The Librarianist

THE MORNING OF THE DAY BOB COMET FIRST CAME TO THE GAMBELL-Reed Senior Center, he awoke in his mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon, in a state of disappointment at the fact of a dream interrupted. He had again been dreaming of the Hotel Elba, a long-gone coastal location he’d visited at eleven years of age in the middle 1940s. Bob was not known for his recall, and it was an ongoing curiosity to him that he could maintain so vivid a sense of place after so many years had passed. More surprising still was the emotion that accompanied the visuals; this dream always flooded his brain with the chemical announcing the onset of profound romantic love, though he’d not known that experience during his time at the hotel. He lay in his bed now, lingering over the feeling of love as it ebbed away from him.

Bob sat up and held his head at a tilt and looked at nothing. He was a retired librarian, seventy-one years of age, and not unhappy. His health was sound and he spent his days reading, cooking, eating, tidying, and walking. The walks were often miles long, and he set out with no destination in mind, choosing his routes improvisationally and according to any potentially promising sound or visual taking place down any potentially promising street. Once he’d witnessed an apartment fire downtown; the hook-and-ladder brigade had saved a baby from an uppermost window and the crowd on the sidewalk had cheered and cried and this was highly exciting for Bob. Another time, in the southeast quadrant, he’d watched a deranged man determinedly ripping out the flower beds in front of a veterinarian’s clinic while dogs looked on from the windows, craning their necks and barking their sense of offense. Most days there was not so much to report or look upon, but it was always good to be in motion, and good to be out among the population, even if he only rarely interacted with any one person. He had no friends, per se; his phone did not ring, and he had no family, and if there was a knock on the door it was a solicitor; but this absence didn’t bother him, and he felt no craving for company. Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.

On this day, Bob was fed and out the door before nine o’clock in the morning. He had dressed according to the weatherman’s prediction but the weatherman was off, and so Bob had gone into the world unprepared for the cold and wet. He enjoyed being outdoors in poor weather but only if he was properly outfitted; in particular he disliked having cold hands, which he did have now, and so he entered a 7-Eleven, pouring himself a cup of coffee and lingering by the newspaper rack, warming himself while gleaning what news he could by the headlines. The cashier was a boy of twenty, friendly but distracted by a woman standing at the rear of the store facing a bank of glass doors which gave way to the refrigerated beverages. She wore a matching pink sweat suit, bright white sneakers, a mesh-back baseball hat, and a pair of dark sunglasses, and she was standing still as statuary. It was the outfit of a toddler or a teenager, but the woman had a shock of frizzy white hair coming out from under the cap, and must have been in her sixties or seventies. The cashier appeared concerned, and Bob asked in a whisper, “Everything all right?”

“I don’t think it is,” the cashier whispered back. “I mean, she doesn’t seem to be on anything, and her clothes are clean. But she’s been watching the energy drinks for forty-five minutes, and I’m worried she’s going to freak out.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“I asked if I could help her find something. No response.”

“Want me to go check in with her?”

“What if she freaks out?”

“What do you mean by ‘freaks out’?”

“It’s things I can’t even talk about in polite conversation. And the cops won’t come unless there’s a weapon involved. You know how many ways there are to freak out without a weapon? Literally one million ways.”

All the time they were speaking they were watching the woman. Bob said, “I’m going to go check in with her.”

“Okay, but if she starts freaking out, can you try to get her through the doors?” The cashier made a corralling gesture, arms out. “Once she’s in the parking lot she’s out of my domain.”

Bob moved toward the figure in pink, humming benignly, both to announce his arrival and identify himself as a friend. “Oh, hello,” he said, as if he just noticed her standing there. She didn’t respond in any measurable way, her features hidden behind the cap and hair and sunglasses. “Is everything all right today, ma’am? Anything I can help you with?” Still no reaction, and Bob looked to the cashier, who touched his own shoulder in a gesture communicating his belief that Bob should give the woman a shake. Bob didn’t shake her but rested his hand on her shoulder; the instant he made contact she became activated, like a robot coming to life, turning away from Bob and walking deliberately down the aisle and right out of the store. Bob watched her go. “What should I do now?” he asked the cashier.

“I don’t know!” the cashier said. He was happy the woman was gone but also happy that something interesting had happened.

Bob said, “I’m going to follow her,” and he left the store.

He walked behind the woman at a distance of ten paces, sipping his coffee, marking her meager progress. It took her full five minutes to travel one city block, at which point she became frozen again, this time at a bus stop, standing outside the glass shelter and looking in at the empty bench. It began to rain and the woman’s sweat suit grew damp. When she started to shiver, Bob approached and draped his coat over her shoulders. But soon he was shivering and damp; when a police car pulled up at a red light, Bob waved to the policeman to get his attention. The policeman waved back, then drove away.

Bob moved to stand under the shelter of the bus stop, facing the woman. His coffee had gone cold in his hand and it occurred to him he hadn’t paid for it. He’d decided his walk had been ruined and that he would cut his losses, forfeit the coat, and taxi home, when he noticed a laminated card hanging from a string around the woman’s neck. He stepped around the shelter and, tilting her body slightly, made to inspect the card. There was a photograph of the woman, in sunglasses and cap, and beneath the photo, a text: My name is CHIP, and I live at the GAMBELL-REED SENIOR CENTER. Beneath the text there was an address, and beneath the address was the image of an imposing Craftsman home with medieval touches — a tower and weathervane, a wraparound porch. Bob recognized the house from his walks, and he said, “I know this place. Is this where you live? Is your name Chip?” A determination rose up in him, and he decided he would deliver Chip to the address.

He took her gently by the arm, pointing her in the direction of the center. Every ten or fifteen steps she paused and groaned, but her resistance was minor, and they made their plodding advancement against the weather. She wanted to go into every storefront they passed, and so Bob had to repeatedly correct her path; each time he did this she became tense and made further groaning noises. “Sorry, Chip,” he told her. “I wish we could stop and browse but they’ll be worrying about you, and we don’t want them to worry, do we? No, let’s keep on, we’re almost there.”

Soon the Gambell-Reed Senior Center was in sight. Bob had walked past the property any number of times, often asking himself what it was, exactly. It stood perched on a hill, looming over its neighbors on both sides and looking very much like the cliched image of a haunted house. There was no signage announcing its function, but hospital shuttle buses and ambulances were commonly parked at the curb, and a wheelchair access path zigzagged up from the sidewalk and to the entrance. Bob led Chip up this path, studying the center as they made their ascent. It looked, he realized, quite a lot like the Hotel Elba; and while Bob took no stock in the unearthly, he couldn’t help but wonder at the similarity between the properties, in connection with his dream of the same morning.

The front door was an imposing barrier of green-painted metals and bulletproof glass, and it was locked. Bob buzzed a doorbell-buzzer and the door buzzed back, unlocked itself with a clack, and swung slowly open. Chip walked in under her own steam, disappearing around a corner while Bob stood by, waiting for someone to come meet him at the threshold; but there was no one, and after a long, ponderous pause, the door began evenly closing. He was about to turn and go when a bellowing male voice from behind hailed him: “Hold that door!” The voice beheld so pure a conviction that Bob reacted without thinking, blocking the sweep with his right foot, which consequently was smashed by such a force of violence that his pain was only barely concealable. The door bounced back and again was swinging open. Meanwhile, the voice’s owner, an abnormally large, that is, tall, broad, wide man in an abnormally large electronic wheelchair, was bearing down on Bob at a high rate of speed and with a look of steely certitude in his bloodshot eyes. As he whizzed past Bob and into the center he pinched the brim of an abnormally large beret in a salute of thanks. The same instant this man entered, there came a call from unseen voices, a calamitous, jeering greeting, a joyful commencement of an earlier communication, as though some new evidence gathered overnight had altered a prior dispute. “Pup pup pup,” the man said, wagging his mitt of a hand to downplay the noise. He drove his chair deeper into the center proper.

A forty-something-year-old woman in pale green scrubs and a beige cardigan was walking up to meet Bob. She asked if there was anything she could help him with and Bob explained about his bringing Chip back. The woman nodded that she understood, but she wasn’t noticeably impressed that Chip had been at large, or that she had been safely reinstalled. She introduced herself as Maria and Bob said he was Bob. When the door began closing, Maria stepped back, hand held aloft in a gesture of neutral farewell; but here Bob both surprised himself and Maria by hop-limping into the center, and afterward stood lightly panting, while Maria considered whether to call for security.

BOB LIKED MARIA INSTANTLY. SHE SEEMED SLY TO THE WORLD’S foolishness, something like a cat’s attitude of critical doubtfulness, but she also beheld a cat’s disposition of: surprise me. Bob could tell that she was tired, physically and emotionally; her hair still was wet from her shower, he noticed. She asked Bob what was wrong with his foot and he told her, “Your front door smashed it,” and she said, “I see.” She asked if he was well enough for a tour of the center and he said he was, and she led him to the airy space she called the Great Room. In the middle of the room was a long table around which sat a dozen or more senior men and women, some chatting volubly, others sitting with their heads bowed to the gentle labors of unskilled craft projects, others sleeping, chin to chest. The man in the wheelchair was nowhere in sight, but Chip was sitting at the head of the table, apart from the others, breathing through her mouth, and still with Bob’s coat hanging off her shoulders. Bob pointed this out to Maria, who approached Chip from behind to retrieve the garment. This took some good bit of pulling but finally Maria managed to yank the coat free, and she crossed over to return it to Bob. He thanked her but didn’t put the coat on right away, wanting Chip’s body warmth to dissipate before he wore it again.

He and Maria resumed their promenade. “So, that’s Chip. She’s a free bird. Runs away as often as she can. Luckily, she never runs very far, or very quickly. Half the time we don’t know she’s gone, then there’s someone at the door, like you, bringing her back home.”

