as you daydreamed it, would take more money, more luck, more coolness than you could ever hope to have.

“Keep talking Trek,” Gwen instructed him softly, holding herself still, her eyes closed, possibly keeping some kind of internal count, even though Julie, with his watch, was faithfully tracking the contractions’ frequency and duration on the back of an envelope he had found in her car. “It’s helping. Also I think it was more of a Van Dyck.”

“Okay,” Julie said, unsticking his legs from the vinyl seat of the LDR’s armchair. He turned around to face Gwen, holding her moist left hand in his right one. Gwen was lying on the bed in Archy’s old Xavier McDaniel T-shirt and a clean pair of leggings she had sent Julie into her house to retrieve on the way here. She had allowed herself to be hooked to the fetal monitor, but she refused to change into a gown as a way of proving her determination not to have this baby until Aviva was free and there was no need for the nurses to page Paul Lazar. “Also, the Captain’s Woman, on that one?”

“Oh, you like that.” The soft voice, studious, a librarian of pain running her finger down some endless index of burning. “Do you.”

“She’s, I don’t know. I guess she’s pretty kick-ass.”

Not saying that whenever he watched that episode, which he first remembered seeing with Gwen the night his parents went out to see Almost Famous, he liked to imagine that he was the Captain’s Woman, stalking the quarters of the evil Kirk with her bare midriff and her Tantalus Field, waiting for the captain to return to her arms, her lips, to the retro-future 1960s starship bed with the red sparkle-mesh bedsheets.

Forty-nine seconds went by in silence, and then she opened her eyes again. Julie wrote down the time and duration on the back of the envelope, which had been sent to Gwen by the law firm of Leopold, Valsalva & Rubin and which Gwen had not bothered to open. It bore a serious and, Julie would have thought, urgent aspect.

“Over,” she said, swallowing, licking her lips. A last little fizz of pain in her eyes. Julie could see it dying away, like Sally Kellerman in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when the psionic fire went out of her.

“You okay?” he said.

“I am fine. If Lazar comes in here, I will not be fine. You will have to kill him.”

“I can do that.”

“You will have to be my Captain’s Woman, hit him with that Tantalus Field.”

“Dude is toast.”

She took hold of his hands in hers. “You are a good boy, Julius Jaffe,” she told him. “Your momma raised you right.”

“Thank you.”

“That must have been a weird, weird scene over there at that motel this morning.”

“It was insane. I don’t know what was happening. I don’t get what the deal is.”

“Who were the guys?”

“I don’t know, they work for, you know, Mr. Flowers, they have the suits, so they look kind of like Black Muslims, only with bling, and neckties, not bow ties.”

“Yes. Yeah.”

“I don’t know, it’s some kind of thing between him and Luther. Mr. Flowers and Luther. From back a long time ago, when Archy was little.”

“Archy didn’t tell you what it’s about?”

“No. He just said he would take care of it.”

Gwen bit her lower lip, not in pain, and shook her head once turning away from Julie. He was about to reassure her that Archy was coming, that he would come as soon as he heard that she had gone into labor. It occurred to him, however, that this might not be true. Julie had no idea what kind of situation Archy had walked into. The dudes from the funeral home went around armed and were probably dangerous, even if the big one, Bank, had proved surprisingly vulnerable to assault with a wooden katana.

“Titus, he’s the one ought to be in the emergency room,” Gwen said. “He was hurt, huh? I did the wrong thing, I should not have let him go. That was wrong. I don’t know where my head was. I guess I was feeling kind of crazy.”

“He had a bloody nose, but he was okay. He is pretty, like, tough.” Julie feeling a rush of gratitude toward Gwen for affording him an excuse to talk about Titus. “I think he lived in some pretty, you know, not so great places? Like where he was living here? Across the street from Mr. Jones.”

“I heard about that.”

“They treated him like shit.”

“Language, Julius.”

“It was a nightmare.”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“He’s my friend.”

Vulcan mind meld, Julie looking at her face could read her thought: Something you never really had before. “What did he ever say about me?”

“He… I don’t know. Probably he’s a little afraid of you. I know he, I mean, I could tell he was kind of, like, kind of excited about this.”

“The baby.”

“Yeah. His brother. He said you told him it was a boy.”

“It is. He is.”

“Yeah, he seemed excited. I bet if he knew you were going into labor, he wouldn’t have run away.”

“Huh,” Gwen said, and at first Julius took it for an expression of mild interest, Gwen registering a minor gain in information on a subject she formerly had known little about. Then the sound deepened and transformed and drew itself into a moan, huuuuuuuuh, and he saw that another contraction was coming on.

Julie heard the rattle of Gwen’s file in the rack outside. He stood up just as the door opened and a lean, pale doctor with a stubbly scalp stuck his head into the room. He wore blue scrubs and a stethoscope necklace.

“Seven minutes apart!” Julie reported, holding up the envelope. “Seven minutes!”

“Seven minutes!” the doctor echoed. “Is that English time or metric?”

Julie lost himself in a fascinated confusion over this concept, the year divided into ten months, the month into ten weeks, the week into ten days. No, that would be too many days.

Gwen had closed her eyes; Julie was not even sure she had seen the doctor. “Not you,” she said, her voice so soft it was barely audible. “No fucking way.”

Lazar glanced at Julie, trying to enlist him with a look. Julie returned his most basilisk stare, willing it to vaporize the doctor into a shimmering Tantalus mist.

“Who’s your friend, huh?” Lazar said to Gwen. He took a look at the fetal monitor, tried to take hold of Gwen’s wrist. “You having one right now?”

She yanked her hand free. “No,” Gwen said. “I’m fine. The baby’s fine. There’s no sign of distress. I can wait until Aviva gets here.”

Then the contraction rolled in over Gwen, and she was swept up in it, swept away. Julie felt himself, Lazar, the hospital, vanish from her thoughts. Lazar stood there watching her. His eyes had looked dead before, exhausted, but now Julie saw a quickness there, an alertness, almost, Julie would have said, a sense of adventure. Lazar waited and waited, glancing at the monitor display. When Gwen opened her eyes again, he said, “Tell you what I’ll do. And this is all I’ll do. Ms. Shanks, you can wait for your partner, hang out here and labor, I’ll be only too happy to stay out of your way. But the instant we see one little blip of what I feel to be evidence of fetal distress, I am going in and getting that baby. Period. Got it?”

