The Nix

1

“HELLO? Hello?”

“Yes? Hello?”

“Hello? Samuel? Can you hear me?”

“Barely. Where are you?”

“It’s me, Periwinkle! Are you there?”

“What’s that noise?”

“I’m in a parade!”

“Why are you calling me from a parade?”

“I’m not really in the parade! More like walking directly behind it! I’m calling about your e-mail! I read your e-mail!”

“Is there a tuba right next to your head?”

“What?”

“That noise!”

“So I wanted to call and say I read the—” Sudden silence on the line, a muffled indistinct digital gibberish, signal coming into and out of strength, a robotic garble, the sound all compressed and Dopplerized. Then: “—is what we expected, more or less. Can you do that for me?”

“I missed literally everything you said.”

“What?”

“You’re cutting out! I can’t hear you!”

“It’s Periwinkle, goddammit!”

“I know that. Where are you?”

“Disney World!”

“It sounds like you’re in the middle of a marching band.”

“One second!”

Seashell-like whooshing sounds, friction noises as a thumb or the wind passes over the microphone, abstract musical whooping, then a diminishment, as if Periwinkle were suddenly encased in a thick lead box.

“How’s that? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Cell coverage seems bad at the moment. Bandwidth problems, I’m guessing.”

“Why are you at Disney World?”

“For Molly Miller. We’re promoting her new video. Cross-promo’d with the reissue of a classic Disney animated film, now digitally remastered and in 3-D. I think it might be Bambi? All the parents are filming the parade with their phones and texting their friends. I think it’s jamming the cell towers. Have you ever been to Disney World?”

“No.”

“I’ve never seen a place so utterly committed to dead technology. Animatronics everywhere. Automatons with their wooden parts clacking together. I guess it’s quaint?”

“Is the parade over?”

“No, I ducked into a store. Ye Olde Soda Shoppe, it says. I’m in this facsimile of Main Street USA. This charming little street that multinationals like Disney helped annihilate in the real world. Nobody here seems to mind the irony, though.”

“I am having trouble imagining you enjoying things like roller coasters. Or children.”

“Every ride, it’s the same conceit: agonizingly slow boat trip through robot wonderland. Like that ride It’s a Small World, which by the way is just a horror of narcotized puppets doing the same rote tasks over and over in what I’m sure Disney totally did not intend to be an accurate and prescient vision of third world labor.”

“I believe that ride is supposed to be about international unity and global peace.”

“Uh-huh. The Norway ride at Epcot was like floating through a life-size pamphlet for the oil and natural gas industries. And there’s this one ride called the Carousel of Progress. Heard of it?”

“No.”

“Originally made for the 1964 World’s Fair. Animatronic theater. A guy and his family. The first act is in 1904 and the guy marvels at all the recent inventions: gas lamps, irons, washing cranks. The amazing stereoscope. The incredible gramophone. You get the idea? The wife says it now only takes her five hours to do the laundry and we all laugh.”

“They think they have it easy, but we know better.”

“Right. Between each act they sing this terrible song that is so catchy in a uniquely Disney way.”

“Sing it.”

“No. But the chorus goes like ‘It’s a great big beautiful tomorrooooooow.’ ”

“Okay, don’t sing it.”

“Song about unending progress. Been stuck in my head nonstop and I think at this point I’d lobotomize myself to remove it. Anyway, they move on to the twenties in the second act. The age of electricity. Sewing machines. Toasters. Waffle irons. Icebox. Fan. Radio. Third act is in the forties. There’s a dishwasher now. And a big refrigerator. You see where this is going.”

“Technology keeps making everyone’s life better and easier. Unstoppable forward movement.”

“Yeah. What an adorable mid-sixties conceit that was, eh? Everything is going to improve. Hah. I swear to god, me being at Disney World is like Darwin being at Galápagos. And by the way, the employees of the soda fountain have been smiling at me like maniacs this entire time. There must be a rule, a smiling-at-the-customer rule. Even when I’m on the phone and”—yelling now—“OBVIOUSLY NOT INTERESTED IN A CREAM SODA!”

“You said you read my e-mail? I didn’t hear anything you said after that.”

“They are smiling like drunk children. Like gnomes on Ecstasy. It must take an enormous act of willpower to do that every day. And yes, I did read your e-mail, your description of the mother-in-high-school material. Read it on the plane.”

“And?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that there’s very little information about throwing fucking rocks at Governor fucking Packer.”

“I’m getting to that.”

“Zero information, in fact. Absolutely fucking nothing, would be my rough estimate.”

“That comes later. I have to set it up.”

“Set it up. How many hundreds of pages will that take, exactly?”

“I’m going where the story is.”

“You agreed to deliver a book that told your mother’s story while also ripping her to shreds, rhetorically.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s the ‘ripping her to shreds’ part I’m worried about right now. Because Son of Packer Attacker Defends His Mom might be persuasive in a few quarters, but Packer Attacker Gets Eviscerated by Own Flesh and Blood has serious appeal.”

“I’m trying to tell the truth.”

“Plus it’s a little coming-of-agey.”

“You didn’t like it much, did you.”

“Slipped into some familiar coming-of-age conventions, is all I’m saying. Also what’s the big message here? What’s the life lesson?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise. So what’s your book going to help people do better? What is it going to teach?”

“I have not thought about that for even one second.”

“How about, for your life lesson: Vote Republican.”

“No. That is not at all what I’m writing about. Not in the same galaxy.”

“Listen to Mister Artist Guy all of a sudden. Look. In today’s market, most readers want books with accessible, linear narratives that rely on big concepts and easy life lessons. The life lessons in your mother’s story are, to put it kindly, diffused.”

“What’s the big life lesson in Molly Miller’s book?”

“Simple: Life Is Great!”

“Well, that’s pretty easy for her to say. Born into money. Prep schools on the Upper East Side. Billionaire at twenty-two.”

“You’d be amazed at the facts people are willing to set aside to believe that life is, indeed, great.”

“Life is hardly great.”

“And this is why we need Molly Miller. The country is falling apart around us. This is plain even to the pay-no-attention-at-all crowd, even to the low-information undecided-voter segment. It’s all crumbling right in front of our eyes. People lose their jobs, their pensions disappear overnight, they keep getting those quarterly statements showing their retirement funds are worth ten percent less for the sixth quarter in a row, and their houses are worth half what they paid for them, and their bosses can’t get a loan to make payroll, and Washington is a circus, and they have homes full of interesting technology and they look at their smartphones and wonder ‘How could a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?’ This is what they wonder. We’ve done studies on this. What was my point?”

“About Molly Miller, life being great.”

“Here’s how desperate people are for good news. Rolling Stone wanted an interview with Molly. But because they were reporting on her writing and not her music, they said they wanted it more ‘real.’ A more real interview, to reflect the more real memoir, I guess? Setting aside for a moment that the memoir itself was focus-grouped and ghostwritten? And that the ‘more real’ Rolling Stone interview would be staged from the get-go? What they wanted wasn’t reality, per se, but a simulation that felt closer to reality than their usual simulations. But whatever. We brainstormed and spitballed and one of our junior publicists, this recent Yale grad who is going places let me tell you, he has this dazzling idea. He says let’s have them watch her make pasta at home. Brilliant, right?”

“I’m guessing there’s a special reason it was pasta.”

“It focus-tests better than meat. Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform. Pasta is still pretty neutral, unobjectionable. And of course we’d never show anyone what she really actually eats.”

“Why? What does she eat?”

“Steamed cabbage and mushroom broth, mostly. A reporter sees that and it becomes a different kind of story altogether. How the poor teen idol is starving herself to death. Then we get dragged into the whole body-image debate, which no one ever scored any mass public points arguing either side of, ever.”

“I don’t think I really want to read about Molly Miller making pasta.”

“In the face of national calamity and utter annihilation of their personal prospects, people generally go in one of two directions. We have reams of paper showing this. They either get righteously indignant and hyperaware, in which case they’ll usually begin posting libertarian screeds on iFeel or something, or they’ll sink into a somewhat comfortable ignorance, in which case Molly Miller warming up marinara out of a jar is pleasantly and weirdly diverting.”

“You’re making it sound like a public service.”

“There is no creature more arrogant than a self-righteous libertarian on the web, am I right? Those folks are just intolerable. And yes, it is a public service. You want to know my secret hope for your book?”

“Sure.”

“That it’s the one to replace Molly’s on the best-seller list. You know why?”

“I find that wildly improbable.”

“Because there are very few products that appeal to those two groups of people: the angry and the ignorant. Very few products can make that jump.”

“But my mom’s story—”

“We’ve tested this. Your mom has huge crossover appeal. This is rare and usually unpredictable, the thing that pops out of culture and becomes universal. Everyone sees what they want to see in your mom, everyone gets to be offended in their own special way. Your mother’s story allows people of any political stripe to say ‘Shame on you,’ which is just delicious these days. It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

“I’ll be sure to work on that.”

“Remember, less empathy, more carnage. That’s advice, me to you. And by the way? Those ghostwriters we used for Molly’s book? They’re available. I have them on retainer, should you need assistance writing your book.”

“No thank you.”

“They are seriously professional and discreet.”

“I can write the book myself.”

“I’m sure you would like to write the book yourself, but your record is not what I might call promising, book-finishing-wise.”

“This time is different.”

“I’m not judging you, simply pointing out certain historical facts. Speaking of which? All these years, I have never asked: Why couldn’t you finish your first book?”

“It’s not that I couldn’t finish it—”

“I’m curious. What happened? Did I not send enough letters of encouragement and praise? Did you lose your inspiration? Did your ambition buckle under the weight of expectations? Were you — what do they call it—blocked?”

“None of those things, really. I just made a few bad decisions.”

“A few bad decisions. That’s how people explain a hangover.”

“There were some poor choices made, on my part.”

“That is a pretty blithe way of explaining your total failure to become a famous writer.”

“You know, I’d always wanted to be a famous writer. I thought being a famous writer would help me solve certain problems. And then suddenly I was a famous writer and the problems weren’t solved at all.”

“Certain problems?”

“Let’s just say there was a girl involved.”

“Oh lord, I’m sorry I asked.”

“A girl I very much wanted to make a big impression on.”

“Let me guess. You became a writer to impress a girl. And then you didn’t get the girl.”

“Yes.”

“This happens, not surprisingly, all the time.”

“I keep thinking I could have gotten it right. I could have gotten the girl. I just needed to do things a little differently. I just needed to make some better choices.”

2

YOU CAN GET THE GIRL! A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

This is no ordinary story. In this story, the outcome depends on the decisions you make. Think carefully about your choices, as they will affect how the story ends.

You are a timid and shy and hopeless young man who for some reason wants to be a novelist.

A really important one. Like a really big deal. Award-winning, even. You think that the way to fix the problem of your life is to become a famous author. But how?

Turns out, it’s easy. You don’t know it, but you already have all the qualities you will need. Everything is already in motion.

First, and this is essential: You feel hopelessly, irredeemably unloved.

You feel abandoned and unappreciated by the people in your life.

Especially women.

Especially your mother.

Your mother and a certain girl you become obsessed with in childhood, a girl who makes you feel all woozy and manic and fuzzy-headed and disconsolate. Her name is Bethany, and she does to you roughly what fire does to a log.

Her family moves to the East Coast shortly after your mother abandons you. These events are not related, but they feel connected in your head, the great pivot point of your life, that month in early autumn when your childhood cracks in two. When she leaves, Bethany promises she will write, and she does: Every year, once a year, on your birthday, you get a letter from Bethany. And you read it and write back immediately, write like a maniac until three o’clock in the morning, draft after failed draft, trying to achieve exactly the perfect letter to send back to her. Then for a month afterward your mailbox-checking is obsessive-compulsive. But nothing comes, not for another year, when on your birthday another letter from Bethany arrives, full of updates. She is living in D.C. now. She is still playing the violin. She is taking lessons from all the best people. They say she has great promise. Her brother is going to a military boarding school. He loves it. Her father spends most of his time in their Manhattan apartment now. The trees are blooming. Bishop says hi. School is nice.

And you are despondent about the neutral and cold tone of the letter until you reach the end, where she’s signed it:

Love you,

Bethany

She does not sign it “With love” or “All my love” or any of the things one can say without really meaning them. Bethany writes “Love you,” and these two words sustain you for a whole year. Because why would she say “Love you” unless she really loves you? Why wouldn’t she use one of those sign-offs everyone else uses? All best. Be well. Yours sincerely.

No, she says “Love you.”

But of course there is the problem of the letter itself, which is so impersonal and safe and harmless and devoid of romance or love. How to explain this dissonance?

You decide that her parents are reading the letters.