Bob asked how the center could house so many individuals as were present; Maria answered there were only five residents, and that the rest were shuttled to the center each morning, then shuttled back to their homes after suppertime. Most of them lived with their adult children, or relatives. Maria explained that these were people without insurance or savings, people who couldn’t afford full-time care.

“Chip’s one of the residents?”

“For now she is. To be honest, she needs more from us than we can give her. We’re lucky to have this house at our disposal but it’s poorly suited to our needs when it comes to the complicated cases. We’re understaffed and underfunded and all the rest of it. Chip needs more focused care in a secured environment. The ideal from our point of view and according to what we can offer is someone more like Brighty, here. How are you, Brighty?”

Bob found himself shaking hands, or found his hand being shaken by the woman, Brighty. She stared hard at Bob but spoke to Maria. “Who’s this? A new face? New blood? What’s his story?”

Maria said, “This is Bob, Brighty. He was good enough to bring Chip back to us, so I thought I’d show him around.”

“Okay, that all makes sense, but where does he live?”

“I don’t know. Where do you live, Bob?”

“I live in a house in northeast.”

“Sounds plush,” Brighty told Maria.

“It’s all right,” said Bob.

“He’s modest. I’m sure it’s very plush and classy. His wife must be pleased with her — fortunate situation.”

Bob said, “I have no wife.”

Now Brighty looked at Bob. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t. I did have one, once.”

“And one was enough?”

“It must have been.”

“You’re a widower?”

“Divorcé,” said Bob.

“And when were you granted — your freedom?”

Bob did some quick addition. “Forty-five years ago.”

Brighty made to whistle, but the whistle didn’t catch and so was more a puffing noise.

Maria said, “Brighty has been married five times, Bob.”

“What do you think about that?” Brighty asked Bob.

“I think that’s a lot of times to be married,” Bob answered.

“I like a big party, is what it is,” said Brighty. “And I’ll take a wedding over a funeral any day of any week, if it’s all the same to you.” She walked off to a bank of mismatched couches lining the long wall of the Great Room, sat down, leaned her head back, and shut her eyes. “Brighty,” Maria told Bob. Bob noticed Chip was no longer in her chair but had taken up a standing position next to the front door, looking at it but not looking at it. He mentioned Chip’s movements to Maria, who sighed and led him to the far corner of the Great Room where a scowling woman sitting at a fold-up card table was working on a thousand-piece puzzle. She had stringy, unclean gray hair, and she wore a pair of reading glasses on top of her regular glasses. “This is Jill,” said Maria. “Jill’s one of our nonresident visitors. Jill, will you say hello to our new friend Bob? I won’t be a minute.” She excused herself to fetch Chip away from the front door. Jill, meanwhile, was staring up at Bob, who told her, “Hi.” She didn’t respond. When Bob asked how she was doing she raised her hands up in the style of a doctor who has just scrubbed in ahead of surgery, each finger standing alone, with space between itself and its siblings. “I can’t feel my thumbs,” she said.

“Just now you can’t?” asked Bob.

She shook her head. “I woke up in the middle of the night thinking there was someone in the room with me. ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello?’ Then I realized, you know, about my thumbs.”

“You couldn’t feel them.”

“I couldn’t and still can’t.” She lowered her hands onto her lap. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “Who was the person in the room?”

“Oh, no one. Probably what that was was the presence of something new that’s wrong with me?” She cocked her head, as if in recognition of her own queer phrasing. She told Bob, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look like a doctor.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

Jill drew back in her chair. “Why are you asking me questions about my health if you’re not a doctor?”

Bob wasn’t sure what to say to this, so he decided to reroute the conversation in the direction of the puzzle: “What will it look like when you’re done?” he asked, and she took the puzzle’s box top and held it up beside her grave face. She asked Bob, “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a harvest scene.”

She bobbed her head, as if to say he was partly right. In an explaining tone of voice, she said, “It’s about the fall feeling.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’m not sure that I do.”

“The fall feeling,” said Jill, “is the knowledge of a long dusk coming on.” She looked at him with an expression of significance. Her reading glasses had a sticker attached to the left lens that read: $3.99.

She resumed her puzzle work, rooting about for useful pieces, her numb thumbs held out at odd angles, her middle and pointer fingers stained yellow by nicotine use. Bob said goodbye and walked off in search of Maria, pausing before a bulletin board choked with notices and artworks and informational papers. One flyer among the many caught his eye: a call for volunteers at the center. Maria returned to find Bob writing down the phone number for the American Volunteer Association in his pocket spiral notepad.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m interested.”

“Have you volunteered before?”

“No.”

She pointed that Bob should follow her out of the center and onto the porch. Once the front door clacked shut behind them, she said, “If I could be frank with you, I would encourage you to think twice before volunteering. I say this for your sake as well as mine. Because the volunteer program has been nothing but a strain on the center. Actually, I’ve asked the AVA to take us off their rotation because every person they’ve sent us has been far more problematic than helpful. Each one of them arrives here simply beaming from their own good deed, but none of them lasts out the month because the reality of the situation here is thornier than they can comprehend. You will never, for example, be thanked; but you will be criticized, scrutinized, and verbally abused. The men and women here are sensitive to the state of their lives; a single hint of charity and they lash out, and I can’t really say that I blame them.”

“Well,” said Bob.

“I don’t mean it as a critique against you personally,” Maria told him. “You seem like a very nice man.” She paused, and made the face of someone reapproaching an issue from a fresh angle. “May I assume you’re retired?”

“Yes.”

“What position did you hold?”

“I was a librarian.”

“For how long were you a librarian?”

“From the ages of twenty-two to sixty-seven.”

Maria said, “Sometimes retirees volunteer for us in hopes we’ll take their malaise away.”

“I don’t suffer from malaise,” Bob said. “And I don’t care to be thanked.” The cloud cover had thinned and the sky was lit in pastel pinks, purples, and an orange. Bob was marking these colors when he had his idea. “I could read to them.”

“Read to who?”

He pointed at the center.

“Read to them what?”

“Stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Stories of entertainment.”

Maria was nodding, then shaking her head. “Yes, but no,” she said. “These aren’t readers, for the most part, Bob.”

“But to be read to is another thing,” he told her. “Everyone likes to be told a story.”

“Okay, but do they?” she asked.

They were stepping down the tall concrete stairwell set to the side of the zigzagging path. Maria restated her belief that the reading angle was a mistake; but Bob had won her over with his pluck, and she said she was willing to let him try it out. When they arrived at the sidewalk, she gave him her business card and said, “Just refer the AVA to my office number, and we’ll get you placed here.” Bob thanked her and shook her hand and walked off. Halfway up the block he turned back and saw that Maria was watching him. “What did you think of Jill?” she called out, and Bob made the half-and-half gesture. Now Maria smiled, and she turned and jogged up the steps, which surprised Bob; he wouldn’t have thought of her as a jogger-up-the-steps.

BOB TELEPHONED THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER ASSOCIATION THE NEXT morning and later in the week received a packet in the mail, color brochures featuring pictures of glad seniors, glad people in wheelchairs. The text was highly praiseful and petting of Bob’s decision to lend a hand, but there was a hitch, which was that he had to be vetted before the AVA welcomed him officially into the fold. Saturday morning and he drove to a storefront on Broadway that specialized in such things as passport photos and notarizations and fingerprints, the last being what he was after. His prints were sent off to what he imagined was a subterranean robot cityscape, a bunker database where they kept the shit list under dense glass, to check his history for uncommon cruelties, irregular moralities. He didn’t expect there to be an issue and there wasn’t, but he did feel a doubt reminiscent of his experience of passing through the exit barriers at the pharmacy and wondering if the security alarm would sound even though he’d not stolen anything.

Bob had not been particularly good or bad in his life. Like many, like most, he rode the center line, not going out of his way to perform damage against the undeserving but never arcing toward helping the deserving, either. Why now, then? He himself didn’t know for certain. The night before his first official visit to the center he dreamed he arrived and was greeted in the same garrulous, teasing manner as the man with the big beret had been. The scene of group acceptance was heady, but when Bob stepped into the center the next morning no one acknowledged his presence. “Hello,” he said, but nobody so much as glanced at him, and he understood he was going to have to work his way toward visibility, to earn the right to be seen by these people, which he believed was fair, and correct.

Bob sought out Maria, who sat talking on the phone in her small, untidy office. She pointed Bob toward the rear of the Great Room and gave him a goodwill thumbs-up; soon he was standing at a podium before an audience of twenty souls. He briefly introduced himself and the chosen text; since this first appearance took place some days before Halloween, he’d decided to begin with a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat.” The reading was going well enough when on page three the cat had its eye cut out with a penknife by its owner, and a third of Bob’s small audience left the room. On page four, the same unlucky cat was strung up by its neck and hung from the branch of a tree, and now the rest of the crowd stood to go. After the room emptied out a muttering janitor came in with a hand truck and began folding and stacking the chairs. Maria approached Bob with an I-told-you-so expression on her face. “I told you so,” she said.

Bob walked home through the October weather. A stream of leaves funneled down the road and pulled him toward his mint-colored house, the location of his life, the place where he passed through time, passed through rooms. The house rested in the bend of a quiet cul-de-sac, and it was a comfort for him whenever he came upon it. It didn’t reflect worldly success, but it was well made and comfortably furnished and well taken care of. It was a hundred-odd years old, and his mother had purchased it from the man who’d built it. This man had gone blind in his later years and affixed every interior wall with a length of thick and bristly nautical rope run through heavy brass eyelets positioned at waist level to guide him to the kitchen, to the bathroom, the bedroom, up the stairs and down, all the way to the workshop in the basement. After this person died and the property changed hands, Bob’s mother did not remove the rope, less an aesthetic choice than obliviousness; and when she died and Bob inherited the house, he too left the rope in place. It was frayed here and there, and he sometimes banged his hip on the eyelets, but he enjoyed the detail for its history, enjoyed the sight of it, enjoyed the rope’s prickliness as it ran through his hand.