Gwen only nodded.

Lazar seemed to hesitate, on the point of saying something more. But he just jotted a few notes in her file and walked out.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s all right,” Gwen said. “There’s time. I think there’s time. I wish my mom were here.”

She started to cry about her mom a little bit. She said she missed her father and her brothers, all of them back in D.C. and Philly. Julie gave her a tissue, then a second. His father came in holding a rattling cup of ice.

“Aviva’ll be here as soon as she can,” he announced. “Probably any minute. Also, I brought ice.”

“Bless you,” Gwen said.

He handed her the plastic cup, and she crunched thoughtfully. Eyes aswim, staring at Julie in a way that made him worry he might start to cry, too. She was feeling sorry either for herself, having a baby three thousand miles from her family, or for him.

“You know where to look for Titus?” she said at last, around a mouthful of ice.

“Maybe,” Julie said, drafting a thesis almost immediately. “Maybe I might.”

“Go on and find him, then,” she said. “This baby is going to want his brother.”

“I don’t know you,” said the little old Chinese lady. “Why I would know your friend?”

“No reason,” Julie said. “But—”

“He’s my student?”

“No. But like I said. He keeps his bike here. So I—”

“You think I’m deaf?”

“No.”

“Because you talking so loud.”

“I—”

“Deaf, old, Chinese, and stupid. That what you think?”

“No.” Julie took a deep breath. Start again. “Hello,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name is Julius Jaffe.” He took out the cards from his wallet, shuffled through them. Found one, an old one, that identified him as OCCULT RESEARCHER. Passed it to her. She read the proffered text, frowned, took another look at him, betraying neither skepticism nor interest.

“My friend Titus,” he said, “hid his bicycle behind your Dumpster, in the, uh, honeysuckle bush? He has to hide it there because, okay, when he was living in Mrs. Wiggins’s house? Around the corner on Forty-second? Stuff kept happening to his bike. I guess there’s a lot of people living there?”

“Miss Wiggins.” He could tell that she knew which house he meant. “Okay.”

“Like one time somebody took it and, like, rode it. And they broke it. And another time somebody sold it to buy drugs, and Titus had to steal it back. So he started hiding it back there because, I mean, there’s so much honeysuckle. You can’t see it. And because I am looking for him, to tell him that his baby brother is being born right now—”

“Loudness,” she cautioned him. “Volume.”

“I was going to see if he’s at Mrs. Wiggins’s. So I looked, and his bike is in the bushes. But then I thought, I don’t know. That maybe he might be here.”

“Here?” She shook her head, looking closer to smiling than he had yet seen her. “Not here.”

“I mean, you don’t know. He could have sneaked in. Titus has skills.”

“Look at me, occult investigator,” she said. “You think because I am old, stupid, deaf, and Chinese, some boy can sneak and hide in my house and I don’t know it?”

“No,” he guessed.

“You must be a really lousy occult investigator.”

“Kind of.”

“I think ghosts are laughing at you.”

“Probably.”

“No ghost here,” she said. “Your friend went to his house. Go look there, tell him, ‘Little brother is coming.’”

“Yeah, but what about,” lowering his voice, glancing up and down Telegraph, “that room you have?”

“No room.”

“No, the, like, secret bedroom? The door that’s hidden behind a poster of Bruce Lee? Where Gwen was staying. Gwen Shanks.”

She blinked and handed him back his card. “No ghost. No ghost room. Good luck. Goodbye.”

Julie thought about trying to slip past this annoying old person. Run upstairs, take a look for himself in the room that was behind the Bruce Lee door. He turned away, dropped his board to the sidewalk, stepped onto the deck. Hesitating, trying out a different kind of move.

“Oh, uh, you taught Luther Stallings, right?” he said. “From the movies. My friend, Titus? He’s Luther Stallings’s grandson.”

She came out in her gray gi and black sandals, skinny and featherweight with the walk of a younger person. “Let me see this ghost bicycle,” she said.

Julie led her around the side of the building to the parking area. They crunched across the gravel over to the Dumpster. He pushed aside tangles of honeysuckle, covered in flowers like a scattering of buttered popcorn. The heavy fragrance of the flowers mingled with the rancid atmosphere of the Dumpster. Before Julie could help or prevent her, she grabbed the handlebars of Titus’s bicycle, tugged it out of the tangling vines with surprising ease. She seemed to regard the bike’s presence as something of an offense, but there was also, Julie thought, a touch of puzzlement; even, possibly, of wonder. She looked sidelong at a small, square window at the top of the building—it was open, though there was no obvious way to climb up to it—then back down at the bicycle.

“Weird bike,” she said.

“It’s called a fixie?” Julie said. “No brakes. No gears. You just pedal it. When you want to stop, you have to pedal the other way.”

She climbed on the seat, gripping the handlebars, pedaled forward slushing through the gravel, fingers fluttering to find hand brakes that were not there. She slammed backward on the pedals, stopped, ground forward till she hit sidewalk. For three seconds she wobbled on the bike like a kid fresh from training wheels, a frail knot of bone, tendon, and gray silk. By the fourth second, she had figured out how to pedal backward, weaving away heedless down the sidewalk without looking over her shoulder. She disappeared behind a high fence. Ten seconds later, she reappeared, pedaling forward, and gestured curtly with one hand, master of the fixie now and for all time. “Come on,” she said.

“Come on, where?”

“Miss Wiggins. Look for your friend. Mr. Occult Investigator, scared of ghost house. That’s why you come here first. Talking about some lamebrain idea, a fourteen-year-old boy could sneak into the Bruce Lee Institute and I don’t know about it. You came here because you are afraid to go there. Right or wrong?”

“Right,” Julie said. “Basically. But seriously, Titus does have skills.”

“Insult me one more time,” she said, “I don’t go with you.”

He got on his skateboard and they set off, the lady tearing down the sidewalk with such impossible energy, such abandon, that Julie could not keep up. She stopped and waited for him, gesturing toward her shoulder with her chin. He took hold of it. It was rope and bone.