They are monitoring her communication with you. Because even though you were never formally implicated in any of it, you were best friends with Bethany’s brother during a time when Bishop was doing some pretty fucked-up shit to the headmaster of his school. And so her parents probably do not approve of you, nor of their daughter’s love for you. Thus, the only place she can sneak that message past the censors is in the valediction, where she writes, crucially, “Love you.”

When you write back, you assume the letter will be inspected. So you tell Bethany about the bland details of your life while also trying to hint at your enormous love for her. You imagine she can sense your love at the edges of the letter, hovering ghostlike over the words, barely beyond her parents’ comprehension. And of course at the end of the letter you sign it “Love you too” just to show her that you got the message — the real message — of her letter. And this is how the two of you communicate, like spies during wartime, sending a single meaningful fact obscured in a cloud of banality.

Then you wait a year for another letter.

And in the meantime you count the days until you both graduate high school and go to college and, no longer under her parents’ scrutiny, she will be free to express her real, true, deep feelings. And during this time you entertain fantasies of attending the same college she does and becoming campus sweethearts and how awesome it would be to attend parties with Bethany on your arm, how much instant credibility you’d have being the guy dating the violin prodigy, the beautiful violin prodigy (no, gorgeous, actually, stunning, and you know this because she occasionally sends a new picture of herself and her brother in the annual letter, where on the back of the picture she writes “Miss you! B&B” and you put the photo on your nightstand and during the first week with the new photo you barely sleep because you wake up hourly having these weird nightmares where the photo is blowing away or disintegrating or someone is sneaking into your bedroom to steal the photo or something). And you seriously believe you’ll be attending the same college all the way up until Bethany gets into Juilliard, and you tell your father you want to go to Juilliard, and your father raises an eyebrow and says “Yeah, okay” in a really dismissive manner that you don’t understand until you find a brochure for Juilliard at your high-school guidance office and discover that Juilliard is pretty much only for people in music, theater, and dance. Plus tuition is like ten times your father’s stated budget.

So, shit.

You revise the plan and tell your father you are not going to Juilliard but instead somewhere in New York City.

“Maybe Columbia,” you say, because that campus looked very close to Juilliard on the map of New York you found in the high-school library. “Or NYU?”

Henry, who at that moment is testing the consistency of a new-concept “quiche” frozen dinner by swishing the eggy liquid batter around in his mouth and making notes on a fifteen-step flowchart, stops for a moment, swallows, looks at you, and says, “Too dangerous.”

“Oh come on.”

“New York City is the murder capital of the world. No way.”

“It’s not dangerous. Or if it is, at least the campus isn’t dangerous. I’ll stay on campus.”

“Listen. How do I say this? You live on Oakdale Lane. There isn’t a single Oakdale Lane in New York City. It is nothing at all like this. You will be eaten alive.”

“There are lanes in New York,” you say. “I’ll be fine.”

“You’re not catching my symbolism. See? This is exactly my point. There are people from the Street. And, other side of the spectrum? There are people like us, from Lanes.”

“Stop it, Dad.”

“Besides,” he says, returning to his quiche, “it’s way too expensive. We can afford public, in-state. That’s it.”

Which is where you end up, and where you discover this thing called e-mail, which all the students use now, and in your next letter from Bethany she gives you her e-mail address and you send her an e-mail and after that the paper letters stop forever. The upside here is that you and Bethany can write each other much more often, even weekly now. E-mail is so immediate. This seems great until about a month in, when you realize the downside is the lack of any physical object, any actual thing that Bethany has touched, which in your teenage years often soothed you, holding the thick paper she used, covered with her neat cursive — Bethany was a thousand miles away but this thing could fill in for her. You could close your eyes and hold the letter and almost feel her touches on the paper, her fingers running across each page, her tongue licking the envelope. It was an act of imagination and faith, a Christlike transubstantiation, this thing becoming, for a moment, in your mind, a body. Her body. Which is why after the e-mails start and you write each other all the time, you feel more lonely than ever. Her physical embodiment has disappeared.

As has the “Love you.”

At college, at Juilliard, the “Love you” at the end of her correspondence switches quickly to “Love ya,” which stings. “Love ya” seems to be what happens to real love when its formality and dignity are amputated.

The other problem is that despite the fact that Bethany is no longer under her parents’ rule, her letters do not substantially change. The best way to describe their tone is informational. Like a guide on a campus tour. Given the chance to finally express her true feelings, Bethany falls back into the familiar patterns, giving updates, sharing news. It is like, after nine years of writing this way, she has written herself into a rut. It is so familiar it becomes the only way she can converse. And no matter how much news you get — that some classes are easy (like Ear Training) and some classes are hard (like Diatonic Harmony), that the cellist in her chamber group is really talented, that dorm food is bad, that her roommate is a percussionist from California who gives herself regular migraines from cymbal practice — there is a quality to this information that seems to lack warmth or humanity. It lacks intimacy. It is romanceless.

And then Bethany starts telling you about boys. Flirty boys. Brash boys at parties who make her laugh so hard she spills her drink. Boys, usually brass players, usually trombonists, who ask her out on dates. Further, she says yes. Further, the dates are fun. And you boil inside your skin that you’ve been pining for this woman for nine years and suddenly these guys, these strangers, have more success with her in one night than you’ve had your whole life. It’s unjust. You deserve better, after what you’ve been through. This is about the time that “Love you” turns to “Love ya,” which then turns to “Love,” which eventually becomes “xoxo,” and by then you realize that something fundamental has shifted in the nature of your relationship. Somewhere along the way, you missed your chance.

This is, incidentally, an essential step in becoming a famous writer. This failure. It gives you a rich inner life, fantasizing about all the ways you might not have screwed it up, and all the ways to win Bethany back. Top of the list: Beat the trombone boys. Method: Writing deep and pseudo-intellectual and artsy and important literary fiction. Because you are not a person who can make Bethany laugh until she spills her drink. You cannot compete with the trombone boys on this front. Because you always become deadly serious and formal when you think about her or write to her. It’s like a religious response, becoming solemn and official in the face of that which could annihilate you. When it comes to Bethany, you are utterly without humor.

And so you write humorless stories about Big Social Issues and you congratulate yourself because the funny trombone boys wouldn’t touch Big Social Issues with a ten-foot pole. (“Ten-foot pole” being a cliché that the trombone boys would use unthinkingly but you, as an artist who does all things originally, would not.) You believe that the point of being a writer is to show Bethany how much more unique and special you are than the same-feeling, same-doing masses. You believe that becoming a writer is the life equivalent of wearing the most creative and interesting Halloween costume at the party. When you decide to become a writer — this is in your early twenties, when you do that really important-seeming thing where you go to grad school to study “Writing, Creative”—you throw yourself into the lifestyle: You go to artsy readings; hang out in coffee shops; wear black; build a whole dark melancholic wardrobe that might best be described as postapocalyptic/postholocaust; drink alcohol, often late into the night; buy journals, leather-bound; pens, heavy and metal, never ballpoint, never clicky; and cigarettes, first the normal kind, the brands that everyone buys at the gas station, then fancy European numbers that come in long flat boxes that you can find only at special tobacco stores and head shops. The cigarettes give you something to do when you are out in public and feel like you’re being examined and appraised and judged. They serve the same function the smartphone will in about fifteen years: a kind of social shield, something to pull out of your pocket and fiddle with when you feel awkward about yourself. Which you feel pretty much all the time, and for which you blame your mother.

You never write about this, of course. You typically avoid all introspection. There are things inside you that you prefer to ignore. There is a molten mass of anguish and self-pity way deep inside you and you keep it pressed down there by never looking at it or acknowledging it. When you write, you don’t write about yourself. Instead, you write dark and heavy and violent stories that get you the reputation that maybe you have secrets. Maybe some really brutal shit went down in your past. You write a story about an abusive alcoholic plastic surgeon who gets drunk every night and rapes his teenage daughter in unimaginably cruel ways, a horror that continues through most of her high-school years until one day the girl comes up with a plan to murder dad by slipping huge amounts of botulinum toxin pilfered from his Botox stores into the maraschino cherry supply, so that after several old-fashioneds the father is reduced to total paralysis, whereby the daughter invites this brutal gay psychopath she met under shadowy circumstances to rape the father repeatedly while the father is totally conscious to experience all of it, and then after getting his proper comeuppance he is killed when the daughter cuts off his genitalia and allows him to bleed to death slowly over a period of seven days down in the basement where no one can hear him scream.

In other words, you write stories that have nothing to do with your life or really anything you know anything about.

And while you write these stories, all you care about is what Bethany will think reading them. The stories are really just a large ongoing performance that has a single goal: To get Bethany to feel certain things about you. To make her believe you are talented, artsy, brilliant, deep. To make her love you again.

The paradox here is that you never show her any of these stories.

Because even though you hang out with the writing crowd and take the writing classes and dress like a writer and smoke like a writer, ultimately you have to recognize that your writing isn’t very good. It earns a lukewarm reception in classes, unenthusiastic feedback from teachers, loads of anonymous form rejections from the editors you query. The worst is when a teacher asks in an unusually intense office-hours visit, “Why do you want to be a writer?”

The subtext here being, of course, maybe you shouldn’t.

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer” is your pat response. An answer that is not altogether true. You didn’t always want to be a writer but rather wanted to be a writer ever since your mother abandoned you, at age eleven, and because life before that feels like an altogether different person’s life, it might as well have been always. You were, essentially, reborn on that day.

This is not something you tell your teacher. This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside. The morning your mother disappeared, especially, is stuffed way down deep, your mother asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up. And you said a novelist, and she smiled and kissed your forehead and said she’d be reading whatever you wrote. And so becoming a writer was the only communication you’d have with your mother, a one-way communication, like prayer. And you thought if you wrote something really great that she’d read it and, by some strange calculus, it would prove to her that she should never have left.

Problem is, you can’t write anything near this level of quality. Not even close. Despite all the training, there is an elusive element missing.

“Truth,” suggests your teacher in the end-of-year meeting, when you are called into the office because you have one more story to write before graduation and so your teacher wants to impress upon you in a last-ditch way that you absolutely have to “write something that’s true.”

“But I write fiction,” you say.

“I don’t care what you call it,” the teacher says. “Just write something true.”

So you write about one of the only true things that ever happened to you. A story about a pair of twins living in the Chicago suburbs. The sister is a violin prodigy. The brother is a troublemaker. They sit tensely at the dinner table under the imperious gaze of their stockbroker father, then are released into the night where they have adventures, among them the slow poisoning of the Jacuzzi belonging to their neighbor, the headmaster of their elite private school. The manner of poisoning is simple: pesticide overdose. But the explanation? Why does the brother want to poison the headmaster? What has the headmaster done to deserve it?

This one is easy to answer, but difficult to write.

It all clicked a few years ago. You finally connected the dots you were unable to connect when you were eleven. Why Bishop seemed to know things beyond his years. Sexual things. Like at the pond that final afternoon together when he pressed himself into you in exactly the correct position for sex — how did he know that? How did he know to do that? How did he know to seduce the principal to avoid a paddling? Where did he get all that pornography, all those creepy Polaroids? Why was he acting out? Becoming a bully? Getting expelled from school? Killing small animals? Poisoning the headmaster?

The moment you grasped this and suddenly understood it you were in high school, walking to school one morning, and you weren’t even thinking about Bishop or the headmaster or any of it when suddenly it came to you all at once, like in a vision, like your mind had been putting it together all this time beneath the surface: Bishop was being abused. Molested. Of course he was. And the headmaster was doing it.

And the guilt washed over you so hard you staggered. You sat down right in someone’s front yard, dizzy, dumbfounded, astonished, and missed the first three periods of school. You felt like you’d broken open right there on the lawn.

Why hadn’t you seen it? You’d been so wrapped up in your little dramas — your crush on Bethany, buying her a gift at the mall, which at the time seemed like the biggest problem in the world — so wrapped up that you didn’t see this tragedy happening right in front of you. It was an immense failure of perception and empathy.

Which is maybe why you decide finally to write about it. In your story about the twins, you describe how the brother is being abused by the headmaster. You don’t tiptoe around it; you don’t evade it. You write it the way you think it happened. You write it true.

Your classmates are, predictably, bored with it. They are by this time weary of you and your subject matter. Yet another child-abuse story, they say. Seen it before. Move on. But your teacher is unusually enthusiastic. He says there is a different quality to this story, a measure of humanity and generosity and warmth and feeling that was missing from your earlier efforts. Then, during another private chat, the teacher mentions that a bigwig New York publishing guy named Periwinkle has been asking around, trying to find new young talent, and could he, the teacher, send him this story?