He returned the Poe paperback to its place on the paperback shelf. He had been amassing books since preadolescence and there were filled shelves in half the rooms in the house, tidy towers of books in the halls. Connie, who had been Bob’s wife, had sometimes asked him why he read quite so much as he did. She believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live?

As the day wore on, and Bob relived his experience at the center, he came to see it was not that he’d taken the task overseriously, but that he hadn’t taken it seriously enough. He hadn’t even preread the text. A cat is tortured and hung in the first pages of the story, and for some reason his appearance was unsuccessful! He telephoned Maria, explained why he’d failed, and told her he wanted to try again. Maria sighed a sigh that sounded like a no, but then she told him yes, all right, as you wish, and Bob spent the next six days preparing for his return. He put together a syllabus, a series of connected short stories and excerpts from longer works that he felt were of a piece thematically; he also wrote an introduction that illustrated his point of view. He wondered if he wasn’t giving too much of his time to the project, but he couldn’t stop himself, and didn’t want to.

He slept poorly the night before his second reading and arrived at the center thirty minutes early, where the janitor again was muttering as he set up the chairs. Bob stood at the podium, readying himself, looking over his texts; Maria approached and asked if she might inspect Bob’s books. He passed them over and she studied them one by one.

“Is Comet a Russian name?” she asked.

“No.”

“But these books are all by Russians.”

“That’s true.”

She passed the books back to Bob. “Do you read books by non-Russians?”

“Of course,” he said. “I thought it could be fun for the group to try to identify the cultural through-lines and buried political opinion.”

“Yes, that could be fun,” said Maria. She obviously believed he would fail again, but wished him luck and went away. People began trickling in; there were not so many in the audience as before. Bob began with the prepared statement, which he had memorized.

“Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough — that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone. Sometimes an author’s voice is familiar to us from the first page, first paragraph, even if the author lived in another country, in another century.” Bob held up his stack of Russians. “How can you account for this familiarity? I do believe that, at our best, there is a link connecting us. A lifetime of reading has confirmed this for me. And this is the sentiment or phenomenon I want to share with you all today. I’m going to read some selections from the Russian canon. We’ll be starting with Gogol — an obvious choice, but obvious for a reason. The language is a little formal, but the emotional information is, I think, relevant as ever.”

Bob read “The Overcoat.” He read in a clear, bright voice, and with a faith in the sideways beauty and harsh humor of the work. He knew that he could get through to these people if only they would give themselves to the words, but before he arrived at the text’s halfway point they were shifting in their chairs. Soon they began to collect themselves, and then they did stand to go. By the time Bob completed the story the only people in the room were Chip and the muttering janitor, who had already begun the unhappy business of folding and stacking the chairs. As his muttering evolved to audible complaint, Bob learned the janitor blamed him for what he saw as needless busywork. Bob forbade himself from apologizing; he collected his books and made to leave, pausing to look down at Chip, who he now saw was soundly sleeping. Her sunglasses were crooked, and he corrected them. He walked past the long table in the Great Room, populated with people who had just left his reading; they were sitting side by side under softly buzzing fluorescent lighting, chatting, not chatting, doing crossword and Sudoku puzzles, cutting construction paper with safety scissors.

Bob went to say goodbye to Maria but saw through her door she was again talking on the phone. He stood around a while, then abruptly left, heading for home. He felt angry, which was not at all common for Bob; but he found himself wishing he’d never come to the center in the first place. It began to rain and he shielded the books under his coat and his face puckered against the damp. He was unlocking his front door when he heard the phone ringing. The kitchen was unlit; it was clean and orderly in the darkness of the day. He set his books on the countertop and lifted the phone off the wall and said hello.

It was Maria. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. You were right, so I left.”

“But you didn’t tell me you were leaving.”

“You were on the phone.”

“You could have waited a minute.”

“I waited several minutes.”

Maria asked, “Are you pouting?”

“A little bit, yes.”

“All right, well I can’t say you haven’t earned it, and after I get off the phone you can pout your little heart out, but can you put a plug in it for a minute? Because I have an idea. Will you listen to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“I’d like to propose that you keep coming back here but without the books.”

“Come back without the books.”

“Leave those books at home, Bob.”

“And what would I be doing there?”

“Just that: being here.”

“Being there doing what?”

“Being here being around. Most of the people at the center are in a state of letting go. Some of them are unbothered by this, or unaware; but others are afraid, or confused, or angry. You’re the steady, hand-on-the-tiller type, and I think your presence might be useful. I just got off the phone with a man who wants to perform sleight of hand tricks for us. Half the people at the center have some degree of dementia. The whole world’s a sleight of hand trick already, and I’m not looking to give them any more examples of instability. To my way of thinking, that’s where you come in.” She pressed Bob to commit to visiting the following week, but he claimed he needed to think on it, affecting a coolness as he rang off. In truth, though, he was moved by Maria’s assessment of his character. The functional purpose he’d known in his professional life had been put away when he retired, but now that cold piece of his person came back to life. In the morning he called Maria to agree to the schedule, and on the appointed day he arrived at the center, and without any books, as prescribed.

HE STILL WASN’T FULLY SURE WHAT HE WAS SUPPOSED TO DO, however.

“Just move around, circulate,” Maria told him. “Ask someone what their name is, then tell them yours. It’s like a cocktail party but no cocktails.” She gave him a friendly little shove into the Great Room and he looped the long table, waving to anyone who made eye contact, hopeful for an invitation to linger. But nobody was inclined to speak with him, and he only continued walking. At the back of the room the woman named Jill was again at her card table, working on another puzzle. Bob was stepping up to greet her when he noticed the man in the electronic wheelchair and big beret sitting in the opposite corner beneath a wall-mounted television. This scenario struck Bob as the more promising of the two; he crossed over and pulled up a chair. The man in the big beret was watching a tennis match, men’s singles; Bob took advantage of his distraction to make a thorough inspection of his features: a countenance of high, true ugliness. The ample flesh of his face was mottled with inky purple staining, so that he looked as if he’d been poisoned or gassed; he had a broad and pitted nose destroyed by burst vessels; he had no eyebrows or eyelashes, and his eye whites were pink going red. These elements came together to form the picture of a man with unhealthy habits and gargantuan appetites running unchecked across the length of several decades. But there was also an animation about him that spoke of a defiant life force; something like joy, but mutant.

In a little while a nurse with a NANCY name tag and a gold crucifix necklace approached pushing a cart. “Snack time, boys,” she said. The cart held four rows of rounded lumps, ten lumps per row, half of them whiteish and furred, the other half dark brown and resembling brains in modeled miniature. “And who are these gentlemen?” asked the man in the big beret.

“Peanut butter balls and raisin balls.”

“Which are what, exactly?”

“Peanut butter balls are peanut butter rolled into balls and covered with coconut flakes. Raisin balls are just raisins mashed together.”

“And who fabricated them?”

“I did.”

“Can I assume you wore gloves?”

Nurse Nancy looked at Bob fatiguedly, as if for a witness. She brightened when she realized she’d not met him before. “Are you new?” she asked.

“Yes, hello, I’m here by the AVA.”

Now her face became cold, she wheeled the cart backward, away from Bob. “I’m sorry, but the snacks are not for volunteers.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Bob told her. He hadn’t wanted to partake of the snacks even a little bit. But she remained wary, as if Bob might try to lunge and snap up one of the balls when she wasn’t paying attention. The man in the big beret had put on a pair of reading glasses and now was looking over the cart with his head tilted back. “Is there a shortage of food in the pantry?” he asked. “Because it seems to me these are some bullshit snacks.”

“Actually, there is a shortage. And if you think it’s fun to try to piece together a healthy nutritional program from what they’ve given me in there, then why don’t you do me a favor and think again. Also, I believe I’ve already told you what I think about your language, have I not?”

“You did tell me, but it must have slipped my mind.” He took his reading glasses off. “Brass tacks, Nance. How many can I have?”

“How many do you want?”

“How many can I have?”

“You can have two.”

“Two of each?”

Nurse Nancy looked over her shoulder and back, nodded discreetly, and the man in the big beret lifted four balls from the cart, setting them one at a time in a line up his broad forearm. Nurse Nancy wheeled the cart away and the man ate his snacks, quickly and efficiently, looking into space as he chewed, swallowed, chewed, swallowed. After he was done, then he was at peace; he wiped the crumbs from his palm and held out a hand for Bob to shake. “Linus Webster.” He asked Bob his name and Bob told him. “Bob Cosmic? What are you, in show business?” Bob was restating his name when Linus Webster became distracted by the television and began wagging his hand to call for quiet. A quartet of female players took to the tennis court and he was turning up the volume on the remote control, loud and louder, far louder than was necessary, or appropriate. The game commenced. The noises the players made filled up the space of the center, heartfelt declarations of physical exertion which were also, in any other context, obscene. Jill was twisted all the way around in her chair, glaring at Linus. “He’s doing it again!” she called out. Bob caught Jill’s eye and waved; she stared blankly back. Over the sound of the television, he asked, “How’s your thumbs?” Jill recoiled. “How’s yours?” she demanded. Bob shook his head and explained, “Your thumbs, last time I was here, you couldn’t feel them, don’t you remember?” A look of glad remembrance crept onto her face. “Oh yeah,” she said, then turned back to the wall and resumed her puzzle work. Linus, meanwhile, had propped his head against his wheelchair’s headrest and was basking in his audio experience when Nurse Nancy returned to snatch up the remote from his hand and mute the television. She was breathing heavily, glaring into Linus’s face. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.

Linus asked, “If God didn’t want us to appreciate the grunts of others, why did He invent them in the first place?”

“Okay, hey, guess what? You just got your television privileges revoked for twenty-four hours. Maybe you’d better just go to your room, have a rest, and think about things.”