She towed him down to Forty-second Street and turned the corner. They rode past Mr. Jones’s, the house looking empty and forlorn. On the porch stood the perch where Fifty-Eight used to sit, empty, abandoned. She pedaled on, rolling toward the door of the house where Titus’s auntie moldered like some ancient monarch whose kingdom had gone to lawlessness and ruin. The lady—she’d said to call her Mrs. Jew—hoisted the bike and rolled it up the crumbling front steps of the porch. She pounded on the door, bang! bang!

“Titus,” she told the young man who opened the door, eighteen, nineteen, pop-eyed and heavy-jawed, with a frowsy tangle of chin beard. Shirtless, lean-bellied, his skin blotted with unreadable, uninterpretable tattoos. The elastic of his boxer shorts and an inch of dark blue lozenges on light blue background emerged from the waistband of his knee-length denim shorts.

“Titus,” Mrs. Jew said again.

The young man gardened at his chin beard with two fingers. Julie lingered on the bottom step, feeling exposed and dangerously faggoty in his short shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt. From the open mouth of the house came a steady exhalation of marijuana and a low rumble of television, maybe a football game. There were voices, too. Not angry or hostile. Just voices. People talking, laughing.

“I teach kung fu,” Mrs. Jew said.

“Kung fu?”

“Bruce Lee Institute. Around the corner.”

Julie remembered his father telling him once about how when Julie was little and he would go around the neighborhood wearing his little Batman or Spider-Man costume year-round, people used to think he was cute and all. But when he went around the block dressed up like Superman, people would light up. Over and above the cuteness of some little dude masquerading around all solemn-face in the gaudy S-suit, there was something about the idea of Superman that made people happy. It was probably like that when you mentioned Bruce Lee.

“Bruce Lee,” the young man said. “He really was a student there?”

“I was his teacher.”

“For real? You?”

“I kick his ass,” said Mrs. Jew. “On a daily basis. ”

“Yo,” the young man called, glancing over his shoulder into the house. “Where Titus at?”

Somebody said something, and the man stepped aside. It was easily accomplished, without violence, subterfuge, or even use of the word “please.” Julie felt ashamed of his trepidation and anxiety, but he did not renounce them as he followed Mrs. Jew into the house. It was old and cramped, maybe kind of charming once upon a time. The fireplace mantel had that medieval feel you saw in a lot of little bungalows. Handsome columns of painted wood held up the ceiling here and there. The living room was all about the television, an old rear-projection number whose sun-dimmed display struggled to contend with the color palette of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Three teenage boys and two girls on a sectional tartan-plaid sofa repaired with accumulated yards of silver duct tape. On the floor a girl about Julie’s age, in a Catholic-school skirt, and four or five little kids. The girl looked more Latina than black to Julie, and one of the little kids was almost white, with drifts of reddish-brown curls. Across from the plaid sofa, a young man in a wheelchair breathed air from a green steel tank. He laughed into the plastic breathing mask. An empty bag of spicy Cheetos lay on the floor. On the coffee table stood two large bottles of Coke. A pizza box. A plastic tub that once held Trader Joe’s animal crackers. It was messy, dirty, crowded, and there was a miasma of Cheetos, but mostly, it was a bunch of kids sitting around watching a show that Julie also enjoyed. He had been expecting strobe lights, peeling wallpaper, people passed out on the floor, the flash of crack pipes. Twenty-four-hour pounding of woofers. Baleful people, he thought, lurking in the corners of shadowy rooms.

He was such a racist.

The young man who had greeted them at the door led them all the way to the back of the house, down some ill-sorted steps to an addition. In one of the bunks, a boy not much younger than Julie lay cuddling a Game Boy.

“Titus?” Julie called.

It was a kind of bunkhouse, furnished with a variety of bunk beds of different periods and styles, some made of steel tubing, some of scuffed and gouged wood. Not much light. In the rear corner, on the bottom bunk, under a Blue’s Clues sleeping bag, Julie found Titus. “Hey,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” Titus said from under the comforter, voice muffled but sounding, to Julie’s ear, roughened by weeping. “Man, get the fuck out.”

“Okay,” Julie said, and tears came to his own eyes. He started to turn away but then wiped his face with his arm. The little kid with the Game Boy was staring at him. “I just came to, uh, tell you that I thought you might want to know that Gwen is having the baby. About to. Right now. I mean, she’s in labor. If you come now, you, you know, you could kind of like, be there, or whatever. When your brother’s born.”

Titus didn’t move or speak.

“He got a brother?” said the boy, doubtful.

“Almost,” said Julie. “Titus, come on. We got your bike. Let’s go, don’t miss this. It’s really awesome. Brothers are cool. I wish I had one.” He looked at the boy. “Right, brothers are cool?”

“Not really,” the boy said.

“Could you, maybe, like, could we get a little privacy?”

“Why, so you can suck his dick?”

“Yes, totally,” Julie said without missing a beat, exhilarated by his own daring. “Here.” He took five dollars out of his wallet. “Go buy some candy or something.”

The kid left. Julie sat down on the corner of the bed.

“I know, I mean, I get that you…” He took a breath, let it out. “I just wanted to say, if you came back here, you must have been feeling pretty lonely right then. Like, okay, Archy was being an ass and all. But, I mean, this is your brother, it’s a, here’s your chance, you know? To have somebody that loves you and looks up to you. Besides me, I mean, because I know that’s, like, not really such a big deal.”

“Get up,” Mrs. Jew said. “Go to the hospital. Now. Or I will kick your butt. Do you believe me?”

Titus sat up, looked at Julie, then back at Mrs. Jew. Nodded yes.

Over. A rest between measures scored for kettledrums. A patch of blue sky between two rolling thunderheads.

Gwen in the birthing bed, between contractions, hating the only friend she had in the world. Hating his aftershave: a compound of unlit cherry cigar and the cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview of a taxicab. Underneath that smell a deeper rancor, raw bacon gone soft in the heat. Hating the shine of his scalp through crosshatched hair. The whitehead at the wing of his right nostril. The fur on the backs of his fingers. Hating him for not being Archy.