This is the final step in becoming a famous writer. This is the final step in fulfilling the ambition you’ve had since your mother walked out: impressing her from afar, winning her approval and praise. And this is the last thing you need to do to get Bethany to notice you again, to see the very special qualities that the trombone boys can’t compete with, to get her to love you the way you should be loved.

All you have to do is say yes.

To say yes, go to the next page…

3

You say yes. You don’t even think about the long-term consequences of this. You don’t once consider how Bethany or Bishop might feel about this violation of their privacy. You are so blinded by your desire to impress and dazzle and awe the people who left you that you say yes. Yes, absolutely.

So the teacher sends the story to Periwinkle, and things happen pretty fast after that. Periwinkle phones the next day. He tells you that you’re an important new voice in American letters, and he wants you for a new imprint featuring only the work of young geniuses.

“We don’t have a name for the press yet, but we’re thinking of calling it The Next Voice,” Periwinkle says, “or maybe Next, or maybe even Lime, which many of the consultants seem really fond of, weirdly.”

Periwinkle hires a few ghostwriters to smooth out the story—“Totally normal,” he says, “everyone does it”—then works to get it placed in one of the huge taste-maker magazines, where you are declared one of the five best writers under twenty-five in America. Periwinkle then leverages that publicity to finagle a ridiculous contract for a book that hasn’t even been written yet. This gets into the papers along with all of the other good news of early 2001: the information superhighway, the New Economy, the nation’s engine humming powerfully forward.

Congratulations.

You are now a famous writer.

But two things keep you from enjoying this. The first is that there is no word from your mother. Instead, there is just a wretched silence. There is no evidence she has even seen the story.

The second is that Bethany — who absolutely does see the story — stops writing. No e-mails, no letters, no explanation. You write her wondering if something is wrong. Then you assume there is definitely something wrong and you ask to talk about it. Then you assume that the thing that’s wrong is that you completely stole her brother’s story and profited immensely from it, and so you try to justify this move as a writer’s prerogative while also apologizing for not clearing it with her first. None of these letters are answered, and eventually you understand that the story you hoped would win Bethany back has, perversely, killed any chance you may have had with her.

You don’t hear from Bethany for years, during which time you do no writing whatsoever, despite monthly encouraging phone calls from Periwinkle, who is eager to see a manuscript. But there is no manuscript to see. You wake up every morning intending to write but you don’t, ultimately, write. You can’t really say what exactly you spend your days doing, except that it is not writing. The months fly by, filled with not-writing. You buy a big new house with all your advance money and you do not write in it. You use your bit of fame to snag a teaching job at a local college, where you teach students about literature but make no literature yourself. It’s not that you’re “blocked,” exactly. It’s simply that your reason to write, your primary motivation, has melted away.

Bethany does eventually send another e-mail. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an e-mail that she sends to about a hundred people that says, simply, “I’m safe.”

Then in the early spring of 2004, on a day that is otherwise completely insignificant, you see in your in-box a message from Bethany Fall and you read the first paragraph about how she has something very important to tell you and your heart is popping because the thing she needs to confess, you decide, has to be her deep lifelong enduring love for you.

But that’s not it at all. You realize this when you come to the next paragraph, which begins with a sentence that cracks you open all over again: “Bishop,” she writes, “is dead.”

It happened last October. In Iraq. He was standing next to a bomb when it detonated. She’s sorry she didn’t tell you sooner.

You write back begging for details. Turns out after Bishop graduated military prep school he went to college at the Virginia Military Institute, and after he graduated he enlisted in the army as a normal soldier. Nobody could figure it out. All his education and training entitled him to a commission and officer’s rank, which he refused. He seemed to enjoy refusing it, seemed to enjoy taking the more difficult, less glamorous path. By this time, he and Bethany weren’t really talking. They’d been growing distant for a while. For years they had only seen each other at rare holidays. He enlisted in 1999 and spent two uneventful years in Germany before September 11, after which he was deployed to Afghanistan for a time, then Iraq. They’d hear from him only a couple of times a year, in short e-mails that read like business memos. Bethany was becoming a seriously successful violin soloist, and in her letters to Bishop she’d tell him all the things that were happening to her — all the venues she played, the conductors she worked with — but she never heard back. Not for another six months, when she’d get a quick impersonal e-mail with his new coordinates and his typically formal sign-off: Respectfully, Pfc Bishop Fall, United States Army.

Then he died.

You spend a long time feeling miserable about this, feeling in some way that your brief friendship with Bishop was a test you failed. Here was a person who needed help, and you did not help him, and now it was too late. And you write a letter to Bethany expressing this misery because she is the only person who would understand it, and it’s probably the only letter you’ve ever sent her that is utterly without guile, without subterfuge or ulterior motive, the first time you aren’t self-consciously trying to get her to like you and instead just sincerely expressing a true emotion, which is that you feel sad. And this letter begins a thawing in your relationship with Bethany. She writes back and says she too is sad. And you both have this in common, this sadness, and you grieve together and the months go by and your letters begin to move on to other subjects and your grief seems to lift and then one day Bethany signs her letter — for the first time in years—“With love.” And all your guile and obsession ignites again. You think: I might still have a chance! All your love and neediness comes back, especially when she writes one day in the first week of August 2004 and invites you to New York. She asks you to come at the end of the month. There will be a march, she says, through the streets of Manhattan. The idea is a silent vigil honoring soldiers who’ve died in Iraq. It will happen during the Republican National Convention, which will be under way at Madison Square Garden. She wants to know if you’ll come march with her. You can stay at her place.

And suddenly your nights are sleepless and agitated as you fantasize about seeing Bethany again and you worry about not screwing up what is obviously your very last chance to capture her heart. It’s like you are living the plot of the Choose Your Own Adventure books you loved as a child, and it’s up to you to make the right choices. This is all you can think about until the very day you leave: In New York, if you do everything right, if you choose correctly, you can get the girl.

To go to New York, go to the next page…

4

You drive from Chicago to New York, stopping once in Ohio for fuel, again in Pennsylvania for sleep, checking into a shabby hotel you’re too amped up to actually sleep in. Next day, well before dawn, you drive the rest of the way and stash your car in a parking garage in Queens and take the subway into the city. You walk up the stairs from the subway station into the mid-morning light and crowds of downtown Manhattan. Bethany lives on one of the upper floors of the building at 55 Liberty Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, which is where you are right now, at this moment, in 2004. Where the towers once stood is now a well-cleared and poignant hole in the ground.

You walk its perimeter, past street vendors selling falafel or candied nuts, guys hawking purses and watches laid out on blankets on the ground, conspiracy theorists handing you pamphlets about 9/11 being an inside job or seeing the face of Satan in the smoke of Tower Two, tourists on tiptoe craning their necks to see above the fence and holding their cameras aloft and checking the picture, then doing it again. You walk past all this, past the department store on the other side of the street where European tourists taking advantage of the weak dollar and surging euro load their bags with jeans and jackets, past a coffee shop with a sign that says NO FREE BATHROOMS, down Liberty Street where a mom tugging her two children asks “Which way to 9/11?” until you’re there, Liberty and Nassau, Bethany’s apartment.

You know all about this building. You’d looked it up before coming. Built in 1909 as the “tallest small building in the world” (due to narrow lot size), with a foundation going five stories down, unnecessarily deep for a building that size, but the architects of 1909 didn’t yet understand skyscraper construction, so they overdid it. Was built next door to the New York Chamber of Commerce, which has since been converted into the New York office of the Central Bank of China. Just across Nassau Street from the ass-end of the Federal Reserve Bank. Teddy Roosevelt’s law office was among the first tenants.

You walk through the front doors, past a wrought-iron gate, and into the golden lobby, tiled floor-to-ceiling with polished cream-colored stone slabs pressed so close together you can’t see the seams. The whole place feels airtight. You approach the guard desk and tell the man sitting there you are here to see Bethany Fall.

“Name?” he says. You tell him. He picks up a phone and dials. He stares at you while he waits. His eyelids look heavy from sleeplessness or boredom. It seems to take a long time for someone to pick up, long enough that the guard’s stare becomes uncomfortable and so you break eye contact and pretend to look around the lobby, admiring its austere tidiness. You notice the total lack of bare lightbulbs, as every light source has been cleverly hidden inside recesses and alcoves, making the space seem less like it’s lit and more like it’s being thoroughly glowed upon.

“Miss Fall?” the guard finally says. “Got a Samuel Anderson to see you?”

The guard keeps staring. He has no expression whatsoever.

“Okay.” He hangs up and does some motion under the desk — turns a key, flips a switch — something that makes the elevator doors open.

“Thanks,” you say, but the guard is staring at his computer, ignoring you.

To go up to Bethany’s apartment, go to the next page…

5

On the way up to Bethany’s apartment, you wonder how long you can reasonably wait in the hall before she’ll think you’ve gotten lost. You’re feeling like you need a minute to compose yourself. You’re having that hollowed-out nervous feeling like all your insides have fallen into your feet. You try to convince yourself that it’s foolish to feel this way, foolish to feel so nervous over Bethany. After all, you only really knew her for three months. When you were eleven years old. Silly. Almost comical. How could someone like this have any sway over you? Of all the people in your life, why does this one matter so much? This is what you tell yourself, which does very little to calm the riot in your belly.

The elevator stops. The doors slide open. You had been expecting a hallway or corridor, like at a hotel, but instead the elevator opens directly into a blazingly sunlit apartment.

Of course. She owns the whole floor.

And walking toward you right now is someone who is definitely not Bethany. A man, about your age — late twenties, maybe early thirties. Pressed white shirt. Skinny black tie. Perfectly rigid posture and down-his-nose gaze. He’s wearing an expensive-looking watch. You consider each other a moment, and you’re about to say you have the wrong apartment when he says, “You must be the writer.” And there’s something about the way he inflects the word writer that carries an edge, like he doesn’t believe writer is a real profession and so he says it like someone might say, “You must be the psychic.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” you say. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for—”

And at that moment, behind him, just past his shoulder, she appears.

“Bethany.”

For a moment it’s as if you had forgotten what she looked like, as if all those photos she packed in her letters never existed, as if you had never scoured the internet finding all manner of publicity portraits, concert photos, after-party candids with Bethany standing next to some wealthy donor smiling and hugging — it’s as if all you have is that memory of her practicing the violin in her room when she thought she was alone and you were peeking around the corner and you were a child and you were in love. And how much she resembles that vision here in her apartment, that same self-contained, self-possessed, easy confidence — so formal, even now, as she strides toward you and embraces you with a platonic hug and kisses your cheek in the way she’s kissed the cheeks of a thousand friends, fans, well-wishers, where it’s less a kiss than the suggestion of one in the atmosphere around your ear, and how she says “Samuel, I’d like to introduce you to Peter Atchison, my fiancé,” as if there’s nothing at all odd about that. Her fiancé?

Peter shakes your hand. “Pleasure,” he says.

Then Bethany gives you a tour while your heart plummets and you feel like the stupidest man on earth. You do your best to listen, to act like you’re really interested in hearing about the apartment, which is windowed on all sides so you can see the construction equipment over the World Trade Center site to the west, and Wall Street to the south.

“This is my father’s apartment,” she says, “but he doesn’t come here anymore. Not since he retired.”

She spins on her heel and smiles at you.

“Did you know that Teddy Roosevelt used to work here?”

You pretend not to know this fact.

“He was a banker at the beginning of his career,” she says. “Like Peter.”

“Hah!” Peter says. He slaps you on the back. “Talk about great expectations, eh?”

“Peter worked with my father,” Bethany says.

“Worked for your father,” he says. Bethany waves him off.

“Peter is really very brilliant at finance.”

“Am not.”

“Are too!” she says. “He discovered that a certain number, a formula, or algorithm, or something — anyway, it was this thing people were using and he realized it was wrong. Honey, you explain it.”

“I don’t want to bore our guest.”

“But it’s interesting.”

“Do you really want to know about this?”

You absolutely do not want to know about this. You nod.

“Well, I won’t go too much into it,” he says, “but it’s about the C-Ratio. You heard of it?”

You are not sure if he meant C or see or sea. You say, “Remind me.”

“Basically it’s a number investors use to predict volatility in the precious metal markets.”

“Peter realized it was wrong,” Bethany says.

“Under certain circumstances. Under very specific circumstances, the C-Ratio stops being a useful predictor. It lags behind the market. It’s like…how do I describe it? It’s like believing the thermometer is the thing that’s making it hot.”

“Isn’t that brilliant?” Bethany says.

“And so while everyone was betting with the C-Ratio, I bet against it. And the rest is history.”

“Isn’t that so brilliant?”

They’re both looking at you now, waiting.

“Brilliant,” you say.

Bethany smiles at her fiancé. The diamond on her finger might best be described as protuberant. The gold band seems to lift the diamond up like a baseball fan who has just caught a foul ball.