“Seems to me I’ve thought about things enough for one lifetime. But the resting part sounds all right.” Linus winked at Bob and drove his chair out of sight. There came the sound of a muffled clanking from within the walls of the building; a ramshackle elevator that delivered the residents to their rooms on the second and third floors. Nurse Nancy said, “You shouldn’t encourage that one.” She pulled up a chair and began channel surfing. She landed on a religious program and Bob went away from the television, thinking to try his luck once more at the long table.

He took a seat, asking those sitting nearby how they were doing. The answers came in the shape of soft noises rather than hard language, but the general mood, so far as Bob could tell, was one of subdued disappointment: things were not going badly, it was true — but no one could claim they were going very well, either. Chip sat just across the table from Bob, and she was apparently looking directly at him, but as she was outfitted in her traditional ensemble it was impossible to say for sure. He waved; she did not wave back.

In the middle of the table sat a caddy filled with safety scissors, paste, and mismatched scraps of paper. Recalling his library days, when it sometimes fell to him to entertain groups of children, Bob took up a sheet of red construction paper, snapped it flat, and folded it onto itself, over and over, into an accordion shape. He was working with a combination of casualness and care that awakened the curiosity of certain of his neighbors; by the time he took up a pair of scissors and started cutting away at the folded paper, they all had been hooked into the mystery of what this newcomer was up to. When at last he unfolded the paper and revealed a bowed chain of hand-holding doll shapes, he saw that his ploy to engage was a success: he had surprised these men and women, he had distracted them, even impressed them. Some among the group wanted instruction, that they might make their own paper chain, and Bob gave a brief tutorial. It was not long before the group lost interest, but Bob was satisfied by this first contact.

Brighty was walking across the room with what Bob took for semiurgent purpose. “Hello, Brighty,” he said; when she saw Bob, she altered her course and made for him directly. Seizing his hand, she said, “And to think I used to turn down a dance.”

“Oh?” said Bob.

She formed her face into a coquettish expression and held a phantom cigarette to her lips: “‘I’m going to sit this one out, thank you.’” She dropped the cigarette and shook her head at the memory of herself. “What in the world was I thinking?”

“You were following your own tastes and whims.”

“Tastes and whims, he tells me!” She socked Bob in the arm and hurried off to wherever she’d been going.

Maria had told Bob he should jettison the schedule and come and go as he wished; deciding he’d had enough for the day, he bid the group at the long tables goodbye, and made for Maria’s office. Her door was half-open and she was — on the phone. She made a question mark face at Bob and Bob gave her a thumbs-up. She made the OK sign and he saluted. He made walking fingers and she made the OK sign and he bowed and left the center. Stepping down the path, Bob found that he felt happy; and he understood Maria had been correct regarding her adjustments to his visits. The thought he carried with him as he made his way home was that he’d landed in a place where, in getting to know the individuals at the center, he would likely not suffer a boredom.

JILL WAS A SINCERELY NEGATIVE HUMAN BEING WITH UNWAVERINGLY bad luck and an attitude of ceaseless headlong indignation. Every day she was met with evidence of a hostile fate, and every day she endeavored to endure it, but also to combat it, but also to locate people to talk to about it. She found Bob willing to listen to a degree that was, she told him quietly, as if it were a secret she could somehow keep from him while at the same time telling him, uncommon. In this way he was precious to her, but she was never gentle with him, never thankful. Bob was like a horse run and run, and never fed or watered, only whipped. By the end of Bob’s first month of bookless visits to the center he had established something like a friendship with Jill, or what passed for friendship in her world. No warmth, but a familiarity, with each party comfortable to act as him and herself. Bob couldn’t say what Jill thought of him, but he found her an engaging presence, and he began to look forward to their communications whenever he moved in the direction of the Gambell-Reed Senior Center.

It was a moody day. Bob arrived at the center and found Jill at her usual station, where she sat working on another thousand-piece puzzle: a desert sky at dawn cluttered with hot-air balloons. She did not say hello to Bob, because she never said hello; but he knew she knew he was there, and he knew she would eventually speak, and that this speaking would be the naming of a complaint, and it was: she sighed a long sigh and said, “I’m so tired, Bob.”

“Rough night?” he asked.

“Stupid question.”

Bob took up a puzzle piece and began searching for its position in the picture. “I thought there were no stupid questions,” he said.

“Where’d you hear that? On the internet?” Jill laughed ruefully to herself. Anti-internet sentiment was common from Jill. Bob had almost no experience with that overvast landscape, but somewhere along the line Jill decided he was a devotee and she was disdainful of his behaviors.

She began pumping her hands, explaining to Bob that she had at long last regained the feeling in her thumbs.

“That’s good,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” she told him, explaining that the numbness had been replaced by a throbbing pain at the thumb joints. The reference to her thumb pain made her think of other pains, and she became expansive on the subject, soliloquizing about her history with pain: the pain of her youth, and the pain of midlife, and her present engagement with it. She spoke of pain as a perceived punishment, pain as a discipline, and lastly, about how much the pain hurt. “You understand that, right?” she said.

“Understand what?”

“It’s only pain if it hurts.”

This seemed self-evident. But then, as was not uncommon, Jill made Bob doubtful of his knowledge. He thought of his own aches, which in recent months had been mounting, and asked, “But what’s the definition of hurts?”

“Do you involuntarily jolt in your seat? Are you sucking in short, sharp breaths with your eyes shut up tight? Does your vision go red in splotchy flashes, and you’re worried you might fall over or faint?”

“No.”

“What you’re experiencing is not pain,” Jill said, “it’s discomfort.”

“Not pain.”

“Discomfort is not pain.”

Jill said that her pain was near constant and impossible to get used to, to not be surprised by. She spoke of a wish to measure it, a volume or weight she might assign it, to share with doctors, with strangers, bus drivers. “People would be impressed if they knew the size of it,” she said. “The way it is now, they simply can’t understand. You can’t.” They worked on the puzzle in earnest, silent competition. With both of them going full tilt they completed the image in ninety minutes; as soon as it was done, Jill broke it up and returned the pieces to the box. Later, they were sitting under the television watching a show where four adult women screamed at each other in front of a live audience of adult women who also were screaming. There was an unknowable emotional connection between the women onstage and those in the audience; the more the women onstage screamed, then did the screaming of the audience also increase. At times the two groups were screaming with all of their vigor and volume: altogether too profound a passion for one o’clock in the afternoon, was Bob’s thought. During a commercial break came a comparative silence, and Bob turned to Jill, who was staring at him. She asked Bob if she’d told him about her new heater, and he said she hadn’t. “Tell me now,” he said, and she did.

Her new heater, a fickle and mysterious device. It would sit in cold silence, in defiance of its own on-ness, then roar to life in the middle of the night while Jill slept, overheating and smoking — black, acrid smoke, which set off her fire alarms, which woke up her neighbors, who twice had called in the fire department, who permanently damaged Jill’s carpets with their clanking, filthy boots. This was a classic Jill yarn in that the problems were multifold and collectively unwieldy. In listening to such stories as this it was easy to become lost in the mirror-maze of her misfortune; but Bob wished to be helpful, and so he always made to seek out the root of any one particular problem in hopes of uncovering a solution and improving the quality of her life in some small way. “You should unplug the heater before you go to bed,” he told her.

“I did unplug it, Bob. That’s what I’m saying. The heater turned itself on when it was unplugged.”

Bob said, “I don’t think that’s true.”

“Anyway it was turned off when I went to sleep,” she said.

“That’s not the same thing, though.”

They watched a commercial for laundry detergent that featured an animate teddy bear crawling into a washing machine. Jill said, “He’s going to get more than he bargained for.” The screaming show resumed but Jill hit the mute button. “I’m not done talking about the heater,” she said.

“Okay,” said Bob.

Jill paused, as if steeling herself. “I think that the heater is not just a heater,” she said finally.

“What else is it?”

“I think that the heater is what’s called an oracle.”

“What?” Bob said.

“The heater’s behavior feels threatening to me.”

“You believe the heater has a point of view?”

“I believe it’s communicating bad news.”

“But what is it telling you?”

“It’s telling me my future.”

“What’s your future?”

“Well, think about it, Bob. Where is it hot?”

Bob looked into Jill’s eyes for some sign of levity, but he found only the dark and swirling galaxy of herself. He understood she was confessing a difficult and fearsome truth, which on the one hand was flattering, that Bob had achieved the status of the confidant; but then, and on the other hand, the confession disturbed. Bob asked Jill if she’d kept the receipt. “It was on sale,” she whispered. “No returns.” At the conclusion of the screaming television show, Bob said goodbye to Jill and made for Maria’s office. “Jill thinks her space heater is psychic and that it’s telling her she’s going to go to hell,” he said. Maria looked over Bob’s shoulder, then back at Bob. She said, “Okay.” She waved goodbye but Bob lingered in the doorway.

“May I make an observation?” he asked.

“You may.”

“I don’t want to overstep.”

“Spit it out, Bob.”

“I think Jill would be better off as a resident.”

Maria winced. “Full-time Jill?”

“I know. But maybe she’d be less Jill-ish if she felt safer.”

Maria made a long exhalation. “Let me think about it,” she said.

Bob took a new route home, a long and roundabout line. He was not killing time, for Bob was not a time killer; but he knew that when he entered his home, then the part of the day where something unexpected could happen would be over, and he wasn’t ready for that quite yet. He was looking up and into the windows of the houses as he passed them by; he was wondering about the lives of the people inside. It was a late fall afternoon, damp in the air, damp on the pavement, but it wasn’t raining. Now the lights were coming on in the windows of the houses, and smoke issuing from certain of the chimneys. Was this the long dusk that Jill had warned him about? Bob sometimes had the sense there was a well inside him, a long, bricked column of cold air with still water at the bottom.