Nat sat upright in a leatherette chair, chin raised, stiff-backed, looking like he was waiting for something freaky to happen, something that would demand more from him than he was prepared to deliver, like maybe any minute Nurse Sally was going to roll some weird Filipino piano into the room, made from sharks’ teeth and tortoiseshells and coir, which he would be expected to play. The expression on his face saying, Please, Lord, do not let this spectacle become any more revolting than it already is. Eyelids half-lowered, widening, narrowing again, the poor man trying to find that sweet spot between shut-tight-in-horror and wide-eyed-attentiveness-to-the-miracle-of-birth. Jitter in his legs. Hunch of impatience in his shoulders. Considering that the man had been married to a midwife for seventeen years, Gwen considered it surprising how little he seemed to know, recollect, or be able to intuit about the needs of a woman in labor. The sum of all the birthing wisdom he had managed to acquire was compassed within a cup of ice and the area of the washcloth that he regularly returned to the bathroom to douse with water and wring out in the sink before returning it, blessedly cool, to her forehead.

“Thank you, Nat,” she said, furious with gratitude.

Had to be a thousand degrees Kelvin in the LDR, Gwen feeling strangely but not pleasantly buoyant in the heat. Sweating, fouled, writhing. Hair like a gorgon’s. The bed a swamp. Her skin in full rebellion, as if the baby were something not only to be expelled from her womb but shed from the outside, too; the hospital gown intolerable, abrasive, a crust of toast against the roof of the mouth. Gwen felt desperate, wild to labor naked. Wanted to rip off the gown, burst from it like the Hulk trashing one of his professor-dude lab coats. But here was this guy who was her only friend, wanting to see her naked even less than she wanted him to. His gaze already, every time Gwen rolled over or sat up, lashing around the room like a loose garden hose. The man appalled by the horror of it all, head down, cringing, a palace lackey sent into the foulness of the labyrinth to tend the roaring Minotaur. And humming. Running a metal key, a broken bottleneck, back and forth endlessly along a taut string of piano wire.

“Nat, boy, I beg you, you have to cut it out with the goddamn humming.”

“What humming?” Nat said.

He got up and opened Gwen’s phone for the tenth time, trying to raise Archy. The gesture exhausted Gwen; she hated it more than all of the other incredibly annoying things that Nat was being, doing, and saying right now, put together.

“You might not want to do that. Archy Stallings comes through that door, Nat, swear to God, I’m going to call security on him.”

She had caught him on the point of dialing the last digit, his finger hesitating over the nine. Eyebrows arched, looking at her, entertaining the remote possibility that he had misheard her.

“Put. The motherfucking phone. Away.”

Nat nodded, lips pursed, eyes wide, his expression saying, O-kay. He snapped the phone shut. Sometime around the time that Gwen uttered the obscenity, Nurse Sally had come back into the room, or rather, she was simply there again. Endowed, Gwen noted, with her own combination of odors, almond extract and armpit and some inexcusable derivative of gardenia.

“Hi, Mom, we are fine?” Sally said in that mildly broken English, in that treacly little voice, with that unbearable giggle. “I think your wife, hee, she’s still trapped,” she told Nat. “That other mom, my goodness, she is taking her time.”

“We’re fine, Sally,” Gwen said, working as much normal into her voice as she could manage. Tiring now. Needing to be done, with a longing that brought her—just when she hoped most to appear cheerful, fresh as a daisy, infinitely game to wait it out—to tears. “Just hanging.”

“Totally,” Nat agreed.

“How often?” Sally wanted to know. She went right to over to the heart monitor. “Huh,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mom. Ms. Shanks, I’m so sorry. I have to get the doctor in here. I know you want it to be Ms. Jaffe. I heard you had, I don’t know, some kind of problem with Dr. Lazar. But I think we can’t wait anymore.”

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a deceleration. Just a little one, but. Time for doctor.”

“Oh,” Gwen said, watching Sally’s flowered back as she race-walked out of the room. “Oh, no.”

She was barely able to get the words out as another great slow umbrella of pain opened inside her. Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail. Everything fading but the pain: the room and its furnishings, the whispering of pumps and monitors, the circuit of the hours, daylight, the world. The husband who had abandoned her to bear their child into that world. Pain like a closing of the eyes.

“Hee breaths,” Nat managed to dig up from somewhere.

“Shut the fuck up,” Gwen countersuggested.

Paddling to stay on top of the wave as it broke, trying to ride it. A big one, really big, the biggest one yet, high, wide, deep, and rolling on and on like an earthquake. Impervious as an earthquake to her will, which amounted in the end to nothing more than the words “please be over” repeated for what felt like hours.

This time there was no rest between measures, no patch of blue. The flow of pain within her simply shifted, shunted by some switch in the rail yard of her nervous system, from the bands of steel that belted her abdomen to someplace lower and farther inside. To her horror, then, and as from a great distance, she heard her own voice blubbering, pleading with Nat, begging him to run and get Aviva, drag her ass out of that other room with that cupcake girl, that skinny little tattooed chicken wing, because the baby was coming now, and Aviva needed to be there to catch it. For so long Gwen had scorned, condescended to, or pitied, in varying measure, the doomed and futile dreams, the hopeful visions of soft light and ambient music and a kind of vaginal satori, that pregnant women were prone, in their birth plans, to fall to dreaming. Now she saw that her own doomed birth plan, simple as it was, burned in her heart with a utopian fire. It comprised only one item, and that was Aviva, calm and crafty, without resort to knives, drugs, or synthesized hormones, smuggling the life of her man-child into the light. Any light, any child; let the only certainty be Aviva Roth-Jaffe. Gwen swore to Nat and to Sally, when the nurse came back in to announce that the doctor was on his way, that she would not permit this baby to exit her body, that she would hang on to him, that she would chew nails, lasso herself to granite boulders, fold space-time down to an endless single point, until Aviva could be fetched.

“Go!” she tried, and maybe, right about then, she went a little crazy. “Jesus Christ, Nat, you’re so fucking slow! Go get Aviva now!”

And yet all the time that she raved, and fought, and swore to keep the baby clutched within the intricate and formidable musculature of her uterus, she felt, more powerfully than any sorrow over the spoiling of her birth plan or the latest and greatest failure of her husband to meet his obligations to her, an urge to push the baby out. She knew that it would be useless, too late, for anybody to run.

Nobody ran. Nat got to his feet. There was something weird in his expression, a stoniness, a condemned look, as if he had made up his mind to do something irretrievable. Looking back at this moment afterward, Gwen would see him stepping into a harsh shaft of light.