Throughout all this banter you’ve found yourself barely looking at Bethany. You’re focusing instead on Peter, because you don’t want to be caught staring at Bethany, by Peter. Looking at him and ignoring her is your way of telling him you’re not here to steal his woman, is something you realize you’re doing after you’ve been doing it already for several minutes. Plus every time you look at Bethany you’re jolted by surprise, how none of those photos prepared you for the actual person. Like how photographs of famous paintings always lack some essential beauty that’s startling when you encounter the painting in real life.

And Bethany is really, terribly beautiful. The catlike features of her childhood have resolved themselves sharply now. Eyebrows like check marks. Stern jaw and liquid neck. Eyes green and cool. Black dress that manages to be both conservative and open-backed. Necklace and earring and shoe combo that is the very definition of well put together.

“Too early for a drink?” Peter says.

“I’d love one!” you say, maybe too enthusiastically. You’re finding the more attracted you are to this man’s fiancée, the more ingratiating you become toward him. “Thanks!”

He explains that he’s pouring you something special—“It’s not every day that an old pen pal comes to visit!” he says — a whiskey they bought on a recent trip to Scotland, a bottle that won certain awards, that a certain magazine gave its only perfect score in history, that nobody can even buy anywhere but at the distillery itself, where the technique and recipe is a guarded secret passed through like ten generations — all the while Bethany is beaming at him like a proud parent — and he hands you a tumbler with an inch-deep pool of straw-colored liquid and explains something about the way it clings to the side of the glass and something about the patterns it makes as it swirls and how you can tell something about the quality of the scotch that way, and also something about the opacity too, and he has you lift up the glass to watch how the light filters through it and the view you get, unexpectedly, is the wobbly lines of cranes over the World Trade Center hole as seen through the liquid’s curvy distortion.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Peter says.

“Sure is.”

“Drink it. Tell me how it tastes.”

“Sorry?”

“I’d like to hear a writer describe it,” he says. “Because you’re so good with words.”

You try to figure out if he’s being sarcastic, but cannot. You taste the scotch. And what can you say? It tastes like scotch. It has a very scotchlike quality. You search your memory for words that are used to describe scotch. You come up with peaty, a word you don’t really know the definition of. The only word that pops into your head as accurate and defensible is strong.

“It tastes strong,” you say, and Peter laughs.

“Strong?” he says, then laughs again, harder. He looks at Bethany and says, “He called it strong. Hah! I’ll be damned. Strong.”

The rest of the morning goes something like this. Bethany regaling you with factoids, Peter finding reasons to expound lavishly on some exquisite purchased thing: the coffee they buy, for example, the rarest in the world, coffee that has actually been eaten and excreted by a kind of catlike Sumatran mammal that has a gift for selecting only the best coffee beans to eat, plus the digestion process aids the flavor when the beans are roasted, Peter insists. Or his socks, sewn by hand by the same Italian seamstress who makes the pope’s socks. Or the sheets on the bed in the guest room with their four-digit thread counts that make Egyptian cotton feel like sandpaper in comparison.

“Most people go through life not paying attention to the small details,” Peter says, his arm around Bethany, leg kicked up on the coffee table, the three of you sitting on the leather sectional sofas that take up the center of the astoundingly sunlit apartment. “But I can’t imagine going through life that way. You know? I mean, what’s the difference between your average violin player and Bethany here? It’s the small details. I think that’s why she and I understand each other so well.”

He gives her a squeeze. “That’s right!” she says, smiling at him.

“So many people live their life so fast and never slow down and enjoy themselves and be thankful. You know what I believe? I believe you should live in each season as it passes. Breathe the air. Drink the drink. Taste the fruit. You know who said that? Thoreau said that. I read Walden in college. I realized, yeah, live life, you know? Be in the world. Anyway”—he checks his watch—“I gotta go. Meeting in D.C. in a couple of hours, then London. You hippies have fun at your protest. Don’t overthrow the government while I’m gone.”

They give each other brisk kisses before Peter Atchison throws on a suit jacket and rushes out the door and Bethany looks at you in this, the first moment you are alone together. And before you can ask What do you mean pen pal? she says “I guess we should get going! I’ll call the driver!” in this manic way that blunts any thought of actual conversation. And you hope to have a real one-on-one, heart-to-heart kind of experience with her maybe in the car on the way to the protest, but when you climb into the back of the Cadillac Escalade and get under way Bethany spends most of the time making small talk with the driver, an older and intensely wrinkled man named Tony, who is Greek, you learn, and whose three daughters and eight grandchildren are all doing fine, just fine, you learn, after Bethany insists he go through them all one by one giving little updates for each of them: where they are, what they’re doing, how it’s all going, etc. This takes you roughly to Thirty-Fourth Street, whereby the Tony conversation naturally runs its course as Tony runs out of progeny to talk about, and there occurs a blip of silence before Bethany turns on the Escalade’s overhead television screen and turns it to a news channel already very deep into its daily coverage of the Republican National Convention and associated protests, and she says “Can you believe what they’re saying about us?” and spends the rest of the trip either complaining about the news or typing messages on her cell phone.

The news is, it’s true, dismaying. Reporters saying you and your ilk are all marginal protest types. Coming out of the woodwork. Malcontents. Provocateurs. Clouds of marijuana. Playing footage from Chicago, 1968: some kid throwing a brick at a hotel window. Then speculating on the protest’s effects on heartland swing voters. Their opinion? Heartland swing voters will find it all rather distasteful. “Your average Ohio voter is not going to respond to this,” says one guy who’s not the anchor and not a reporter but rather some middle-type person: the opinion-haver. “Especially if it gets violent,” he continues. “If what happened in Chicago in ’68 happens here, you can bet it will once again help the Republicans.”

All this time Bethany clicks at her device, her violin fingers whirring over the tiny keypad, the little sound it makes like listening to a tap dancer through earmuffs, so engrossed in this she doesn’t notice you staring at her — or doesn’t acknowledge it, anyway, your staring — looking at her profile and then looking at the knot on her neck where her violin sits while she plays, a gnarled cauliflower callus there, the only not-smooth part of her, discolored dark brown spots amid the pale white scar tissue, this ugly thing barnacled onto her, the effect of a lifetime’s musicianship, and it reminds you of something your mother once said, not long before she left. She said, The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst. And as you reach your destination — the meadow in Central Park that serves as the staging ground for today’s march — and as Bethany slaps her BlackBerry into her purse and leaps out of the vehicle, and as you realize there is just no way you’re going to get the intimate-type moment with her that you wanted and your heart sinks and all you really want now is to leave New York and hide for like a decade, you understand that your mother was right: The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them.

To follow Bethany into the park, go to the next page…

6

The coffins are finished and waiting for you.

In the great bowl of the Sheep Meadow, there they are, about a thousand of them, maybe more, set out in a grid in the scruff of the long and tufted lawn.

“What is this?” you say, looking at the whole disquieting scene, all those hundreds of coffins with American flags draped over them, and people walking between them, many of them taking pictures, or talking on their cell phones, or playing hacky sack.

“Our march,” Bethany says, like there’s nothing at all weird about this.

“This isn’t quite what I was expecting,” you say.

She shrugs. She pushes past you and into the crowd, into the park, toward the coffins.

And the downright oddity of seeing normal park behavior around all these coffins. A man walking his dogs seems inappropriate here, even unseemly — how the dogs pull toward a coffin to sniff it and everyone watching is preemptively horrified because is he going to let them pee on it? Turns out he is not. The dogs lose interest and do their business elsewhere. A woman with a bullhorn in some official organizing capacity is asking everyone to remember that these aren’t just coffins, they’re bodies. To think of them as bodies. Bodies of real soldiers who really died in Iraq so please have a little respect. Murmurs that this message is a not-so-subtle dig at those who came too festively costumed: a troupe in colonial garb dressed as the Founding Fathers with plaster-of-paris heads about twelve times the size of real heads; or a team of women dressed in flamboyant red, white, and blue wearing giant strap-on dildos in the shape of intercontinental ballistic missiles; or lots of George Bush Halloween masks with drawn-on Hitler mustaches. The coffins all have American flags on top of them so that they look like the coffins you see on TV coming out of the backs of planes bringing dead soldiers to that one air force base in Delaware. The woman with the bullhorn says everyone can have a body, but if you want a specific body, come talk to her, she has a spreadsheet. People were instructed to wear black for the day and many of them have followed this instruction. Somewhere someone is playing drums. Along Eighth Avenue, brightly logoed news vans are parked with rooftop transceivers extended into the sky like a line of lodgepole pines. Popular signage today includes STOP BUSH and ARREST BUSH and various puns on the word “bush” that involve gardening or genitalia. Two girls out sunbathing in bikinis are not successfully convinced to join the cause. Guys are walking through the crowd selling bottles of water, selling various anti-GOP buttons and bumper stickers and T-shirts and mugs and baby onesies and hats and visors and illustrated children’s books identifying monsters that hide under kids’ beds as Republicans. Someone is definitely smoking marijuana or has just smoked marijuana nearby. SMITE BUSH FOR HE IS AN ABOMINATION UPON THE EARTH among the oddly evangelical signs that make folks in this particular crowd a little uncomfortable. A man dressed as Uncle Sam walking on stilts, for some reason. Hacky sack is kicked an average of three times before plopping on the ground. FREE LEONARD PELTIER.

“There’s a body for each of us!” says the woman on the bullhorn, and people are finding their bodies now, lifting coffins. A body for the guy dressed as Castro, and the guy dressed as Che, and the guy with the sign that says LENNON LIVES! A body for the LGBTQ delegation with T-shirts that say “Lick Bush.” For each of a busload of Young Democrats of Greater Philadelphia, a body. A body for every sign-waving member of Jews for Peace. A body for the plumbers of UA Local No. 1. For members of the CUNY Muslim Student Association. For the several women who came today in matching pink prom dresses, questions (“Why?”) and a body. A body for the skater kid. The Rasta man. The priest. The 9/11 widow, especially for her. For the one-armed army vet in camo fatigues: a spot up front, a body. And for you and Bethany, a body in row thirty, according to the bullhorned woman’s spreadsheet, where, sure enough, you find a coffin with a sticker on the side that says “Bishop Fall.” Bethany does not seem to have any reaction to this except to touch it, lightly, as if for luck. She looks at you as she does this and offers a small, sad smile, and this might be the first true moment you’ve shared since you arrived.

And it’s over just that quickly. All of you lifting your bodies now. In teams of two or three or four you raise them up. The sun is luminous and the grass is green and the daisies are abloom and the colossal field is dotted with black coffins. A thousand rectangular black wooden coffins.

They alight onto shoulders. You begin your march. You are all pallbearers.

It’s thirty or so blocks to the Republican National Convention, and in Central Park the coffins are on the move. The chanting begins. The woman on the bullhorn shouts instructions. The marchers surge out like magma, past the baseball fields, onto the avenue, past the skyscraper with its silver world-conquering globe. They are wearing black and they are baking in the sun but they are bright with excitement. They are shouting, cheering. They roll out of Central Park, into Columbus Circle, and they are promptly stopped. The police stand there ready — roadblocks, riot gear, pepper spray, tear gas — a display of force to dampen the protest’s vigor before it begins. The crowd halts, looks down the channel of Eighth Avenue, the perfectly geometric view to downtown, the wall of buildings on both sides like a sea parting. The police have reduced the street’s four lanes to two. The crowd waits. They look up at the obelisk in the middle of the circle, the statue of Columbus on top, dressed in flowing robes like a high-school graduate. The usual northbound traffic on Eighth Avenue is shut down today, and all the signs that face the protestors say DO NOT ENTER and WRONG WAY. To many of them, this seems to epitomize something important.

If the cops attack, do not resist is the message from the protest’s organizers, the bullhorned woman at the front of the crowd. If a cop wants to put you in handcuffs, let him. If he wants to put you in a police car, ambulance, paddy wagon — no resistance whatsoever. If the cops come at us with clubs and stun guns, do not resist or panic or fight or run. This can’t be a riot. The message here is calm, level-headed, always be aware of cameras. This is a protest, not a circus. They have rubber bullets and they hurt like a motherfucker. Think Gandhi, peace, love, Zen-like tranquillity. Please do not get pepper-sprayed. Please do not take off your clothes. Remember, somber. We’re carrying coffins, for god’s sake. This is our message. Stay on message.