AS A MAN OF VAST VANITY, LINUS WEBSTER SUFFERED UNDER HIS physical condition; all the more so because, as Bob discovered, there was a time in his life where his self-regard was of a piece with his outward appearance. Linus one day showed Bob a black-and-white snapshot of a bronzed and godlike young male in a skimpy swimsuit. The person in the picture was a musclebound giant, six and a half feet tall and without flaw to a point approaching the surreal. Bob didn’t understand why this was happening.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“That’s me.”

Bob took the picture in his hand and looked at it closely. “No it’s not.”

Linus removed an aged identification card and gave this to Bob. There was that same impeccable skin, the ambitious bouffant of lustrous hair, and the name corresponded with his own, and now Bob understood that these two distinctly separate men were one — and he simply did not know what to say about it. Linus was staring moonily at the snapshot, and he shrugged his rounded shoulders and said, “I mated, Bob. I mated with the hostile determination of the political assassin, but also with a love for the deed, like a craftsman. And I thought it would go on forever, that that was what life was made up of, fornicating in the buffet style with whichever beautiful partner I wanted.”

“But, what happened?” Bob asked.

“I wish I had a more pronounced tale to tell you. I wish there had been chapters, eras, but no. One day, a Sunday let’s say, I was Paul Newman, and when I snapped my fingers the world rushed to my side. Monday morning and I couldn’t hail a cab. Elevator operators told me, take the stairs. The Fates banded together to shut me out. I still had my looks, for a time, but if one does not water the flower, the flower surely dies. When the attentions to my person dried up, then did my flesh wither, and quickly. Something had gone out inside my brain.”

“Your brain felt different?”

“The rules had changed while I slept. My membership had been revoked.”

“Maybe you were cursed.”

“Don’t laugh,” he said, suddenly somber. “I think I was cursed. I mean, I think that’s my story — my headline.”

“Who cursed you?”

“Take your pick. I had no staying power in the romantic field, and this caused unrest, and not just with the women, but with their mothers, fathers, their uncles, their boyfriends, their husbands — it went on and on. Every date, and there was sure to be tenfold trouble. I sometimes asked myself if it was worth it.”

“And was it?”

“Probably not. But I kept at it, all the same.” He shivered. “Do you know the word schadenfreude?”

“Yes.”

“You know what it means?”

“Yes.”

“It means when people wish you poorly and are happy for your suffering.”

“I know what it means, Linus. Schaden translates as ‘harmful’ or ‘malicious,’ Freude as ‘joy.’”

“All right, egghead, take it easy. There’s a lot of bullshitters around here, say they know things they don’t. Now let me ask you this: Have you ever experienced it?”

Bob never had, at least never to any great degree. This struck him as regretful; was it not a signal he hadn’t lived his life to its fuller potential? Linus agreed that, yes, it probably was. He said, “It’s a powerful thing, like witnessing extreme weather. By that I mean that it’s frightening but also beautiful, somehow. It follows a natural social order. I should think that schadenfreude existed before there was such a thing as German, or any language for that matter.”

“Envy is one of the seven deadlies,” Bob observed.

“But schadenfreude is not merely envy, Bob. It’s envy plus — the revenge component. It was thrilling for me to see people come into their own as purveyors, as owners of hatred. Certain of my enemies actually said the words, put clear language to the idea that I’d been given too much, and that it wasn’t fair in their eyes, and that it was their intention to level the balance.”

“With violence?”

“Sometimes violence. More often it was a petty meanness or put-down of some kind. Also common was for my antagonist to tell the corrupted woman in question an ugly lie about my character. More common still: they would tell the woman an ugly truth about my character. It all led to the same thing, which was my return to the marketplace of carnal congress. Commerce was brisk, I had no time for remorse until after I was barred from the establishment altogether.”

Linus began to regale Bob with specific details of his sexual adventures, the proclivities of certain partners, their attributes. Bob could never relate to the crude male perspective regarding the mysteries and machinations of sex. He was not an innocent, but felt that to speak of fornication as winnable sport was to demean and be demeaned at once, and there was always the question for him of, Why do this? When you could, as an alternative, not? Linus saw that his enthusiasm was not matched in Bob, and he trailed off. “I never went in for this sort of talk,” Bob explained.

“A soldier speaks of combat.”

“To other soldiers.”

“Are you not a soldier, Bob? Have you never been to war?”

Bob said, “I’ve made love to one woman in my life.”

Linus shut his eyes, and he became so still, as though he’d suddenly succumbed to slumber. After a while he stirred, opened his eyes to slits, and asked, softly, “What’s the German word for pity, scorn, and awe happening all at the same time?”

BOB WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN NOOK WATCHING A NEIGHBOR ACROSS the cul-de-sac raking up the leaves in his yard. The neighbor was unshaven, his face red, a little swollen; he might have been sick from drink, but he looked happy, and Bob considered the man’s experience: the scents of earth and moldering leaves, his pulse throbbing as he transferred the leaves into the garbage can. Bob thought, It’s Sunday. This led to his wanting to perform a domestic maintenance of his own, which led to his spending the afternoon in his attic. The idea had been that he would tidy up up there, but when he arrived and was confronted with a lifetime’s worth of documentation and mementos, then he lost his purpose and began simply investigating himself.

There was a wall of cardboard boxes running the length of the attic space, neatly stacked to the ceiling, as if bearing the weight of the roof. Bob had suffered a lifelong phobia of audit, which accounted for his dedication to record keeping, receipts dating back fifty years in some cases. These papers, viewed altogether, functioned somewhat like a diary — stories existed in the cumulative information. Bob’s relationship with tobacco, for example: he purchased a pack of cigarettes every day for seven years up to the age of twenty-four, when he met Connie, who began at once to wage her prohibitive campaign, and so his purchases became inconsistent: a week off, then back on, a month off, back, and finally, after much needful turmoil, quitting the slender devils outright. This nicotine desire dimmed and eventually disappeared, but then, after Connie ran away with Bob’s best friend, Ethan Augustine, Bob bought a carton of cigarettes, inhaling fully three packs in thirty-six hours, sitting in shell-shocked petulance lighting one cigarette off another, and was so sickened afterward that his flesh gave a greeny hue and his spit came blackish and he tossed the remaining packs into the trash and then none, not again, never another cigarette since.

Bob found a receipt for a matinee screening of The Bridge on the River Kwai on the day his mother died. The stub prompted the memory of his having the whistling theme song in his head as he came into her room at the hospital and found her bed empty and stripped to the mattress. He had summoned a nurse, who summoned two other nurses, who swarmed the room and hovered around Bob to worry over him. The theme song persisted in his mind, which paired with the calamity of the moment led to silent, shuddering laughter, this delivered into his fist, and which was mistaken by the nurses as grief. Bob coughed, hid his face. He was not laughing at his mother’s death, but death in general, or life in general, or both in equal measure. Actually, her passing made him feel afraid, afraid of what his life would be like on his own in that house — the same house he was living in now. This was before he’d met Connie or Ethan but after he’d found his initial position at the library.

A wish came to Bob, then, which was to view the receipts from the date of his wedding, July 12, 1959. He imagined the day would be bursting with ephemera but there was only one receipt he could find. It was pencil written, a shivery, all-caps printing, and it read: SUND x 3—VAN VAN CHOC. Below was the figure $2.75. Further down, in an upright cursive: Congradulations + good luck!!! (Your going to neeed it!!!) Bob puzzled over the stub, trying and failing to understand what purchase it was describing, even. Soon, and a picture took shape in his mind: he and Connie and Ethan were sitting at an otherwise empty soda fountain, each of them drinking a milkshake. Ten minutes before this, across the street and within the cool marble chambers of City Hall, Connie and Bob had been married, with Ethan standing by as best man. After the ceremony’s conclusion, the trio stood together on the sidewalk, shielding their eyes from the summer sun. Bob was thoroughly and completely satisfied. He was looking at his brand-new wife. “You’re Connie Comet,” he told her. She said, “It’s true, that’s who I am.” When Ethan asked, “Now what?” Connie’s arm came up level, and she pointed her bouquet at the soda fountain across the wide boulevard. They all three hooked arms and stepped off the curb; the street was clear but a car sped up to meet them, honking its horn as it approached. They achieved a group trot to push past the vehicle’s path, but then Connie broke free from the chain and spun about, lobbing the bouquet into the open window of the car as it blew past. The driver was a white-knuckling raver, a gargoyle of the highway; he received the bouquet on his lap as if it were a ticking bomb, and it was a joyful thing to watch the sedan sliding all across the road, eventually bending into a long, screeching right-hander, up a one-way street and out of sight.

The soda jerk was an old man, paper hat perched on his speckled head, nodding as the trio set themselves down on the red leather stools. He understood what they “meant”; it was not uncommon for newlyweds to visit him postceremony, he said. Connie asked if he could tell who the groom was and the man sized up Bob and Ethan and said that obviously it was Ethan. The little group laughed at this, and Bob laughed the hardest, hoping it was not too obvious that he’d been stung by the soda jerk’s mistake. The soda jerk was embarrassed; he patted Bob’s arm and told him, “He just has a sheen about him, but of course you’re the one, sure you are. You’ve got those haunted, I’ll-never-be-alone-again, let’s-share-everything-forever eyes.” He asked the group what they wanted and they ordered — vanilla, vanilla, chocolate.