“A minute,” Gwen said. “Just one. Oh, Nat, please. Let’s wait for Aviva just one more minute.”

“No fucking way,” Nat said.

So she abandoned her modest dream of utopia, pushed it out of herself with the violence of disappointment.

“I am going to shit,” she announced.

“Okay,” Nat said. “Go for it.”

“It’s going to be so disgusting. I’m so disgusting.”

“That reminds me,” Nat said. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, lathering them with a precision she found commendable from the standpoint of hygiene but questionable given the imminence of parturition and, given the size of the turd that she felt she was about to expel from her bowels, possibly premature.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “Oh, Nat, oh.”

He hurried out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. Without apparent hesitation, he directed his attention to her crotch and said, “Oh my God. Okay.”

He leaned in, reaching toward her, hunching the way he hunched over the keys of a piano. With a sense of regret, Gwen forced herself to stop pushing. The irritation, the discontent verging on rage that had been flowing freely through her for the last hour backed up inside her, weighing like a dammed river against the floodgates. She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life—feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream—struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

Then Archy walked into the room in a yachting cap. Stood there gawping at her. He looked a mess, creased, untucked, his hair misshapen. In the instant before his new son tumbled, bawling and purple, into mortality and history, Gwen’s heart was starred like a mirror by a stone. One day the feeling might come to resemble forgiveness, but for now it was only pity, for Archy, for his father and his sons, for all the men of whom he was the heir or the testator, from the Middle Passage, to the sleeper cars of the Union Pacific, to the seat of a fixie back-alleying down Telegraph Avenue in the middle of the night.

Then she was holding her own little man, with his smell like a hot penny and his milky blue eyes, and although she had taken no drugs and received no anesthesia, she thought she must be feeling kind of loopy nevertheless, because it seemed to her that a handsome black uniformed policewoman, whose name-badge read LESTER, had come into the LDR along with Nurse Sally and Dr. Lazar—brown cop, golden nurse, white doctor, all of a sudden it was like some kind of nightmarish version of Sesame Street in here—and was asking Nat Jaffe to come along with her. Nat washed his hands and then, exchanging a hangdog shrug with his partner, followed Officer Lester out of the room.

“What’d I miss?” said Archy.

A 2002 Subaru Outback station wagon, fatigues-green, pulled into the driveway of the house on Stonewall Road, over the blood-brown stain deposited five weeks earlier by the leaky gaskets of Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s Volvo. The man of the house, red-bearded and slight, was in the carport, adrift on a floe of spread newspaper, painting a blue crib white. He worked his brush down one slat, finishing the stroke with a dainty twist of the wrist, laid the brush across the open mouth of his paint can, and rose to his feet, clad in a spattered pair of fawn Naot sandals. You could see from his diffident smile that neither the Subaru nor the occupants of its front seat, a hulking black man in a pumpkin beret and a black teenager who, even through the windshield, was visibly in the grip of an intense, perhaps fatal, spasm of embarrassment, meant anything to him.

“The plaintiff,” said the occupant of the backseat, concealed from view by the driver and by the fact that she was canted over the car seat—duly faced to the rear—with her blouse unbuttoned, her bra cup unlatched, her nipple the sole joy and plaything of the car seat’s occupant, whose parents had argued, though only briefly, over whether to name him Kudu (suggested by his father) or (in honor of his maternal grandfather) Clark. She was topping Clark off now, having restored him to sleep after he determined, for unknown reasons, to cause a disturbance midflight.

Just as she eased the cork of her nipple with a moist pop—a sound that never failed to densify the cloud of embarrassment around Clark’s older brother—from the slumbering vessel into which two ounces of rich hindmilk had just been decanted, a second Outback rolled to a stop along the curb. From it emerged the cetacean form of Michael Oberstein, Esq., in a remarkably ugly taupe mohair suit whose construction, Archy thought, must have necessitated the cruel slaughter of dozens, possibly hundreds, of moes. It did not so much clothe as wad him.

Archy got out of the car to greet Moby, eager for the excuse to release himself from the cramped, styleless, and mildly punitive confines to which, once he had conceded that a ’74 El Camino legendary for its unreliability might not be the most suitable car for a family man, fate had sentenced him. Selling the El Camino was only part of a diverse package of concessions, amendments, resolutions, and reparations that he had agreed to under the terms of his repatriation to the house on Sixty-first Street. One day, he hoped, this foreordained path would lead, amid countless chutes and precious few ladders, to the square of ultimate redemption—Forgiveness. Parts of the journey had been painful, and Archy rarely bothered to shield his wife and sons from awareness of this pain. But he had confessed to no one how bitterly he wept on the day when some dude from Livermore drove his El Camino away.

He raised a hand to Moby, who was molesting the knot of his necktie in the side mirror, then nodded to the plaintiff, Garth, standing by the half-white, half-blue crib looking wary, closed down, and as worn out and sleep-deprived as Archy.

“She’ll be right out,” Archy said. “Boy’s just finishing his snack.”

The plaintiff nodded, then turned back to the crib with an air of regret or longing, as if he would much rather continue with his brushwork than go through what Gwen had in mind.

At the back of the carport on a workbench, a radio reported on the count facing Miguel Tejada, and below the radio, strapped into a bouncy seat, busting out with some intricate mudras, lay the troublesome baby. Archy had forgotten its gender and name. The baby had something wrong with its skin, he noticed, some kind of weird blotches of discoloration on its fingers and face. A wire of panic lit up in Archy’s chest; it had never occurred to him that Garth might have actual grounds for his lawsuit. Then he saw that the blotches appeared to be precisely the same shade as the blue stain on the half-painted crib.

“It didn’t occur to me that she was going to lick it,” Garth said.

“They will lick pretty much anything, is my understanding,” Archy said.

“Yo, Arch,” Moby said. “What up. Mr. Newgrange, Mike Oberstein. We spoke on the phone.”

Moby skipped the hand theatrics for once and rolled on over to shake Garth Newgrange’s straight. He turned back to the car as Gwen climbed out of the backseat, running a finger down the buttons of her blouse, tugging her skirt down over the dimples of her knees.

“Hey, Gwen.”