You hold the coffin where the feet would be. Bethany is in front of you, holding the symbolic head. You try not to think of it in these terms: feet, head. You are holding a plywood coffin: empty, hollow. Ahead of you, somewhere, the enormous assembly is oozing slowly southward. Where you stand is the doldrums, coffins bobbing above a lake of stiffening arms. You are full of conflict here, full of competing impulses. You’re holding Bishop’s coffin and it feels awful. It ignites all your appalling guilt, the guilt you felt for not saving Bishop when you were young. And the guilt you now feel for trying to woo Bethany at what is essentially her own brother’s funeral. Oh my god you are such an asshole. It’s as if you can feel your desire physically crawl up into you and die. Until, that is, you look at Bethany again, her bare back, the sweat on her shoulders, the strands of hair that cling to her neck, the angles of muscle and bone, the nakedness of her spine. She’s reading the sticker they affixed to the coffin: Pfc Bishop Fall was killed in Iraq on October 22, 2003. He was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. He grew up in Streamwood, Illinois.

“Doesn’t really capture him,” she says, but not to you. Not to anyone really. It’s as if a passing thought had been vocalized by accident.

Still, you answer her. “No,” you say, “it doesn’t.”

“No.”

“They should have mentioned how good he was at Missile Command.”

A small laugh, maybe, from Bethany here? You can’t be sure; her back is still turned. You keep going: “And how all the kids in school loved him and admired him and were terrified of him. And the teachers too. How he always managed to get what he wanted. How he was the center of attention without even trying. You wanted to do anything he asked you to do. You wanted to please him, even though you didn’t know why. It was that personality of his. It was so big.”

Bethany is nodding. She’s looking at the ground.

“Some people,” you say, “go through life like a pebble falling into a pond. They barely make a splash. Bishop tore through life. We were all in his wake.”

Bethany doesn’t look at you, but she says “That’s true,” then stands up straighter. You suspect, but cannot verify, that she is looking away from you because, right now, she is crying, and she doesn’t want you to see.

The procession begins again, the coffins are moving, and the protestors start to chant. The leaders, bullhorned, and the thousands behind them, singing, raising their voices and fists in fiery unison: Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!

But that’s where the chant breaks down as the throngs are unsure what to say, then all the voices coming back together for the verse’s final line: Has got to go!

What has got to go? It is cacophony. You hear many things. Some people shout Republicans. Others, war. Others, George Bush. Dick Cheney. Halliburton. Racism, sexism, homophobia. Some people seem to have come from entirely different protests, are roaring against Israel (oppressing Palestinians), or China (oppressing Falun Gong), or third world labor, or the World Bank, or NAFTA, or GATT.

Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!

[incomprehensible gibberish]

Has got to go!

Nobody knows the words to use today. They are committed only to their individual furies.

That is, until they reach a certain spot near Fiftieth Street, where along their route a group of counter-protestors have arranged themselves to protest the protestors, which provides a clarity of purpose for all involved. The counter-protestors howl loudly and wave their homemade signs. The signs run the rhetorical spectrum from transparent simple sincerity (VOTE BUSH) to clever irony (COMMUNISTS FOR KERRY!), from verbal expansiveness (WAR NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING — EXCEPT FOR ENDING SLAVERY, NAZISM, FASCISM, AND THE HOLOCAUST) to verbal concision (image of NYC skyline overlaid with mushroom cloud), from invocations of patriotism (SUPPORT OUR TROOPS) to invocations of religion (GOD IS A REPUBLICAN). This is also the spot, not accidentally, where the news stations have chosen to set up their cameras, and so the entire event — the march from Central Park to Madison Square Garden — will be represented tonight on television by a quick clip where half the frame is taken up by protestors and the other half by counter-protestors, all of them behaving badly. They yell non sequiturs at each other, one side calling the other side “Traitors!” and that side retorting “Who would Jesus bomb?” The whole thing will just look very ugly.

This will be the protest’s most exciting encounter. The attack by the police that worried everyone will never come. The protestors will stay within their narrow Free Speech Zone. The cops will bemusedly watch them.

Oddly, when this becomes clear, some of the protestors’ vigor seems to vanish. As the march ebbs its way slowly on, you begin seeing coffins abandoned on the street — soldiers downed on the battlefield for a second time. Maybe it’s too hot. Maybe it’s too much to ask, carrying these boxes for this long. Bethany continues to silently proceed, block after quiet block. By now you’ve memorized the contours of her back, the outline of her shoulder blades, the small field of freckles at the base of her neck. She has a little curl to her long brown hair, a quick twist at the tips. She wears ballet flats that reveal small shoe-related cuts on her heels. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t chant — she simply moves forward in that extraordinarily upright and proper way of hers. She doesn’t even switch the hand she’s using to carry the coffin, which you’ve been doing every couple of blocks as one hand gets sore and cramped. The coffin’s burden does not seem to physically affect her — not the plywood’s rough edges, nor the weight, which did not at first seem all that demanding but after carrying the thing a few hours begins to feel considerable. The tendons in your hands lock up, the muscles of your forearms burn, a knot twists itself into the flesh behind your rib cage — all for this, this thin and empty box. Not heavy, exactly, but given enough time, any weight can become too much to bear.

And finally this, the end of the march. Those who have carried their coffins from Central Park now deposit them at the foot of Madison Square Garden, where the Republicans are holding their nominating convention. The symbolism here is easy to parse: The Republicans are responsible for the war; they should also be responsible for the war dead. And there is something upsetting about the way the coffins pile up. One hundred coffins cover the avenue. Two hundred coffins begin to look like a wall. Then it gets too tall and the marchers begin heaving the coffins up to places they cannot themselves reach and the coffins are stacked atop one another like children’s blocks, balancing perilously, sliding off the pile and landing at oblique angles. The whole thing begins to look like an impromptu roadblock that you associate with Les Misérables. By the time they get to about five hundred coffins the scene has a mass-grave quality that’s downright disturbing, no matter how hawkish one might be. The marchers add their coffins to the pile and then offer some choice words to the Republicans, shaking their fists and yelling in the direction of the giant ovoid arena just beyond the line that demarcates the end of their march as per the permit recently approved by city hall, a line that is recognizable for the massive security buildup — steel fencing and armored trucks and riot police standing elbow to elbow — in case you forget where your Free Speech Zone ends.

When you and Bethany add your coffin to the pile, you do so gently. No throwing. No yelling. You place it quietly on the ground and then listen to the commotion around you for a moment, the many thousands who showed up today, a good turnout for a protest, but a number that is dwarfed by the audience watching you on television right now, on a certain cable news outlet that’s using the live feed from the end of the march as B-roll footage to play in a box on the left side of the screen next to a few smaller boxes on the right side of the screen where pundits’ heads debate whether the protest you’ve just finished will backfire on you or be merely useless, whether you are a traitor or merely giving comfort to the enemy, and underneath your image is a bright yellow headline that reads LIBERALS USE SOLDIER DEATHS FOR POLITICAL GAIN. The protest turns out to be a great triumph for this particular news show, as it will notch its highest post — September 11 ratings today, clocking in at 1.6 million viewers, which is itself dwarfed by the 18 million households that will tune in for tonight’s network broadcast of a reality singing show, but it’s a pretty good score for basic cable nonetheless, and will allow them to bump their ad rates next quarter by a tenth of a percent.

Meanwhile, Bethany looks at you for the first time in hours. She says, “Let’s go home.”

To go home with Bethany, go to the next page…

7

This might not seem like a Choose Your Own Adventure story yet, because you haven’t made a choice.

You’ve been with Bethany for an entire day — you listened to her intolerable fiancé and allowed her to drive you to the protest and followed her into the park and all the way through Manhattan and now she hails a cab and you follow her into it and you ride silently south back to her extravagant apartment and you have not made a single significant decision. You’re not choosing your own adventure; the adventure has been chosen for you. Even the decision to come to New York in the first place wasn’t really a decision so much as a reflexive and impulsive yes. How could it be a “decision” when you never considered saying no? The yes was there already, waiting for you, inevitable, the sum of all those years of pining and hoping and obsessing. You never even decided your life would be this way — it’s simply the way life has become. You’ve been carved out by the things that have happened to you. Like how the canyon can’t tell the river which way to shape it. It just allows itself to be cut.

But perhaps there’s one choice you’re making, which is the constant minute-by-minute low-level tacit choice to act more or less normally and not exclaim in a fit of passion “What the fuck is wrong with you?” or “Don’t marry Peter Atchison!” or “I still love you!” Maybe bolder and more romantic men would do this, but to you it seems impossible. It goes against your nature. You’ve never been able to assert yourself like that. Your greatest dream has always been to fade from view completely, become invisible. You long ago learned to tuck away your biggest emotions because those are the things that trigger the crying, and there is nothing worse than that, the blubbering, in public, in front of people.

So you don’t try to shake Bethany out of this quiet and distant and infuriating stupor she’s in, you don’t proclaim your love for her, and you’re not even really aware that this is a choice. You’re like the ancient cave painter drawing 2-D animals before the invention of three-point perspective: You are incapable of working in anything but your narrow dimensions.

You will, eventually, have to make a choice. You’re approaching the choice — you’ve been getting closer to it ever since Bethany touched the coffin with her brother’s name on it and the manic person she’d been since you arrived shriveled and she became silent and introspective and very, very far away. So far away that when you return to her palatial apartment and she disappears into her bedroom, you assume she’s gone to sleep. Instead, she reappears a few minutes later having changed from one dress into another, from black to yellow, a thin smart summery thing. She has an envelope in her hand, which she places on the kitchen counter. She turns on a few lights and pulls a bottle of wine from the special wine fridge and says, “Drink?”

You agree. Outside, the financial district glows through the night, whole office buildings lit and empty.

“Peter works at that one,” Bethany says, pointing. You nod. You have nothing to say about that.

“He really is very highly regarded,” she says. “My dad can’t stop gushing about him.”

She pauses. Looks into her wineglass. You sip your drink. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was engaged,” she says.

“It’s not really my business,” you say.

“That’s what I told myself too.” She looks at you again with those green eyes of hers. “But that’s not entirely true. You and I, we’re…complicated.”

“I don’t know what you and I are,” you say, and she smiles, leans back on the kitchen counter, and breathes a big dramatic sigh.

“They say when one twin dies the other twin can feel it.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“It’s not true,” she says, and takes a big gulp of wine. “I didn’t feel anything. He’d been dead a few days when we found out and I didn’t feel a thing. Even after, even long after, even at the funeral, I didn’t feel what everyone thought I should feel. I don’t know. I guess we’d drifted apart.”

“I’d always meant to write him, but I never did.”

“He changed. He went to military school and became a different person. Stopped calling, stopped writing, stopped coming home at holidays. He disappeared. He’d been in Iraq for three months before any of us even knew he was there.”

“He was probably happy to escape your father. But I’m surprised he wanted to escape you.”

“We disappeared from each other. I don’t know who started it, but for a while it was easier pretending the other didn’t exist. I’d always resented how he used people and how much he got away with. He’d always resented my talent and the way adults gushed over it. Everyone thought I was the special one and he was the screwup. Last time we saw each other was at his graduation from college. We shook hands.”

“But he adored you. That’s what I remember.”

“Something came between us.”

“What?”

Bethany looks at the ceiling and tightens her lips and searches for the right words.

“He was being, well, you know. Being abused.”

“Oh.”

She walks over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stares out, her back to you. Beyond her, the radiance of downtown Manhattan, quiet this time of night, like embers smoldering after the fire’s gone out.

“Was it the headmaster?” you ask.

Bethany nods. “Bishop wondered why he was targeted and I wasn’t. Then he started getting mean with me. Implying that I was happy about it. Like it was a competition between us and I was winning. Every time I had any kind of success he reminded me that life was so easy for me because I didn’t have to deal with the things he had to deal with. Which was of course true, but he used it as a way to minimize me.” She turns around to look at you. “Does this make any sense? It probably sounds horribly selfish.”

“It’s not selfish.”

“It is selfish. And I was mostly able to forget about it. He went to military school and we drifted apart and I felt relieved. For years, I ignored it. Like it never happened. Until one day—”

She lowers her face, gives you this look, and suddenly you understand.

“You ignored it,” you say, “until the day my story was published.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Reading your story was like realizing a terrible dream wasn’t a dream.”

“I’m really sorry about that. I should have asked your permission.”

“And I thought, my god, you only knew us for a few months. And if you understood so clearly what was going on, how awful am I? For ignoring it?”

“I only understood it much, much later. I didn’t know at the time.”

“But I knew at the time. And I did nothing. I told no one. And I was angry at you for dredging it all up again.”

“That’s understandable.”

“It was easier to be angry at you than to feel guilty, so I was mad at you for years.”

“And then?”

“And then Bishop died. And I just felt numb.” She looks down at her wineglass, traces its edge with her fingertip. “It’s like when you’re at the dentist and they give you some really serious painkillers. You feel fine, but you’re pretty sure underneath it all you still hurt. The hurt is simply not registering. That’s how life has felt.”