Forty-six years prior this scrap of paper was passed to a barely recognizable version of Bob, and now he was an old man in an attic, and his heart was muted as he returned the receipt to its file. He thought he should discontinue his excavation, but then the next box he came across was adorned with Connie’s handwriting, and he felt he couldn’t look away. SALLY ANNE it read, which was what Connie had called the Salvation Army. He opened the box and found a neatly folded stack of his own old clothing. At the top of the stack was a housecoat, a loud number in gold and red rayon, SILKLIKE RAYON as it was named on the tag; stitched to the side of these words was a small, green palm bent by a hurricane wind. He put the housecoat on, discovering that the sleeves had been folded up, two folds per sleeve, which meant that Connie had been the last to wear the garment. Connie had often worn his clothes around the house, and was always adjusting his sleeves in this way, so that it happened he would put on this shirt or that sweater, and there would be this evidence of her. Or there was her habit of using a single blond hair as a bookmark; he had seen her pluck a hair from her own head and set it in the pages of a book that she might or might not return to. And so it was that Bob would happen upon it later. When she and he were together these little touches were such sweet remembrances of her presence; but when it happened after she’d run off with Ethan Augustine, then it prompted a shock of bitterness in Bob, as if he’d been unkindly tricked. Now, after decades with no sign of her anywhere in the house, and Ethan long dead, the folded sleeves were simply bizarre. He stood looking at his own bony, homely wrists, recalling how he used to tease Connie about the sleeve-folding practice, saying she had the arms of a T. rex and that it was a wonder she could blow her own nose. Bob unrolled the robe’s sleeves and resumed his survey of the box. It held several pairs of pants and button-up shirts and was a fair representation of Bob’s wardrobe circa 1959–60. This box was confusing for Bob, because none of the clothes were damaged or threadbare, and it wasn’t as though Connie and Bob had the money to be cavalier about their purchases — clothes were rarely bought, and only thrown out when approaching disintegration. But Connie did have strong opinions about certain articles of Bob’s clothing; when she didn’t appreciate or enjoy a shirt of his, she might tell him, “I don’t like that shirt.” If he wore it again, she would say, “Let’s talk about the removal of this shirt from our lives.” Recalling this, Bob formulated the theory that the box held her discards, the ones she most wished to get rid of. Why the box hadn’t made it to the Salvation Army was a mystery he couldn’t answer — likely it was that their marriage had collapsed before the chore could be completed.

At the bottom of the box Bob discovered a dress of Connie’s. It was a summer dress with spaghetti straps, worn cotton the color of sun-bleached bone with flecks of color threaded throughout: red and blue and yellow and green. Bob remembered the dress but couldn’t picture Connie wearing it — he knew it as an artifact rather than living souvenir. But he felt a pull to engage with it, and he took it out of the box and brought it down from the attic. He hung the dress from a hanger and set this on a nail on an otherwise naked wall in the kitchen, sitting in the nook to consider both the dress and the feeling the dress brought to him. He went back in his mind, and believed he could remember her wearing it in the sunshine, in the backyard. Perhaps this hadn’t happened at all, but it felt a real enough, a likely memory, and he went into it, his thoughts both faraway and close by when he saw by the side of his eye that the dress was moving, undulating, on its hanger. It took Bob some few seconds to understand what was actually happening — he’d hung the dress above a heat register — but within that short span of time he experienced the hauntee’s bottomless terror. After, he felt the flooding gladness of relief, and he shook his head at himself, but he didn’t look away from the dancing, ballooning dress. It was Connie laughing at him the way she had laughed at him when they were in love, not unkindly, but with sympathy, with care for him and his deep and permanent Bobness. An odd-enough Sunday, he thought, running his fingers over the creases from the rolls on the sleeves of his robe. When the heater stopped pushing air the dress, as a film run in reverse, became still again.

AFTER CONNIE WENT AWAY WITH ETHAN AUGUSTINE THERE CAME into Bob’s life the understanding of a perilous vastness all around him. To be hurt so graphically by the only two people he loved was such a perfect cruelty, and he couldn’t comprehend it as a reality. He learned that if one’s heart is truly broken he will find himself living in the densest and truest confusion. There was the initial period of weeks during which he took a leave of absence from the library and only rarely ventured out of the house; he was not eating or sleeping according to any traditional clock or calendar, and his hygiene was in arrears. He began to daydream of a means of murdering himself, weighing out the pros and cons of each style and generally fascinating at the comforting thought of long and untroubled sleep. Connie sent him a letter that he threw away without reading; Ethan sent him a letter that he burned. Six months after Connie left, Bob received the divorce papers in the mail. He sat down and read them and signed them and sent them back and took a five-hour walk without a coat on and caught a cold that furnished him with a physical wretchedness to match his mood. His fever broke on the second restless night and in the morning he peeled himself off the mattress and moved to the bathroom. Looking at his pale person in the mirror, he decided he would not die, and that it was time he resumed his fastidious habits and behaviors. “Fine, fine — fine,” he said. Eleven months later he learned that Ethan had died. Bob was eating breakfast at a café up the road from his house, sitting on a barstool with a newspaper laid out on the counter and skimming through the Metro section when he happened on Ethan’s name. Before he read the piece he knew something bad had happened and he stood away from his stool, as if wanting to achieve a remove from whatever information was coming toward him. He read the article standing, with his hands on his hips, looking down at the paper:

HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER KILLS PEDESTRIAN: Ethan Augustine, 26, was struck by a motorist and killed in front of his house in Northwest Portland yesterday afternoon. Mr. Augustine had only recently moved into the neighborhood with his wife, Connie Augustine, 22 years of age. There were no witnesses to the accident. Any information should be relayed to Portland PD.

Bob sat and folded the paper and stood. He left the café without the paper and walked home and sat on the couch in the living room and stared at the dust motes floating around and around. Later that same day he was passing through the kitchen and saw by the window that there was a man on his hands and knees in the driveway. Thinking him injured or suffering an attack, Bob hurried out to the man’s side. “Are you all right?” he asked.

The man groaned as he stood, using the front bumper of Bob’s Chevy to lift himself up. “Altogether I’d say that yes, I am all right, thank you. Are you Bob Comet?” He identified himself as a police detective, produced a notepad and pen, and asked that Bob should name his whereabouts at the time of Ethan Augustine’s death. Bob answered that he’d been at work, and the detective took down the address and phone number of the library. He asked if he could borrow Bob’s phone and Bob walked him to the kitchen and stood by, listening to the detective’s conversation. After, the detective hung up the phone and told Bob, “All clear, buddy. I’ll let myself out.” Bob realized that when he’d first seen the detective in the driveway, the man had been checking the Chevy’s front bumper for incriminating matter.

Bob waited through the remainder of that day and evening for the multitude of independent emotions inspired by the news of Ethan’s death to form a whole, but it wasn’t until the next morning that they coalesced and he understood he was experiencing a righteousness. He didn’t believe in God or fate or karma or luck, even, but he couldn’t help feeling Ethan’s death was in reply to his, Ethan’s, betrayal; and he couldn’t pretend that he wished Ethan was still alive. Bob understood the grace of forgiveness, and he aspired to grace, but what could he do? An ugliness had been perpetrated against him and ended the way of living he thought was best; the perpetrators were punished, and he knew a foundational vindication. He became thrilled, then, energized, basking in Ethan’s misfortune from the deepest places of himself. Nights, and he cleaned his home, cleaned every room and object in the house to a degree surpassing necessity and logic, as if attempting to return the property and its accoutrements to a state of newness: scrubbing the interior of his toilet’s cistern, polishing the pipework beneath the kitchen sink with Brasso. At a certain point he explained to himself that he was preparing for Connie’s return. Well, so what if he was? He allowed himself to daydream about it, playing the scene out in his mind. His favorite was that it would be raining, it would be night, a knock on the door, and there she would stand, drenched. “Oh, Bob.” Bob would open the door for her and move to the kitchen, making a pot of coffee, but silently. The fewer words he could speak, the better, he decided. He mustn’t forgive her too quickly; he should try to make it look as though he might not be able to accept her back in his life at all. These tales and behaviors were good for passing time, but waiting with such eagerness became its own sort of torture, and Connie’s homecoming was taking longer than he’d thought it would. He told himself that the story only became more burnished with the passage of days; the longer Connie waited to return, the finer would their reunion be. But what wound up happening was that nothing happened. The rains arrived, but no knock on the door. Spring came, and the perennials Connie had planted stood upright in their beds, but the phone did not ring. Bob passed a long and very rotten summer sitting on the couch, but never a letter in the mailbox. He never heard from Connie again. His reaction to the knowledge that it all was actually and finally over was obscured by an alien otherness, and he hobbled along through the following months in the manner of the walking wounded. Eventually, though, he found himself returned to the path he’d been on before he’d met Connie and Ethan. He had strayed so far from that way of life; they had led him away from its isolation and study and inward thought. Now he rediscovered and resumed his progress over that familiar ground. Bob was quiet within the structure of himself, walled in by books and the stories of the lives of others. It sounded sad whenever he considered it, but actually he was happy, happier than most, so far as he could tell. Because boredom was the illness of the age, and Bob was never bored. There was work to do but he enjoyed the work. It was meaningful work and he was good at it. When the work was over there was the maintenance of his home and person and of course his reading, which was a living thing, always moving, eluding, growing, and he knew it could not end, that it was never meant to end. Ultimately it was Bob’s lack of vanity and his natural enjoyment of modest accomplishment that gave him the satisfaction to see him through the decades of his lifetime. He had been in love with Connie, who had loved him, but it had been a fluke; he had loved Ethan Augustine and understood what it was to have a true comrade, but that had also been a fluke. The betrayal by and loss of these two people was hard to square, but the grief was temporary. There was something residual left over, which was an absence, the recollection of injury, but this became blurry and far-off, hiding in a corner of his mint-colored house. Sometimes he could forget what had happened for an hour, and sometimes a month. But whenever the memory was returned to him, he never reacted with bitterness, but took it up as a temporary discomfort. Days flattened fact, was the merciful truth of the matter. A bell was struck and it sang by the blow performed against it but the noise of the violence moved away and away and the bell soon was cold and mute, intact.

CHIP RAN AWAY ONE MORNING IN FEBRUARY AND STILL HADN’T BEEN found when Bob arrived at the center that afternoon. It was a cold day, getting colder and likely to snow, and Chip’s coat hung on a peg by the door. Maria was pulling on her own coat as Bob walked up to meet her. She explained what had happened and asked Bob to stick around in case Chip returned or if someone called in with news of her location. The center was empty; Bob asked where everyone was, and Maria told him, “The shuttles don’t run when the roads turn icy. The nurses and interns are all out looking for Chip; the residents are hiding out in their rooms. Stay by the phone, all right? And keep an eye out the window?” She hurried off and Bob sat at her desk, snooping mildly but finding nothing worth mulling over. He heard the high suffering whine of Linus’s wheelchair; now he was parked in the office doorway.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“What are we doing?”