“Hi, Moby. Hello, Garth.”

Moby had spoken to the man, prearranged it for them to come over, but Garth looked ambushed. He folded his arms across his chest, took a deep breath. “Hello.”

“This is my husband, Archy. Archy, this is Garth.”

Archy got the man to unlatch one hand and offer it, small and freckled with melanin and white latex semigloss.

“That’s, in the car, that’s Titus, Archy’s son. Titus, get out of the car and give this man a proper greeting.”

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study.

“And there she is,” Gwen said, noticing the blue-stained baby in her seat. “Little Bella.”

“There she is,” Garth agreed, not saying No thanks to you.

An awkward silence ensued that Archy did not have the energy or the courage to break.

“Can we—Garth, I was hoping we, you and I, could talk?” Gwen said, gesturing to the stairs that must lead downslope to the house.

“Here’s good,” Garth said.

Gwen blinked, looked at Moby. “Okay,” she said. “All right. I guess what I came here to say isn’t going to take very long, anyway. It’s really just two words long. I should have said them to you a long time ago, the day that Bella was born, right away. But they are not, they have never been, words that come very easily to me, I don’t know why. Maybe because, I’m not making an excuse here, but maybe because, the way I was raised, you know. That, basically, I have nothing to apologize for. Almost as a matter of, I want to say, policy. Politics, if you will. But even if that’s true in a broad, you know, like, historical sense. On the personal level—”

“You said tell you if you ran on at the mouth,” Moby said.

“Two words,” Gwen repeated, as though to herself.

Archy was enjoying this. He had been dwelling in a deep, capacious, and impregnable doghouse for weeks. He tried to remember if he had ever heard Gwen utter, in any but the most pro forma way, the phrase that came, halting but credible, to her lips.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

When she seemed content to leave it at that, Garth cross-armed and frowning without much of an apparent rise in temperature, Moby lofted an eyebrow toward one of the upswept flukes of his bangs: Go on.

“I’m sorry that I lost my temper the way I did,” she said. “With the doctor. I let my… my…”

“Self-righteousness?” Archy suggested helpfully.

Gwen nocked a scowl to her bowstring, aimed it at Archy, then lowered her bow and nodded. “Self-righteousness. My thin skin. Part of the same thing, I guess, that makes it so hard for me to apologize. But I do apologize, and I am sorry. My focus right then ought to have been on Lydia and the baby and nothing else. I failed them, and I failed you, and thank God that baby of yours is healthy and beautiful, because if anything had happened to her…”

She started to lose it, pulled herself together. Carried on. “I understand your anger. I accept it. But I’m hoping that you might find it in your heart to forgive me.”

“Okay,” Garth said.

“Okay, you forgive me?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why not?”

“Does this mean—” Moby said. “I’m sorry, but, informally acting as Gwen’s attorney, I have to ask. Are you dropping the lawsuit against her and Aviva?”

“No problem,” Garth said.

When they got back in the car and drove away, Gwen let herself go. She cried until they got down to the lower gate of the Claremont Hotel, and then she stopped. “I think you ought to try it,” she said.

“I already did,” Archy said. “I got no traction.”

“I wasn’t ready then,” Gwen said. “I didn’t know how good it feels.”

“Okay,” Archy said. “I’m sorry, Gwen. I fucked up long and often, in all kinds of ways, and I’m just nothing but sorry about that. Do you think you could find it in your heart to forgive me?”

“No,” Gwen said.

“What?”

“But almost.”

He glanced over at the boy sitting beside him, staring out at the road, nothing much happening in his expression but a bright shine on the eye.

“Okay, then. Titus, you, too. I’m sorry I wasn’t any kind of a father to you for the first fourteen years of your life. You are a fine young man, and I hope to do right by you from now on. Do you think maybe someday you could find it in your heart to forgive me?”

“Okay,” Gwen said. “That’s it. You’re good.”

Then they stopped for a red light, and the baby woke up again, disconsolate and hungry, and Archy stepped on the gas to get them home. It was weeks before he realized that he had never gotten an answer out of Titus, and by then the matter seemed to have lost its urgency.

Archy and Nat met at the property, an upstairs suite in a handsome commercial block of the 1920s, on the Berkeley-Oakland line. Red roof tiles, oak beams, stucco painted a Lena Horne shade of tan. The ground-floor tenants included a hardcore bike shop, an avant-garde knitting supply, and a dealer in vintage tube amplifiers.

“Already got that crank vibe going strong,” Archy observed. “You’re going to fit right in.”

“Funny,” Nat said. He was pacing off the larger of the suite’s two rooms, laying out the shelving, stocking it with vinyl. Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. Satan architecting Pandemonium. “It doesn’t make you nervous, three thousand pounds of records on the second floor.”

“Building had a total retrofit,” Archy said. “Two thousand one. Previous occupant was a Pilates. You know they have all those heavy-ass machines.”

“I have spent surprisingly little time around Pilates machines.”

“They are heavy,” Archy said with a show of patience. “Mr. Singletary had the floor braced, cost like ten grand.”

“‘Mr. Singletary,’” Nat said.

Archy put his hand to his chin, bunched up his shoulders, shook his head. Sheepish little smile on his face.

“Now the motherfucker’s going to own the building and the stock,” Nat said. “Doesn’t even care for music.”

“He likes Peabo.”

“Peabo is actually quite underrated,” Nat said.

“Not by Mr. Singletary.”

“Huh.”

The baby woke up and began to fuss. Archy took an Avent bottle from the hip pocket of his leather car coat, uncapped it, gave the nipple a sniff. Crouched down beside the car seat to urge the bottle on his son, fitted it to his lips, waited for him to resume his nap.

“Go to all that pain and trouble to have it,” Archy said. “Then spend your life keeping the little fucker sedated.”

“He doing okay?”

“Seems to be.”

“That’s formula?”

“Last of the frozen breast milk.”

“The lactation consultant couldn’t help you guys?”

“Nat, please.”

“Sorry.”

“Catch one baby, now you’re the damn La Leche League.”

“What’s the rent again?”

“Eight hundred.”

“Ouch.”

“Includes water and trash. A third interest in a half-bathroom. I’d say that’s low, for a building of this outstanding caliber.”