“All this time?”

“Yes. It’s made music pretty weird. After concerts people tell me how moved they were by my playing. But to me it’s just notes. Whatever emotion they hear is in the music, not me. It’s only a recipe. That’s how it feels.”

“And what about Peter?”

Bethany laughs and holds up her hand so the both of you can take a good long look at the diamond, sparkling in kitchen’s recessed lights, those million tiny rainbows inside.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

“It’s big,” you say.

“When he proposed, I didn’t feel happy about it. Or sad about it. I guess if I had to describe how I felt I’d say it was the sensation of having one’s interest piqued. His proposal felt really interesting.”

“That’s not exactly poetry, is it.”

“I think he proposed to snap me out of my funk. But it backfired. And the funk became more terrifying because it does not seem like something I am able to snap out of. Now Peter’s pretending it doesn’t exist, and spending a lot of time away. Hence London.”

Bethany refills her wineglass. Outside, the moon has risen over the jagged sweep of Brooklyn. Blinking lights in single file across the sky are aircraft descending into JFK from points south. In the kitchen there’s a very small framed drawing of a bull that might be an actual Picasso.

“Are you still mad at me?” you say.

“No, I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I’m not anything at you.”

“Okay.”

“Did you know that Bishop never even read that story of yours? I never told him about it. I was furious at you on his behalf, but he never read it. Isn’t that funny?”

You feel relieved by this. That Bishop never knew that his secret was not a secret to you. That he had his privacy, at least, till the end.

Bethany grabs the wine bottle by the neck and walks into the living room and plunks herself down on the couch, doesn’t even turn on a lamp or anything, just plunks herself down in the semidarkness so that you can’t really see the plunking so much as you hear the crackling of the expensive leather (alligator, you guess) as Bethany comes to rest on top of it. You sit across from her on the very same couch you were sitting on earlier today listening to a hyper Bethany and Peter simulate a happy relationship. The only light in the apartment comes from the two little spots in the kitchen, and the glow of the surrounding skyscraper windows — not nearly enough to see by. When Bethany talks, her voice seems to come out of the void. She asks you about Chicago. About your job. What your job is like. If you enjoy it. Where you live. What your home looks like. What you do for fun. And you answer all her small-talk questions and while you’re talking she pours herself another glass of wine, and then another, swallowing the wine with the occasional audible gulp while saying “uh-huh” at the key moments in your stories. You tell her the job is fine except for the students, who are unmotivated; and the administrators, who are ruthless; and the location, which is suburban-drab; and come to think of it you don’t really like your job at all. You tell her you live in a house with a backyard that you never use and pay someone else to mow. Sometimes kids run through your backyard playing various games and you are fine with that and you see that as your contribution to community civics. Otherwise, you do not know your neighbors. You’re trying to write a book for which you’ve already been paid, which presents certain motivation problems. When she asks what the book is about, you say, “I don’t know. Family?”

By the time Bethany opens the second bottle of wine you get the sense she’s trying to gear herself up for something that requires courage and that the wine is helping her do this. She begins reminiscing, talking about old times, when you were kids: playing video games or playing in the woods.

“Do you remember the last time you came to my house?” she says. And of course you do. It was the night you kissed her. The last moment of real joy you felt before your mother left. But you don’t tell Bethany that part. You just say, “Yes.”

“My first kiss,” she says.

“Mine too.”

“The room was dark, like this one,” she says. “I couldn’t really see you. I could only feel you very close to me. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” you say.

Bethany stands — the couch announces it, the popping of the leather, the little suction sound releasing — and she comes over to you and sits next to you and she takes the glass from your hand and sets it on the floor and she’s very close now, one of her knees pressing into yours, and you’re beginning to understand about the lights and the wine.

“Like this?” she says, drawing her face to yours, smiling.

“It was darker than this.”

“We could close our eyes.”

“We could,” you say. But you don’t.

“You were about this far away,” she says, your cheeks almost touching now. You can feel the heat of her, the lavender smell of her hair. “I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I pressed my lips out and hoped it was right.”

“It was right,” you say.

“Good,” she says, and she lingers there a moment, and you’re afraid to do anything or say anything or move or breathe, feeling like this whole moment is made of air and could scatter at the smallest agitation. Your lips are only a few inches from hers, but you do not lean in. The space between you is something she must resolve herself. Then Bethany says in a whisper, “I don’t want to marry Peter.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Can you help me not marry Peter?”

To help her not marry Peter, go to the next page…

9

And so you finally kiss her, and when you do you feel a great cascade of relief deep inside break through, and all your obsessing and pining and worrying and regret, and all the ways you’ve been haunted by this woman, and all the torture and self-loathing that you had failed to make her love you, they all seem to shatter on the ground. It feels like you’ve been holding up a wall of glass all this time and only now you realize it’s okay to let it fall. And fall it does, and it’s almost percussive the way it tumbles and breaks around you — you try not to flinch as Bethany kisses you, as she pulls at you with her hands and you have this powerful sense memory of kissing her when you were a child, how you were surprised that her lips were dry, that you didn’t know what to do except smash your face into hers, back when kissing was not a signpost along the way but rather the destination itself. But now you are both older and you’ve had all the relevant experiences and each of you knows exactly what to do with another body — which is to say you know that kissing is a kind of communication sometimes, and what you’re telling each other right now is that you both very much want more. And so you press into her and slide your hands around her waist and curl your fingers into the slight fabric of her dress and she tugs you closer by the collar and still you’re kissing — deeply, wildly, devouring each other — and you’re aware of your awareness of this, how you seem able to concentrate on everything and feel everything all at once: Your hands and her skin and your mouth and her mouth and her fingers and her breathing and the way her body responds to yours — these things don’t feel like separate sensations but rather like layers of a single greater sensation, that drift of consciousness that can happen when you’re entwined with another and it’s all going very well and it’s almost as if you know exactly what the other person wants and can feel her emotions as they shudder through her body as if they’re shuddering through your own, like your bodies have momentarily ceased to have edges and have become things without boundaries.

This is how it feels, this expansiveness, which is why it’s such a shock when Bethany jolts up and away from you and grabs your hands to stop their progress and says, “Wait.”

“What?” you say. “What’s wrong?”

“Just…I’m sorry.” And she pulls away from you and fully disengages and curls up on the other side of the couch.

“What is it?” you say.

Bethany shakes her head and looks at you with these sad, terrible eyes.

“I can’t,” she says, and inside you feel something you might call a plummeting.

“We could go slower,” you say. “We can just slow down a little. It’s okay.”

“This isn’t fair to you,” she says.

“I don’t mind,” you say, and you hope you don’t betray all the desperation you’re feeling because you know if you come this close and still fail with this girl it will break you. You will not come back from this one. “We don’t have to have sex,” you say. “We can, I don’t know, take it easy?”

“The sex isn’t the problem,” she says, and laughs. “The sex I can do. I want to do that. But I don’t know if you want to. Or will want to.”

“I want to.”

“But there’s something you don’t know.”

Bethany stands and smoothes her clothes, a gesture meant to signal calm levelheaded dignity, a very serious break from the theatrics on the couch.

“There’s a letter for you,” she says. “On the kitchen counter. It’s from Bishop.”

“He wrote a letter? To me?”

“We got it from the army, a few months after he died. He wrote it in case something happened.”

“Did you get one?”

“No. Yours was the only one he wrote.”

Bethany turns now and walks slowly to her bedroom. She’s moving in that careful way of hers again — perfectly straight, perfectly upright, all movements composed and purposive. When she pulls open her bedroom door, she stops halfway and turns to look at you over her shoulder.

“Listen,” she says, “I looked at the letter. I’m sorry, but I did. I don’t know what it means, and you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to know I read it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to be in here,” she says, nodding toward the bedroom. “After you’ve read it, if you want to come in, that’s fine. But if you want to leave”—she pauses a moment, turns around, drops her head, seems to look at the floor—“I’ll understand.”

She withdraws into the dark bedroom, the door closing behind her with a soft click.

To read the letter, go to the next page…

10

Private First Class Bishop Fall sits in the belly of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, his chin on his chest, asleep. His is the second vehicle in a small convoy — three Bradleys, three Humvees, a supply truck — driving single file to a village they don’t know the name of. All they know is that insurgents have recently kidnapped the mayor of this village and beheaded him on TV. It strikes the soldiers in the convoy as bizarre that the executions are televised, and also that they’re done in this particular manner: beheading. It feels like a kind of death from another era, a viciousness called up from the dark ages.

Three Bradleys and three Humvees can carry approximately forty soldiers. The supply truck carries two more, plus water and gasoline and ammo and many hundreds of boxes of MREs. Each MRE — or Meals Ready to Eat — has a densely syllabic ingredient list that makes many of the soldiers claim that, behind beheaders and IEDs, MREs are the biggest threat to their physical health out here. A popular game is to guess whether a certain chemical is found in an MRE or a bomb. Potassium sorbate? (MRE.) Disodium pyrophosphate? (MRE.) Ammonium nitrate? (Bomb.) Potassium nitrate? (Both.) It’s a game they might play during meals when they’re feeling complexly cynical, but not when they’re traveling via Bradley to a village an hour away. When they’re on the road like this, mostly what they do is sleep. They’ve been pulling twenty-hour shifts lately, so an hour in the armored belly of a Bradley is a little slice of what goes for heaven around here. Because it’s totally dark and it’s the safest place to be when they’re outside the wire and — because a Bradley at top speed sounds like a flimsy wooden roller coaster going Mach 2—they’re wearing earplugs, so it all feels real nice and cocooned. Everyone loves it. Everyone except this one guy Chucky, whose real name no one even remembers because he was nicknamed Chucky a long time ago for his tendency to vomit while riding in the back of a Bradley. It’s due to his motion sickness. So they nicknamed him “Up Chuck,” which was soon shortened to “Chuck,” which inevitably became “Chucky.”

Chucky is nineteen years old, short-haired, spindly muscled, fifteen pounds lighter now than he was at home, often forgets to brush his teeth. He comes from some kind of rural place no one has strong opinions about (maybe Nevada? Nebraska?). He’s a kid with very deep convictions that are unburdened by facts or history. Example: One time he overheard someone calling this whole operation in the Gulf “George Bush’s war,” and Chucky got all puffed up about it and said Bush was doing the best he could with the mess Bill Clinton left. And that started this whole fight about who actually declared war and whose idea it was to invade Iraq, and everyone was trying to convince Chucky that Clinton didn’t start the war and all Chucky did was shake his head and say “Guys, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this” like he felt sorry for them. Bishop pressed him and insisted that it didn’t matter if he was pro-Bush or pro-Clinton or whatever, that who started the war was a simple neutral objective fact. And Chucky said he thought Bishop needed to “support our C and C” and Bishop blinked at that and asked “What’s a C and C?” and Chucky said “Commander and chief.” So this started a whole new argument where Bishop told him it’s not commander and chief, it’s commander in chief, and Chucky looked at him with an expression like he knew they were pulling a prank on him and he was determined not to fall for it.

Anyway, they don’t talk politics much. None of them do. It’s sort of beside the point.

One time Chucky tried to get them to open the portals in the Bradley so that during the trip he could watch the horizon and keep his bearings, which he said would help with the dizziness and vomiting. But that argument went nowhere because if the portals came off then it wouldn’t be dark inside the Bradley and they couldn’t sleep, and also because the portals are covered with armor, and no one wants to sacrifice any armor at all given the number of mines and bombs and snipers they’d encountered thus far. Chucky pointed out that the Bradley was equipped with several M231 assault rifles that are expressly designed to fit through the portals (they are basically M16s without the front sighting assembly, which is too tall to fit inside the portal, and a much shorter stock, because the inside of a Bradley is pretty narrow) and Chucky asked didn’t the mere existence of the M231 imply that they should have the external portals open so they could shoot through them? Bishop said he was impressed with Chucky’s logic, even if it was transparently self-serving. Anyway, the commander of the Bradley, whose name is actually Bradley but whose nickname is “Baby Daddy” for the several families back home he joined the army to get away from, decided that the armor would stay. He said, “If you have protection you’d be a fool not to use it,” which was pretty funny coming from him.

So one would think with the vomiting and the brittle knowledge of world events and the constant whining about the closed firing portals that Chucky would be a prime candidate for pariah status. Given how many times they have to go somewhere in the back of a Bradley, Chucky should be very unpopular indeed. But that’s not how it works. Chucky is roundly loved and adored and has been ever since this one midnight raid on a suspected enemy compound when his night-vision goggles broke, and instead of falling back like any of them would have done he kept on opening doors and clearing rooms with a goddamn flashlight. Which in an operation like that might as well have been a giant neon sign that said Shoot Me! Seriously, the courage of this kid is off the charts. He once told Bishop that the only thing worse than being shot at is when the people shooting run away. And Bishop really thought that Chucky would prefer the enemy stand still while trying to kill him rather than not try to kill him at all. So everyone loves Chucky. And it’s clear they do because they keep calling him Chucky, which is a nickname that maybe to an outsider sounds cruel for the way it ribs someone for his greatest personal flaw, but what it actually does is acknowledge that they accept this person and love this person despite that flaw. It’s a very male way of expressing unconditional love. All of this goes unsaid, naturally.