“What are we doing who?”

“What are we doing sitting around like pussies when we could be out there with the rest, looking for Chip?”

“I’m surprised to hear you care.”

“I’m offended to hear you’re surprised.”

“I’m apologetic at your being offended.”

“I’m accepting of your apology.”

Bob pointed at the desk. “Maria asked me to stay in case Chip comes back or someone calls about her.”

“Okay, but let’s go anyway. Look at that, holy shit, it’s snowing.”

It was snowing, Bob now noticed: angled and heavy. Bob thought of Chip outdoors in her pink sweatsuit and was inclined to agree with Linus that they should mobilize and pitch in. When he said as much, Linus clapped, snapped, pointed, and backed his chair up, zooming away to gather his things from his room upstairs. Bob pulled on his outerwear and was standing in the half-dark Great Room waiting for Linus to return when he noticed that Jill was sitting at her card table, squinting at a puzzle. Jill, per Bob’s pitch to Maria, had recently become a resident at the center. Contrary to his theory, however, this had done little to allay her naturally occurring misery; Bob thought she looked even more tragic than usual, and he invited her to come along with Linus and himself. Peering out the window, she shook her head.

“Will you be all right on your own?” asked Bob.

“So far so good.”

Linus and Bob exited the center and began their cautious descent down the snow-slick zigzagging path. They were almost to the sidewalk when Jill appeared in the doorway, calling out to Bob: “Wait for me! I’ve changed my mind! I’m coming with you!” Bob gave her a thumbs-up and Jill ducked back into the center to fetch her things. She moved with an agility and speed that surprised Bob. Because he’d never seen her upright before, and within the context of the center, he’d assumed she was not able to walk. “I didn’t know Jill could walk,” Bob told Linus, who made a yikes face. When Jill came stepping down the path, Linus, smiling now, said, “Bob didn’t know you could walk, Jill.”

Jill stopped in her tracks. “Fuck you, Bob.”

“Hey,” Bob said.

“Hey nothing.” She reached up her gloved hand to touch her hair. “Shoot, I forgot my hat. I’ll be right back. You guys’ll wait for me, right?”

“We’ll wait,” said Bob.

“But hurry up,” said Linus.

Jill paused. “Okay, but you’ll wait?”

“Yes,” said Bob.

“But hurry,” said Linus.

Jill retreated back up the path to the center.

Linus said, “You hurt her feelings, Bob. Her feeling.”

“Actually, you did, big-mouth.”

Linus looked up innocently. “How was I supposed to know not to say anything?”

“It was inferred.”

“You inferred nothing.”

“Decorum infers it.”

Jill returned without a hat, explaining the front door was locked up tight, and she asked Bob for a key, but neither he nor Linus had one. The sky was darkening as the day pushed toward dusk, the snow continued to fall, the temperature dropping. Jill asked, “What are we going to do?”

“The answer to every problem is money,” Linus stated confidently. “Now, how much have we got? I, personally, have none.”

“Me neither,” said Jill.

“I have money,” said Bob.

“If Bob’s flush, we’re flush too, Jill. Now comes the question of, what are we going to spend our money on?”

Jill was not in the mood to engage in humors. The snow was attacking her face and collecting in a crystalline loaf atop her diminutive head. Bob pushed the loaf away, took off his watchman’s cap, and pulled it down over Jill’s ears. Partly he felt it the chivalrous thing to do, but also he was hopeful the gesture would play in his favor and that she would forgive him his earlier social error. She thanked him, not effusively but with sincerity, which he took as a sign there would likely be peace between them.

The trio struck out in search of Chip, with Linus in the lead, Bob and Jill pulling up the rear, walking side by side. They’d not traveled two blocks when Linus pointed at a movie theater across the street and said, “You guys want to go see a matinee?”

“We’re looking for Chip, Linus,” Bob said.

“But they serve pizza, beer — chocolate. And maybe that’s where Chip is, did you ever think of that? Just sitting in there waiting for us.” Bob made no reply to this but walked on in silence. Linus said, “This was a huge mistake.” Bob said nothing. Linus swung his chair around to face Bob. “I never should have listened to you!”

“This was your idea,” Bob reminded him.

“All right,” said Linus, “let’s not cast aspersions.”

Bob agreed, anyway, that they couldn’t remain outside in such weather as this for much longer; and when he proposed they retire to a café for a hot cup of coffee, Linus was enthusiastic. Jill, however, was shaking her head. “Coffee makes me go to the bathroom.”

“But going to the bathroom is fun,” said Linus.

Jill didn’t know what to say to that.

“How about a hot chocolate?” asked Bob, and Jill said that sounded pretty nice, after all. Bob said he knew a restaurant four or five blocks away; Jill said, “If we’ve got that far to go, I’m going to need a puff,” and she paused to tap a cigarette from her pack. Bob noticed she was smoking Camels. Bob had smoked Camels in his day, and he felt an impulse to ask for one. He didn’t, but then when Linus said, “Let’s smoke one of Jill’s cigarettes, Bob,” he surprised himself by instantly agreeing.

They stood together as Jill handed out Camels and passed her lighter around. They each lit up, inhaling, exhaling, enjoying the lark of the day in spite of the weather. “It feels just like skipping school, doesn’t it?” said Jill. She was in something like a good mood, the first Bob or Linus had witnessed, and they shared discreet looks between them in honor of the uncommon event. The snowfall seemed to decelerate as the nicotine seeped into their bodies. Linus said, “I haven’t had a smoke in ten years.” Bob said, “I haven’t had one since 1959.” Both men were transported back to the place of loving tobacco wholly; the terrible efficiency of the device was thrilling and frightening in equal measure.

As they made their progress toward the café, Jill became animated, speaking gaily of the many deaths in her family. Everyone was dead but her, she said. Her mother and father, of course; but they had not died in their dotage, but by grisly disease in the prime of their lives. They had died from what Jill called eating diseases.

“What do you mean, eating diseases?” Bob asked.

“I mean the disease ate them,” she said.

“You mean like leprosy?” asked Linus.

“It was in the leprosy family. I can’t remember the clinical name. Something exotic — a lot of syllables.”

Jill’s sisters were dead and her brothers were dead and her aunts and uncles were dead and her cousins were dead. Her husband was dead, but there was something in her tone which said that this was not so significant a tragedy as the others. Bob imagined Jill had been trapped in a decades-long marriage with an abusive, alcoholic tyrant; but when he asked if the union had been combative, Jill shook her head. “Goodness, no. Clarke didn’t have an angry drop of blood in him. But was he ever a damp one.”

“A what one?” said Linus.

“A wet-seat.”

“What?” said Bob.

“Unfun,” she said peevishly. “But it was intentional, the unfun-ness.”

“He was against it.”

“Strongly, yes. He found grace in solemnity.”

“That sounds admirable, actually.”

“Thank you, Bob. I did admire him. I just wish he’d taken me out for a hamburger dinner every once in a while.” She took a final drag off her Camel and flicked it into the street. “After Clarke passed, I thought, Now I’ll finally have some fun. But, I haven’t had any. Not really I haven’t.”

Bob said he was surprised to hear she had an interest in fun at all.

“Of course I’m interested. Can’t you see I crave it?”

“I can’t see that. Linus, can you see it?”

Linus said, “I can’t, no. But then, and possibly you’ve noticed this, I don’t really care about or consider anyone else’s point of view other than my own.”

They arrived at the café and were sheltered in a Naugahyde booth. Basking in the room’s warmth, they elected to indulge in full meals. Bob wanted breakfast; Jill and Linus both followed suit, and in a little while their food was delivered to the table. Jill picked up a piece of bacon from her plate, sniffed it, and held it out, asking, “Does this bacon smell funny to either of you?” Bob said he didn’t want to smell someone else’s bacon, but Linus said he did, and Jill held it under his nose. “It’s just a normal bacon smell,” he told Jill, and so she ate it.

They finished their meal but lingered; outside, the snow continued to fall. Bob saw a figure in pink move past the café and he hurried across the dining room to peer out the front door and see if it was Chip, and it wasn’t. When he returned to the table, Jill and Linus were discussing the moon landing. Linus said, “Neil Armstrong was playing at being off the cuff, but he had memorized the words before Apollo even left the ground. He always claimed to’ve improvised the line, but evidence suggests it was written by an ad agency hired via NASA.”

“Maybe he did make it up after all,” Jill said. “Maybe he did come up with it on the fly.”

“Please,” said Linus. “Have you ever looked in Neil Armstrong’s eyes? Talk about infinite space. You can see forever in that handsome head of his. The man couldn’t compose a shopping list. We want to think of astronauts as the embodiment of the best of our collective flesh and blood when actually they’re half-mannequin, and probably more than half.”

In a deep voice, Jill said, “‘One small step for man.’”

“It’s a man,” said Linus. “‘One small step for a man.’ Otherwise the quip doesn’t even make sense. Armstrong says that there was transmission interference and that he delivered the line with the ‘a’ intact.”

“You don’t believe it?” Bob asked.

“I’m doubtful.”

“I feel like you have a low opinion of astronauts generally.”

“I don’t like them very much, it’s true.”

“Well,” Jill said, “I don’t think Mr. Armstrong did such a bad job as all that.”

“You may take solace, my taciturn comrade, in the fact that yours is the majority opinion.”

Bob said, “I wonder what the second man on the moon’s words were.”

Linus said, “Buzz Aldrin: ‘Beautiful view. Magnificent desolation.’”

“What do you think of that?”