“I imagine you would,” Nat said. “That’s just the kind of thing a real estate agent is supposed to say.”

“Oh, I can definitely talk the talk,” Archy said. “Alas, that ain’t what’s on the exam.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“I’m still deciding.”

“The baby is a great gimmick. Who’s not going to want to buy a house from a giant-size cuddly black man with an achingly cute little baby?”

Archy pondered the question. “Almost no one,” he said.

“I think you have to go for it.”

“I think you do, too,” Archy said. “Mr. Singletary—Garnet—you already gave him too much time, as it is, to reflect on his rash offer.”

Nat looked around at the bare tile of the floor, black and glossy as a record, the freshly painted white walls, the three small windows that overlooked the alley behind the building. “Won’t be a counter. Nobody coming here to hang out, shoot the shit,” he said. “I thought that was all Garnet cared about at Brokeland.”

“I guess something put him in a generous mood. Mr. Jones dying. Dogpile Thang going south on Chan Flowers. G Bad’s moving the whole deal over to the city, going to put it in Hunters Point.”

“I heard Visitacion Valley.”

“But I’ll tell you, Nat, I get the feeling his good mood’s about to wear off. Chan Flowers is already back on his feet, brushing the dirt off his shoulder. Shifting the blame, pulling the levers. Got a guy in the economic development office fired because ‘the city government lost Dogpile,’ so on, so forth. The guy who got fired? Was Abreu’s brother-in-law.”

“No more counter,” Nat said, resuming his previous train of thought. “No more bins, writing up the little comments in Sharpie on the dividers. No more watching the world go by through the front window. That magic window. No more customers.”

“You would have customers,” Archy said. “All over the world. Every time zone, some Samoan, Madagascar motherfucker, hitting you up for a five-thousand-dollar original pressing of Blue Note 1568, deep groove, mono. Anyway, there’s folks, I’m not saying who, but there is a general consensus at large, Nat, says you are not really a people person.”

“I like people in theory,” Nat said. “That’s what was good about Brokeland. It was all just a theory we had.”

“Turns out,” Archy agreed.

“So now, you’re saying, it’s time to get real.”

“Follow my helpful example.”

“Selling real estate.”

“That’s only one of my many ways.”

“And for me to get real, I need to start a website that will sell forty-year-old chunks of vinyl on consignment to invisible Samoans.”

“I showed Mr. Singletary the books,” Archy said.

“You what?”

“He went over them. Got way down deep inside.”

Nat shuddered. “A man of courage.”

“He asked me a lot of questions. Who did I know that was trying to make it online, how they handled it, did they go through eBay or have their own online store or what. I guess he even went and talked to some people, talked to the dude at the mailbox store about shipping costs. He thinks you could do it. Sell off all of Mr. Jones’s wax. Make you and the estate some money. And Nat, if Garnet Singletary smells a profit, I think you got to take that shit seriously.”

“Wait, I have to get real and take shit seriously?” Nat said. “At the same time?”

The empty bottle fell out of Clark’s hands, startling him awake.

“Oh, shit,” Archy said. “Okay, little man. All right.” He unstrapped the baby and grabbed him, threaded him through the handle of the car seat. Cupped the baby’s bottom in one palm while the other hand played triplets on his back. Clark was not impressed. Archy fished an enormous key ring out of the other pocket of his John Shaft car coat, barbed with dozens of keys, each one stamped DO NOT COPY, the green plastic fob bearing the legend SINGLETARY PROPERTY MANAGEMENT. He jangled the keys in front of Clark’s face. Clark listened in apparent horror to their clangor. Archy tried to pass the key ring to the boy, let him jingle it for himself, and the keys clanged against the tile floor. At that Clark nearly jumped out of his OshKosh onesie.

“Wow,” Nat said. “Quite a set of lungs.”

“Sometimes you have to do this,” Archy said, taking his son under the arms and subjecting him to a firm oscillation, his hands sweeping and rising, sweeping and rising, back and forth across his body, steady as the works of a clock. As he was synchronized to the rotation of the earth, or maybe just stunned by the sudden increase in velocity, Clark quieted down some. But he remained unwilling to commit fully to silence. So Archy added a complementary leg move to the pendulum swing, a simple harmonic motion, up and down.

Titus Joyner appeared in the doorway of the empty two-room suite. He watched his father’s absurd dance routine with unfeigned, possibly good-natured scorn.

“What?” Archy said.

Titus held up Archy’s cell phone. “You left it in the car,” he said. “She called.”

“What I tell you about that ‘she’ shit?”

“Gwen. She called.”

“Yeah? Clark, man, come on. What’d she say?”

“Said don’t forget she’s working tonight. At the hospital.”

“Shit, I did forget. I have to get dinner.” He looked at Nat. “Gwen started in at Chimes, part-time LDR nurse.”

“I heard. Aviva ran into her on the ward.”

“Just to keep some money coming in.”

“We figured. Medical school’s going to be a stretch?”

“What do you suppose?”

“She can get help. Smart and experienced as she is. What school’s not going to want her?”

“You are replete with rosy predictions today about our future.”

“Just quoting Aviva.”

“Gwen’s worried Aviva’s still mad at her.”

“It was a blow. It was, you know.”

“I know.”

“Kind of like a divorce. You don’t stop—I mean, you’re mad, but. Let me try him?”

“No, man, I got it.”

“You don’t stop loving the person. You miss them.”

“You do.”

“Come on, give me little mister.”

The partial charm of the pendulum treatment had long since worn off. Archy shrugged and handed over the baby, whose cries had taken on a feline rasp.

“Hey, hey, big boy. Okay, now. We’re friends, aren’t we? Oh, yeah, we go way back, Clark and I.”

But Nat, though he broke out his most sonorous and somniferous material to hum, proved no more adept than Archy at quieting the baby.

“Give him,” Titus said.