Plus there is the thing about the girl. Chucky’s primary conversational topic: Julie Winterberry. Everyone likes hearing about her. Hands down the most beautiful girl in Chucky’s whole high school, the girl who won every relevant queen-type prize a girl could win, who ran the table four years in a row, a face that launched a thousand erections, a girl whose beauty didn’t cause the usual nervous sniggering among the teenage boys but rather an almost physical pain that biting the inside of one’s cheek was sometimes an effective cure for. The boys were despondent if she did not look at them, shattered if she did. Chucky has a photo, a senior portrait, that he passes around and everyone has to agree that he is not exaggerating. Julie Winterberry. He says it with church-like reverence. The thing about Julie Winterberry is that Chucky had always been so intimidated by her beauty that he’d never spoken to her. She didn’t even know his name. Then they graduated high school and he went to basic training, where he had the most punishing drill sergeant in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces, after which he figured if he could overcome that asshole, he could talk to Julie Winterberry. She didn’t seem like much of a challenge anymore, not after basic. So in those few weeks he was home before deployment he asked her on a date. And she said yes. And now they’re in love. She even sends him dirty pictures of herself that everyone begs Chucky to show that he will not show. People are literally on their hands and knees, begging.

What everyone likes about the story is the part where he finally asks out the girl. Because the way Chucky tells it, it’s not like he had to work up the courage to do it. It’s more like it no longer required courage to do. Or maybe he discovered that he had plenty of courage all along, inside him, ready to be used, and everyone likes imagining that. They hope the same thing has happened to them, too, because they are occasionally terrified out of their minds over here, and they hope when the time comes for them to be brave, they will be brave. And it’s nice to think that they have this well of courage inside that can get them through the impossible things ahead.

If a kid like Chucky could land a girl like Julie Winterberry, surely they can make it through one lousy war.

They ask him to tell about it especially when they’re on clean-up, which is just about the biggest injustice of this war, that soldiers sometimes have to clean up the remains of suicide bombers. Imagine hunting around for body parts with a burlap bag oozing slop that looks like the inside of a pumpkin. And the road is baking in the sun and so the random pieces of flesh aren’t only sitting there but actually literally cooking. That smell: blood and meat and cordite. When they’re doing this, they ask Chucky to tell them about Julie Winterberry. It passes the time.

Eventually Baby Daddy struck a deal with Chucky that he could ride up top next to the gunner. Of course this is against regulations because a person standing where Chucky stands interferes with the movement of the M242. But Baby Daddy was willing to go against regulations in this one instance because it’s better than having to smell Chucky’s puke every time. So Chucky gets to ride up top where he can watch the horizon in that way he needs to do to avoid motion sickness, with the tacit agreement that if any shit goes down he needs to drop into the cargo area pronto. Which he’d have no problem doing because no one wants to be near the M242 when it’s firing. That thing can tear up an SUV like it’s tissue paper. The bullets are as long as Chucky’s forearm.

They were told to expect an hour’s travel to the village with the recently murdered mayor. Bishop sits in the back of the Bradley with his helmet over his eyes and his earplugs pushed practically into his brain. Blessed silence. Sixty sweet minutes of nothingness. Bishop doesn’t even dream over here. One of the many surprises of war is how it has turned him into a sleeping savant. If he’s told he has twenty minutes for a nap, he will use all twenty minutes. He can tell the difference between sleeping two hours and sleeping two and a half. He can feel the contours of consciousness over here that he never felt back home. Back home, life was like driving a road at sixty miles per hour, every little bump and texture flattened into an indistinguishable buzz. War is like stopping and feeling the road with his bare fingers. A person’s awareness expands like that. War makes the present moment slow. He feels his mind and body in ways he never knew were possible.

Which is why Bishop knows for sure when the Bradley comes to a halt and he wakes up that they are not yet at their destination: that was a thirty-minute nap. He can tell by the way his eyes feel, or maybe more accurately the way the space just behind his eyes feels, a certain kind of pressure there.

“How long have we been driving?” he asks Chucky.

“How long you think?” he says. They like to test each other this way.

“Thirty minutes?”

“Thirty-two.”

Bishop smiles. He climbs up top, blinks at the mighty desert sunlight, looks around.

“Suspicious thing in the road,” Chucky says. “Up ahead. Possible IED. You gotta see this. You’ll never believe it.”

He hands Bishop the binoculars and Bishop searches the dusty and cracked asphalt in front of them until he sees it: a soup can in the center of the road. Standing straight up. Its label pointing right at the convoy. That familiar red logo.

“Is that—”

“Yep,” Chucky says.

“A Campbell’s soup can?”

“Affirmative.”

“Campbell’s tomato soup?”

“All the way out here. I shit you not.”

“That’s not a bomb,” Bishop says. “That’s modern art.”

Chucky gives him a queer look.

“It’s a Warhol,” Bishop explains. “It looks like a Warhol.”

“What the fuck is a war hall?” Chucky says.

“Never mind.”

What happens when they see something that might be an IED is they call in the explosive ordnance disposal techs and then wait around, glad that disarming bombs is not their job. And of course the EODs are like thirty minutes away and so everyone’s on edge waiting and smoking and Chucky staring out into the distance suddenly says to Bishop, “I’ll bet I can hit that camel with your rifle.”

So everyone turns to see what camel he’s pointing at and they see this haggard lonely thing way off in the distance without anything around it, this weak-looking straggler all alone in the desert about a quarter mile away all wavy-looking from the heat radiating off the sand. Bishop is interested; Chucky is not known for his precision with a rifle. “What are we betting?” he says.

“Whoever loses,” says Chucky, who’s clearly thought this part through because he’s right there with an answer, “has to stand in the Port-a-John for an hour.”

Cries of disgust from the surrounding eavesdroppers. This is a proper bet. Everyone knows the only thing hotter than the sun in the desert is a Port-a-John in the sun in the desert. How the desert heat gets trapped inside the thick plastic walls and brings the collective excrement of the whole company practically to boiling. People swear a pork chop could be braised in there, not that anyone ever would. Most people hold their breath and get out as quickly as they can. There are stories of people becoming dehydrated only because they had a particularly long shit.

Bishop thinks about this. “An hour?” he says. “You have things to do, Chucky. I wouldn’t want to take you away from jerking off for a whole hour. How about five minutes?”

But Chucky’s not having it, because everyone knows that Bishop has been through sniper training, and one of the things snipers learn is to hold their breath a long time, maybe even upward of five minutes. Those are the stories, anyway.

“An hour,” Chucky says. “That’s the deal.”

So Bishop makes a show about thinking it over, but everyone knows he’ll take the bet. He can’t turn down a bet like that. And eventually he says “Fine” and everyone cheers and he hands Chucky the M24 and says, “Doesn’t matter. You’re never gonna hit it.” And Chucky gets into this kneeling position that looks exactly like the little green army men that kids play with — a posture that is decidedly not the textbook way to fire the M24 and which makes Bishop smile and shake his head — and the onlookers, who include the Bradley’s full complement and now even the guys from the supply truck behind them, start hollering and offering advice both genuine and not.

“Whaddya say there, Chucky? About four hundred meters?”

“I’d say three ninety.”

“More like three seventy-five.”

“Wind at about five knots?”

“Ten knots!”

“Ain’t no wind, jackass.”

“Make sure you account for the heat coming up off the ground!”

“Yeah, it’ll make the bullet rise.”

“That true?”

“That’s not true.”

“Stop fucking with him.”

“Shoot it, Chucky! You got this!”

And so on, Chucky just ignoring it all. He settles into position and holds his breath and everyone waits for the shot — even Baby Daddy, who as commander of the Bradley unit is supposed to be above all this and detached but really privately savors the idea of Chucky’s chutzpah landing him in a Port-a-John for an hour (Baby Daddy is in a war because of his shenanigans, so he loves when anyone else gets their comeuppance too). And the seconds tick by and everyone gets quiet expecting Chucky to shoot and they can’t decide if they should be looking at the camel or at Chucky, and he wiggles and lets his air out and sucks back in again and Bishop laughs and says, “The more you think about it, the worse you’re gonna miss.”

“Shut up!” says Chucky, and then — frankly faster than anyone expected after the shut up thing — Chucky fires. And everyone looks at the camel in time to see a small mist of blood poof up where the bullet glances off its left hind quarter.

“Yes!” Chucky said, his arms up. “I hit him!”

Everyone cheers and looks at Bishop, who is now sentenced to sixty ungodly merciless minutes in the shit oven. Except that Bishop is shaking his head saying, “No, no, no. You didn’t hit him.”

“What do you mean?” Chucky says. “I did too hit him.”

“Look,” Bishop says, pointing at the camel, who is understandably surprised and upset and confused and is now terrified and running, weirdly, right at the convoy. Bishop says, “That doesn’t look like a dead camel to me.”

“The bet wasn’t to kill the camel,” Chucky says. “The bet was to hit it.”

“What do you think hit means?” Bishop says.

“I shot it, with a bullet. That’s what it means, end of story.”

“Do you know what I’d be if all my hits were glancing shots off the ass? Demoted, that’s what.”

“You’re trying to get out of losing.”

“Didn’t lose,” Bishop says. “You tell a sniper you’re gonna hit something, that something better be dead. Otherwise you didn’t hit it.”

The camel, meanwhile, is now full-out charging the convoy, and some of the assembled spectators laugh at the idiocy of the thing, running toward the people who shot it. Kind of the opposite of an insurgent, someone says. Big dumb stupid animal. And Chucky and Bishop keep arguing about who won the bet and defending their own interpretation of what the verb “to hit” really means — Chucky taking a strictly literal approach against Bishop’s, which is more context-driven — when the camel, which is now maybe a hundred yards off, suddenly veers to its right and begins moving more or less directly at the Campbell’s soup can.

Baby Daddy is the first to recognize this.

“Hey!” he says, pointing at it. “Whoa! Stop it! Kill it! Kill it now!”

“Kill what?”

“The fucking camel!”

“Why?”

“Look!”

And they see the camel running at the soup can, which is right now also being approached by the EODs in their massive and almost comically large armor, and the soldiers who understand what is happening take out their sidearms and shoot at the camel. And they can see where their bullets strike the thing harmlessly, shaving off the outermost layer of fur and hide. All the gunshots really do is terrify the thing more, and it increases speed and runs with these huge bulging eyes and a foam dripping from its mouth and people start yelling “Duck!” or “Run!” at the EODs, who have no idea what is happening, not having been part of the whole camel-shooting thing in the first place. And the camel keeps going and it’s clear its path is going to take it right over the soup can and everyone now finds whatever cover they can find and they close their eyes and shield their heads and wait.

It takes a few moments to realize nothing is going to happen.

The first soldiers who pop their heads up see the camel tearing ass away from them, the empty soup can bouncing harmlessly behind it, end over end.

They watch the camel half gallop, half stagger into the immense desert horizon, overtaken eventually by the shimmers coming off the sand. The EODs have removed their helmets and are walking back toward the company, cursing loudly. Bishop stands next to Chucky, watching the camel race away.

“Fuck, man,” Chucky says.

“It’s okay.”

“That was too close.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t mean to.”

“It’s like everything slowed down. I was just like—ffft,” he says, and he puts his palms up by his eyes indicating a total narrowing and tunneling of his vision. “I mean, I was in it.”

“In what?”

“The war hall,” Chucky says. “I get it now. That was it.”

And they think that’s the end of the story — a bizarre one to tell back home, one of those surreal moments that present themselves during war. But just as everyone is getting comfortable back in their positions and the convoy begins to rumble forward and they’ve been driving maybe thirty seconds, suddenly from inside the Bradley Bishop feels a jolt and a wave of heat and hears that crack-boom sound of something in front of them exploding. It’s that sound — in the desert they can hear it for miles — the worst sound of the war, the sound that will later make them all flinch even when they’ve been home for years whenever a balloon pops or fireworks explode, because it will remind them of this, the sound of a mine or IED, the sound of violent gruesome random death.