“The first part is chilling for its banality. The second part at least achieves some general shape of a human being, though it’s not a human being I’d want to, you know, go camping with.”

They made their way back to the center, following their own partly filled-in footsteps and wheelchair tracks. When they arrived they found Chip still was missing, and that Maria had broken down and called 911. A muscular police officer in his early twenties was interrogating her in her office. Bob and Jill and Linus lurked near her door; Maria was in trouble, and they wished to protect her in some way. The police officer eventually stood away from Maria’s desk, pausing in the open doorway as he flipped his notepad closed. “We’ll do what we can, obviously,” he said. “But it’s a shame we’re in this position in the first place, wouldn’t you agree?” Maria nodded contritely, but when the police officer turned away she held up a long middle finger at the back of his head, which stirred Linus in his chair, stirred him almost to the point of mistiness; later he would admiringly describe the gesture as a “Firm, firm bird.” After the police officer departed, Maria noticed that Bob and Jill and Linus had returned. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked Bob, leading him by the arm to stand apart from the others.

“We went out looking for Chip,” he told her.

“In this weather? At this time of night? You can’t just take out a resident without telling someone, Bob. Jill’s blood pressure is so low she’s practically flatlining. And there are so many things wrong with Linus I wouldn’t know where to begin naming them. Either one of them is teetering — they could drop dead at any given minute.”

“We can hear you,” Linus called.

Maria pulled Bob a few steps farther away. “Well, what the fuck?”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you mad at me?”

“Can you not see that I’m mad at you?”

“You seem mad at me.”

“I am mad at you! The whole time I was in there giving that smug shit the details on Chip, I knew I should also tell him about you three being gone as well. But I just — I couldn’t do it.” She touched the side of her face and she went into a kind of swoon. Her phone rang and she shooed Bob away and shut herself into her office. Brighty stepped out of the elevator and walked up to join the others. “I napped the whole goddanged day away,” she said. “What’d I miss?” Linus was filling her in when Maria came out of her office and announced that Chip’s son was on his way to the center.

“Chip has a son?” asked Brighty.

“Yes,” Maria said, “and he sounds very angry.” She returned to her office and laid her head on her desk. The group discussed the mysteries of Chip’s biography. They pooled their information and found there was none; they knew not a single thing about her. “Not even her name,” said Brighty.

“It’s Chip Something,” said Jill helpfully.

Brighty was shaking her head. “I hung that on her when she first came in. Chip, like chipper, get it?”

Jill said, “But she’s not chipper at all.”

“Yes, Jill, I’m aware of that. The function of the nickname is ironical.” She looked to Bob and Linus. “Try to keep up, kids.”

Bob asked, “Is Brighty a nickname?”

Brighty said, “Who gave you the green light to get personal?”

The Chip saga continued into the night and Bob stayed on far later than he ever had before. His presence was not helpful in any real way, but there was a vigil sense to the evening which he couldn’t tear himself away from. The Great Room took on a new set of visual properties after dark; the sconce lights were set on a dimmer, and the woodwork was honey-colored, the center transformed to the stately home it once had been. Bob and Linus played cards, with Jill looking on and commenting on the plays like a cynical television announcer who believed the players couldn’t hear her. “That was foolish. He’s getting greedy.” They were playing for factual peanuts, but something in the raking in and pushing out of these awakened the gambling impulse in Linus, who brought up the idea that Bob should bundle up and make the trek to the market for a stack of scratchers.

“You mean we’ll go together?” Bob asked.

“Well, no.”

“And who’ll foot the bill for the scratchers?”

“I mean,” said Linus.

Actually, Bob didn’t mind going; he put his coat back on and left the center. Outside and the world was quiet; the snow was no longer falling but there was a full foot of it on the ground, and the moon was rising in the sky. A lone car passed in the distance and Bob was at peace as his boots punch-punched through the untouched snow. When he entered the 7-Eleven he recognized the cashier from his last visit, and the young man instantly recognized him, hopping up from his stool and pointing a two-foot meat stick like a cutlass toward the rear of the store, where Chip was standing at the glass doors, clinging to the handle for support and staring in at the refrigerated beverages. The cashier said she had arrived just as he came on shift, a full five hours prior; and whereas her presence had been alarming to him the first time around, now he was rooting for her, in the way one might root for a marathon dancer or flagpole sitter, humbled by her dedication to her arcane medium. Bob borrowed the cashier’s phone and called the center. He volunteered to walk Chip back, but Maria insisted he stay put and wait for the ambulance, and he did this, standing at Chip’s side and making observational comments about the weather, praising her tenacity, trying and failing to get her to drink from a bottle of water. Her legs were trembling from fatigue, and when the paramedics came they had to pry her hands from the glass door handle. She was groaning as they led her away on a gurney, her hands still gripping the air before her. After she’d gone, Bob bought several different kinds of scratchers, twenty in total, five for each of the four waiting together at the center — it didn’t occur to him to get any for Maria. “How’ve you been?” he asked the cashier, who made the half-and-half gesture. Bob admitted he’d forgotten to pay for his coffee all those months earlier, and volunteered to pay now; the cashier raised his meat stick up above Bob’s head, then gently tapped it over his right and left shoulder. “On behalf of the 7-Eleven corporation and all of her subsidies, I absolve you of your debt.” Bob thanked him and returned to the night. By the time he got back to the center the Great Room was dark, save the light bleeding in from Maria’s office, where she sat opposite a man in a worn canvas coat and blue jeans. The man was turned away, so Bob couldn’t see his face, but Maria’s face was drawn, and her body language read of remorse, apology, shame. Linus hissed from the rear of the Great Room and Bob moved to sit beside him.

“What are you doing in the dark?”

“Spying, what does it look like?”

“Where is everybody?”

“Gone to bed.”

“Where’s Chip?”

“They took her to the hospital.”

“Is she okay?”

“As okay as she ever was.”

“And that’s the son?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he mad?”

“He’s mad. Did you get the scratchers?” Linus had laid out two quarters in readiness; he wanted to scratch all the scratchers elbow to elbow with Bob. Bob counted out ten per each of them; Linus tidied his stack and took up his coin. “Ready?” he asked, and Bob said he was, and they began.

There had been evidence of an odd-shaped fate running through the day, and both Linus and Bob were taken by an unspoken potentiality. But neither of them won anything, not a solitary dollar, and they sat for a time in silence, feeling the feeling that was failure. Linus said, “When we gamble, we’re asking the universe what we’re worth, and the universe, terrifyingly, tells us.” He patted his hand on the table, pinched his big beret. “Good night, amigo,” he said.

“Good night,” said Bob.

Linus wheeled away and Bob sat alone in the dark, looking into Maria’s office. Chip’s son was standing now, pulling on his gloves and hat, shaking his head at Maria, who stared wanly, saying nothing. Bob considered Chip’s son as he left the center. He was in his middle forties, working-class, and his handsome face was tight and he was muttering to himself, still angry, and who could blame him. But Bob felt sorrier for Maria than Chip’s son, or Chip, even. He watched as she rose up and pulled on her coat. When she left her office, Bob scraped his chair to let her know he was there; she startled and squinted. “Bob? What are you doing?” It was past midnight. Bob told her he needed a ride home. “Well, why not?” Maria said, aloud, to herself.

It was odd being in Maria’s car; the cramped vehicle was filled with fast-food trash and smashed coffee cups. The roads were empty and Bob said, “Left here. Left again. Right here.” The car slipped around corners and slid past stop signs and Maria was quietly laughing; she was dead on her feet, she said. The car pulled up in front of Bob’s house; Maria said, “What a nice little place.” Bob felt her disappointment and frustration regarding the Chip situation, and he wanted her to know how much everyone at the center liked and appreciated her. Maria in turn intuited that something bulkily sincere was moving in her direction and she told Bob she was too tired to field anything of the sort. “One kind word and I’ll burst into tears, Bob, I’m serious.” Bob said that he understood and thanked her for the ride and exited the car and walked up the snow-covered path to the house. There was the sound of his footsteps and of Maria’s car driving away. There was the sound of his keys jingling, and the soft sound of his breathing. The house was completely silent. He went upstairs and drew a bath and bathed and put on his pajamas and lay down to sleep but couldn’t sleep. He put on his robe and came downstairs and sat on the couch to read but couldn’t do that, either. He moved to sit in the kitchen nook and look out the picture window. All was still, the snow glittering in the moonlight, untouched save for Maria’s car tracks and his own footsteps. Bob was thinking of the events of the day. Nobody had congratulated him on finding Chip, and he wondered if anybody ever would. No one will ever thank you, he remembered Maria telling him. It occurred to Bob that he would never have come to the center in the first place if it weren’t for Chip; and how curious a thing it was that their story had looped back onto itself at the 7-Eleven. Bob thought of Chip’s son, and the look of anger on his face, but also how handsome he was, and of the unlikeliness that Chip should sire such a specimen. He had looked familiar, Bob realized, like some famous bygone film actor, or politician. Or was it a face from the past, a library regular? It nagged at Bob, and he made to locate the answer. The furnace groaned in the basement and now the heat came on and Connie’s dress, which Bob had never put away, started its undulations, and something in this visual delivered Bob the answer to his question; and when the answer arrived, then did Bob shoot away from himself for one airborne moment, as if his tether had been cut. Chip’s son looked like Ethan. Bob covered his shut mouth with his hand. He worked out a problem of arithmetic in his mind. The data was sound and he crossed the kitchen to seek out Maria’s business card and found it pinned to the cork board beside the phone on the wall. The clock on the oven said it was almost two o’clock in the morning but Bob couldn’t not call, and he punched in the number and waited. It rang four times and went to voicemail. He called again and Maria picked up but didn’t speak. Bob said, “What’s Chip’s real name?” Maria wasn’t fully awake; she thought she’d entered another chamber of the multivenue persecution nightmare she’d been having relating to Chip’s disappearance. In a crouching voice she said, “Connie Augustine,” then hung up the phone.