Archy okayed it with a nod, and Nat passed the baby to his older brother, who carried him out of the suite, along the hall, to the terra-cotta stairs of the old building. By the time he came out onto the sidewalk, Clark appeared to have run out of things to complain about. He lay supine in a crook of Titus’s arm, hot and sweaty and smelling of clabber. The October sunshine was dusty and mild. Halloween a week off, here came Julie Jaffe, rolling up on his skateboard, ready a week ahead of time. All in black, blazer, pants, a black string tie like Val Kilmer’s in Tombstone. Wearing a long, threadbare satin glove, purple and finned, on his right hand. Hair dyed a matte black. Stealth hair, absorbing all ambient light, reflecting nothing. Black hair, red freckles, kind of weird in combination, but somehow he made it work. He left his white earbuds buried in his ears. Stomped on the tail of the deck, flipped it up into his arms. “What’s up?” he said.

“Yo, check it out,” said Titus. “It’s Johnny Cash.”

Julie tugged out each earbud, pop, pop. He crossed his eyes at the baby, kissy-faced him. Reached out one finger, touched the tip of it to a teardrop that clung to Clark’s cheek. “Why was he crying?”

“Boy don’t really need a reason,” Titus said.

“I saw you coming out of Fred’s Deli, uh, yesterday.”

“Yeah.”

“With Kezia. She’s pretty.”

“She’s all right.”

“I knew her at Willard. Actually, I went to kindergarten with her. She was always really nice to me.”

“She remembers you, too.”

“And those guys, Darius and, um, Tariq, I know them, too. They’re okay.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, they aren’t the worst. It’s good you made friends or whatever.”

“Julie.”

“I’m sorry.”

Titus looked away. Watched the traffic, lips compressed, an air of imposing patience on exasperation. “Everybody crying,” he observed.

Without quite looking at Julie, he handed over the cloth diaper that had come along with his brother, stuck to his pj’s by static electricity. Julie used the diaper to wipe his eyes. It came away bearing the calligraphy, painted in smeary guyliner, of his sadness.

“Sorry,” Julie said. “I’m such a loser.”

“Nah, whatever.”

“I made a couple friends, too.”

“I know.”

They stood there along the shoulder of the street that had carried them, rolling, into the darkness of a few lost summer mornings.

“Oh, fuck, what time is it?” Julie said at last.

“Like around three?”

“Fuck. My dad can’t be late. My mom sent me to get him, he must have his phone turned off. They upstairs?”

“Yeah. Can’t be late for what?”

Julie waited before replying, took a deep breath. Rolled his eyes. “Picking up trash by Lake Merritt,” he said.

“Ho.”

“I know, right? How could I not be a loser?”

“Stealing a zeppelin, though. I mean, that’s kind of badass.”

“No, it isn’t. He just untied it. It went up. It came down in Utah. I better get him.”

After Julie went inside, Titus sat down outside, on the topmost step. He propped Clark next to him on the step, holding him up by the armpits, and they pretended for a minute that Clark knew how to sit. At this point, that was about as much fun as the boy knew how to have. A few minutes were lost to this pastime, and then Julie came back out of the building with Nat behind him. Titus returned Clark to the crook of his arm.

“Archy’s just locking up,” Nat told Titus. “He’ll be right down.”

“Okay.”

“Say hi to your stepmom for me.”

“All right.”

Nat walked over to the Saab, which bore the marks of its cruel treatment at the hands of a hurricane fence, got in, and drove off to Lake Merritt to pay down his debt to society amid its eternal snows of goose shit.

Titus and Julie clasped fingertips—one bare-handed, one gloved—yanked loose, brought their fists together in a soft collision. Then Julie laid down his board.

“Yo, Artist Formerly Known as Julie,” Titus said. Julie turned. “I’ll probably be on tonight. Like around ten, all right? Meet me in Wakanda.”

“If I get my homework done,” Julie said. “Okay.” Then he hopped onto the deck of his skateboard and pushed off, rumbling down the sidewalk away from Titus.

“Y’all not going to hang out?” Archy said, coming out of the building swinging the empty car seat, locking the front door with a key from the jingle-bell key ring.

“Maybe I’ll see him on MTO. Here, you take him. Go on,” Titus told Clark, turning custody of the baby over to their father. “Y’all smell like Monterey Jack.”

Archy and Clark were reunited on friendlier terms than those under which they had last parted. “What’d you do?” Archy said to Titus.

“Nothing.”

They watched Julie skate away into the late-October afternoon, looking back over his shoulder only once.

“He still play as a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dezire. With a z.”

Archy shook his head slowly, a gesture that put him somewhere between admiration and disdain. “That’s how you friends now. In a game. With him being a girl and you being, what’s it?”

“Black Answer.”

“Right. Dezire and Black Answer, hanging out in downtown Wakanda.”

“No, but we mostly meet up in the Blue Area of the Moon.”

“Of course.” Archy buckled Clark into the car seat, snapped the seat into its base in the back of the station wagon. “Right, shorty?” he said to the baby. “I mean, where else?”

Clark, as yet unfamiliar with the secret domed refuge postulated, in the pages of Marvel Comics, to lie forever hidden on the moon’s far side, said nothing.

“That’s pretty much the only place,” Titus said.

He got into the backseat so that he could, when required, make faces at Clark or give him a bottle. Archy started for home along Telegraph, but then when they hit Sixty-first Street, he missed the turn.

“Where we going?” Titus said.

“To Wakanda,” said Archy.

“Where?”

“The Blue Area of the Moon.”

He didn’t stop when they got there, though. Just slowed down, in his drag-ass, baby-smelling, style-free Subaru wagon, long enough to check out a banner announcing, in baseball-jersey script, the imminent opening for business, between the United Federation of Donuts and the King of Bling, of a trading card store called Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood. Beyond the fourth grade or so, Archy had never taken much interest in baseball cards, but he could feel the underlying vibe of that particular madness. Although he knew he would never be able to set foot in that building again without breaking his heart, he understood that the new operation held promise, and in principle, at least, he approved. The merchandise was not the thing, and neither, for that matter, was the nostalgia. It was all about the neighborhood, that space where common sorrow could be drowned in common passion as the talk grew ever more scholarly and wild.

“I hope you make it,” he said to Mr. Nostalgia, whoever the dude might be. “Truly, bro, I really hope you do.”

He eased his foot off the brake, thinking as they rolled away that, after all, perhaps one day a few years from now, he might have recovered enough to feel like he was ready to stop in. Say hi, drop a little lore and history on the man, tell him all about Angelo’s, and Spencer’s, and the Brokeland Years. See how they put the world together, next time around.

Berkeley, California

September 30, 2011