And now comes the panic and the screaming and Bishop pushes his way up to the turret and stands next to Chucky and sees how the Bradley in front of them is on fire, this tar-black smoke rolling out of it as one by one soldiers climb out bleeding and dazed. The front of the Bradley seems to have been cracked in half right at the spot where the driver would have been sitting. One soldier is being carried away by two others, his leg attached by only bare red ribbons at the knee, swinging like a fish on a line. Baby Daddy is already calling for helicopters.

“The soup can,” Bishop says, “must have been a decoy. So we let our guard down.” And he turns to Chucky and knows right away by Chucky’s look of terror and panic that something is wrong. Chucky holds his hands over his belly, clutching the wound. Bishop pulls the hands back and doesn’t see anything.

“There’s nothing here, Chuck.”

“I felt it. I felt something go in.” He is already turning pale. Bishop sits him in the belly of the Bradley and pops open his jacket to reveal the body armor underneath and still sees nothing.

“Look. You’re all armored up. You’re fine.”

“Trust me, it’s there.”

And so he pulls off the armor with Chucky moaning and peels off his undershirt and there it is, exactly where he said it would be, a few inches above his belly button, a dime-size spot of blood. Bishop wipes it away and sees the small cut underneath — maybe the size of a large splinter — and laughs.

“Jesus, Chucky, you’re all worked up about this?”

“Is it bad?”

“You dumb motherfucker.”

“It’s not bad?”

“It’s tiny. You’re fine. You’re an asshole.”

“I don’t know, man. There’s something wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong. Shut the fuck up.”

“It feels like there’s something very not right here.”

So Bishop stays with him insisting everything is okay and suggesting he stop being such a pussy while Chucky keeps saying that something doesn’t feel right, and they stay like that until they hear the thumping of the helicopters, at which point Chucky says, very quietly, “Hey Bishop, listen, I have something to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“You know about my girlfriend? Julie Winterberry?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. I made that up. She doesn’t even know who I am. I only talked to her once. I asked her for her picture. It was the last day of school. Everyone was trading pictures.”

“Oh man, you’re going to be sorry you said that.”

“Listen, I made it up because every day I think about not talking to her.”

“This is good info. This might be new-nickname worthy.”

“I regret it so much, not talking to her.”

“Seriously, you are never going to hear the end of this.”

“Listen. If I don’t make it—”

“You will be taking shit for this literally nonstop forever.”

“If I don’t make it, I want you to find Julie and tell her how I really feel. I want her to know.”

“Seriously, it will last the rest of your life. I will call you when you are eighty years old and make fun of you about Julie Winterberry.”

“Just promise.”

“Fine. I promise.”

Chucky nods and closes his eyes until the medics come and take him on a stretcher and into the helicopter and they all disappear into the dull-copper sky. Then the rest of the convoy continues its loud, slow journey.

What happens that night is that Chucky dies.

A piece of shrapnel only about half an inch long and as thin as the straw on a juice box had clipped the artery feeding his liver, and by the time doctors figured it out he’d lost too much blood and was in full-blown acute liver failure. Baby Daddy is the one to tell them, the next day, right before going out in sector.

“Now forget about it,” he says when it becomes clear the news is going to interfere with their concentration on the upcoming patrol. “If the army wanted us to have emotions, they would have issued us some.”

And it’s a quiet and subdued and uneventful evening, and the whole time Bishop feels angry. Angry at Chucky’s senseless death and the fuckers who planted that bomb, but also angry at Chucky, at Chucky’s cowardice, that he could never say what he needed to say to Julie Winterberry, that a man who could rush into dark rooms where people with machine guns wanted to kill him was unable to talk to a stupid girl. These two kinds of courage seem so different they ought to have separate words.

That night, he can’t sleep. He broods. His anger has twisted so that he is no longer angry at Chucky but rather angry at himself. Because he and Chucky are no different. Because Bishop has terrible things inside him that he cannot bring himself to tell anyone. The great evil secret of his life — sometimes it feels so big it’s like he needs a new inner organ to contain it. The secret sits inside him and devours him. It devours time and grows stronger as time passes, so that now when he thinks of it he cannot separate the event itself from his later revulsion of it.

What happened with the headmaster.

The man whom everyone revered and loved. The headmaster. Bishop loved him too, and when, in fifth grade, he picked Bishop for tutoring, for extra weekend lessons that absolutely had to be kept secret because the other boys would be jealous, it made ten-year-old Bishop feel so special and wanted. Picked out of the crowd. Admired and loved. And how he shudders at it now, years later, that he was so easily tricked, that he never questioned the headmaster, not even when he told Bishop that their lessons would be about what to do with girls, because all the boys were terrified of girls and didn’t know what to do with girls, and Bishop felt really lucky he had someone to show him. It started with photographs from magazines, men and women both, together, separate, nude. Then Polaroid pictures, then the headmaster suggesting they take Polaroids of each other. Bishop remembers only fragments, images, moments. The headmaster gently helped Bishop out of his clothes and still Bishop did not think this was wrong. He did everything willingly. He let the headmaster touch him, first with his hands, then with his mouth, afterward telling Bishop how wonderful and handsome and special he was. The headmaster saying, after a few months of this, Now you try it on me. The headmaster disrobing. The first time Bishop saw him, red and swollen and strongly persuasive. Bishop trying to do on the headmaster what the headmaster had done on him, and doing so awkwardly, clumsily. The headmaster getting frustrated and angry for the first time when Bishop’s teeth accidentally got involved, grabbing Bishop by the back of the head and thrusting and saying No, like this and later apologizing at the tears that arrived when Bishop’s gag reflex engaged. Bishop feeling like this was his fault. That he would practice and do it better next time. Then doing no better next time, nor the next time. One day the headmaster stopping him halfway through and turning him around and leaning over him and saying, We’ll have to do this the way adults do it. You’re an adult, right? And Bishop nodding his head because he didn’t want to be bad at this anymore, didn’t want the headmaster to be angry anymore, so when the headmaster positioned himself behind Bishop and pushed himself in, Bishop endured it.

The horror of it now, these images cascading back to Bishop — so many years later and ten thousand miles away, in a desert, in a war. Bishop thinking how even this secret has another secret, a deeper and more devastating layer, the thing that made him sure he was evil and broken, which is that while the headmaster was doing what he was doing, Bishop liked it.

He looked forward to it.

He wanted it.

And not only because of how it made him feel wanted and special and unique and picked out of the crowd, but also because what the headmaster did to him, especially at first, felt good. It jolted his body in a way nothing else did. A way that he loved while it was happening and missed when it stopped, the headmaster abruptly canceling their lessons in the spring. And Bishop felt rejected and abandoned and realized all at once sometime in early April that the headmaster had taken up with a new boy — Bishop could tell by the looks they shared in the hallway, and how the new boy had recently turned sullen and quiet. And this made Bishop furious. He began acting out in school, talking back to the nuns, getting into fights. When he was finally expelled he was sitting with his parents in the headmaster’s office and the headmaster said I’m very sorry it came to this and there were so many layers of meaning to this that Bishop just laughed.

He began poisoning the headmaster’s hot tub the next week.

And this is the part that horrifies him most now. How he tried to get back at the headmaster like a jilted girlfriend. How he would have stopped behaving badly if the headmaster had only taken him back, invited him in. It’s horrifying because he can’t tell himself now that he was an innocent victim. He feels more like an accomplice in his own perversion. It was an evil that happened — and he wanted it to happen.

The full consequence of this didn’t reveal itself until later, in adolescence, at military school, where the worst thing in the world was to be a queer or faggot, and if anyone called another boy a queer or faggot or gaywad or homo he would routinely want to fight, and the way the boys showed everyone else they weren’t queers or faggots was to make fun of others for being huge queers and faggots, and to do so loudly. This became Bishop’s calling card. He was especially ruthless to his roommate sophomore year, a slightly effeminate boy named Brandon. Whenever Brandon walked into the communal shower Bishop would say something like, “Careful boys, don’t drop your soap.” Or before going to bed, he’d ask, “Do I have to put duct tape over my asshole tonight or can you behave yourself?” Things like that, the typical late-eighties jock-type harassment. Nicknames included “Ass Pirate” and “Daisy.” As in “Eyes forward, Daisy” when they were standing next to each other at the urinals. Brandon eventually left the school, which was a relief to Bishop, who had developed powerful longings for Brandon that had become almost physically painful. How he watched as Brandon undressed, watched him in class hovering intently and dutifully over his notes, chewing on a pencil.

But that was so many years ago, and in all this time he’s never told anyone. And he suddenly jolts up in his bed on this, the day that Chucky has died, and he decides he needs to write a letter. Because Chucky was killed with so many secrets still inside him that his dying wish was to let them out, and Bishop does not want to feel the same when his time comes. He wants to have more courage than that.

He decides he’ll write to everyone in his life. He’ll write his sister, apologizing for becoming so distant, explaining that he detached because he was damaged — because the headmaster must have flipped some switch inside him and now he felt so much rage, at the headmaster for doing this to him, and at himself for being so awful and perverted and deviant and unfixably broken. He was trying to protect her, he would tell Bethany; he didn’t want to break her, too.

And he’ll write his parents, and Brandon. He’ll track down Brandon and ask his forgiveness. Even mighty Andy Berg, whom he never saw again after trapping the poor kid in a stairwell and pissing on him. Even the Berg needs a letter. He’ll do one every night until all his secrets are laid bare. He fetches some army stationery, sits in the barren and concrete-walled break room lit fluorescently green. He’ll write to Samuel first, he decides. Because he knows exactly what he wants to say and it will be a short letter and already it’s very deep into the night and he has to be awake again in a few hours, so he begins, and in a flare of inspiration and focus he finishes the letter in under five minutes. And he folds it up and places it inside an official U.S. Army envelope and licks it closed and writes Samuel’s full obnoxiously hyphenated name on the outside and places it in his locker with all his other personal effects. He feels good about it, about getting that off his chest and out into the world, and he feels good about his new project, about letting go of the things that have been bundled up inside him all these years. He feels like he’s actually looking forward to writing the letters to his sister and his parents and the various friends he’s abandoned along the way, and he falls asleep feeling really good about these letters, not knowing that they will never be written, because tomorrow he will be out on patrol and he’ll be thinking about Julie Winterberry (who obviously also needs a letter) when a trash can will explode a few feet away from him, remote-detonated by someone watching from a second-story window way down the street, someone who doesn’t really see Bishop but rather sees only his uniform, who has stopped recognizing anyone wearing that uniform as anything remotely human, who if he could have heard what was going through Bishop’s head at that moment as Bishop tried to mentally compose a letter to a beautiful girl back home about a dead friend who loved her would have never exploded that bomb. But of course we can’t ever do this, hear these things. So the bomb exploded.

And the force of the bomb propelled Bishop into the air where for a moment everything was quiet and cold and the feeling of being inside the bomb’s blast was like being inside one of his mother’s snow globes, everything around him moving as though through thick liquid, hanging there, suspended, in its way beautiful, before the bomb shattered everything inside him and all his senses went dark and Bishop’s body — no longer containing in any meaningful way Bishop himself — crashed into the street many meters away, and for the second time that week someone died while thinking about Julie Winterberry, who was ten thousand miles away at that moment and probably wishing that something exciting would finally happen to her.

The army collected his things and sent them to his parents, who found the letter addressed to Samuel Andresen-Anderson and remembered that was the strange name of their daughter’s childhood pen pal, and so they gave the letter to Bethany, and she struggled many months before deciding she would finally give the letter to you.

And so this is how the letter traveled from a classified village somewhere in Iraq to this kitchen counter in downtown Manhattan, where it looks spotlighted by one of the kitchen’s overhead recessed lights. You pick it up. It’s almost weightless — a single page inside, which you remove. He’s only written a few paragraphs. You sense that your big decision is approaching. It’s a decision that will shape you and go on shaping you for years. You read the letter.

Dear Samuel,

The human body is so fragile. It’s ruined by the smallest things. You can put twenty bullets into a camel and it will just keep coming for you, but half an inch of shrapnel is enough to kill us plain little people. Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion. I am beginning to accept this.

If you’re reading this, then something has happened to me and so I have a favor to ask. You and I did a terrible thing together that morning by the pond. The day your mother left, the day the police came. I’m sure you remember. What we did that morning, to each other, is terrible and unforgivable. I was corrupted, and I corrupted you too. And this corruption, I’ve discovered, does not go away. It stays with you and poisons you. It’s with you for life. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

I know you love Bethany. I love her too. She is good in a way I have never been good. She’s not broken the way we are. I’d ask you to keep it this way.

This is my dying wish. The only thing I ask of you. For her sake, for my sake, please, stay away from my sister.

And so you’ve arrived. It’s finally the moment to make your choice. To your right is the door to the bedroom, where Bethany waits for you. To your left, the elevator door and the whole great empty world.

It’s time. Make a decision. Which door do you choose?